19. Chapter 19
RIVIK
Ishould not have gone on the hunt with her, and I knew it as I knew most of my worst decisions, clearly, in good time to stop myself, and with no intention of stopping at all.
It was Sawa's hunt, and a large one, the kind the pride ran when the great herds moved through in late summer and the whole settlement turned out to lay in meat against the coming cold; Ellie came by right.
That was the thing that undid my resolve before we'd even set out, that she came in her own right as a voice of the council, and not as anyone's woman at all, because the council she'd built had a say now in how the hunt was shared, and a people who'd once have left a foreign woman at the fires walked out onto the steppe with her as though she'd been born to it.
She'd earned that place herself; I'd watched her earn it.
And watching her stride out under the wide grey sky with a hunting spear she barely knew how to hold, chin up, entirely determined to be useful, I understood that I'd follow her into far worse country than this and call it duty to the last.
Daska stayed behind at the settlement. The pride's healer was needed where the injured would be brought, and he'd caught my eye before we left with a look that held everything neither of us would say, go, then, and stop drowning in it.
His blessing sat on me like a coat two sizes too large, warm and unearned and impossible to take off; he'd given me a door.
He hadn't told me how to walk through it, and I'd spent the days since standing in front of it like a wolf who's forgotten what his legs are for.
The open country helped; it always had, for both of us.
Out on the steppe, away from the settlement and its hundred watching eyes, something in Ellie loosened that stayed knotted at the fires, and something in me did too, the old road-self surfacing, the man I'd been in the weeks before Karik's wolves took her, when it had been the two of us walking point together and the whole cold world ahead.
We fell into it without deciding to. She'd point at a thing and give me its lion word, and I'd give her the wolf one.
We'd argue cheerfully over which was uglier, and somewhere in the middle we'd land on a third word that was neither, some mongrel sound the two of us had bent into shape on the road that meant the thing only to us.
"Grennok," she said, nodding at the churned mud where the herd had crossed, and I snorted, because that wasn't lion or wolf, that was the noise she'd made the first time she'd stepped in it months ago and it had stuck.
"That's not a word."
"It is now. I'm on the council. I can make words.
" She said it in her careful wolf-tongue, with the lion lilt she'd picked up threaded under it, and the whole tangled music of it was a language that belonged to nobody in the world but the two of us.
"Grennok. Mud that wants your boot. It's a very useful word, you'll thank me for it. "
I looked at her too long. I knew I did it, and I couldn't stop, and the bond in my chest pulled so hard at the sound of her mangling three tongues into one that I had to turn my face to the wind and pretend to read the herd.
The herd was harder to read than it should have been, too.
Twice we crossed ground where the animals had bolted from nothing, no predator sign anywhere a party of lion noses could find it, the scatter starting from clean empty ground, and Sawa frowned over it the same way I did, because beasts don't run from empty air, and these had.
The pride's elders had been muttering half the summer about restless animals and a wrongness in the ground, and I'd put it down to old women's talk until I stood in the middle of what it left behind with the hair rising on my own neck.
We'd built that language a word at a time on the road, in the weeks before the river, and out here it came back whole.
It had rules only we knew. Grennok for treacherous mud, and a low two-note call that meant stop, look, quiet that I'd taught her for the hunt and she'd bent into a greeting, and the old hunting-song underneath all of it, the calls that turned to melody when the walking got long.
She started humming it now without seeming to notice, low under her breath as she scanned the herd, and I had to school my face to stone, because she still didn't know what that song was to me, and I couldn't afford to let her read it there.
"You're humming again," I said, before I could stop myself.
"Am I?" She flushed, caught out. "I do it without noticing.
It's a good walking-tune. Whoever taught it to me knew what they were about.
" She said it lightly, teasing, with no idea at all that she'd reached into my chest and closed her hand around my heart, because whoever taught it to me was walking three feet from her, dying quietly of the thing he'd sung into her on a hard road and never once named.
