21. Chapter 21
ELLIE
Nathan had divided the supplies before telling any of us we were leaving.
I found him at the edge of the main fire with our hides laid out in separate piles, the dried meat portioned and the remaining lengths of sinew rope coiled neatly beside them.
Dev sat nearby with his bad leg stretched in front of him.
Megan stood rigid at the other side of the fire, her loose outer hide pulled carefully across her middle.
“A hunting party leaves east the day after tomorrow,” Nathan said. “They know a lower route towards the mountains. We go with them.”
“No,” Daska said.
Nathan looked at him. “That wasn’t a request.”
“And mine wasn’t an invitation to argue.” Daska crouched beside Dev and pressed careful fingers around the thickened joint. Dev’s face tightened despite his attempt to hide it. “This leg will not hold their pace. Not for several days.”
“The hunters said they’ll slow.”
“They said there is little water and no reliable shelter for the middle part of the route,” Rivik said. “They won’t slow enough.”
Daska rose and looked towards Megan. He had examined her that morning, privately, with me standing guard outside the shelter.
“She cannot make it either. She’s still weakened from the captivity, her blood is poor and the cold takes too much out of her. We don’t have enough winter hides for the whole party.”
Nathan barely glanced at her before solving the problem.
“Then Megan stays here.”
The silence that followed was very small and very complete.
“She isn’t essential to the mission,” he continued. “Tau’s people can care for her until we return. Ellie and Dev are the carriers. They’re the ones we need.”
Megan’s face didn’t move. Only her hand did, closing slowly over the fold of hide concealing Nathan’s child.
“No,” I said.
Nathan turned to me. “Eleanor—”
“We do not leave her behind.”
“She’ll be safer here than on the road.”
“Then we wait until she can travel safely with us.”
His expression cooled into the familiar arithmetic, one life weighed against all the lives he couldn’t see.
“The route may not remain open.”
“Then we find another route. Megan came through the stones with us, she survived that river with us, and she stays with us. You don’t get to decide she matters less because you’ve finished finding her useful.”
Across the fire, Megan looked at me.
Months ago, I’d have called the thing in her face shock. I knew her better now.
It was the first fragile shape of being chosen.
Rivik came to my fire after the others had gone to their furs, when the settlement had quieted to the small night-sounds of a place at rest, and I knew the moment I saw his face that something had come loose in him at last.
He'd changed the binding at his ribs; the healer in me registered it before anything else, the clean strips of hide where I'd left the field dressing that afternoon, Daska's careful work over mine; he moved stiffly still.
But it wasn't the wound that made him stand at the edge of my firelight like a man at the edge of a cliff, turning something over in his hands that he couldn't quite bring himself to set down.
I'd fled from him on the steppe that afternoon, fled from the thing I'd felt with his heartbeat under my palm, and I'd spent the hours since bracing for him to be cold with me, or careful, or worst of all kind about it.
This was none of those; this was a man who'd come to say a thing that frightened him more than the bison had.
"Sit," I said, because he looked as though his legs might not hold him much longer, and because the not-knowing was worse than whatever was coming. "You're making me nervous, looming there. Sit down and tell me before you fall down."
He sat, folding himself down across the fire from me as he had a hundred nights on the road, and then he only looked at me, his amber eyes catching the firelight, his jaw working around words that wouldn't come.
I'd known Rivik for the better part of a year and I'd never once seen him lost for what to do.
He was a man who led, always. That was the whole shape of him, the alpha who always knew the next move, who'd got us across a killing river and through six weeks of hell and never let the fear show.
To see him unmoored frightened me more than anger would have.
"Whatever it is," I said, gentler now, "just say it. You've earned the right to say anything to me, after today. You put yourself between me and a bull the size of a boulder. Say it."
"That's the trouble." His voice came out rough, scraped down to something raw.
"I'd put myself between you and anything, a bull, a river, the whole world, if it came for you.
And I've been telling myself for six months that I could do that, be that, and keep the rest of it locked down where it couldn't touch you.
