16. Chapter 15
Valen
First light comes into the cabin gray and I’m dressed before it reaches the window.
The bed is made. The one chair still sits exactly where it was the day they handed me the key.
I’ve been in here long enough to know which board by the window creaks.
The place still looks like a room waiting for somebody to move into it.
There isn’t much to carry - a knife, water, the clothes I travel in. I stand in the middle of the one room and run through the morning: out before the compound wakes, get the ground under me at the boundary of the range before anyone here has finished breakfast.
My cabin sits at the east end of the row, the last one before the treeline. I pull the door shut quietly behind me. The grass is soaked through. Cool air runs down off the ridge and goes straight through my shirt.
Over the ridge the sky breaks pink first, low against the rock. Orange comes up under it fast, then a band of gold along the last low clouds before the light clears white. I’ve watched that same run of color come up over every realm I’ve ever stood in. It has yet to get old.
I turn and walk toward the Lodge. Nothing between my door and the Lodge is awake except a horse shuffling in the dark of the barn. Dane is in the front room with a mug in his hand and the lights off. He’s dressed. His boots are on.
“North Range this morning,” I say. “I’ll go in alone.”
He take a sip of his drink. “Alone?”
“I move faster without having to account for anyone. There’s no reason to spend two people on a scouting pass.”
“What are you expecting up there?”
“A boundary they won’t open. A pack that gives the same answer to every question.” I stop there. “I want the ground under my feet before I ask anybody anything.”
He looks at me over the mug for a while. Then he looks past me, down the hall toward the front doors.
“You’re telling the wrong man.”
“I’m telling my Alpha.”
“You’re telling the one who’ll say yes.” He sets the mug down on the table. “I’m not what’s standing between you and that ridge.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then you know how this goes.” He picks the mug back up. “Bring her home in one piece. She’ll be trying to do the same with you.”
She’s on the steps when I come out. Dressed for travel.
Dark clothes, boots laced high, hair pulled back off her face, catching pink and then gold at the edges where the light off the ridge finds it.
Her arms are crossed. Even braced for a fight she stands loose, hip cocked, no hurry anywhere in her.
I take that in first. Then the rest of it - she’s been standing out here waiting for me to come through that door.
“I heard what you told Dane,” she says. “It isn’t happening.”
“I’ll cover more ground in a day than the two of us will cover in two.”
“You’ll cover none of it.” Her chin comes up. “Faelan still holds every portal in reach. Step into one and it could open anywhere but where you mean to go. I’m the only way north that’s safe. If you’re going, you’re going with me.”
Standing this close to her while I argue takes more out of me than the argument itself does. I keep going anyway.
“I’ve walked into worse than a bad crossing.”
“Not one Faelan is holding open.” She waits. I keep my mouth shut. “Tell me the real objection, Valen. This one is beneath you.”
“Then I’ll take my chances with the portal.”
She goes still. Not the polite kind of still.
Everything in her stops at once. Her eyes hold mine, violet with silver caught through them.
I want the words back in my mouth. Her eyes give nothing back.
She lets it sit there between us. One more question would pull the rest of it out of me. She doesn’t ask it.
“That pack will be hostile before we’re inside the boundary,” I say. “There’s no reason for you to walk into that.”
She’s close enough now that I catch her weight come forward onto the balls of her feet, the same step she takes right before she moves fast.
“I’ve walked into worse than a cold welcome.” She comes down one step. “I’m not asking you to clear the room for me first.”
“I know what they are. You don’t.”
“Then I’ll learn.” She takes the last step down. “That’s the entire reason I’m going.”
“Goddamn it, Nyxiana.” The words come out harsher than anything I’ve ever said to her. “I’m trying to protect you.”
“I don’t need you to protect me.” She doesn’t raise her voice to meet mine. In fact, it drops, becoming slower, more exact than before. “I’ve never needed that from you. What I need is for you to stop deciding what I can carry before you’ve asked me a single question about it.”
I have an answer for that. I’m not going to give it to her.
So, I stop arguing, turn and start walking toward the treeline.
I’m most of the way there before anything moves behind me.
Then she’s in front of me. No run. No sound of her crossing the ground.
The distance is simply gone. Her palm lands on my chest and stops me where I stand.
The shock goes through the point of contact.
It cracks up under my sternum, then out along both arms to the ends of my fingers, bright and hot.
It rocks the two of us back half a step.
Her hand comes away. I look down at the place on my shirt where it was.
She turns her own palm over and looks, fingers half curled, like the hand belongs to somebody else.
Neither of us fills the quiet. Wind moves through the tops of the pines above us.
My pulse goes hard under the spot she touched.
She has to tip her head back to hold my eyes.
“Go back inside.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.
She holds her ground on the pine needles and doesn’t answer.
The place on my chest where her hand landed stays warm.
It should have faded already. It hasn’t.
I’ve made worse feelings go away before.
Anger at a pack that judged me before I said a word.
