30. Chapter 30
ELLIE
The world came apart with a sound I had no name for, a deep grinding roar that came up through the furs and the floor and my own bones all at once, and I was on my feet in the pitching dark before I understood I'd moved.
Tau had me by the arm. Daska had the back of my head, one broad hand cradling my skull as he'd cradle a thing he was afraid of dropping, and Rivik was already at the entrance with his whole body braced against the heaving hide wall, shouting something the roar swallowed whole.
The fat-lamps had gone over; the furs slid underfoot like the deck of a ship.
I got one hand flat to the ground to steady myself and felt the earth buck against my palm, alive and furious, a thing thirty thousand years deep turning over in its sleep, and the borrowed weight in my chest screamed toward it so hard I nearly went down from the pull alone.
Then the shaking dropped to a shudder, and the shudder to a tremble, and the first terrible wave passed.
"Out," Rivik said, into the ringing quiet. "All of you, out, now, before the next one, the frame won't hold a second like that."
We went out into a dawn that hadn't come yet, into a settlement I didn't recognise.
I'd spent a summer and an autumn learning this place by heart, every fire and windbreak and worn path between the shelters, the great mammoth-bone hall at its heart, the pens and the drying racks and the storehouses banked against the coming cold.
All of it stood broken now, everything I knew wrenched half off its bones and thrown down at wrong angles: shelters caved in on themselves, a storehouse split open with its winter stores spilling into the churned earth, one of the smaller fires knocked clean out of its ring and gnawing hungrily along a fallen hide toward the next shelter down.
The whole settlement had gone up in screaming, children, dogs, and somewhere a horse that had got loose and was plunging through the wreckage wild-eyed with a snapped tether whipping behind it.
Over all of it hung a haze of dust and smoke gone silver in the last of the starlight, so the whole settlement looked like something drowned.
For one heartbeat I stood frozen at the edge of it, and the enormity of it pressed the breath out of me.
Then the chef in me, the part that had run a professional kitchen through a fire and two floods and a Christmas Eve when the ovens died with two hundred covers booked, took hold and started sorting the chaos into things that could be done.
Fire came first, because fire spread and fire killed faster than falling bone.
After the fire came the trapped, and after the trapped, the hurt.
"The fire," I said, and pointed, and my voice came out steadier than I felt. "Rivik, the fire's going to take the eastern shelters if it isn't stopped. Get people beating it out before it reaches the storehouse thatch."
He looked at me for half a breath, this man born to command who'd given up a pack, and he weighed whether to argue and decided not to, because I was right and there was no time to be anything else.
He turned and became the alpha again between one stride and the next, his voice cracking across the settlement in the wolf-tongue, gathering the nearest able bodies to him and driving them at the fire with the sure authority of a man who'd run evacuations before.
Tau was already moving the other way, his golden voice raised over the din, his sheer size and certainty a thing frightened people turned toward and steadied against. The king held his people together simply by being visible among them, unhurried even now, and I understood why a pride would follow a man like that into anything.
Daska stayed at my side; of course he stayed. He'd have a hundred wounded to reach before the sun cleared the horizon and he knew it, but for this one moment he stayed, his healer's eyes moving over me head to foot in the dark. "Tell me you're not hurt anywhere."
"I'm whole, not a scratch on me." I gripped his forearm, once, hard. "Go, the wounded need you more than I do. I'll find whoever's trapped and send runners for you where it's bad."
* * *
I found Megan because I'd been looking for her from the first heartbeat, reaching for her as you reach for the one thing you can't lose before you've decided to.
She'd taken a shelter near the eastern edge with two of the statusless women she'd grown close to over the autumn, the ones from her own quiet corner of the pride, and I fought my way toward it through the wreckage with dread mounting in me at every step, because the eastern shelters had taken the worst of it and I could see even from a distance that hers was down.
The whole frame had gone, collapsed inward, a heap of hide and shattered mammoth-bone where a home had stood, a knot of people already clawing at the edges of it, and above the general din a sound that stopped my heart, a woman's voice from somewhere under all that ruin, thin with terror and calling out.
