31. Ellie
ELLIE
He takes me up.
Through the branch-lattice, the passages I’m starting to know, the narrow one where I turn sideways, the wet corridor where the stream cuts through, the steep climb where the fused boughs make a staircase and each step puts me higher than I’ve been since the Cage’s second-floor windows.
He goes ahead. His hand or his tail is always near.
Never touching, never pulling. Just there, between me and the drop.
I’ve never climbed anything in my life.
The Cage had stairs—smooth stone, polished by women in approved shoes on approved floors.
My legs were built for flat. The rut put muscle on me I never had, but strength without skill is just force pointed nowhere, and I climb like somebody handed a body and never given the manual.
My feet slip on wet bark. I grab a root and it comes off in my hand, soft with rot, and my weight lurches—
His tail’s around my waist before I finish the thought. One coil, fast and tight, like he was waiting for exactly that. He steadies me without stopping, without turning, without one sound that could be mistaken for I told you so. Then it loosens, the tip brushing my hip. Here. And it’s gone.
We climb. The light changes layer by layer, dim and green-brown down in the deep wood, then soft green shadow in the mid-levels where the moss glows and the wet bark shines. Then I haul myself onto a branch wider than my whole body, and look out, and—
The canopy.
I thought I knew. Standing at the nest entrance I saw the layers.
But standing at a door isn’t the same as walking through it.
The green is everything, every direction, above and below and out to a horizon I can’t find because the trees curve away with the earth.
Each one its own world. Trunks like columns, bark in spirals and deep cracks and pale peeled patches the color of bone.
And the trees are fighting, every crown shoving at its neighbors for the light coming down in shafts so solid you’d think you could climb them.
Territorial. I know that look from somewhere closer to home.
The size of it makes my head swim. Not the height—the amount. The Cage was a finite thing; I knew every wall of it. The whole world it held could fit inside one of these trees, and there are thousands of them, and my mind keeps reaching for the edges and the edges keep not being there.
Here’s the thing the Cage gave me that turned out to actually be mine: noticing.
They trained it into me—color, fabric, the grain of wood, the beauty of their sacred halls. Noticing was the one kind of thinking the tea allowed, because beauty was safe, beauty was approved, beauty didn’t ask questions. They meant for me to notice how lovely the program was.
Up here I notice everything outside it. A red trumpet-flower growing out of the crook of a branch.
The way moss holds a drop of water and splits the light into colors too small to name without squinting.
The flash of something like oil-on-water at the joint of his wing, there and gone when the angle shifts.
The wings in daylight, thin enough to show the veins, the leading edge a harder line catching the light different from the rest of him.
Built for killing. Built to fly a body that was never meant to. Beautiful anyway.
I’m keeping the noticing. They can’t have it back.
A bird crosses the open air—wingspan wider than my arms, dark at the body, pale at the tips, painted-looking. Another follows, and they spiral around each other in a slow climb toward the crown.
“What are they?” I ask.
“I don’t have a name.” No embarrassment in it—just an honest account of what he knows and doesn’t. “They nest in the upper crown. They mate for life. The male is larger.”
“Shocking,” I say. He doesn’t smile. I don’t think his face does that, but something moves through the amber, and neither of us bothers pretending the parallel isn’t sitting right there.
The birds spiral up and out of sight, and I’m left looking at him.
At all of him, for the first time, in full light.
In the nest I learned him by touch, by the slivers of him the dark allowed.
Up here the sun gets the whole of him at once—the near-black of his skin gone warm where the light lands, the hollows gone almost blue-black.
The wings half-furled, the membrane thin enough in the sun to show the branching veins, the leading edge a hard black line.
The broken horn. The pale throat scar. The amber eyes lit from the inside to the color of the light coming down through the leaves.
I’ve been claimed by this in the dark. I’ve never once chosen it in the light.
I want to.
“Hey,” I say, and my voice does something I feel in my own chest. He turns his head.
I don’t have a speech ready. I put my hand flat on the warm plane of his chest, not that he’d move unless he wanted to, but he reads the want in it and goes still in the way that means I have all of him, and I climb into his lap there on the branch, the canopy dropping away on every side, the light all over us.
His hands come to my hips. Careful. A question.
“Yes,” I say. Out loud. In the light, where I can watch his face hear it land.
He doesn’t drive. That’s the thing the dark never gave me—this.
He’s soft against me when I settle over him, and then he isn’t, the change happening slow as I move, him thickening and finding his way, the blunt heat of him nudging until it’s right and easing up into me by degrees with no rush in it at all.
I sink down onto him the way you lower into warm water.
Inch by inch. The stretch of him is the same enormous fact it always is, but this time I set the pace of meeting it, and that changes everything about what it is.
