3. Chapter 3
ELLIE
The river was worse in the morning light than it had looked at dusk, and at dusk it had looked like something that wanted us dead.
We stood on the near bank in the grey before proper sunup, the six of us and the three Hanging Rock men who'd see us across before turning for home, and I made myself look at the water as Rivik had taught me to, not as a horror, but as a thing to be read.
I was afraid of it, but fear wasn't the useful thing to feel; what mattered was reading it as a set of problems that had answers.
The shallowest reach ran wide and braided here, split around a long shingle bar so the crossing came in two stages instead of one killing rush.
Slabs of rotten ice shouldered down the main channel and broke apart against the bar with a sound like the world clearing its throat.
The far bank rose low and slumped, undercut by the melt, fringed with willow scrub that hid whatever lay behind it.
Answers, I told myself. It's just a set of problems with answers, and Rivik has the answers, and you trust Rivik.
I did trust Rivik; that was the strange thing, the thing I hadn't examined too closely because examining it led somewhere I wasn't ready to go.
Somewhere over the winter I'd started reaching for him without deciding to, the reflex of a falling body grabbing for a handhold, and it made no sense, Daska was my mate, my bonded, the warm sure centre of everything I'd let myself become.
The pull toward Rivik came from nowhere I could name and shamed me every time it surfaced, because a woman who already had more than she deserved had no business wanting more, and because I knew exactly what it was to be wanted by a man who couldn't say so and I would not do that to Daska.
Later, I told the pull, as I told it every day. Not now, and preferably not ever.
Nathan was already directing things, of course.
He'd rigged a line from the spare sinew rope, and he stood at the water's edge with it looped over one shoulder, laying out the order of crossing in the clipped tone of a man reading from a plan only he could see.
Dev first with two of the wolf-men, his mending leg making him the slowest and therefore the one to get over while everyone was freshest. Megan would follow, then the gear, and the rest of us last.
"You're putting Dev in the water first," I said. "With the bad leg. In the fastest water of the day, before the sun's had a chance to slow the melt."
"I'm putting him over while we've got the most hands to catch him.
" Nathan didn't look up from the rope. "The melt doesn't slow till afternoon and I'm not burning the whole morning here.
You want to be useful, translate, tell your bear and the others the order, and tell them to keep their mouths shut and their feet under them. "
Your bear. I felt the old flinch start and killed it before it reached my face.
He did it to needle me, the possessive, and the trick of it was that the word landed on the wrong nerve entirely, because Daska was mine, the one thing in twenty-five thousand years and a whole lifetime before that had ever been unarguably mine, and I'd have worn the word openly if Nathan hadn't meant it as a leash.
I translated for the others, leaving out the parts designed to wound, and Daska listened with that steady attention of his and then met my eyes across the little space between us, a question in them; All right?
He always asked. He'd spent a winter learning the weather of my face as closely as he read the weather of the sky, and it still caught me somewhere unguarded, being read by someone who only wanted to know where it hurt so he could mend it.
I gave him the smallest nod, because this wasn't the fight worth having, not here with the water waiting and everyone's life about to be strung out across it on a length of sinew rope.
And still, underneath the fear, beneath the cold arithmetic of it, some traitor part of me kept returning to Rivik crouched at the water's edge, to the set of his shoulders, to how he'd read this ground days before any of us and been overruled for it.
Stop, I told myself, disgusted; You're about to cross a river that could kill you and here you are mooning over a man who isn't yours to moon over.
Brilliant work, Ellie, the survival instincts of a lemming and the self-restraint to match.
Rivik crouched at the bank testing the current with a stripped branch, reading depth by feel, and when he stood his face told me everything his careful words to Nathan hadn't.
He didn't like the willow scrub on the far side any more than I did.
He said something low to the two wolf-men who'd cross with Dev, and they nodded and spread out, and what he was doing was plain enough: arranging what protection he could inside a plan he'd have never chosen.
