23. Chapter 23
ELLIE
Istood at the edge of the firelight with a fistful of crushed betony going to pulp in my hand, and I could not make my lungs work.
I'd come back early. That was the whole of it, the small ordinary thing that had undone me, Eleya had run out of the dried yarrow she wanted and sent me to fetch more from Daska's stores, humming, thinking of nothing, and I'd rounded the end of the drying racks into earshot of two low voices and stopped as though I'd walked into a wall.
Rivik's came rough beneath its care, Daska's low and level under it.
And the thing they were saying to each other in the dark, the thing they plainly thought no one would ever hear.
She's big enough to hold us both.
Whether a bear and a wolf can share one fire and call it brotherhood instead of a wound.
I've only been waiting for you to stop drowning long enough to hear it.
The two of them, together, not circling me warily like men who'd struck a truce over a prize, not dividing me up into your night and mine, but reaching toward each other, over the top of me, toward some third thing I hadn't dared let myself imagine could exist. And now they'd both gone still and turned their heads toward me with the firelight on their faces, the wolf and the bear, my wolf and my bear. I understood that they knew I'd heard.
For a long moment nobody moved at all.
The old voice got there first. It always got there first, it had had a two-year head start and it never tired.
There it is, it whispered, in the reasonable tone that sounded so much like my father and a little like Nathan and mostly, by now, like me; You greedy, broken thing.
One man wasn't enough for you, so you took the bear, and then the wolf, and now look what you've done, dragged two good men into this shape, and you'll want still more after tonight, because there's a hole in you that nothing fills and decent women don't have holes like that.
My eyes stung. My hand had crushed the betony to nothing.
Every good thing I'd been let have since the stones spat me into this world stood balanced on a ledge, and the voice told me, kindly, that this was the moment it all got taken back.
"Ellie, look at me." Daska set down the sinew he'd been knotting and came to his feet, unfolding to his full great height, and his voice was so gentle it nearly finished me.
"Breathe first, love, before you do anything else, and whatever you're telling yourself right now, let me tell you it's wrong. "
"I didn't mean to listen." The words came out strangled. "Eleya wanted yarrow, I wasn't, I heard you. I heard what you—"
"I know." He crossed the ground between us slowly, as he'd cross to a spooked animal, and stopped a careful arm's length from me, not reaching, giving me the room he always gave me.
"You heard us being honest about a thing we should have said to your face weeks ago.
That's the only wrong in it, that you heard it round the side of a rack instead of straight from the two of us, and that's ours to be sorry for, not yours. "
Behind him Rivik had risen too, favouring his healed ribs out of habit more than need, and where Daska had softened, Rivik had gone very still and watchful, reading my face as he read a herd for the one beast about to bolt.
He knew what was happening in me; of course he knew.
He'd carried a bond for six months in silence because he understood exactly this animal, the one that ran from its own wanting.
"Say the thing out loud," Rivik said quietly. "The thing that voice is telling you. Don't let it work in the dark. What does it say?"
And because it was him, because he'd shown me his own worst secret at this same fire not a week past and let me rage at him for it, I said it.
"That I'm greedy, is what it says." My voice broke on the word.
"That a normal woman would be grateful past all sense to have even one of you, and here I am with two, and now the two of you have gone and reached for each other over the top of me, and some part of me heard it and didn't recoil.
It reached for it, God help me, and that's the proof.
That's the proof of what they always said I was.
Too much of a want that never fills, a hole where a decent woman keeps her limits.
My own fated mate took one look at what I am and rejected me in front of five hundred people, and you want to know why?
He saw exactly this in me. And you two, you good men, you've somehow decided my too-much is a thing you want to build a home around, and I can't, I don't know how to let you, because if I let myself believe it, then when it's taken away it'll be the Savoy all over again, only this time it'll kill me. "
The fire cracked between us. Somewhere out in the dark of the settlement a lion coughed, low and unbothered, and the night went on around us as though a woman weren't coming apart at its centre.
Daska closed the last of the distance then.
He didn't take me in his arms, he knew better, knew I'd have flinched from being managed, he only lowered himself down onto the log by the fire so his great height wasn't looming over me and his eyes came level with mine, and he waited until I looked at him.
"When I was young," he said, "in the bear clans where I was born, before ever I came to the wolves, I watched my mother feed six children through a winter that should have killed half of us.
She'd take a haunch of meat that any sensible person would say was enough for two and she'd stretch it into a pot that fed us all, and there'd still be a bowl left for the old woman two fires down who had nobody.
I asked her once how she did it. How the pot never ran dry.
" He turned his broad hand over in the firelight, palm up, as he did when he was reaching for a word in my tongue.
"She said a mean heart divides. A generous one multiplies.
She said the ones who love small think love is a haunch of meat, a fixed thing, and every mouth that eats leaves less.
And the ones who love large know it's a fire, that you can light a hundred torches off one flame and the first flame doesn't shrink. It only throws more light."
I was crying now, openly, the betony fallen forgotten into the dirt.
"You're not a hole that never fills, Ellie.
" He said it plainly, a healer stating a finding.
"You're the fire itself. I've watched you do it all summer, feed a whole pride off scraps, build a council out of nothing, take a hostile king's people and make them yours one bowl at a time, and never once run dry.
The thing they named a flaw in you is the truest thing about you.
Your heart is large. It was always going to be large enough for more than one man, because that's simply the size it is, and I stopped being frightened of that the day you knelt in the dirt and patched my ruined hands and didn't flinch.
" His voice went rough. "The only person in this settlement who thinks your love is a haunch of meat is you. "
"He's right, and you know he is." Rivik came and crouched at my other side, close but not touching, his amber eyes level and certain.
"And I'll tell you the other half of it, the half a healer's too kind to say.
I've been an alpha most of my life. I ran a pack for years, and the first law of a pack is that a wolf who has to be the only one is a wolf who tears the pack apart.
Jealousy isn't love, Ellie, it's fear wearing love's face.
I felt for that jealousy in myself, sitting at this fire watching you fall asleep against him, and it wasn't there.
What was there..." He glanced at Daska, and something passed between them, steady and unashamed.
"It was a wanting to come in, never once a wanting to take you off him for myself.
What I wanted was to stand at the same fire he stood at.
And I spent three nights certain that made me greedy too, until this great stubborn bear told me it didn't, and I'm passing the mercy along, because you look like you need it more than I did. "
I looked between them; my bear, patient as bedrock, who'd waited two years' worth of my flinching without once making me feel it.
My wolf, who'd bled half a year in silence rather than cage me.
And the impossible thing they were offering wasn't a division of me between them.
It was an addition, a widening, a fire with more than one warmth in it and no one measuring the meat.
"You planned this," I said, wiping my face, grabbing for something ordinary to hold. "The two of you. Mending a snare where I'd hear."
"We planned nothing of the sort." Daska's face creased with something close to laughter.
"The Great Mother did this. We were mending a genuinely broken snare and you came round the racks at exactly the wrong moment, and I've never in my life been more grateful to a length of frayed sinew.
" He held out his hand, palm up, that open patient offer he never once forced.
"I'm not going to talk you into anything, and you know that about me by now.
If what you need tonight is to go to your own furs and think, then Rivik and I will bank this fire, wish you good sleep, and nothing between us will have changed except that now you know.
But if some part of you reached for what you heard...
" His dark eyes held mine in the low light.
"Then you should know it's allowed to reach.
That's the whole of what I'm telling you tonight, you're allowed this, if you want it. "
You're allowed, he'd said, and the words went through me as let me take care of you had gone through me in another shelter weeks ago, straight past every wall to the frightened thing behind them.
I put my hand in his.
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