6. Chapter 6 #2
I did the only thing there was to do. I put my arm around her and pulled her in, and she came, this woman I'd hated with a clean unwavering hatred for two years. She put her filthy tear-wet face against my shoulder and let me hold her while she shook.
"You're not doing it alone," I said into her hair.
"Whatever happens down there tomorrow, whatever this is, you're not carrying it by yourself anymore, because I've got you now.
I've had my eye on you for a fortnight, you daft cow.
Why do you think I've been slipping you the good bits off the stone? "
A sound came out of her that was half sob and half startled laugh. "I thought you'd worked out I was pregnant and were trying to be, I don't know, a better person than me."
"Oh, I'm a much better person than you," I said. "That was never in question."
She laughed properly then, a wet cracked sound with something real underneath it, and a knot I had not known I still carried came loose.
Two years of poison drained out of me on that cold hillside and left behind a strange light feeling I didn't fully trust yet.
Forgiveness, maybe, or something adjacent to it.
Whatever it was, it was warmer than the hatred had ever been, and I understood, sitting there with Nathan's pregnant mate weeping quietly against my shoulder, both of us cargo, both of us waiting to be sold at first light, that he'd taken almost everything from both of us, and left us, without meaning to, each other.
* * *
Under my ribs, while I held her, the borrowed weight lay quiet and almost warm, and I registered it only as a headache lifting, by the sudden absence of a pain you'd stopped registering as pain.
There was no lurch this time, no curdled ache, only that low banked steadiness that seemed to come over it whenever I was doing what I was apparently for, whenever I turned whatever I had toward someone who needed it.
It likes this, I thought, and then felt absurd for thinking it, because a lump of borrowed magic doesn't like or dislike anything, it's not a cat.
But the pattern was getting harder to argue with; it hurt when I was made small.
It settled when I was of use. I turned the observation over and set it down again with the rest of the things I didn't understand and couldn't afford to chase.
I filed the realisation away with the loosened cord and the count of days: I was starting to think the thing the Council had loaded into me like a battery wasn't quite the inert cargo they'd all assumed.
But that was a problem for a woman with more time and fewer wolves.
Tonight I had Megan, warm and finally unburdened against my side, and a secret between us now that had turned two enemies into something neither of us had a word for.
It would have to be enough. It was, I was surprised to find, a great deal more than I'd had yesterday.
We slept badly, tangled together for warmth, and I dreamed of a river and a song I couldn't quite hear.
In the dream I kept reaching for the melody as you reach for a word on the tip of your tongue, certain that if I could only catch it I'd understand something that mattered more than anything, and I woke each time with it dissolving and the cold pressing in and Megan's breath slow against my back.
Toward dawn I gave up on sleep altogether and lay watching the fires die in the bowl below, doing the only thing left to do with a night like that, which was to make myself ready.
I'd been made ready for humiliation before.
There was a discipline to it I'd learned in a ballroom and never wanted to need again, the settling of the face, the going-still inside, the packing-away of anything a watching crowd could use against you.
I did it now, piece by piece, and hated that I still knew how.
Morning came grey and hard. The wolves broke camp with the brisk efficiency of men with business to conclude.
The scarred one came and hauled us to our feet himself, checking us over with that flat appraising look, tugging Megan's chin up to the light and my own, frowning at whatever he saw and clearly deciding it would do.
Then they marched us down off the shoulder of the rise and into the bowl.
The settlement rose up around us as we came, bigger than it had looked from above, sprawling and thronged, shelters of hide stretched over great curved bones, drying racks heavy with meat, fires everywhere, and people.
So many people, turning to look as we passed, calling to one another in that warm rolling tongue I couldn't parse a syllable of, parting to let Karik's band through toward the heart of it.
The chef in me catalogued it before the frightened woman could stop her.
This was no raiders' camp thrown up for a season.
Smoked fish hung in silver ranks; rendered fat sat stored in gut-skins; racks of curing hide had been worked to a suppleness I'd not seen even at Hanging Rock.
The sweeter smell I'd caught on the wind the night before resolved into something cooking low and long over banked coals, a grain of some kind, honey somewhere in it.
These were people with a surplus. People who'd solved the daily arithmetic of not-starving so thoroughly they had attention left over for beauty, for the ochre patterns worked into their shelters, the carved bone at their throats, the sheer unhurried ease of a place that wasn't afraid of the winter.
In my old life I'd have called it wealth.
Out here it meant something more dangerous, because wealth is what buys things, and I was a thing about to be bought.
And at the heart of it, on a rise of packed earth before the largest shelter I had ever seen, someone was waiting for us.
I couldn't make him out clearly yet through the press of bodies and the smoke, only that he was big, even at a distance, bigger than Daska, and that he was gold somehow, gold in the grey morning like the one warm thing in the whole cold world, and that the entire settlement bent toward him like a field toward the sun.
Megan's bound hand found mine and gripped it, and I held on just as hard.
Whoever he was, we were about to be his.