34. Chapter 34 #2
I hadn't planned to. It came up out of me in the middle of the channel, low, pitched for her ear alone as I'd first sung it to her on a hunt in the spring, the hunting-song, the old one, older than my grandsire, the one wolves sing walking into country they don't know to tell it they come as guests and not as thieves.
I'd sung it to her when they took her, thrown it across the water after her so she'd know we were coming.
She'd hummed it at her own fire before she knew I'd hear.
Now I sang it against her hair in the middle of a river that wanted her, and I felt her breath change against my throat, the faintest catch, the smallest lift, some drowned part of her rising toward the sound as a hand rises toward a hand in the dark.
She didn't wake for it, but she heard it, all the same.
I would stake the whole of what I am on the fact that somewhere down under the grey she heard the song and knew it and knew who was singing it, and knew that this time the water was not going to have her, because this time no one was carrying her away from us across a river.
We were carrying her home across one, by four men who would have drowned to the last of them before they let the current take so much as her shadow.
I brought her up the far bank with the song still in my throat and the snow falling on both of us, and I did not let go of her until Daska was there with his hands out to take her.
Even then I let go slowly, because a part of me had been waiting half a year to carry her back across that water, and I was in no hurry at all to set the finishing of it down.
* * *
We made camp early that night, on the far side, because the crossing had taken everything we had and because a wolf knows when a party has reached the end of a day whatever the light says.
We got a fire going in the lee of a fallen bank, out of the wind, and we settled her close to it wrapped in the warmest of the hides, and for a little while the seven of us were simply still in a way we hadn't been since the ground first shook.
Then Tau began to cook.
I watched it happen without understanding at first what I was watching.
The king took the day's small kill, a hare Dev had snared, not much for seven mouths, and he set himself down by the fire with it and Ellie's own scavenged cooking-stone, the flat one she'd carried east wrapped in hide because she wouldn't leave it behind, and he began, clumsily, with the great hands that had never in his gilded life needed to feed anyone, to make the food she'd spent all summer preparing for everyone else.
He did it badly. He'd watched her enough to know the shape of it, the fat rendered first, the meat laid on the hot stone with attention rather than flung on to char, the wild garlic he'd pulled on the day's march crushed in at the end as he'd seen her do it.
He got half of it wrong; the stone was too hot and then not hot enough.
He swore softly in the lion-tongue at a piece that stuck, and Daska leaned in to murmur some correction a healer had no business knowing and a king had no business needing, but he did it.
He knelt at her fire in the snow and cooked for her, with a devotion that had no elegance in it anywhere and needed none.
When a little of the broth was ready he lifted her against his chest and got it into her a slow spoonful at a time, patient past anything the golden king had ever been asked to be.
I understood, watching, what I was seeing, and it went into me deep.
All summer she had fed us. Every one of us at this fire had been kept alive and cared for by her hands, Megan through her fear, the pride through its hunger, a whole council built out of stew and stubbornness, each of us mended in some place we hadn't known was broken by the plain fact of being fed by someone who thought us worth the feeding.
She'd poured herself out into all of us without ever once letting us pour anything back, because being of use was the only way the woman knew to believe she was worth keeping.
And now, with her too far gone to lift a hand, the pouring had finally reversed.
Now it was Tau clumsy over her cooking-stone, Daska teaching him the fire, Dev saving her the choicest scrap of the poor hare, and me holding her upright against the cold so the king could feed her, all of us sending back toward her, in the only language she'd ever fully trusted, the thing she'd spent her whole life sending out and never once letting herself receive.
She'd taught us this. She'd taught us that feeding a person is how you tell them they're worth keeping alive, and here we were, the four of us and the small carrier and even the cold man at the edge of the firelight, telling her the only way we knew how.
I hoped she could feel it, wherever she was.
I hoped the broth reached down to the place the song had reached and told her the same thing the song had told her, that she was not alone, and would not be, and that a great many people who loved her were pouring everything they had into the simple work of keeping her in the world.
* * *
She took a little more of the broth than she had the night before.
Daska noticed it, and caught my eye across the fire, and did not let himself make it into hope out loud, because a healer who's lost patients before knows better than to name a thing so fragile.
But it was there between us all the same, the smallest of easings, and we held it carefully and said nothing and let it warm us more than the fire did.
Long after the others had settled, I sat up with her, because it was my watch and because I wasn't ready to let the day end.
I held her against me in the dark with the snow ticking down outside our little circle of warmth, and I looked east, as I'd looked east all day without letting myself dwell on it.
The mountains were out there. I couldn't see them in the dark, but I'd seen them at dusk before the light went, and the sight had put a stone in my chest that hadn't shifted since.
They stood up across the whole of the eastern sky, higher than any country I'd ever walked, and they were already white.
This was no thin dusting on the peaks. The snow lay deep and long-settled a good way down their shoulders, over the very ground we still had to climb.
That was where the healer was, if he was anywhere.
That was the road, up and over those white shoulders and down the far side into country none of us had ever seen.
And the snow was already there ahead of us, waiting, deep on the passes we had to cross before it closed them for the year.
I looked at how far we still had to go, all that white distance rising into the dark, and then down at the woman in my arms, at the shallow flutter of her breath and the grey the firelight couldn't quite chase out of her face.
I did the arithmetic no alpha ever wants to do, the miles against the days, the days against the snow, the snow against the thin and fading thread of her.
The sums did not come out kind. We had so far to go, and she had so little time in which to be carried there, and between us and the only hope she had stood a wall of mountains going whiter by the hour.
I bent my head to her hair and sang the old song once more, low, into the falling snow, and would not let myself finish the thought that the miles and the days and the failing woman in my arms all pointed toward.
There'd be time enough for that on the passes.
Tonight I would sing, and hold her, and keep the watch, and believe against the mountains that we'd reach the far side of them before the winter or the sickness reached the end of her.
We would climb at first light. We had no other choice, and she had no other chance, and the snow was not going to wait for us to be ready.