22. Chapter 22
RIVIK
Iwoke before the settlement did, as I always had, with the grey light not yet come over the eastern rise and the great banked fire in the pride's central hearth breathing its low red breath into the dark.
For a long moment I didn't know why the waking felt wrong.
Then I understood that it wasn't wrong at all, that the thing knotted so long in my chest, the thing I'd carried across six weeks of wilderness and a winter before that, had come loose in the night and left a warmth behind it I had no name for.
I lay still in my furs at the edge of Ellie's fire, where she'd pulled me down three nights ago and refused to let me leave, and I took stock of myself as I'd once taken stock of a wound before deciding whether it would kill me.
The bond had answered; that was the shape of it.
Six months I'd carried a thread reaching for a woman who couldn't feel it reaching, aching and one-sided, a rope thrown across a river with nothing on the far bank to catch it, and now, faint as a first spark in wet tinder, there was tension on the far end.
Something held it now, at last, and the something was her.
When I turned my head and looked at her sleeping beside me, dark hair loose across the furs, one hand tucked under her cheek as a child sleeps, the warmth in my chest tugged toward her gently, and for the first time since Hanging Rock the pull didn't hurt.
It had spent half a year as a wound. Now it was only a direction, the way home is a direction, and I lay there in the cold before dawn and let myself feel it without flinching, which was a thing I had not permitted myself in longer than I could count.
Frostbite comes back like that. I'd seen it happen to men on hard trails, the flesh gone white and dead to feeling, and then the fire, and then the slow furious ache of the blood coming back into a place that had learned to do without it.
That was the bond these three days, the dead thing waking, and it hurt in its own way, the feeling of feeling again, but it was the good hurt, the kind that meant a thing would live rather than rot.
I should have been at ease. A wolf who's answered his fated bond ought to be the most settled creature under the sky.
Instead I lay in the dark and turned over the one trouble that even this couldn't quiet, the trouble I'd carried to her fire alongside the confession and hadn't spoken because there'd been no room for it, because a man can only set down one impossible thing at a time, and I'd chosen the bond.
The other thing was Daska.
* * *
Nobody watching us those first days would have guessed what had changed.
That was the strangeness of it. We were careful, she was careful, and I took my lead from her, because it was her standing in the pride I wouldn't spend cheaply, her council seat that a whisper could undermine, and I'd sooner have cut my own hand off than cost her an ounce of the place she'd built here.
So by day we went on as we had. She sat her council; I ran with Sawa's hunters; Daska worked his healer's craft in the great shelter where the pride brought their sick.
We passed each other in the open and gave nothing away, and only a wolf with his nose to the wind would have found the truth of it, in the way her scent had changed to carry mine now, threaded through with the smoke and the cold and the particular sweetness that was only ever her.
But the settlement is a warren of blind corners, and Ellie had learned every one of them.
She caught me behind the drying racks on the second morning, where the long lines of meat hung curing in the wind off the steppe and the racks made a screen from the settlement's hundred eyes.
One moment I was checking the set of a snare I'd no real reason to check, and the next she'd fisted a hand in the front of my hide, hauled me down into the shadow of the hanging meat, and kissed me like she'd been thinking of nothing else since she'd sent me from her furs at first light.
One of my hands found her hair, the other the small of her back, and I pulled her in until there was nothing in the world but the heat of her mouth, the low sound she made against mine, the racks creaking overhead in the wind.
"Someone will see," I said against her lips, which was true, and which I did not mean as a request that she stop.
"Then be quick about it, alpha." Her wolf-tongue had the lion lilt threaded under it now, and the tease in it undid me as it always did, and she bit my lower lip just hard enough to make her meaning plain. "You crossed a killing river for me. You can manage a little discretion behind a meat rack."
I managed considerably less discretion than that.
She was flushed, laughing, straightening her hides when we finally broke apart, and I watched her slip back out into the settlement with her chin up and her council face on as though she'd been about some perfectly ordinary errand, and the pride parted around her with the respect she'd earned, none of them the wiser.
