Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Polly ruined three carvings before mid-morning.
The first she cut too deep, the little bird’s wing snapping clean off in her hand.
The second she gripped so hard the blade skipped and left a pale gouge straight across where the eye should go.
The third she simply stopped in the middle of carving, the blade resting against the stone, and stared at nothing while the same two seconds played themselves over again behind her eyes for what had to be the hundredth time since the crystals had come back up.
Her mouth on his. His absolute stillness. The way he had let her stop.
You infuriating male, she thought again, and set the knife down before she could ruin a fourth carving.
She had said too much last night. She knew she had.
She’d meant to kiss him and then go to sleep with a win, and instead the whole tangled mess of it had come pouring out of her in the dark—safe and furious both—and he had lain there and taken every word of it the way he took everything, patient as stone, and then he’d asked her what she wanted and she’d frozen.
And eventually, when she couldn’t answer him, he’d told her, when you know, little one, you tell me. There’s no hurry. There never will be.
Which was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to her. And she had wanted, absurdly, to hit him with a pillow.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Tess said, and Polly blinked as she focused on the healer’s cave again.
“What thing?”
“The thing where your brain goes somewhere else and your hands stop moving.” Tess turned her own carving over.
She’d announced last night that the lumpy, stubborn little shape was going to be a fish even if it killed her, and it looked like it might.
“You’ve been doing it all morning. It’s either a male or a stomachache. ”
“It’s not a stomachache.”
“So it’s a male.” Tess snorted, but there wasn’t much bite in it. That was new, the bite leaving her in small amounts, like a splinter working its way loose. “The big one.”
“His name’s Njkall.”
“I know his name.” Tess shaved another fragment off her fish with more force than the fish required. She was quiet for a moment, then asked, “How long until I can leave?”
Polly’s knife went still again, but for a different reason this time.
“Leave,” she repeated.
“This planet.” Tess said it flatly, the way she said most things, but Polly had learned to hear underneath the flatness now, and underneath it was something raw. “I appreciate—” She stopped, jaw working. “I do. I’m not stupid, I know that you saved me. But I can’t stay here, Polly. I can’t.”
“It’s only been—”
“It’s cold.” Tess set the fish down, her hands trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature and Polly knew it, because she knew that tremor from the inside.
“It’s cold, and it’s dark half the time, and everything’s stone, and every time somebody big walks past that door I’m back—” She swallowed hard.
“I keep waiting to wake up somewhere worse. I need to be somewhere warm. Somewhere with the sky over it that isn’t trying to kill you.
Somewhere that isn’t this, nothing against you, but this whole place is a cave and I have had enough of dark confined spaces to last me the rest of my life. ”
Polly looked down at the stone in her hands.
She could have said that the caves were warm and safe and the walls were protection, not imprisonment, but she remembered that need to be anywhere else.
To be free of the place where your fear had happened, as though the fear lived in the walls and not in you.
“Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll get you somewhere warm.”
Tess gave her a startled look, like she’d expected an argument and didn’t know what to do without one.
“It’s not simple, though,” she said it gently, because it wasn’t a no and she needed Tess to hear that it wasn’t a no.
“I want you to understand that part. Not so you’ll stay, but so you’ll be safe when you go.
The Empire’s big, Tess, and there are too many places where what happened to us is a business.
And a human woman traveling alone—” She shook her head.
“You’d be walking straight back into the nightmare you just crawled out of.
Somewhere warm and full of the wrong strangers is worse than somewhere cold and full of the right ones. ”
“So I stay in the freezer forever?”
“No. You stay until we find somewhere safe. Njkall’s friend Baralt has spent a lot of time away from Hothrest. He knows people, and he knows places.
It might take time to find the right place and time to find the right person to get you there safely.
” She leaned in a little, holding the other woman’s tired gaze.
“But when it’s found, nobody here will stop you.
Not Cera, not the clan. Certainly not me.
You’ll go, and someone will make sure you get there whole, and that’ll be that.
That’s a promise, and no one is going to break it. No one gets kept here who wants to go.”
Tess returned her look for a long moment. Then she smiled, and it was the worst kind of smile, the kind Polly had worn herself, the kind that had given up.
“Sure,” Tess said.
“I mean it.”
“I know you mean it.” Tess picked the fish back up, turned it over, and then set it down again, all without looking at Polly.
“That’s the thing about you, you actually mean it.
But everybody means it, to an extent. You have a choice.
And you do, right up until you make the one they don’t want, and then—” She spread her hands, and the tremor was back.
“Then suddenly there’s a reason. It’s for your own good.
It’s too dangerous out there, it’s not the right time, just wait, just a little longer, we’re only looking out for you.
And you wait. And you’re grateful, because it’s nice, it’s so much nicer than the last place, and one day you look up and you realize the door was never actually going to open.
It was just going to keep being not quite the right moment for it to open. Forever.”