And so we started across.
Dev went first, roped between the two Hanging Rock wolves, and it was bad but not the worst, waist-deep in the main channel, the current dragging at him, his bad leg buckling once so that both men took his weight and hauled him up onto the shingle bar, screaming and swearing, which would've been funny on any other morning.
He lifted a hand to show he was whole. The far crossing, from the bar to the slumped bank, ran shallower, and he made it across.
He stood dripping in the willow scrub on the wrong side of the world and lifted his hand again, and a knot in my chest loosened half a turn.
One of us over, then, with only the rest of us left to go.
Megan went next, and I watched her closely, as I'd been watching her for days without letting myself finish the thought about why.
She'd been grey at dawn again, gone quietly away from the fire to be sick where she thought no one saw, waving off the dried meat with her hand pressed flat to her mouth.
On the march she tired faster than the cold alone explained and moved with a new carefulness, a hand drifting to her middle when she thought herself unobserved.
I knew what that arithmetic added up to.
I'd cooked for enough women through enough early months to know the look of it.
The knowing sat in me heavy, because Megan and I had spent two years being nothing to each other but the woman Nathan kept and the woman Nathan threw away.
She caught me looking as she took the rope, and for a second the mask she wore slipped, and underneath it was someone frightened and trying very hard not to be.
"You'll be fine," I told her, in English, low enough that Nathan didn't turn. "Keep your feet wide. Lean into the current, not away from it. Don't fight it, use it."
She stared at me like I'd spoken in the wolf-tongue. Then she nodded, once, and went down the bank into the water, and I found I was holding my breath the whole way across as if I could carry her over on it.
She made the bar; she made the far bank. Dev caught her arm and steadied her, and the two of them stood together in the willows, and I let the breath go.
The gear went over on the line, bundled hide and the precious dead weight of the scanner that Nathan trusted to no hands but the rope's.
And then it was our turn, Nathan, Daska, Rivik, me, and the last of the Hanging Rock men, and the sun was coming up hard now over the far ridge and the melt was already loud, and I put my foot into water so cold it stopped being cold and became a kind of burning, and I thought, nearly, nearly, we're nearly through the worst of it.
That was when they came out of the willows.
I understood it in pieces, because it was too big and too fast to take in whole.
The scrub on the far bank moving wrong; shapes rising out of it that weren't willow.
Dire-wolves, enormous, twice the mass of any wolf that had a right to exist, pouring down the slumped bank toward Dev and Megan where they stood defenceless and dripping on the wrong side of the river.
And behind them, wading into the shallows of the far crossing, a monster of a wolf-shifter in man's shape, scarred across half his face, moving with the terrible unhurried certainty of someone who had done this many times before.
Karik was his name, though I didn't know it yet. What I knew was the shape of what he was, because I'd met that shape before in a gilded ballroom wearing a tailored suit, a man who looked at people and saw goods.
Everything happened at once after that.
Daska's roar tore across the water. I'd never heard a sound like it come out of him, my gentle patient healer, a bear's fury ripping up out of a man's throat, and he was already surging forward through the current toward the far bank where Megan and Dev stood defenceless against the wolves.
Somewhere Nathan was shouting orders no one could follow.
The Hanging Rock men were shifting mid-stride, fur and muscle erupting where men had been, throwing themselves into the current.
And Rivik was already in the water ahead of all of them.
Rivik went into the deep channel after the ones coming for me.
Because they were coming for me; that was the part I understood last and worst. The dire-wolves on the near bank hadn't come for the men or the gear or the scanner they'd trusted to the rope; they'd come for me.
Two of them hit the water on my side, huge and silent and moving with purpose, and they weren't trying to kill me.
They were trying to take me, jaws closing on the fur at my back, my collar, hauling, and then the cold water closed over my head, the world went to roar and grey, and all that was left of it was the iron grip of teeth that didn't break skin because breaking skin was never the point.