"Megan, hold on, I've got you." I hit the edge of the collapse at a dead run and went down on my knees in the churned earth and started hauling at the fallen hide with my bare hands. "Megan, I'm here, I'm here, where are you, keep talking, let me hear you."
"Ellie?" Her voice came up muffled through the wreckage, cracked with terror. "Ellie, I can't, there's a weight across my legs, I can't move, and it hurts, something's wrong, it's too early, it's far too early..."
The words went into me like ice water. She was thirty weeks by my reckoning, thirty at the outside, and no woman that far along should be pinned under the bones of a fallen house with her body griping in fear.
If this brought the baby now, in the cold and the dust with the settlement in ruins around us, then two lives were running out under that heap and not one.
"Listen to my voice." I made my voice the voice I used in the kitchen when a knife had opened someone to the bone and panic would kill them faster than blood.
"You're not going to move, do you hear me?
Don't you dare try to move. You lie still and you breathe and you let me get to you.
I have done harder things than this before breakfast, and I'm coming for you right now. "
And then Sawa was there.
She came out of the smoke at a flat run, the hunt-leader, the pride's fiercest and most certain body, taking in the collapse and the sound of the trapped woman in a single sweep of those hard eyes before she dropped to her knees beside me without a word wasted.
She was built for exactly this, all that lean hunting strength bent now to a different kind of survival, and where my bare soft hands could shift a hide she could shift a roof-beam.
She braced her shoulder under the largest of the fallen bones, the great curved rib that had come down across the whole collapse, and she looked at me once, a look that asked ready?
and told me when this lifts, you pull, and I understood that whatever else Sawa had ever been to me, in this moment we were two people who would spend the last of ourselves to get a third out of the ground.
"On three," I said, and showed her the count on my fingers because the word might not carry. "One, two, and..."
She heaved with everything she had. The great bone rose a hand's width, then another, her whole body shaking with the effort, a sound tearing out of her that I felt in my own chest. In the gap lay Megan, pale and dust-streaked and terrified in the hollow beneath, her arms wrapped around the swell of her belly that the loose hides had hidden all autumn and hid no longer.
Her eyes met mine, and neither of us said the thing we both knew.
I got my hands under her arms and hauled.
She came free of the weight with a cry that hurt to hear, her legs dragging, and Sawa held the killing bone up on nothing but her own failing strength until I'd dragged Megan clear of the collapse and back onto open ground.
Only then did the hunt-leader let it fall, with a crash that shook the earth all over again, and knelt there gasping over her own knees.
* * *
"Sawa, we need the healer," I said. "The big one, the bear, Daska, and only him. Can you bring him?"
She caught it, the whole of it, in the space of a breath, caught that of every healing hand in the pride I'd named the one man, and why; Sawa knew about Megan.
I understood as much the instant I said it and watched her take it without a flicker, a simple nod, and then she was moving.
She'd likely known for weeks, because Sawa knew everything that moved through her pride and kept exactly as much of it as suited her.
She was already gone, cutting back through the smoke toward wherever the worst of the wounded had drawn Daska, and I turned back to Megan with my heart going like a hammer.
She was in a bad way, and worsening. I didn't need Daska's training to see how bad, the grey in her face, the sweat standing out cold on her skin despite the freezing air, the ceaseless clutch of her hands at her belly, and the low sound she was making now with every breath, a sound I knew from a dozen kitchens' worth of women who'd worked too long into a pregnancy that was starting to go wrong.
"It's coming, isn't it," she said, and it wasn't a question, and her eyes were huge and wet in the dust-light. "The baby's coming right now, weeks too early, and there's no, there's no hospital, there's nothing, there's no one who even knows how—"
"There's Daska." I took her face in my hands and made her look at me.
"He has brought more babies into this world than you've had hot dinners, and he is the best pair of hands in five hundred miles, and he is coming right now.
You are not doing this alone in the cold.
You have me, and you have him, and I am not going anywhere. Do you understand me?"