24. Chapter 24
ELLIE
The trade caravan came up out of the south three days after the night I'd lain awake wanting a third man, and I took it, at first, for the best kind of ordinary, a break in the long warm sameness of pride life, a chance to barter and gossip and see new faces.
That was before I understood what it had carried all that way to tell me.
I'd woken that morning in a tangle of warmth I was still learning to trust, Daska at my back, Rivik's hand loose in mine, the shelter close and dim, smelling of banked fire and the two of them.
For the length of a few breaths before the day arrived, I let myself simply lie there and be a woman with more than she deserved.
That was the trouble with happiness, I was discovering.
It didn't arrive and settle like a fed animal; it arrived and immediately started asking questions.
Who are you to have this; what did you ever do to earn it?
What will it take from you when the accounting comes, because it always comes.
Three weeks now, the three of us, three weeks since the drying-racks and the fire and Daska's story about the pot that never ran dry.
Every day of it had been better than the one before, and every day of it the arithmetic in my chest had got a little louder.
I was a woman who'd been given two men who loved her without measuring, a role in a community that had once bought me off a slaver as carelessly as butchered meat, a friend where I'd had an enemy, a body that felt things again after two frozen years, more, all of it together, than I'd had in my whole life laid end to end.
And somewhere in the deep unfixable middle of me, the more I was handed, the more certain I became that a reckoning was gathering out past the firelight, sharpening itself, waiting for me to let my guard all the way down before it came to take the lot.
You're building a debt, the old voice told me, reasonable as ever, while I dressed and pulled my hair back and readied myself to go and be useful. Every good thing is another thing to lose. You've always known this, in your bones, whatever pretty story you tell yourself over the cooking-fire.
"I know that already," I told it, under my breath, as I'd started doing. "I've always known it, and I'm getting up anyway."
I went out to my fire, and I started the day's cooking, and I did not yet know that the south had sent me something that would feed the voice better than anything Nathan had ever managed.
* * *
The caravan was six wolves and a scatter of pack-beasts loaded with the goods of a warmer country, amber, worked bone, hides cured a particular supple way the pride prized, little pots of a resin that burned sweet.
They'd come up the corridor trading fire to fire, and they knew Tau's pride of old, and by midday the settlement had the loose festival air of a place with visitors.
I did what I always did with newcomers: I fed them.
A cook learns more at a full pot than a council ever learns at a formal one, and I'd long since stopped pretending my hospitality was only hospitality.
They were easy company, the traders, full of the road and its news.
I ladled out marrow broth and the last of the season's bilberries baked into Sira's cakes, and I let their talk wash over me in the lion-tongue I was still stitching together word by word, and where the lion failed us we fell back on the wolf-tongue, which two of them had a rough traveller's grip on.
It was one of these, a lean grey-muzzled wolf named Orin who'd clearly crossed more country than any of us, who did it, who set the whole afternoon on its edge without ever meaning to, over a second cake, in the idle way travellers trade the misfortunes of far-off places.
"Good trading, this run," he said, licking honey from his thumb. "Better than the last. Last time through we came by way of Broken Ridge, and a man does no good trade there anymore. Karik's grown greedy even by his own measure."
The name went through me like cold water. I kept my hands moving over the cooking-stone, kept my face the careful neutral I'd learned in a ballroom and never wanted to need again, and said, lightly, as though it cost me nothing, "You know Karik, then."
"Everyone on the corridor knows Karik." He said it as you'd name a bad crossing or a killing winter, a hazard of the country.
"He had a good run of it this season. Sold a pair of females up your way, I heard, got a king's ransom for them, more than any two women ever fetched, and it's gone to his head.
" Orin shook his grey head, disapproving in the mild way of a man disapproving of weather.
"Now he thinks every woman he can lay hands on is amber in the ground.
He's got a whole string of them at the Ridge now, six or seven at least. Taken off other packs, off the trade road, off any hearth too weak to hold them.
