5. Chapter 5
ELLIE
By the fourth day I had learned the exact weight of being nothing.
It settles into you, that knowledge, if you let it.
The wolves who carried us east didn't hate me, which was somehow worse than if they had, hatred at least grants you the dignity of being a person worth the trouble.
They simply moved me as they'd have moved a bale of hides, lifting me onto a back at dawn and dropping me off it at dusk, feeding me enough to keep the goods from spoiling and no more.
On the water it was a hide boat, low and evil-smelling, two wolf-men paddling while a third watched us with the incurious patience of a man minding cargo he'd already been paid to deliver.
Off the water it was the march, jolting and endless, the country sliding past in a grey blur of steppe, half-frozen marsh, and the huge indifferent sky.
I kept a count of the days scratched into the inside of my own head, because a count was a thing they couldn't take from me, and because if Daska ever did follow the thread to wherever this ended, I wanted to be able to tell him how long.
If. I hated that word and used it anyway.
Four days of pushing the same message down the bond into a silence I couldn't read, I'm alive, I'm alive, find me, with no way of knowing whether it reached him or fell into the dark between us like a stone down a well.
Being bond-deaf had shamed me my whole life, no bond reaching for me had ever made a sound I could hear.
Out here even the answered thread had frayed with the miles, gone quiet by the second day, and having the one rope that might save me pull thinner with every hour was a special cruelty all its own.
He felt it at the river, I told myself, on the mornings the doubt got its teeth in. He's a healer to the bone, a man who reads what he can't see for a living. He felt you, and he's coming, and your job is to still be worth finding when he gets here.
They'd bound my wrists even though I was no threat, and everyone involved knew it, and the cord had rubbed the skin raw before one of the younger shifters loosened it a turn when he thought the scarred one wasn't watching; I filed that away.
A small mercy from a captor is still information: it tells you where the cracks are, which of them still has enough conscience to flinch at a woman's raw wrists.
I'd spent a lifetime reading rooms full of men who saw me as an asset, learning which ones could be moved and how.
This was the same skill in colder weather, and that thought should have depressed me more than it did.
The cold was the enemy that never slept.
The furs they'd taken us in were never quite enough at night, and Megan and I ended up pressed back to back in whatever fold of ground they dumped us, sharing what heat we had because pride was a luxury neither of us could afford anymore.
She'd stopped flinching from me somewhere around the second night.
That was its own small landslide, two years of frost between us giving way under the simple animal need to not freeze, and I lay awake in the dark with her spine warm against mine and thought about how strange it was that it took being reduced to cargo to make us finally touch.
The river days were the worst of it, and not for the reasons I'd have guessed.
The boat itself was miserable enough, a low thing of stretched hide over a bent-wood frame, riding so close to the surface that meltwater slopped over the gunwale and pooled cold around us, and the wolf-men paddled in a grim silence that gave me nothing to read.
But it was the water that undid me. All that moving water, hour after hour, hissing under the hull and glittering grey to both horizons, and every mile of it carried me further from the only people in twenty-five thousand years who'd ever looked at me and seen a person.
I'd sit with my knees drawn up and my bound hands in my lap and push the same message down the bond until my chest ached from the effort of it, hurling it into a silence I had no way to measure.
I'm alive, I'm alive, find me. Nothing came back anymore.
At the river his anguish had come down the thread with the force of a blow, near and terrible; the miles since had worn it to a silence I couldn't read, and the not-knowing was a particular torture I'd not wish on anyone.
For all I knew I was screaming down a thread that had snapped at the river, comforting myself with a rope tied to nothing.
I chose to believe it held. Belief was another thing they couldn't take, if I gripped it hard enough, and I'd got very good over the years at gripping things nobody could see.
Once, on the second river day, something huge and pale broke the surface a hundred metres off, a fish the length of the boat, or a thing that had been a person and was something else now, I never learned which, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath.
Under my ribs the borrowed weight lurched toward it, hard, reaching as it had reached at the ambush river, straining after the water as if the water were calling it home.
Out of a habit older than the mission I clamped down on it, and it subsided sullen and unsatisfied.
None of it made sense to me. What I knew was that water woke the thing in me, and that whatever it wanted, I couldn't afford to find out here, dressed as goods, watched by men who'd sell whatever they discovered I could do.
Being worth finding turned out to be its own kind of work, and the water made it harder every mile.
Food, in the end, gave me back a shape.
On the third evening they made camp early in the lee of a long ridge, and one of the wolf-men gutted a brace of hares and a fat marmot and set them by the fire.
Then simply left them there, no one among Karik's brutes had the least interest in cooking when they could bolt meat half-raw or shift and eat it off the bone.
I watched the good meat sit there going tough in the cold and the part of me that had lain dormant for four days snapped alert.
Waste offends me on a level that predates the mission, predates Nathan, predates everything.
My father used to say I'd have made a fortune if I'd cared about money half as much as I cared about a properly rendered fat.
He meant it as a criticism. He was right about the fact and wrong about everything else, as usual.
So I held up my bound hands to the young wolf-man who'd loosened my cord, nodded at the meat and the fire, and mimed the work, let me, I can make this better, and watched him weigh it.
Cargo doesn't ask for things; cargo that asks for things is a complication, and complications get a cuff round the head.
But he was young, and bored. I think some part of him was as sick of raw marmot as I'd have been, and after a moment he grunted, cut my wrists free, and jerked his chin at the fire: try anything and I'll break your arm. Fair enough.
I made them something worth eating.
Not much, I had a fire, a flat stone, a flint blade one of them lent me with enormous suspicion, and whatever I could scavenge from what they'd gathered and thrown aside.
But cooking is mostly attention, and attention was the one thing I had in unlimited supply.
I jointed the hares properly instead of hacking them, seared the pieces on the hot stone to hold the juices, rendered the marmot fat down slow and used it to keep the lean meat from going to leather.
There were wild onions coming up green along the ridge that the wolves had trampled without seeing, and a handful of last year's hazelnuts a squirrel had been fool enough to store where I could find them, and the bitter early shoots that Sira had taught me over the winter were safe to eat if you knew them.
I cooked as I'd cooked in a Michelin kitchen and as I'd cooked over a fire at Hanging Rock, the same craft, only the stakes had changed, which is a thing about craft that the people who've never had any never understand.
The smell of it did what smells do. One by one the wolf-men drifted over, pretending they weren't, and I served them off the stone with the flat competence of a woman who has fed hostile rooms before, and by the end of it I had four of Karik's raiders eating out of my hands in the most literal sense, and something had shifted in the arithmetic of my captivity.
I was still cargo, but I was cargo that could do a thing they wanted, and that is a different and more survivable category of nothing.