34. Chapter 34
RIVIK
Awolf learns the trail in his body before he ever learns it in his head.
My grandsire taught me that on my first long hunt, walking me until my feet bled and then walking me further, until the reading of ground and weather stopped being a thing I thought about and simply became a thing I was.
I have travelled hard country my whole life.
I know the weight a body can carry and the distance it can make in a short autumn day and the exact colour the sky goes before it turns on you.
None of it had prepared me for the particular labour of carrying a dying woman east into the closing year, one careful mile at a time, with her heartbeat fluttering against my chest like a bird gone quiet in the cold.
We'd rigged a litter the first day out and abandoned it by the second, because the ground was too broken for it and because none of us could bear the distance it put between our hands and her.
So we carried her instead, in turns, as you carry something you have decided the world will not have.
Daska took the longest turns, his great arms so tireless it frightened me, because I knew what it cost him and knew he'd never once say.
Tau spelled him, the king's easy strength bent to a use no one had ever asked of it.
And I took my turns with her tucked against me and her head under my chin, matching my stride to the shallow rhythm of her breathing, murmuring the low travel-words of my language into her hair so that some part of her, wherever she'd gone, might feel the road moving under us and know we were carrying her somewhere.
She surfaced sometimes from wherever the sickness had taken her.
Never often, and never for long, and never all the way.
Her eyes would open onto the grey sky and travel over whichever of us held her, and something would move behind them that might have been recognition and might have been only the habit of a face turning toward warmth; once she said Daska's name.
Once she said mine, so faint I felt it against my throat more than heard it, and I had to stop walking for a moment and let Tau go on ahead so no one would see what it did to me.
Then she'd sink again, back down under the grey, and we'd close ranks around the going of her and walk on.
The first snow found us on the third day.
* * *
It came out of the north on a wind that had been sharpening all morning, a few dry flakes at first, spinning down through the bare branches and melting where they touched us.
By midday it had thickened into something the sky meant.
The ground began to hold it, and I read the whole story of the coming winter in the way it lay, early, and hard, and hungry.
Nobody said what it meant; we didn't need to.
Every one of us knew that the snow was the thing that closed the passes, and that the passes were the road, and that the road was the only chance she had, and that the same weather thickening around us now was the enemy racing us to the high country.
Nathan knew it best of all, in the cold way he knew everything, and for once he didn't say it aloud, which was the nearest that man came to mercy.
He'd been strange since the earthquake, Nathan, quieter than the cold alone explained.
He walked at the back with Dev and the small pack of our belongings, and he did the work without complaint, the fetching, the carrying, the reading of the dead scanner he still couldn't quite let go of, without once trying to take command of the going; I'd braced for him to.
I'd spent the whole summer braced for Nathan to do the thing Nathan did, which was to decide he knew the straightest line and walk us all down it whether we willed it or not, as he'd done at a spring river that took her the first time; he didn't do it now.
Maybe even a man built like a ledger could look at the woman he'd thrown away, dying to save people he'd have written off without a second thought, and find the sum no longer added as it once had.
I didn't trust the change in him. I noted it, as I noted weather, and I kept the wariness banked but ready, because a wolf who stops watching the cold thing in the party doesn't stay alpha long.
The family held together through all of it.
That was the thing that carried us, more than the food or the miles or the fragile hope pointed east, the fact that we had become, over a long warm summer none of us had seen coming, a thing that held its shape under a weight that should have broken it.
Daska and I had crossed a killing river together in the spring as two men who barely knew each other, bound only by the woman between us and a truce we didn't yet trust. We walked into the snow now as brothers, and the word had earned itself somewhere along the way without either of us noticing it happen.
Tau, who a season ago had been a golden stranger who'd bought her off a slaver, took his turns carrying her and his turns at the fire and his place in the circle of us as though he'd always been there, and the strange truth was that he had, in every way that had come to matter.
Even Dev held a corner of the thing up, a small grief-worn sentry who refused to despair out loud where she might hear him.
We were tested to the edge of what we were, every hour of every one of those days. And we held, because she'd built us into something that could, and none of us would be the one to let the building fall while she still breathed inside it.
* * *
On the fifth day we came to the river.
The particular voice of big water moving fast reached me before the river came into view, and something in me went cold and went still in a way the snow had nothing to do with.
We came out of a stand of bare birch onto the bank, and I stood looking at it with her weight in my arms and my heart gone sideways in my chest, because I had crossed this river before in a different season, and it had taken her.
It wasn't this river, of course; I knew that with the sensible part of my mind.
This was another water entirely, a hundred miles and half a year from the braided spring channel where Karik's wolves had come out of the willow scrub and turned my whole life over.
But my body didn't care what my mind knew.
My body stood on a riverbank in the falling snow, a current running fast and grey in front of me, the smell of cold water in my nose.
It dragged me straight back to the worst hour I had ever lived, the deep channel closing over my head, the ice driving me back, her small shape hauled away up the far bank while I went under and fought up and went under again, my arm reaching across a distance that was already too far and getting further, the song I'd taught her thinning to nothing behind her until there was only the roar of the water and the certainty that I had failed the one person the bond had given me to keep.
I had reached for her that day and the river had won.
I had stood in the flood half-drowned and beaten while the willows swallowed the last of her, and it had been the hardest thing I ever made my body do, standing there and not dying in the water for the sake of being able to track her later.
Every mile since had been walked in the shadow of that failure.
Some part of me had never once climbed out of that channel.
"Rivik, stay with me." Daska's voice, low, at my side. He'd come up next to me and read my face as he read everything, and his hand settled warm against my back, steadying, asking nothing. "It's not the same river."
"I know it's not." My voice came out rough. "Tell that to the rest of me."
He didn't try to. He only stood with me a moment while I got my breathing back under my own command, and then he looked at the water with a healer's flat assessment and said the thing that mattered.
"This one we can cross; slow water at the bend there, shallow over the bar.
We can get her across if we do it together and we do it carefully.
" His eyes came to mine, and there was something in them that had been forged in the same fire as mine, on the same riverbank, half a year ago.
"We don't cross this one as we crossed the last. No straight lines this time, and no one goes into the water alone.
We take her over between us, all of us, and the water doesn't get so much as a finger of her. "
* * *
We crossed at the bend where the river widened and slowed, roped together with the sinew line, Tau breaking the current at the upstream end where his great size could bear the push of it and Daska anchoring the downstream where his steadiness would catch anything the water tried to take.
Dev and Nathan carried the gear across first and came back to hold the line from the near bank.
And in the middle of us, passed hand to hand and never once out of two men's grip at any moment, we carried Ellie.
I took her across the deepest part myself.
I had asked for it without quite deciding to, some old debt in me needing to be the one who bore her weight through the place the water ran strongest, and no one argued, because they'd all read what the river had done to me on the bank and understood the shape of what I needed.
So I went into the current with her held high against my chest, out of the water's reach, both my arms locked around her, the rope taut to Daska on one side and Tau on the other.
The cold climbed my legs and hauled at my footing exactly as it had that day in the spring, and this time I did not go under.
This time the water pushed and I held. My brothers held the line, and the woman in my arms stayed dry and above the grey while I carried her step by step through the place the river had beaten me before.
And I sang to her.