Page 40 of Roar of the Wild

I took stock of myself as Daska had taught me to, a healer's inventory of my own body, and found what wasn't there.

The ache was gone.

It had been with me so long I'd stopped naming it, the low constant wrongness that lived under my breastbone, the pressure that had been getting worse all summer, the thing Dev fretted over and I brushed off, the tiredness that sat in my bones like cold in stone. Tonight it had eased to almost nothing. My chest felt open and light, as though whatever had been sitting on it had, for a few hours, decided I was worth setting down. I didn't understand it and I was too warm and wrung-out to chase theunderstanding, but I filed it away as I filed everything, a small clean fact set aside for later:I feel better when I let myself be loved; that has to mean something.

I should have slid straight into sleep. Both of them had, the wolf and the bear breathing in a slow shared rhythm on either side of me, their bodies still finding each other even in sleep, a hand of Rivik's resting on Daska's forearm where it lay across me. The word came to me plain and astonishing in the dark.This is my family; I made it, and it's mine, and no one handed it to me.

And then, unbidden, into the warm dark, came what I didn't want.

Because the fire had more than one warmth in it now, and lying there counting my impossible blessings I found there was a space at the edge of it; a golden, absent space. I thought of Tau, of the measured wolf-tongue he'd used so I'd understand every word the day he chose to make my life a choice instead of a fight, of how he watched me feed his forgotten women with something naked in his face before he covered it with a grin, of a loneliness under all that gold that I'd started, lately, to be able to read as clearly as I now read Daska and Rivik. I thought of him alone at his king's fire tonight while I lay wrapped in warmth, and something in my chest, the same chest that had ached all summer and didn't ache now, pulled toward that absence like a tide.

I wanted him here.

The realisation went through me cold and clear. I didn't want Tau instead of these two; I wanted a place for him beside them, at the edge of the same fire.

Too much,the old voice whispered.Two men asleep in your arms and already you're reaching for a third.

But the quieter truth felt less like greed than recognition. I pressed closer into the warmth of the two men who were alreadymine and lay awake wanting a third, no longer certain I was wrong to.

Chapter 24

ELLIE

The trade caravan came up out of the south three days after the night I'd lain awake wanting a third man, and I took it, at first, for the best kind of ordinary, a break in the long warm sameness of pride life, a chance to barter and gossip and see new faces. That was before I understood what it had carried all that way to tell me.

I'd woken that morning in a tangle of warmth I was still learning to trust, Daska at my back, Rivik's hand loose in mine, the shelter close and dim, smelling of banked fire and the two of them. For the length of a few breaths before the day arrived, I let myself simply lie there and be a woman with more than she deserved. That was the trouble with happiness, I was discovering. It didn't arrive and settle like a fed animal; it arrived and immediately started asking questions.Who are you to have this; what did you ever do to earn it? What will it take from you when the accounting comes, because it always comes.

Three weeks now, the three of us, three weeks since the drying-racks and the fire and Daska's story about the pot that never ran dry. Every day of it had been better than the one before, and every day of it the arithmetic in my chest had got a little louder. I was a woman who'd been given two men who loved her without measuring, a role in a community that had once bought me off a slaver as carelessly as butchered meat, a friend where I'd had an enemy, a body that felt things again after two frozen years, more, all of it together, than I'd had in my whole life laid end to end. And somewhere in the deep unfixable middle of me, the more I was handed, the more certain I became that a reckoning was gathering out past the firelight, sharpening itself, waiting for me to let my guard all the way down before it came to take the lot.

You're building a debt,the old voice told me, reasonable as ever, while I dressed and pulled my hair back and readied myself to go and be useful.Every good thing is another thing to lose. You've always known this, in your bones, whatever pretty story you tell yourself over the cooking-fire.

"I know that already," I told it, under my breath, as I'd started doing. "I've always known it, and I'm getting up anyway."

I went out to my fire, and I started the day's cooking, and I did not yet know that the south had sent me something that would feed the voice better than anything Nathan had ever managed.

* * *

The caravan was six wolves and a scatter of pack-beasts loaded with the goods of a warmer country, amber, worked bone, hides cured a particular supple way the pride prized, little pots of a resin that burned sweet. They'd come up the corridor trading fire to fire, and they knew Tau's pride of old, and by midday the settlement had the loose festival air of a place with visitors. I did what I always did with newcomers: I fed them. A cook learns more at a full pot than a council ever learns at a formal one,and I'd long since stopped pretending my hospitality was only hospitality.

They were easy company, the traders, full of the road and its news. I ladled out marrow broth and the last of the season's bilberries baked into Sira's cakes, and I let their talk wash over me in the lion-tongue I was still stitching together word by word, and where the lion failed us we fell back on the wolf-tongue, which two of them had a rough traveller's grip on. It was one of these, a lean grey-muzzled wolf named Orin who'd clearly crossed more country than any of us, who did it, who set the whole afternoon on its edge without ever meaning to, over a second cake, in the idle way travellers trade the misfortunes of far-off places.

"Good trading, this run," he said, licking honey from his thumb. "Better than the last. Last time through we came by way of Broken Ridge, and a man does no good trade there anymore. Karik's grown greedy even by his own measure."

The name went through me like cold water. I kept my hands moving over the cooking-stone, kept my face the careful neutral I'd learned in a ballroom and never wanted to need again, and said, lightly, as though it cost me nothing, "You know Karik, then."

"Everyone on the corridor knows Karik." He said it as you'd name a bad crossing or a killing winter, a hazard of the country. "He had a good run of it this season. Sold a pair of females up your way, I heard, got a king's ransom for them, more than any two women ever fetched, and it's gone to his head." Orin shook his grey head, disapproving in the mild way of a man disapproving of weather. "Now he thinks every woman he can lay hands on is amber in the ground. He's got a whole string of them at the Ridge now, six or seven at least. Taken off other packs, off the trade road, off any hearth too weak to hold them.Keeps them for the trading, as you or I'd keep a store of good hides against a lean season."

My hands had gone still on the cooking-stone. I made myself start again, turning the cake that didn't need turning, because Megan was three fires down and I could feel the thing in me that wanted to go to her and the thing in me that knew better than to show this stranger what his idle news had done.

"Seven women, and no one raising a hand for them," I said.

"Thereabouts, last I saw. Poor creatures, the lot of them." He reached for another cake with the easy conscience of a man to whom this was a story and not a wound. "But that's the Ridge for you. Always was a bad pack, even before Karik. No use crying over it. A man can't right every wrong on the corridor or he'd never get his trading done."

A pair of females, sold up your way, more than any two women ever fetched.That was Megan and me he was talking about. We were the good run of Karik's season, the sale that had gone to his head and taught him that women were amber in the ground. And somewhere five days south of here, at a pack whose name I'd first heard spoken like a curse, there were seven more, taken off any hearth too weak to hold them, waiting in the cold to be turned into trade.

I fed Orin his cake and asked him nothing more, because a woman with nothing learns not to show a stranger where her heart is. But the thing had already gone in, deep and clean, and I knew it would not come back out.

* * *