5. Chapter 5 #2
The young one who'd freed my wrists ate three helpings and then hovered, working up to something, and finally pointed at the seared hare and said a word in the wolf-tongue I didn't have, a lion-tongue word, I realised later, though I didn't know yet that there was such a thing as a lion tongue.
I shook my head to show I didn't understand.
He tried again, slower, jabbing his finger at the meat and then at his own chest and then making a broad helpless gesture at the whole of it, and what he wanted, when I finally caught it, was to know how.
How I'd turned the same marmot they'd been choking down raw for a week into a thing worth a second helping.
There was no shared word for render or sear or don't boil the flavour out of it, you savages, so I showed him, mimed the low fire, the patient fat, the difference between meat cooked with attention and meat merely heated until it stopped being alive.
He watched with the total concentration of a boy being told a secret, and nodded, and repeated my gestures back badly, and I found myself correcting the grip of his imaginary knife before I remembered he was one of the men who'd hauled me off a riverbank like a carcass.
It's a strange thing about feeding people.
It gets past your guard, and theirs, in a language older than the ones we didn't share.
I made sure Megan ate first, and ate well, before any of them. None of them stopped me; I don't think it occurred to them to wonder why.
* * *
Because I'd been watching Megan closely since before the river, and what I saw was frightening me more with every day that passed.
The march was stripping her down to something underneath the person I'd spent two years resenting.
Nathan's PA, the immaculate one, the woman who'd stood at his shoulder in a midnight-blue coat and never once let a hair fall out of place while my whole life came apart at the Savoy, that woman was gone.
What was left was grey and sick in a way I recognised from other women in other kitchens, a sickness that had nothing to do with cold or captivity and everything to do with arithmetic.
She was sick at dawn; every dawn now, quietly, turned away into the dead ground, bringing up what little she'd managed to keep down.
She couldn't bear the smell of the rendering fat that everyone else fell on, went green and had to move upwind of my fire, which the wolf-men found baffling and I found damning.
Her exhaustion outran even this brutal road; she slept the instant we stopped and woke no more rested.
Then there was the tell no amount of composure could train out of a body: the hand that kept drifting low across her belly when she thought herself unwatched, cradling, protecting, an old gesture older than language.
I did the maths I'd been refusing to do since Hanging Rock.
Counted back to the last time we'd stayed anywhere long enough, to the weeks before we broke camp, to how she'd been even then.
The number I landed on was small and terrible; five weeks, maybe six; early enough to hide.
Early enough that she might not have told a living soul, not Nathan, not anyone, early enough that she might still be sitting on it alone, carrying the one spark of new life any of us had seen in a dying world, on the back of a slaver's wolf, on a forced march to a place none of us had a name for.
The cold that went through me then had nothing to do with the weather.
She's pregnant, I let myself think, all the way, for the first time.
It's Nathan's, and she's out here being hauled like a sack of meal, and if this march doesn't kill the pregnancy outright then the hunger and the cold and whatever waits at the end of it might, and she is going through all of it alone because the father is fifty miles behind us across a river and she probably hasn't even told him.
Two years I'd wanted this woman to suffer.
I'm not proud of it, but I won't pretend otherwise, I'd lain awake in the numb grey months after the rejection and wished Megan Hartley a fraction of what I was feeling, wished the perfect PA a single crack in her perfect life.
And now I had my wish, all of it and more.
It turned to ash in my mouth exactly as my father always promised revenge would and never had the decency to be right about anything else.
Because whatever she'd done, whatever she'd known and not stopped, she hadn't earned this, and nobody on earth earned a thing like this.
And the spark she carried had done nothing at all except begin, in the worst possible place, at the worst possible time, against odds the whole mission had crossed twenty-five thousand years to try to change.
I looked at her across the fire, grey and swaying and pretending she wasn't, and the last of my two years of resentment went quietly out like a coal nobody had fed.
I didn't say anything. It wasn't the moment, and it wasn't my secret to open, and if I was wrong, I wasn't wrong, but if, then saying it aloud where Karik's wolves might catch even the shape of the word could put a price on her they hadn't thought to charge yet.
A breeding female in a world starved of them.
I made myself not think about what that would be worth to a man who trafficked in women.
Instead I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing I'd always done, the only language of care I'd ever been fluent in.
So I fed her. I gave her the tenderest of the meat and the marrow cracked warm from the bones, along with the shoots that settle a sour stomach, and I did it without a word or a look that would tell the wolves it mattered, tucking the care inside the ordinary act of a captive cook doing her captive job; she ate all of it.
She met my eyes over the last mouthful, and something passed between us that didn't need translating, and her own eyes filled and she blinked it fiercely away, because tears out here were a currency neither of us could spend.
And under my ribs, while I watched her eat and felt the tension in my chest ease that had been clenched for days, the borrowed weight I carried shifted again, but gently this time, almost warm, nothing like the wrenching heave it had given at Karik's hands.
It settled when I was doing this. I'd started to notice the pattern without at all understanding it: the thing curdled and ached when I was shamed or made small, and it quieted when I was of use, when I made warmth out of nothing and pushed it toward someone who needed it.
As if whatever lived in me kept its own count of my worth, and marked the days I earned my place against the days I was only ever cargo.
That can't be right, I thought, pressing a hand flat to my sternum where the ache had been. Power doesn't care whether you feel useful. That's the sort of thing mad people think.
But I filed it away with everything else, next to the loosened cord and the count of days and the shape of Megan's secret, because a woman with nothing hoards information the way a starving one hoards seeds, and I had a growing sense that everything I noticed out here I was going to need.
We reached the top of a long rise on the fifth evening, the wolves slowing, something changing in the set of them that I'd learned to read as nearly home.
And I looked down into the shallow bowl of land below us and forgot, for a moment, to be afraid, because it was vast, and it was warm with the smoke of a hundred fires.
It was alive in a way nothing had been since the river, a great sprawling settlement of hide and bone and banked flame stretching further than the eye could easily hold.
Then the wind carried up the sound of it: voices, laughter, the ordinary music of a great many people living close together. And not one word of it, not a single syllable rising up out of that warm and enormous place, was in any language I understood.