I made some rough noise of agreement and looked hard at the bison, and thanked the goddess she couldn't hear a bond as her mates could, because if she'd felt what was happening in mine right then she'd have run for the horizon.
* * *
The herd was bison, a great shaggy river of them, hundreds strong, flowing across the steppe in the blue distance with the dust rising gold above their backs.
Sawa read them as I'd once read my own hunting grounds, with a leader's whole attention, and she set us in a long careful arc downwind to cut a few of the old and the slow from the edge of the mass without spooking the rest into a stampede that would flatten everything in its path.
It was good hunting. I gave myself over to it with relief, because a hunt is the one place an alpha's mind goes quiet, no room in it for anything but the wind and the ground and the animal, the old clean work my body knew better than my own name.
Sawa ran it well. She'd have made a fine alpha in any pack that would have had a female at its head, and I watched her move her hunters with a few low calls and the flat of one hand, easing the arc closer with a stalking cat's patience, until we were near enough to the stragglers to smell the sour musk of them and hear the great bellows-breath of a beast the size of a boulder.
The spears went in on Sawa's signal, three of the old cows dropping at the edge of the mass while the herd flowed on around them, and for a moment it was the good clean chaos I'd lived for in my old life, the shouting, the dust, the meat that would feed the pride through a hard moon, the sheer roaring aliveness of it.
Ellie held the line where Sawa had placed her, well back, spear planted, doing the one job she'd been given, which was to look large and shout at the right moment and help turn the cut beasts toward the spears.
She was good at it; of course she was good at it.
She was good at everything she set her stubborn mind to, and I let myself watch her from the corner of my eye, alight with it out on the steppe, and that was my mistake, because I was watching her instead of the herd when the bull broke.
It came out of the mass without warning, as they do, some old bull at the edge, half-blind and wholly furious, catching a scent or a shadow it didn't like and wheeling out of the river of bodies straight toward the line, straight toward the place where Ellie stood.
She froze, as anyone would have. A bison bull stands taller than a man at the withers and carries the weight of four, and there's a moment when that much muscle turns toward you that the animal part of the brain simply stops, and Ellie's whole hard-won courage was worth nothing against ten thousand years of prey instinct telling her to be still.
I was moving before anything resembling thought.
The bond did it, the bond and the years of leading hunts, my body crossing the ground between us faster than I'd known I could still run.
I hit her sideways, taking her down and out of the bull's line as it thundered past close enough that the wind of it stank of musk and terror.
We went down together in the churned mud, her under me, my body curved over hers, and the bull's horn caught me as it passed, a hot line of pain drawn shallow down my ribs, the animal already gone and crashing on into the open before the pain even registered.
For a moment we just lay there, both of us breathing hard, her heart slamming against my chest through two layers of hide, my arms full of the woman I'd crossed the world for and sworn not to hold.
"You're bleeding," she said, against my throat. "Rivik, you're bleeding, get off, let me, you're hurt, you're—"
"It's shallow, I promise." That much was true, I'd had worse from a bad-tempered pup. "The bull's run itself off. You're safe now, and that's the whole of what matters."
She got out from under me, shaking, and I let her, and the moment she saw the wound properly the fear on her face turned into something else, something I knew well because I'd worn it myself watching her, the particular focus of a person who deals with terror by finding a task and doing it with their whole heart.
* * *
She wouldn't wait for Daska. We were an hour's hard walk from the settlement and the blood was coming freely enough that she planted me down in the lee of a boulder, tore into the healer's satchel Daska never let her leave without, and set about closing me up herself with a grim competence that would have made the bear proud.
I should have stopped her; a lesser wound, another day, I'd have waited for Daska and kept the distance I needed.
But the bleeding wanted seeing to. She had the skill of it from a summer at the healer's side, and there was no good reason to refuse her that didn't give away the real reason, so I sat with my back to the cold stone and let her lift my torn hide away and put her hands on me.
That was the mistake that unmade all the others.