2. Chapter 2
RIVIK
The tracks were three days old and belonged to a bull bison gone lame in the off-hind, which meant meat if we moved before the cold hardened his trail past reading.
I crouched over the print, pressed two fingers into the churned earth at its edge, and felt the give of it.
It was soft ground, the kind that took a beast's weight and told you afterward exactly how it had carried it, and the kind that a swollen river left for a hundred paces up its banks, waiting to swallow a careless boot to the knee.
I didn't like this country. I'd said as much to Daska at first light and got his slow nod in return, which was the closest thing to agreement a bear ever gave you before he'd finished thinking.
The land here ran downhill toward water in every direction, all of it rushing with the winter's melt, and a man who'd led a pack for eleven years learned to distrust ground that wanted to funnel him somewhere.
I'd walked out to Nathan's crossing the day before and come back at dusk with the truth of it, swollen with the melt, ice still riding down out of the high country.
I'd laid that truth at the fire and watched him weigh it against his schedule and choose the schedule.
So today was for meat, because whatever tomorrow's water did to us, we'd meet it better fed.
Ellie moved up beside me, quiet on her feet in a way she hadn't been in the autumn.
She'd learned that from us over the winter, how to set a heel, how to let the earth take her weight without announcing it, and watching her do it now, unthinking, sent something unbearable through the coal I carried under my ribs.
I looked back at the track.
She belongs to Daska, I told the coal, as I told it a dozen times a day.
You gave her to him; you watched it done and you called it the right thing, because it was.
The coal didn't care, and it never had. It had snapped into place the day I pulled her half-drowned from the shallows below Hanging Rock, and it had been burning me down by slow degrees ever since, and no amount of being right about it had ever cooled it by a breath.
"This one?" Ellie asked, in the wolf-tongue, nodding at the print. She'd asked to come out with the hunting party this morning, and I'd said yes before I'd thought better of it, because I always said yes to her and had given up pretending the reason was courtesy.
"This one." I straightened out of my crouch over the sign. "He's hurt in the off-hind, so he'll be slow, and he'll keep to the low ground near the water where the new grass comes first. We follow the river down and we'll find him before midday."
She fell into step at my flank as we moved, the three others of the party spreading wide behind us, good men the pack at Hanging Rock could spare, come this far south with me out of loyalty and turning back within the week to their own lives.
I'd have that loss to feel soon enough; I set it aside.
A leader learned to set things aside, or the weight of everything he was responsible for buried him where he stood.
Except I wasn't a leader any longer, and the setting-aside didn't work as well as it once had.
I'd handed Hanging Rock to Ryke with my own mouth and my own hands, told the pack it was right, watched them believe me because I'd never given them cause not to, and the guilt of it still found me at odd hours, in the grey before a hunt or the dead middle of the night, whispering that an alpha who walked away from his people was a thing with no name worth having; I knew better than that.
Ryke would lead them well, better than a man burning alive from the inside could have, and a pack deserved a whole alpha and not the husk I'd become watching Ellie choose my brother.
The knowing didn't stop the ache. It only meant I could carry the ache and still believe I'd done right, which was a different thing from being at peace, and I'd stopped expecting peace the day the bond took me.
What I had instead was a reason walking at my flank, learning to set her heel in cold ground.
That was the trade I'd made, whether Ellie ever knew it or not.
I'd given up a pack, and in the giving I'd told myself that what I built next would be worth the wreckage, something small and fierce and mine, hers and Daska's and mine, a fire in a sheltered place and a woman safe at the heart of it who'd never again be handed across a room like a debt settled.
A man had to want something on the far side of a loss that size, and that was the thing I wanted.
The hunting went as hunting always went, long stretches of nothing, the wind read and re-read, the party drifting apart and knitting back together around the sign.
To fill the silence, and because she asked, I taught her the calls.
The low double-note that said quarry ahead, hold; the rising one that meant come to me.
She had a quick ear, quicker than any human had a right to, and she caught the shapes of them fast and threw them back slightly wrong, making one of the men behind us snort.
"Not a birdcall," I told her, and did it again, softer. "From here." I touched my own chest, over the breastbone, and regretted it, because her eyes followed my hand and the coal flared under the breath of her attention.
She tried again, and came closer to it that time.
"Better." I let myself look at her a moment longer than I should have. "You learn everything this fast?"
"Only the things worth learning." She said it lightly, and then seemed to hear the weight that had got into it, and looked away toward the river. Colour came up in her face that the cold hadn't put there.
I turned back to the trail before the coal could make me a fool.
The trouble of it, laid bare: I knew a hundred ways to keep her alive and not one way to reach her.
On the hunt I had a use, I could teach her the ground, the calls, the reading of water and sign, and the teaching gave my hands somewhere to be and my mouth something to say.
Away from it I was a big scarred stranger who'd known her a handful of months and had no notion how a man courted a woman like Ellie, one who'd been sold once by a father and thrown away once by a mate and had learned from both that a man wanting her was only ever the start of a reckoning.
Daska knew how to do it. Daska had a gentleness I'd never been shaped for, a patience that let him wait at the edge of her like a fire she could come to when she was cold; I didn't have that.
I'd been made to decide things and defend things, and neither was any use at all with a woman who flinched from being decided for.
And there was the other thing, the one I couldn't get a clean read on.
This group of hers sat wrong with me. Not Ellie, never Ellie; whatever I turned over in the long marches, my mind refused to set a single dark thing at her feet, and I'd stopped trying to make it.
But the whole of them together had a wrongness I couldn't name, a smell under the smell.
The cold man Nathan, who looked at Ellie as a man looks at a tool he's discarded and half regretted.
The small one, Dev, and his fear he tried to hide.
The weight the two of them carried that no one would explain to me, that turned Dev grey when he thought of spending it.
Even Ellie herself had a strangeness on her, a thing that wasn't the language barrier and wasn't grief, moments when she stopped mid-stride and pressed a hand flat to her chest, guarding something no enemy I could smell had touched.
I didn't understand any of it. I only knew that a wolf who ignored the prickle at the back of his neck didn't stay alpha long, and mine had been prickling since the day I met them, and it had never once pointed at her.
She glanced at me then, across the trail, quick, there and gone, colour still in her face from before, and my heart turned over with a force I'd stopped pretending was anything else.
She's not looking at you with anything close to what's in your own face, I told myself, hard, because a man in my state saw invitations in a woman's every turn of the head and made a fool of himself acting on them.
The bond was months old now and getting worse with every day of walking at her side, and proximity fed it like dry grass thrown on a spark, I felt her nearness in my teeth, in the set of my shoulders, in the pull that wanted me always angled toward wherever she stood; she couldn't feel it.
That was the mercy and the cruelty both: whatever I suffered, she was spared, and if she glanced at me now and then it was likely nothing more than a woman checking on the man leading her through country that could kill her.
I would not build a hope out of it. I'd built a hope out of less, once, and it had cost me a pack.
We lost the bison's sign at a shale slope past noon and cast about for it, and it was in the casting about, with the party scattered and the wind loud in the pines, that I did the thing I'd promised myself I wouldn't. She'd got a few words of the travel-songs out of me over the winter, everyone knew them, they were how a pack marked the long marches, one voice starting and the rest folding in, and now, working a line of broken ground with her head down, she was humming one under her breath and getting the turn of it wrong, the same place every time, reaching for a note that sat lower than she thought.
"Not there," I said. "Here."
And I sang it, low, just the one phrase, pitched for her ear alone and not for the men fifty paces off. The song was old, older than my grandsire, a thing wolves sang walking into country they didn't know to tell it they came as guests and not as thieves. My voice wasn't much; it did the job.