“Oh,” I breathe. Not a broken sound. A whole one.
He’s all the way in me, the sun’s on my back, and his wings come up, not the snap of the rut, a slow flare, the membrane catching the light and washing it down over us in shifting amber.
I look at him lit gold from below and think: nobody made me do this.
Nobody put anything in my tea. I climbed up here on my own legs and chose this with my eyes open.
I move. He lets me. His hands stay loose on my hips, guiding, never gripping, letting me find the roll of it, and I do, the slow grind that drags him against the place he taught my body to want in the dark and now lets me reach for in the light.
A grunt rolls out of him on every grind down.
“Unh.” The wind moves over my bare skin.
Far off, the mated pair calls. The slick sound of us is a small thing under all that open air.
“Look at you,” he says, low, his eyes never leaving my face. “Look what you took.”
I come with the sun on me and his name in my mouth, not bitten off, not stolen, just said.
“Riven.” And I feel him follow, a groan breaking out of him into my hair.
“Hrrah…” His cum spills hot up into me, his knot swelling to catch and hold.
Smaller than the rut’s. Gentler. An intimacy now, not a sentence.
The vibration starts soft against my clit and I ride the last of it out with my forehead dropped to his sternum, his mouth coming down to the crown of my head, his breath stirring my hair.
His knot eases after a while, the way it does now—softening, letting me go without the old finality. I climb off him on loose legs, and we sit in the light a while, his arm around me, the wonder of the open world and the wonder of what we just did in it folded into one bright afternoon.
“I’ve only ever had you in the dark,” I say.
A rumble under my cheek. His arm tightens, all of me gathered against all of him.
“Now you have me everywhere,” he says.
I could stay up here forever.
Then a sound from below, and we both go still.
Something big, moving through the understory, wood cracking under real weight, leaves rushing, smaller things scattering out of its way in bursts of wing and claw. Not a bird. Not wind.
His body changes in a breath.
One second he’s the contained, almost-careful thing beside me.
The next his wings are half-open with a sound like canvas snapping taut, his tail’s rigid and lifted off the branch like a blade, and the amber’s fixed on a point below us with an intensity I’ve seen exactly twice—the night he came through my wall, and the last peak of the rut.
I follow his eyes. Down in the green-shadow, a shape moves.
Seven feet, maybe. Mottled gray-green, near-invisible against the bark.
It doesn’t run, it flows, low to the wood, fast, the limbs working in a way built for this place.
I get two seconds of it. A long body, an angular head, and the limbs—too many limbs?
I can’t tell. It’s gone before I can be sure.
The branch it crossed sways twice and the canopy closes over the space like it was never there.
He doesn’t relax.
I watch the tension hold in him, the cords standing in his shoulders, the claws dimpling the bark, his tail rigid a full minute after the thing’s gone, the amber tracking the line it took.
“What was it?” Quiet. I’m not scared yet—that comes later, when the rush wears off. Right now I’m too busy reading him.
“Unmade.” One word, flat. It carries weight I don’t have the whole of yet—something from his world, the dark underside of the same change that made him.
“What does that mean—unmade?”
He chooses the words one stone at a time off the riverbed.
“The change took the men. Some it killed. Some it made into this.” One hand moves down his own body—the wings, the dark, the size of him.
“Some it only broke. Half-made. Left wrong.” His jaw works.
“The Ordained gather the broken ones. Finish them. Build something that hunts, that doesn’t tire, that doesn’t die easy.
” A beat. “Put one down and it gets up. You kill it twice, or it kills you.”
The cold crawls up the back of my neck.
“Dangerous?” I ask.
His jaw works. “To you.”
Not to him. To me. Which means it’s a threat that’ll get met with every inch of the ten feet of predator sitting next to me—and this time not because the rut’s making him do it. The rut’s done. Him choosing it is the whole difference.
He comes down off the alert slow, wings folding, tail loosening, the claws letting go of the bark one at a time, the same measured way the rut ebbed. Takes ten minutes, maybe more. I sit and watch him do it.
His hand finds my knee. Light. It’s gone, the hand says. And then it stays. I’m not.
I put my hand over his. My fingers fit in the grooves between his knuckles and cover maybe a third of it.
We sit. The canopy goes back to its business—birds, insects, the wind, something tapping wood three trees over to say this is mine. The world’s enormous and full of things that don’t know my name. Some beautiful, some dangerous, most of them both.
“I want to come back tomorrow,” I say.
The almost-smile.
“Yes,” he says, and the one word carries about ten.
I lean into his arm. It’s warm and solid, his pulse slow under the skin now, a thing that went to full alert in a heartbeat and found its way back down with a woman pressed to its side.
The canopy breathes. We breathe with it.