That was a lie. I can't do it anymore, Ellie.
I can't stand at the edge of your fire and pretend the reason I'm there is duty. "
I set down the stick I'd been tending the fire with, very carefully, as though the fire were the thing that needed care.
"Back at Hanging Rock," he said, then stopped and began again.
"The night you patched Daska's hands and didn't flinch, something happened to me.
You didn't feel it because bonds go quiet when they reach a carrier, but I did.
It set in my chest like a hook, and I looked at you across the fire and knew. "
The air went thin in my chest, because I knew what he was going to say, some distant part of me had already understood it on the steppe, with his heartbeat hammering under my hand, and had run from exactly this.
"You're my mate," Rivik said. "Fated, as the old bonds go. It's been there since Hanging Rock, six months, Ellie. I've carried it six months and never said a word."
The words landed on me one after another like stones dropped into still water, the rings spreading out and out, and the first thing that rose up through the shock, before the tenderness, before anything soft, was fury.
It came up so fast and so hot it frightened me.
"Six months." My voice didn't sound like mine. "You've known for six months."
"Ellie—"
"No, don't." I was on my feet without deciding to stand, the old numbness burned clean away by something I hadn't let myself feel in longer than I could remember.
"You don't get to say my name like that, gently, like I'm the one who needs handling here.
Six whole months, Rivik. You felt a fated bond snap into place and you decided, you decided, all on your own, that I didn't get to know about it.
That you'd carry it around in secret and let me stumble through half a year with no idea. Do you have the first idea what that—"
"I know exactly what it—"
"You don't get to know! That's the whole point!
" The words tore out of me, and I was shaking now, my hands curled into fists at my sides.
"You made a choice about my life without me, all over again.
Do you understand what that means to me?
It's the thing that has been done to me by every man I've ever, my father decided who I'd marry.
Nathan decided I wasn't worth keeping and announced it to a ballroom.
Even Daska. I know it worked out well, but it was never really a choice to be mated to him.
And you, you, who I trusted, who I'd have said was nothing like them, you looked at a bond between us and decided I didn't get a say.
You took the choice away from me and called it kindness.
That's the same wound they gave me, only with a gentler face on it. "
He'd gone white under the firelight, taking it, not defending himself, which somehow made it worse.
"And that's not even the part that..." My voice cracked, and I hated it, and I kept going.
"You sat in judgment on Tau all these weeks.
Watching him, wary of him, letting me feel your disapproval every time he came near me, and the whole time you were sitting on a bond you'd never told me about.
He claimed me the first day, Rivik. He did it arrogantly and wrongly, and I refused him for it, but he told me.
From the first minute I knew exactly where I stood with him.
And you let me believe you were the honourable one, the one who'd never presume, while you hid the biggest truth of all behind that noble silence.
You had no right to judge his claiming when you were guarding a claim of your own in the dark. "
"You're right," he said. "About all of it. You're right."
The agreement stopped me where the fury hadn't.
I'd braced for him to fight or explain, to do the thing men did where they turned your anger back into your own failing; he did none of it.
He sat there in the firelight with his ruined face and took every word, and agreed, and it knocked the legs out from under my fury so suddenly I swayed with it.
"Then why," I said, and now my voice broke properly, the anger cracking to let something rawer through. "Why would you do that to me? If you know it's the same wound. Why?"
And Rivik looked up at me, and told me the truth, and the truth undid everything.
"Because I couldn't bear to be one more man claiming you," he said.
"You'd been rejected in front of a crowd.
Being wanted had only ever meant being owned and discarded.
I thought carrying the bond alone would leave you free to choose Daska, the king or no one at all. I thought my silence was a gift."
The fury emptied out of me all at once, and what came flooding in behind it had no anger in it anywhere.
Because I understood, suddenly and completely, what he was telling me.
"Six months," I said again, but the words meant something entirely different now. "Oh, Rivik, you've had a fated bond, unanswered, for six whole months."
I watched him understand that I'd understood.