13. Chapter 13
DASKA
Ifelt her before I saw the settlement, as I'd felt her for weeks, the bond pulling steady in my chest, warmer and stronger with every mile we closed, until on the last morning it was so bright and so near that I could have wept from the pull of it.
We'd been six weeks on the road after her.
Six weeks of following a thread through country that tried to kill us a dozen ways, of Rivik tracking, of Dev limping gamely on a leg that had knitted crooked, of Nathan chafing at every delay and being overruled at every turn because the one who could actually feel the direction of her was me, and I'd not once let the bearing waver.
The trail had died at a river weeks ago; the bond never had.
It had pulled me east and south through the thawing steppe like a lodestone that only pointed one way, and now, cresting a long rise in the grey spring light, I finally saw the thing it had been pointing at.
Below us lay a settlement, vast, warm, sprawling in the shallow bowl of land, threaded with the smoke of a hundred fires, bigger than anything I'd seen in my life, bigger than Hanging Rock ten times over.
And somewhere down in that great living sprawl, close now, so close the bond sang with it, was Ellie.
"There," I said, the word coming out half-broken. "She's down in that, I can feel her."
Rivik came up beside me, breathing hard, his amber eyes raking the settlement below with an alpha's reflexive tally, the size of it, the defences, the sheer number of people.
I felt him weigh it all and come to the same place I had, which was that whatever this was, we couldn't fight our way into it.
There were too many; if Ellie was down there against her will, we'd not be taking her out by force.
"Lions," Rivik said quietly, and wariness threaded his voice. "Can you smell them? Cave lions, a lot of them, and wolves, and cats I don't know. This is a mixed pride." He was silent a moment, reading the wind. "It's big and old and settled. This isn't a raiding camp, Daska. This is a kingdom."
Behind us, Dev caught up and bent double, hands on his knees, wheezing, and said something in his own tongue that I'd learned enough of over the weeks to catch the shape of, something about being too old and too broken for this, delivered with the wry gallows humour that had kept us all upright through the worst of it.
Even Nathan, coming up last, went still at the sight of the settlement below, and for once the cold impatient thing in him had nothing to say.
That was the first surprise of that strange day, how Nathan changed, looking down at the pride.
All the way from the river he'd worn his authority like a hide he refused to take off, certain that his was the only clear head among us, forever pushing to go faster, take the straight line, spend whatever had to be spent.
But cave lions are bigger than wolves. A cave-lion shifter stands shoulder to shoulder with a bear, and there were hundreds of them down there, and something in Nathan, who for all his cruelty was no fool, recognised that he'd walked to the edge of a power that dwarfed his own.
He went careful and watchful in a way I'd not seen from him before, and I set it down with everything else I'd learned of him, because a man who only respects what can destroy him tells you exactly what he is.
We went down into the pride openly, because there was no other way that didn't end with us dead.
It went against every instinct I had, walking a small band of exhausted strangers straight into the heart of a power that could crush us without noticing.
A bear's whole life is spent reading the size of a thing before he tangles with it, and everything about this place said too big, walk away.
But the bond in my chest said she's there, and a healer knows there are worse things than dying, and being the man who turned back within sight of her was one of them, so we went down.
Rivik took the lead, as he always did, his alpha's shoulders set square and his hands loose and visible; I walked at his flank with my own hands open; Dev came behind with Nathan, the two of them an ill-matched pair, the injured old wolf and the cold fallen alpha who'd caused half our grief.
I found myself watching Nathan on the way down, as I hadn't stopped watching him since the river.
He'd been the one who overruled the crossing that got her taken.
He'd been the one whose certainty cost us all of this.
And now he walked into a lion-kingdom gone quiet and small, and for a man like Nathan, the only thing worse than losing Ellie would be arriving to find her thriving without him.
Whatever had rejected her two years ago, whatever hollow cruelty lived where his heart should have been, some part of him had still expected to be the one who mattered when we found her.
I could see him bracing against the possibility that he wouldn't be.
It ought to have given me satisfaction. Mostly it just made me tired, because I'd spent six weeks walking beside a man who'd broken the best person I'd ever known and never once understood what he'd thrown away.
* * *
They knew we were coming, of course. A settlement that size has scouts.
We'd been watched since the rise, and by the time we reached the outermost fires there were lions ranged loosely across our path, enormous men and women with tawny hair and golden eyes, armed but not yet hostile, watching us with the frank assessing curiosity of a people confident enough in their own strength that four road-worn strangers didn't frighten them.
This was where Rivik and I earned our place, because between us we had enough of the lion tongue to matter.
We'd both spent years trading north and south in our old lives, before Hanging Rock, I'd wandered a long way as a young bear looking for a pack that would have me and picked up scraps of a dozen tongues on the road, and Rivik had led hunts that ranged into lion country; neither of us was fluent.
But between his handful of words and mine, and a great deal of open-handed gesture to show we carried no violence, we could make ourselves understood, and understanding was the difference between a welcome and a slaughter.
"We come for a woman," Rivik said, in his rough careful lion, both hands open at his sides. "She was taken from us, a small woman, dark, human. Brought here by wolves, Broken Ridge wolves, slavers. We've followed six weeks. We mean no harm to your pride. We only want her back."
The lions looked at one another. Something moved through them, a ripple of reaction I couldn't read, and one of them, a hard-faced woman, tall even for a lioness, with the bearing of someone used to being obeyed, stepped forward and looked us over one by one, slow and thorough, her golden eyes lingering longest on me; on the bond, I realised.
She couldn't see it, but she was a hunter, and hunters read what they can't see, and something in how I held myself must have told her which of us the pull ran through.
She said something too fast for me to catch, and Rivik shook his head to show he'd missed it, and she tried again slower, and what she said this time landed in my chest like a dropped stone.
"The dark woman is here," she said. "She is well, and she is..." She used a word I didn't know, then, seeing our incomprehension, tried another. "She is no captive, not any longer. She belongs to the king."
She belongs to the king.
Rivik went very still beside me. My heart did something complicated and painful.
I made my face stay calm, because a healer learns to keep his face calm over the worst news, and because I didn't yet understand what the words meant and wouldn't let myself leap.
Belongs to the king. It could mean a hundred things across the gulf of a half-shared language.
It could mean she was a slave in a finer collar.
It could mean she was dead and this was a kindness.
It could mean any of a dozen things I couldn't yet bear to weigh.
"Take us to her," I said, in my clumsy lion, and I put every scrap of the healer's steadiness I had into it, the voice I used on the dying and the terrified. "Please take us to her. Let us see that she's well with our own eyes, and we'll do whatever your king asks after."
The hard-faced woman studied me a moment longer. Then something in her decided, and she turned and jerked her head for us to follow, and led us in through the fires toward the heart of the pride.
* * *
I smelled her cooking before I saw her.
It came to me through the woodsmoke and the press of unfamiliar bodies, a thread of something so achingly familiar that my throat closed on it, seared meat done exactly as she did it, and under it the honey-and-berry sweetness of the little hot-stone cakes old Sira had taught her at Hanging Rock.
I knew before I rounded the last shelter and saw her that she was not a slave, not dying, not anything I'd feared on six weeks of hard road.
No slave cooks like that; no captive fills the air of her prison with the smell of the food she makes for love.
Then I rounded the shelter, and there she was.