The pride's carrier-woman, they called her, the maker of the council, the strange soft creature who couldn't shift or fight and had somehow bent a lion king and half his people to her will with nothing but her food, her stubbornness, and her unaccountable way of seeing straight to the middle of a person.
Mine, some old wolf part of me said, low and satisfied, watching her go. But it said it quietly, and it didn't say it alone, and that was the trouble I'd woken with.
* * *
The smokehouse was worse, or better, depending on how a man reckoned these things.
It was a low structure of hide and bent saplings at the settlement's edge, where the pride smoked the fish the river gave up in the shortening days.
It was warm inside and thick with the good haze of alder-smoke and nearly always empty in the slack hour after the midday meal.
Ellie found reasons to be there, and so, shameless as any lovesick pup, did I.
We told ourselves and each other that it was the language, that she was teaching me the lion words for the smoking and the curing, ravenous for the tongue of this place as she was ravenous for all its craft, and there was even truth in it, because she did make me repeat the words back until I had them, laughing at my wolf's mangling of the lion sounds.
"Ashka," she said, holding up a split fish. "Say it properly this time. You sound like you're being strangled by it."
"Ashka," I said, and got it wrong on purpose, because the way she corrected me involved putting her fingers to my jaw to feel the shape of the sound, and I'd have mispronounced every word in three languages to earn that.
"You're doing that deliberately." She narrowed her dark eyes at me, fighting the smile. "You had it perfectly on the road. I've heard you speak better lion than that when you're bartering with Sawa."
"Sawa doesn't stand this close when she corrects me."
She lost the fight with the smile then, and I lost whatever discipline I'd been pretending to.
The fish got set aside, the lesson with it, and I backed her gently into the warm shadow at the smokehouse's heart, my hands finally free to touch her after half a year of wanting to.
She was greedy under my hands, warm and quick to answer, this woman who'd flinched from being wanted for two years, and every sound I drew from her was a wonder I hadn't earned.
"The whole pride's at the midday fire," she said against my mouth, breathless, already working the ties of my hide loose with clever cook's fingers. "That's the longest we ever get. So stop being reverent about it, wolf, and put your hands where I want them."
"Bossing an alpha in his own..." I started, and she bit my lip to shut me up, and I stopped pretending I had any authority here at all.
I got her outer layer open and my hand under it, found her breast and dragged my thumb over her nipple until it stood hard and she gasped into my mouth.
She was already rocking against my thigh, shameless, and when I slid my hand down inside her leggings and found her wet and ready for me she made a sound that nearly finished me on the spot.
"Gods, Ellie..." The wolf-tongue had no word close enough, so I reached for one of hers. "You're soaked. We've barely started."
"I've been thinking about this since dawn." She got her hand around my cock, stroking, and my hips jerked into her grip without my leave. "Some of us don't have your famous discipline. Rivik. Now. Before someone comes for a fish."
I checked her eyes once, a heartbeat, the old careful thing all three of us did with her now, and she answered it by fisting her hand in my hair and dragging my mouth back to hers, which was answer enough.
I turned her, one hand splayed flat and warm over her belly to hold her steady, and worked her leggings down over her hips.
She braced her palms against the smoke-blackened frame and pushed back against me, and I notched my cock against her and drove in on one long stroke.
The sound we made together was lost in the alder-haze.
"Yes..." She dropped her head between her arms. "God, yes, like that..."
There was nothing patient in me here. This was the register I couldn't help, the starving thing under the alpha's control, six months of silent wanting let off its leash, I fucked her hard and deep in the smoke-warm dark, one arm banded round her waist to hold her to me, the other hand sliding down to find her clit and work it in time with my thrusts.
She hummed the hunting-song then, broken, without knowing she did it, the song I'd sung into her on a hard road when I'd had no other way to say the thing I felt, and now she wore it as her own and gave it back to me.
It was all I could do not to weep into her hair like a boy even with my cock buried in her.