The words landed cold and hard in her chest, because they were not about her and yet they were exactly about her.
Tess was watching her.
“See,” Tess said quietly. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“That’s not—” she began, then stopped and started again.
“It’s not the same, but I’m not going to sit here and tell you I don’t know the feeling.
I do.” She looked down at the ruined little bird with its missing wing.
“I’ve got someone who’s never once shut a door on me.
Never even leaned towards it. And I still lie awake sometimes waiting for him to.
Not because of anything he’s done. Just because—” Her throat tightened.
“Because that’s what people did before. And sometimes your body doesn’t know the difference between before and now. It just remembers the cage.”
Tess said nothing for a while, shaving more stone away from her fish.
“That’s the most true thing anyone’s said to me since I got here,” she said finally, then added, gruffly, “This fish still looks like a turd.”
“It looks like a very good fish.”
“It looks like a turd with fins.”
“A majestic turd.”
Tess gave an ugly, startled, real laugh, the first Polly had heard out of her, and for a moment the two of them just sat there in the crystal-light shaving stone and being two women who had both learned the shape of a cage and were, slowly, learning it wasn’t the only shape there was.
But the cold thing Tess had put in Polly’s chest didn’t leave. It rode with her all through the rest of the day, humming its ugly little tune. Just wait. Just a little longer. It’s not quite the right moment.
And by the time the crystals dimmed and she stood in the mouth of Njkall’s sleeping cave that night, she’d made up her mind about something, though she couldn’t have said in words exactly what.
She was so tired of waiting for the door to open. She wanted, for once in her life, to open it herself and walk towards something.
“Come,” he said in the dark, and she came.
But she didn’t fit herself against his side.
She didn’t lie down at all. She got up onto the furs on her knees beside him, and she felt him go still, waiting to learn what she needed so he could give it and take nothing, and something about that stillness made her chest ache and her resolve harden both at once.
“I’ve been thinking all day,” she said.
“Mm.”
“About last night.” She found his chest in the dark, and laid both her hands flat against it, feeling his heart already racing. He couldn’t hide that from her, and she loved that he couldn’t. “And I decided something.”
“Tell me.”
“No,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake at all, which surprised her. “I’ll show you.”
And she leaned down and kissed him.
Last night had been tentative and uncertain, a question.
This was an answer, with both her hands braced on his chest and her whole weight tipped over him.
She pressed her mouth to his, and this time she didn’t pull back.
She moved closer and learned the shape of his mouth, her tongue tracing the seam of his lips.
For a long moment he did what he always did. Held still. Let her do what she wanted.
And then, so slowly she felt every second of the change, he kissed her back.
She’d braced for careful. For the same patience turned outwards.
And there was gentleness in it. His enormous hand came up and cradled the back of her head like she was something that could break, all that strength held down to a whisper.
But underneath the gentleness there was heat.
A low, banked, wonderful heat, the kind that had clearly been chained inside him for a very long time, and when his mouth answered hers it answered with a hunger that set her body on fire.
She hadn’t known she could feel that sudden greedy ache, low in her belly, or that her hands could fist in his fur to pull him closer, or that a small sound she didn’t authorize would come out against his mouth—
She broke away, breathing hard.
His hand fell from her head at once. He didn’t chase her.
Of course he didn’t chase her, and she knelt there over him with her heart pounding and her lips hot and swollen and her whole body lit up in a way she wasn’t prepared for.
In the dim glow she could just make out his face, watching her, waiting to be told what she’d felt so he could be whatever she needed him to be about it.
She understood that he thought she’d bolted. He thought that the heat between them had frightened her and his hunger had frightened her, and that he’d let too much control slip and scared her away.
“Njkall.” She got the word out between breaths, and she found his face with her hand and made him look at her. “Listen to me. Because I know what you’re thinking, and it’s wrong.”
“Polly—”
“I’m not scared,” she said fiercely, and it came out with none of her old tentativeness at all, because she was certain right down to the ground.
“Not of you. Not of what’s between us. I felt it, and I know exactly what it is, and I’m not running from it.
I’ve spent a long time being afraid of things and I know what that feels like. This isn’t fear.”
He was very still under her hand. But it was a different stillness, the way a held breath is different from a calm one.
“Then why did you stop?” he asked quietly.
She took a deep breath and said the thing that had taken her all day to say.
“Because I need you to know that I’m doing this on purpose.
Not to feel safe. Not because I’m sad and you’re warm and I need holding.
I’m doing it because I want to, and because I want to find out where it goes.
” She leaned her forehead down against his, felt his slow exhale wash over her mouth.
“I’m asking you not to be patient anymore.
I’m asking you to come down this path with me. Slowly. But with me.”
He was silent for a long moment, and she thought that he’d tell her to wait again, tell her that it was too soon. He didn’t. Instead his hand came up to cup her cheek.
“Then slowly,” he said. “And together.”