24. Chapter 24 #3
"I'd risk your version of the mission," I said, "which has always been the one where you get to decide who's expendable.
I've watched you do that arithmetic, Nathan.
You did it at a river once, standing dry on the bank while my...
" I caught it and changed course. "While men went in to die for the crossing you chose.
I'm not handing you that sum again. We go when the healers and the carriers say it's safe to go, and that's not a thing you get to arrange over honey cakes with a caravan. "
For a moment he only looked at me, and I saw him recalculating, as he always did, a man for whom other people were variables, reassessing one that had stopped behaving. Then he stood, brushing off his knees with that fastidious precision, and gave me a thin cold smile that didn't reach anything.
"You've grown very brave," he said, "surrounded by monsters who'll do your fighting for you. I wonder how brave you'll be when the snow closes those passes and the mission dies here at your feet, and you have to live knowing your comfort was what killed it. Sleep well on that one, Ellie."
He walked away toward the shelters, unhurried, deniable as ever, leaving me at my coals with my heart going hard and the old poison working exactly as he'd designed it to.
Because that was his craft; he didn't need to win the argument.
He only needed to hand me a new thing to lie awake over, and he'd done it, slid it in clean beside the seven women and the debt I was already sure I owed the world for being happy: your comfort will kill the mission, and you'll have to live with it.
* * *
I didn't go to Daska that night, or to Rivik.
I sat at my dying fire a long time on my own, which was a thing I could do now that I couldn't have done a season ago, sit with a hard feeling and not run from it into someone's arms, not because I couldn't have the comfort but because I was strong enough, some nights, not to need it.
The ache was back under my breastbone. I noticed it as Daska had taught me to notice things in a body, without panic, a plain observation: the borrowed weight had curdled and clenched sometime during Nathan's little visit, that sick cold flare I got whenever I was made small or made guilty, and it hadn't fully eased when he left.
It sat there now, low and wrong, worse than it had been in weeks.
Three nights ago, wrapped in the warmth of two men who loved me, it had gone almost entirely quiet.
Tonight, with Nathan's poison in me and seven women's worth of guilt and the whole gathering weight of everything I had and didn't deserve, it throbbed like a stone in a boot.
Eases when I'm loved, I thought, turning it over.
Worse when I'm made to feel I've taken more than my share.
I'd noticed the pattern before and never quite let myself look straight at it, and I didn't have the strength to chase it tonight either, so I filed it with everything else, the traders' news, the count of days, the shape of the argument I'd won and would keep on paying for.
A woman with nothing hoards information the way a starving one hoards seeds.
I had a great deal now, and somehow more seeds than ever, and the growing sense that I was going to need every one.
Then the wind changed.
I felt it before I understood it, a shift in the dark, the settlement's smoke suddenly streaming sideways, the fires all leaning the same way at once.
It came down off the eastern heights, off the far mountains I'd never seen but knew were out there in the black, and it carried a cold in it that hadn't been in any wind all summer.
A thin hard edge, a warning, the first breath of the season Nathan had come to threaten me with.
It found the seams of my clothes and settled in them to stay, as the early-spring cold had done on a morning by a different river a lifetime ago, and I pulled my hides closer, understanding with the whole animal certainty of a body that had survived one ice-age winter already exactly what it meant.
The countdown had begun; all summer the leaving had been a thing out on the horizon, a someday, an argument we could keep having gently.
That wind was the horizon arriving. Somewhere east of us the high passes were feeling this same cold, and the snow was gathering behind it, and the door that led toward everything we'd crossed the world to reach was beginning, slowly, to swing shut.
I sat at my fire with the new wind streaming my smoke sideways and felt the truth of it settle into me alongside all the other stones: that this home I'd built out of care and stubbornness and honey cakes was a thing I'd have to leave, and soon, walking out of the warmth into the teeth of exactly the winter that had nearly killed me the first time.
Megan would have to be carried through it, secret and swelling.
Dev's reserves would have to hold where they'd never yet been tested.
And seven women I couldn't reach would stay unreached while I saved the ones I could.
And underneath it all was the golden thought I'd carried for three nights: I didn't want to leave before I found out what the space at the edge of my fire was for.
Out at the pickets, faint under the new wind, I heard Rivik begin, very low, to sing.