40. Ellie #2
He holds my eyes one second longer. Then the predator takes him again, there’s still a white shape down in his passage, and he drops back off the nest to be sure, to put his body between me and whatever’s left.
And I’m alone in the wreck: Neve’s knife in my fist, my hip running warm, the understanding only starting to arrive.
The Eunuch waited through the whole of it. It didn’t fight. Didn’t flinch. It watched six things that used to be males die twice with the flat attention of something counting stock, and when the count came out wrong it simply steps back from the wreck the way you’d step around a puddle.
A whistle. One sharp note. The Eunuch turns and walks out the way it came, unhurried. Not fleeing. Leaving on schedule.
The passage goes quiet.
Too quiet. The wet sounds of the fight have stopped. The clicking’s stopped. The Eunuch’s gone—and now there’s nothing down there at all. No breath. No drag of weight. Nothing.
“Riven.” It comes out cracked. I haul myself to the lip of the nest, my hip screaming, Neve’s knife still locked in my fist, and look down into a black I can’t see the bottom of. “Riven.”
Nothing answers.
He went down to one knee in front of me. He took a bolt through the shoulder. He dropped back into that dark still bleeding, and now the dark’s gone silent, and the silence is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’d trade the whole canopy for one wet, ragged breath.
“Riven—” My voice breaks all the way apart, and I’m already over the lip, already climbing down toward the black and whatever’s lying still at the bottom of it, because if he’s down there then I am not going to crouch up here in the nest he built and let him be alone in the dark—not him, not the one who was alone in every dark there ever was until me—
A sound.
Low. Wet. The drag of a great weight against heartwood.
He’s moving.
I freeze halfway down, my heart slamming my ribs, and listen to the most terrible and most beautiful thing in the world: ten feet of wrecked predator hauling himself up out of the dark one slow pull at a time, breathing like every breath costs him, and alive. Alive. Coming back up to me.
The broken horn comes up out of the black first. Then the rest of him, dragging into the gray light through the cracked wood wall, hauling up into the entrance with the bolt still in his shoulder.
I see it before anything else, the shaft sticking out of the meat of him, the dark blood running down his arm and dripping off his claws, steaming in the cool air, pooling where he sets his hand to hold himself up.
The male I thought couldn’t be hurt. The thing in the dark I never once imagined bleeding.
He stands in the doorway of the nursery he carved and bleeds on the furs he laid for our child.
And underneath the relief, the cold thing lands—the understanding I had no room for until I knew he’d live.
It was timed. While he fought six Unmade in his own passages, a second handler hit the nearest nest in the web—Lira’s aerie, the newest link, the one I brought in only weeks ago.
The clicking from two directions was never a pincer on us.
It was a diversion. Lira’s already gone, three territories east, recaptured, the eastern link cut, taken clean while I was here putting down the one that came for mine.
Six dead-twice things spent to do it, and they decided she was worth the trade.
I’ll carry that. Later. Right now there’s a bolt in him.
I go to him.
My legs shake the whole way across. My bare feet step in his blood and it’s warm—hotter than bathwater, the heat of something running out of him that’s meant to stay in. The smell of it fills my nose. Iron, and under it something that’s only him, woodsmoke burned down to coals.
“Sit down.” My voice comes steadier than my hands. “Sit down, Riven.”
He sits. Not the smooth unfolding I know, a heavy lowering, ten feet of him going down to the furs because he’s spent everything he had. I kneel beside him.
“I have to pull it.”
He nods. No sound, his jaw set so hard the muscle jumps.
I grip the shaft. It’s slick, my hands too small, my fingers slipping and finding it again, his blood under my nails. I brace my other hand on his chest—the muscle locked, his heart going fast and hard under my palm—and I pull.
It comes free with a sound like tearing cloth, a rush of dark blood following. His jaw flexes. No grunt, no hiss, the tendons standing in his neck like cables, his claws shredding the pelts on either side of him.
I heat water the way he taught me—the fire-pit stones dropped in, warm in seconds—and the motion steadies me. My hands know how to do this. They know how to heat water and wring moss and clean a wound. The Cage taught me to tend a body. This isn’t what they meant. My hands don’t care.
I wash it. The burnt edges flake away under the wet moss. He hisses through his teeth—the first sound he’s made—and it goes through my chest like a blade.
“I know,” I whisper. “I know. Hold still.”
I pack the wound and bind it with the bark-fiber cord I braided, the first thing the canopy taught me, my own two hands’ work, holding his shoulder together now. The strips darken as his blood soaks through.
“You’re bleeding.” Not about himself. His good hand finds my hip, where the ceramic opened me—a shallow line, long, already clotting, my own blood dried dark down my thigh.
His thumb stops just short of it. Something crosses his face that’s worse than anything the bolt put there.
He fought six of them and took a bolt through the shoulder without a sound.
He’s silent now, too, but it’s a worse silence, all of it aimed at the small cut a thing got close enough to leave on me.
“It’s nothing,” I say. “I’m fine. It barely caught me.”
“It got that close.” Flat. Wrecked. Close enough to mark you.
“And I put it down.” I take his face in both hands. “Me. With Neve’s knife. The one she gave me for exactly that.” I hold his eyes. “I’m not the thing they grew in a jar anymore, Riven. It came through the wall, and I used it.”
His forehead comes down to mine. We stay there a moment, breathing the same air, his blood and mine drying together on my hands.
He sits back against the wall, the hurt wing flat behind him, and I see something on him I’ve never seen. Not the easy weariness of a body that chose hard work. The gray, drawn exhaustion of a thing that fought for its life and isn’t sure it’s done.
I sit between his knees, my back to his stomach, the way we spent three weeks in the dark. His good arm comes around me. The hurt shoulder holds anyway, and I feel what it costs in the fine tremor running through his arm, but he holds.
“Can they kill you?”