24. Chapter 24 #2
Thawing came with its own cruelty: you didn't get to choose which things you felt.
* * *
The stone was still fresh in me that evening when Nathan came to find me, and so I was already raw when he pressed exactly the place he'd come to press.
I'd learned his moments by now, he chose them as a good hunter chooses a shot, patient for the angle.
He waited until I'd left the main fires to bank my own for the night, until Megan was gone to her furs and Daska was at the healers' shelter and Rivik was somewhere out at the pickets where he liked to walk the dark.
He came across the emptied space between the fires with that unhurried certainty of his, the man who decided things, and I felt the old prey-stillness settle over me and made myself keep working, feeding my fire down to coals.
"Word's going round the caravan brought news," he said, by way of nothing. "About the state of the eastern passes."
"Has it brought news, now?"
"The season's turning, in case you hadn't noticed past your cooking-fire.
The traders came up ahead of the weather, said the high routes into the eastern mountains start closing with the first hard snows, and the first hard snows aren't far off.
" He crouched down across the coals from me, and the firelight did nothing kind to his face.
"Which means we've a window, and it's shutting, and every day you spend playing house here is a day of it gone. "
There it was, laid out plain. Not the doctrine speech this time, not you were never enough, he'd tried that blade already and watched it turn.
This was the other Nathan, the competent one, the one who was sometimes right, which was what made him dangerous.
Because he wasn't wrong about the passes.
Dev had been saying the same thing for weeks in his own worried way, watching the sky, fretting the reserves he carried like a man counting coins toward a debt he wasn't sure he could pay.
Winter was coming, and the mountains east of us would close, and we could not stay at this pride forever however much my whole heart had started to call it home.
"I'm aware of the season, Nathan."
"Are you really, though? Because from where I stand you've gone native.
" He said it mildly, reasonably, the poison always in the reason.
"You've got yourself a little kingdom and a pair of pets and you've decided the mission can wait on your comfort.
So let me make it simple. I've spoken to the traders.
They go back south in four days, and their road takes them east of here for the first stretch, toward the passes.
We go with them. I've as good as arranged it. "
The coals popped between us; somewhere a lion coughed in the dark.
"You've arranged it," I said.
"Someone in this party has to. You won't, because you don't want to leave your cakes, your council or your...
" A small precise pause, aimed. "...arrangement, whatever it's become.
Dev won't, because he waits for someone else to accept responsibility.
So I've made the decision. Departure is in four days. Plan your goodbyes accordingly."
And two years ago, this would have worked.
Two years ago I'd have felt the old helplessness close over me, the man deciding my life, arranging it, informing me after the fact, and me nodding along because I'd been trained since childhood that a man arranging my life was simply the weather, a thing that happened to me rather than a thing I got a say in.
My father had done it in a boardroom, Nathan at the Savoy, Karik at a river; the whole long line of men who'd looked at my life and decided it belonged to them.
But I wasn't that woman anymore, and the proof of it rose in me clean and certain and, this time, entirely without shaking.
"No, we won't," I said.
He blinked, small and quickly covered, but I saw it, the flicker of a man who'd expected the old Ellie and met a new one.
"Megan is five months gone with your child," I said, and watched him fail to understand because he'd never looked closely enough to count.
"She can't take a hard mountain crossing in deep winter.
Dev's leg is barely sound, and we still don't know whether the reserves are enough.
We leave when it's right, Nathan, not when it suits you to be the man who decided it. "
I hadn't meant to tell him about Megan. It came out of me in the heat of it, and I regretted it the moment it left my mouth, but he'd already dismissed it, I could see, filed it as one of my soft distractions, a woman's fuss, and some cold part of me noted that the secret was safe precisely because he thought so little of the woman carrying it.
It was the ugliest kind of safety, and it would hold precisely because of it.
"You'd risk the mission," he said, and now the pleasant was gone entirely, "for a pregnant woman and a lame man and your own reluctance to leave a warm bed."