13. Chapter 13 #2
She was crouched at a fire that was plainly her own, her dark hair longer than I remembered and bound back with a strip of hide, her hands busy over a cooking-stone, and she was laughing, laughing, at something a lion child had said, a rich warm sound I'd feared on the worst nights I might never hear again.
She looked well, more than well, if I'm honest. The thin worn look the march must have put on her was gone; she was fed and rested and there was a colour in her, a life, a contentedness in how she moved through the space around her fire, and even before she saw me it was written in every line of her that whatever had happened to her here, she had not merely survived it.
She'd grown into it; she'd taken a captivity at the edge of the world and made it, somehow, into a place where she could laugh.
The old wound turned over in me then, quiet and cruel, before I could stop it.
Because she looked like a woman who belonged somewhere.
And I was a bear who'd never belonged anywhere in his life, who'd given up the only pack that had ever half-accepted him to follow her across the world, and some small, poisoned voice I'd carried since I was a cub looked at her thriving in a king's settlement and whispered the thing it always whispered.
She's found better, of course she has. She was always going to find better than you, the moment she had the choice.
A bear is what you settle for when there's nothing else, and she's got a whole warm kingdom now, and a king, and she doesn't need the thing you are.
I crushed it down. I'd had a lifetime of practice crushing it down, ever since I was a young bear drifting from pack to pack, always tolerated and never chosen, the useful one who mended their hurts and buried their dead and was never once asked to stay for his own sake.
That voice had been with me so long it felt like truth rather than fear.
It told me that a creature like me got kept only as long as he was useful, that the moment someone had a warmer option they'd take it, and that a woman as extraordinary as Ellie thriving in a golden king's settlement was exactly the warmer option arriving on schedule.
The bruise of it ached under her fire and her laughter and the easy grace of her in this place that had so clearly come to love her.
But I'd learned something on six weeks of road that the voice hadn't caught up to yet.
All that way, through every cold night the trail went dead, the bond had pulled steady and warm, never once breaking, and a broken thing, a thing already discarded, doesn't pull like that.
Whatever the poison told me, her end of the bond had never once gone slack.
I held on to that against the old fear, and mostly it held.
Then she looked up.
She looked up because the child had gone quiet, staring at the strangers, and she followed the child's gaze across the fire, and she saw me, and her busy hands stopped dead over the stone.
I watched it hit her, the laughter dying, something enormous taking its place, disbelief giving way to a joy so fierce it looked almost like pain, all of it slamming down the bond at the same instant in a flood so strong after six weeks of that thin frayed thread that my knees nearly went.
She came up off the ground without seeming to decide to.
She said my name, just my name, breaking in the middle of it, and then she was across the space between us and into me, both arms around my ribs, her face buried in my chest. I wrapped her up and held on, feeling her whole body shake against mine, and six weeks of terror, of endless walking, of that cruel thin bond went out of me all at once, leaving me trembling as hard as she was.
"You came," she said, into my chest, muffled and wet. "You came, you came, I knew you'd come, I told myself every single day that you'd come —"
"I felt you the whole way," I said into her hair, my voice gone to pieces. "Every single mile of it. I carried your bearing in my chest and followed it, and I'd have followed it to the edge of the world, Ellie. Are you safe, are you hurt anywhere? Let me look at you, love, let me see you properly."
I pulled back to run my healer's eyes over her, hunting by reflex for injury, for illness, for anything the road might have done, and found her well, truly well, better than I'd left her, and the relief of it nearly took my legs a second time.
She laughed and cried at once, letting me turn her face to the light and press my thumb to the pulse at her wrist, submitting to the examination because she knew I needed it as much as she did.