Standing outside rooms nobody let me into.
All of that went when I told it to go. This doesn’t go.
It stays with me through the quiet. It’s still there when she speaks again.
“I’m coming,” she says. She closes the last of the ground between us and turns her hand over, palm up, waiting for mine.
I could tell her the real reason I don’t want her coming. I know exactly what it is even if I’ve never let myself think all the way through it, not even alone. I’m not going to start now.
There’s a second reason behind it, that one I could say out loud and lose nothing.
Yesterday she came out of the dark hauling me and went down on one knee in the grass at the border.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her the first time she tried to stand.
She got up because she decided to. Her body had no part in the decision.
Asking her to carry me anywhere again is not a small thing. I have every right to say so out loud.
I keep that one back too. Both of them stay unsaid.
The argument goes out of me. I put my hand in hers.
Her fingers close around mine. Then there’s no light at all.
The dark between places has no ground, no air.
Pressure closes on me from every side at once.
My ears fill with it. My lungs hold what they had when the light cut out.
Partway through they start asking for more.
There’s her grip on my hand. There’s nothing else in here.
No direction. No up. No sound of her breathing an inch away from me.
Somewhere in it I’m dragging. Not moving, not falling.
Hanging off her like a stone she’s hauling uphill, the same way I hung off her coming out of Drakoria.
I can’t reach her in here to see what it’s taking out of her.
I already saw it once. She’ll come out of this the same way she came out of that one: unsteady, barely able to stand.
The pressure holding us in the dark lets go all at once. Ridge rock comes up hard under my boots. Wind cuts straight across it, loud over the stone. It pulls her hair out of its tie and across her face. The air has a cold, smoke-edged scent in it that lifts off the rock itself.
She staggers a step sideways before she catches herself. My hand is under her elbow before her second foot lands. She takes it. Neither of us says a word about it.
“I’m fine,” is the first thing out of her mouth.
The color has gone out of her face. There’s a fine tremor running the length of her arm.
She straightens up on her own. Her mouth goes tight, then eases, and the diplomatic mask settles back over her face, the same composed look she carries into rooms full of people who want something from her.
I nod once and let her elbow go. My hand stays open at my side, half a foot off her arm, ready for the next stagger. There isn’t one. I stay at her shoulder as we start walking. Then I look out at the ground ahead of us for the first time since we landed.
Long spines of rock running east and west, dropping away steep between them.
Water moving fast somewhere below and out of sight, the sound coming up thin through the wind.
Two of the spines cross further out. I know which of them takes the light first. That’ s been sitting in me the whole time, unused.
The country up here is barer than the range behind us.
Barer than it has any business being in high summer.
This is the cold end of it, where the ground gives back less every mile you go north.
It looks exactly like the place that made me.
I stand there and let it be what it is. Then I walk.
I pick out the switchback the second I look up, ahead of any real study of the ground.
Sharp eyes. That’s what I’ve always called it.
I call it that again and put my hand out toward the second spine, where the rock breaks and lets the switchback through.
“There. That’s the way in.”
She’s looking at me instead of at the ridge.
“How far?” she says.
“An hour.”
“Uphill?”
“Most of it.”
“How many of them are up there?”
“Enough.”
That’s all I give her. The terrain ahead of us is the reason she came.
Her eyes have been on me since the wind first hit us anyway.
She’s watching me with the same look she gets when a read won’t settle.
I’ve caught it on her face before, gone as fast as it comes.
I’ve never known what she’s not getting.
Whatever it is, she isn’t getting it now either.
I hold her eyes longer than I mean to, testing whether she’s going to say what she sees.
I don’t like how much it takes out of me to sit through a woman working out I’m wrong somehow without any way to prove it.
“Valen.” She waits until I look at her. “Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
It isn’t true. She’ s spent her whole life pulling truth out of people who had no intention of handing it over. She’s standing close enough to smell the lie on me. She leaves it where it is.
We come up over the shoulder of the first spine.
This is where the pack’s territory starts, marked the same way it’s always been marked: a stack of stone, waist high, set by hand, gray with weather.
Nothing carved into it, nothing written on it, exactly the color it was when I was small enough to walk under the top of it.
It says now what it said then - this ground has an owner.
I am not it. I stop in front of the stone, put my hand on the top of the stack.
The stone holds the cold the same as it always did, straight through my palm and into the bones of my wrist.
From here the switchback climbs two bends and turns out of sight behind the rock. Everything past that stays where it is until we walk into it.
I stand there long enough that she could ask me what’s wrong. She stays quiet, comes up on my left and stops a few inches off my shoulder. Her attention goes out to the switchback with mine. She waits it out beside me.
I start walking again. Past the marker, onto the ground that made me. Nobody up here ever let me keep one inch of it. She comes with me.
The pack that raised me is somewhere past that switchback. In a few minutes she’ll see the ground I grew up on and the people who never claimed me. I never gave her a reason for wanting to come up here without her.
She never asked me for one.