Keeps them for the trading, as you or I'd keep a store of good hides against a lean season. "
My hands had gone still on the cooking-stone.
I made myself start again, turning the cake that didn't need turning, because Megan was three fires down and I could feel the thing in me that wanted to go to her and the thing in me that knew better than to show this stranger what his idle news had done.
"Seven women, and no one raising a hand for them," I said.
"Thereabouts, last I saw. Poor creatures, the lot of them.
" He reached for another cake with the easy conscience of a man to whom this was a story and not a wound.
"But that's the Ridge for you. Always was a bad pack, even before Karik.
No use crying over it. A man can't right every wrong on the corridor or he'd never get his trading done. "
A pair of females, sold up your way, more than any two women ever fetched.
That was Megan and me he was talking about.
We were the good run of Karik's season, the sale that had gone to his head and taught him that women were amber in the ground.
And somewhere five days south of here, at a pack whose name I'd first heard spoken like a curse, there were seven more, taken off any hearth too weak to hold them, waiting in the cold to be turned into trade.
I fed Orin his cake and asked him nothing more, because a woman with nothing learns not to show a stranger where her heart is. But the thing had already gone in, deep and clean, and I knew it would not come back out.
* * *
I found Megan at the mending, as I always did when I needed the one person who'd understand without the whole of it having to be said.
She was set a little apart from the other women, in the shade of a windbreak, her needle moving through a torn hide with the neat efficiency she brought to everything, and under the loose layered hides of the pride she'd started, this last fortnight, to round unmistakably.
Only I knew to see it. To anyone else she was a wolf-woman gone comfortable on pride food; to me she was five months along and hiding it in plain sight, and getting harder to hide by the week.
I sat down beside her and picked up a second torn thing and threaded a bone needle, and for a while I didn't say anything, because some things you have to come at sideways.
"The traders came by Broken Ridge," I said, at last, to the hide in my lap. "On their way up."
Megan's needle didn't stop, but something in the line of her shoulders changed, a stillness coming into her that I'd learned to read. "And what did they say?"
"Karik's got others down there. Seven women, the trader said, taken off other packs and off the road, kept for the trading.
" My voice went flat and careful, as it did when I was holding something too heavy to let shake.
"We were his good season, Megan, you and me both.
We're the reason he's decided every woman he can catch is worth catching. "
She was quiet for a long moment, her needle moving, moving, and then going still. When she spoke, her voice had the particular controlled evenness she used on the things that frightened her most.
"There's nothing we can do, and you know it.
" She gave me the facts in the clipped order she once used for Nathan's diary.
"We're five days north. We have no transport, no force and an eastern mission we can't abandon.
Going back would get us killed without freeing one woman. Misery isn't a plan, Ellie."
"I know all of that." And I did know it. Everything she'd said was true, and none of it made the smallest difference to the stone that had settled behind my breastbone. "That's not the same as it not mattering."
"It's not the same, no." Megan looked up from her stitching then, and for a second the careful management dropped and I saw the thing underneath, the thing she'd been carrying since the river, since before the river, since a ballroom two years ago.
She held my eyes a moment longer, and then she did the thing she always did when a truth cut too close to her own life, and turned it away with the flat of her hand.
"But you can't carry this one, Ellie. You collect broken things as if nobody else has hands, and this will crush you without helping them.
I'm telling you as your friend: record it, remember it, and put it down until there's something useful to do. "
She was right, and I hated that she was right, and I filed it, but not away, not out of reach.
I filed it as you file the location of a wound you mean to come back and tend.
Somewhere south there were seven women nobody had overpaid for.
I couldn't reach them today, or this season, or maybe for years.
But I put them somewhere I'd feel them, a stone I chose to keep carrying, because the alternative was hearing a thing like that over a honey cake and letting it wash off, and I'd spent two years being numb and I was done with it, even when feeling was the harder road.