15. Chapter 15 #2
Dev dragged himself upright, shaking. “There’s too much noise. I need the scanner, or Ellie. I cannot give you a direction that won’t get us killed.”
Nathan looked down at the useless machine as though determination alone might wake it.
I walked on before either man saw me. I understood perhaps half of what had passed between them.
I understood all of what mattered. Dev had said he could not do it, and Nathan had heard only that he had not done it yet.
I shook my head, and continued past them, then paused as I caught the faint sound of Ellie’s voice. She was at her own fire, alone for the moment, banking it down for the night, her hands busy with the small competent movements I could have watched for the rest of my life, and she was humming.
I knew the tune before my mind caught up to my ears; my body knew it. It went through me like a spear, and I stopped dead in the blue dark forty paces off, the hares forgotten in my fist, everything in me gone still and roaring at once.
It was the hunting-song. My hunting-song, the one I'd taught her on the road in the long weeks before Karik's wolves took her, the calls that turned into songs when she stumbled over the melody and I sang it low just for her, the two of us falling into the rhythm of it mile after mile until it belonged to us as nothing else did.
I could still see her the first time she'd got it right.
We'd been walking point together, ahead of the others, the spring steppe opening grey around us all the way to the edge of the sky, and she'd been butchering the melody for an hour with that stubborn refusal to quit that was the truest thing about her.
Then, without warning, she'd found it, pitched the calls clean, the sound of a wolf pup landing its first proper howl, and she'd turned to me with her whole face lit up, delighted with herself, and for one unguarded moment I'd forgotten every reason I had to keep my distance and simply loved her, openly, out loud in my own chest where no one could see.
I'd had to look at the horizon for a long while after that.
After that, I stopped pretending the bond might fade on its own.
That song was the message I'd sung across a killing river as they carried her away, the only thing I could send in a tongue her captors wouldn't parse, we're coming, hold on, we're coming.
And she'd carried it. Through captivity, through a slaver's march, through a king's claiming and courting and all of it, she'd carried my song in her, and now she sat at her fire in another man's kingdom and hummed it to herself without even knowing I was there to hear.
She didn't know what it meant to me, and how could she?
To her it was a tune a friend had taught her on a hard road, a comfort, a thread back to something safe.
She had no idea it was the sound of my whole hidden heart, that every note of it was a thing I'd sung into her on purpose because I couldn't say the words, that hearing it in her voice now was like being handed the one thing I wanted most in the world and told in the same breath I could never keep it.
I stood in the dark and listened to the woman I loved hum my song at another man's settlement, and something in me that had held for six months came very close to breaking.
I don't know how long I stood there; long enough for the hares to go cold in my hand. Long enough that when a voice spoke quietly behind me I flinched like a struck animal.
"She hums it when she thinks she's alone," Daska said. He'd come up beside me with the soundless care of a man accustomed to frightened patients and stood looking at her across the fires. "I've heard it for weeks. Half the time she doesn't know she's doing it."
"It's a road-song." My voice came out wrong. "I taught it her on the way. It's nothing."
"Rivik." He said my name as he said everything, slow and entirely without pity, which was the only reason I could bear it.
"I'm a healer, remember. My whole life I've spent reading what bodies say when mouths lie, and I felt your bond snap the same as you did, months ago, back at the Rock.
I've watched you carry it every day since, and said nothing, because it was yours to carry and yours to speak. "
For a moment I couldn't find my own footing. I turned to look at him, this great steady brother of mine, and found no judgement in his face at all, only a warmth so complete it shamed me.
"You knew." The words came out flat with disbelief. "All this time you knew, and you never once said."
"Of course I knew." The corner of his mouth softened.
"I love her, Rivik. Do you think I could love her as I do and not recognise what the same hurt is doing to another man?
I've watched it work on you for six months.
" He let that settle before he went on. "Every day you've chosen what you thought was her freedom over what you wanted for yourself.
I know why you called that honour. I also think you've mistaken the wound for the cure. "
I had my reasons, and I'd kept them polished.
She'd come to us broken from a public rejection and healed through that winter under the pack's protection, my pack then, my word still deciding what shelter she had.
If I'd told her what had snapped into place in me, what could she have said that was free?
A woman with nowhere else to stand doesn't refuse the alpha holding the ground she stands on.
She'd have accepted me out of gratitude or out of fear of losing shelter, and I'd never have known which, and neither would she.
"There's nothing honourable in adding to what she carries. She was rejected by a mate in front of a crowd. I won't be another man deciding."
"Telling her the truth isn't deciding for her. Keeping it from her is." He said it gently, but it struck clean because it was true. "You've made the choice already, Rivik. You decided she couldn't bear to know. But when the bond came to you, did it break you? Tell me plainly."
The answer wouldn't come, because the true one was too large to fit through my throat.
"It didn't break you," Daska said for me.
"It kept you alive when a lone wolf should have faded.
I've watched it hold you together every day since.
Don't call it a burden just because you're afraid to place it in her hands.
" He looked back at her, the small dark shape of her humming my song into the night and lowered his voice.
"She's stronger than either of us has allowed for.
Tell her, Rivik. You know what silence does to a person.
You've been living with the damage for half a year. "
He didn't wait for an answer. He never pushed further than the thing that needed saying, that was Daska, he set the truth down in front of you and let you pick it up in your own time.
He touched the back of my neck once, briefly, as our kind did to say you're not alone in this.
Then he walked on toward the fire and the woman we both loved and left me standing in the dark with my dead hares and my burning chest and a door I'd kept bolted for six months easing open a crack.
Across the settlement she finished the song, and let the last note fade into the dark, and reached to bank the fire, and had no idea at all that she'd just cracked her wolf wide open with a tune.
I would speak to her; not tonight, tonight I had nothing steady enough to say.
But the choice I'd made six months ago, the silence I'd worn like a hair shirt and called honour, had finally started to look like what Daska had named it.
It was never a gift I was giving her. It was a decision I'd made on her behalf, one more man arranging her life without asking.
And that I could not stand to be; if I told her, at least the choice would be hers.
The thought terrified me more than any hunt, any fight, any river ever had. But I'd hummed with her on the road, and she'd carried the song through hell and out the other side, and a man who'd been kept alive by a bond he'd never claimed owed it to her, finally, to let her decide what it was worth.
I picked up my cold hares and took them to the common fires the long way round, past hers, close enough to hear the last of the song.