Page 5 of Roar of the Wild

Rivik crouched at the bank testing the current with a stripped branch, reading depth by feel, and when he stood his face told me everything his careful words to Nathan hadn't. He didn't like the willow scrub on the far side any more than I did. He said something low to the two wolf-men who'd cross with Dev, and they nodded and spread out, and what he was doing was plain enough: arranging what protection he could inside a plan he'd have never chosen.

And so we started across.

Dev went first, roped between the two Hanging Rock wolves, and it was bad but not the worst, waist-deep in the main channel, the current dragging at him, his bad leg buckling once so that both men took his weight and hauled him up onto the shingle bar, screaming and swearing, which would've been funny on any other morning. He lifted a hand to show he was whole. The far crossing, from the bar to the slumped bank, ran shallower, and he made it across. He stood dripping in the willow scrub on the wrong side of the world and lifted his hand again, and a knot in my chest loosened half a turn.

One of us over, then, with only the rest of us left to go.

Megan went next, and I watched her closely, as I'd been watching her for days without letting myself finish the thought about why. She'd been grey at dawn again, gone quietly away from the fire to be sick where she thought no one saw, waving off the dried meat with her hand pressed flat to her mouth. On the march she tired faster than the cold alone explained and moved with a new carefulness, a hand drifting to her middle when she thought herself unobserved. I knew what that arithmetic added up to. I'd cooked for enough women through enough early months to know the look of it. The knowing sat in me heavy, because Megan and I had spent two years being nothing to each other but the woman Nathan kept and the woman Nathan threw away.

She caught me looking as she took the rope, and for a second the mask she wore slipped, and underneath it was someone frightened and trying very hard not to be.

"You'll be fine," I told her, in English, low enough that Nathan didn't turn. "Keep your feet wide. Lean into the current, not away from it. Don't fight it, use it."

She stared at me like I'd spoken in the wolf-tongue. Then she nodded, once, and went down the bank into the water, and Ifound I was holding my breath the whole way across as if I could carry her over on it.

She made the bar; she made the far bank. Dev caught her arm and steadied her, and the two of them stood together in the willows, and I let the breath go.

The gear went over on the line, bundled hide and the precious dead weight of the scanner that Nathan trusted to no hands but the rope's. And then it was our turn, Nathan, Daska, Rivik, me, and the last of the Hanging Rock men, and the sun was coming up hard now over the far ridge and the melt was already loud, and I put my foot into water so cold it stopped being cold and became a kind of burning, and I thought,nearly, nearly, we're nearly through the worst of it.

That was when they came out of the willows.

I understood it in pieces, because it was too big and too fast to take in whole. The scrub on the far bank moving wrong; shapes rising out of it that weren't willow. Dire-wolves, enormous, twice the mass of any wolf that had a right to exist, pouring down the slumped bank toward Dev and Megan where they stood defenceless and dripping on the wrong side of the river. And behind them, wading into the shallows of the far crossing, a monster of a wolf-shifter in man's shape, scarred across half his face, moving with the terrible unhurried certainty of someone who had done this many times before.

Karik was his name, though I didn't know it yet. What I knew was the shape of what he was, because I'd met that shape before in a gilded ballroom wearing a tailored suit, a man who looked at people and saw goods.

Everything happened at once after that.

Daska's roar tore across the water. I'd never heard a sound like it come out of him, my gentle patient healer, a bear's fury ripping up out of a man's throat, and he was already surging forward through the current toward the far bank where Megan and Devstood defenceless against the wolves. Somewhere Nathan was shouting orders no one could follow. The Hanging Rock men were shifting mid-stride, fur and muscle erupting where men had been, throwing themselves into the current. And Rivik was already in the water ahead of all of them.

Rivik went into the deep channel after the ones coming for me.

Because they were coming for me; that was the part I understood last and worst. The dire-wolves on the near bank hadn't come for the men or the gear or the scanner they'd trusted to the rope; they'd come for me. Two of them hit the water on my side, huge and silent and moving with purpose, and they weren't trying to kill me. They were trying totakeme, jaws closing on the fur at my back, my collar, hauling, and then the cold water closed over my head, the world went to roar and grey, and all that was left of it was the iron grip of teeth that didn't break skin because breaking skin was never the point.

Cargo,some cold flat part of my mind said, even as the rest of me thrashed and screamed and swallowed river.You're cargo, cargo the way you were always cargo, your father's asset, the Council's vessel, and now theirs, and this is the only thing you've ever been.

I fought anyway, got a hand free and clawed at a muzzle and felt it not care in the slightest. The current had me, the wolves had me, and between one wave and the next I caught it all in broken flashes, Daska reaching the far bank and being met by three of them at once, Megan screaming, Dev dragged down. Rivik was in the deep channel, driven back by the ice and the killing weight of the water, going under, surfacing, going under again, and the last clear thing I saw before they pulled me up the near bank was his head above the churning grey, his arm reaching across a distance that was already too far and getting further.

They hauled me out and up and slung me over the back of one of the shifted wolves across the wolf’s back as dressed meat. My ribs cracked against the ridge of its spine and the breath went out of me. Daska was gone from sight, and the river with him. The bank tilted and swung and the willow scrub tore past, and Megan was somewhere behind me making a sound I'd hear in my sleep for a long time, and there was no more pretending it could go any other way: we had lost. That Nathan's straight line had walked us into exactly the funnel Rivik had read in the ground days ago, and that the men who'd have died to stop this were on the wrong side of a river that kept no debts.

Daska.I reached for the bond as I reached for it in the dark, groping after the warm sure thread of him, and it was there, frayed thin with distance and terror but there, and his anguish came down it with the force of a blow; he was alive, then. He was alive and he couldn't reach me and it was killing him, and I pushed back everything I had,I'm alive, I'm alive, find me, not knowing if it carried, knowing only that I had to send it.

And then, under the roar of the water, crashing willows, and my ragged breathing, I heard it.

It was Rivik's voice, ragged, half-drowned, pitched to carry, and it was the hunting-song. The one he'd sung low into my ear only yesterday with the party scattered on the trail, the old song wolves sang walking into country they didn't know. He was singing it now across the river with the last air in his lungs, and I understood what he was doing even as the distance ate the sound of it. He was telling me a message in the one language Karik's wolves would never parse, in the melody he'd braided with my voice in the cold spring air. He was telling me they would come. That they would follow, and that being taken was not the same as being lost.

Twisting on the wolf's back, hair streaming water into my eyes, I found him for one last instant, Rivik, chest-deep in the killingriver, driven back and beaten and singing anyway, his amber eyes fixed on me across everything.

I have it,I thought at him, fierce and drowning.I have the song and I'll keep it, so come and find me.

Then the willows closed over the sight of him, the wolf beneath me lurched into a ground-eating run, and the song thinned to nothing behind me until all that remained was the cold, the jolting dark, and the terrible arithmetic starting up again in the back of my mind, Megan, the thing I was almost certain she carried, and how long a body could be treated as goods before it started to believe it again.

Megan was the worst of it. Somewhere in the pack of running wolves behind me they carried her the same way, and she'd been grey with sickness for a week now, worn past exhaustion, and if I was right about the reason then every mile of this was a danger to more than just her. I didn't want to be right. Two years I'd have paid good money to see Nathan Cole's perfect PA suffer even a fraction of what I'd suffered, and the wanting had curdled somewhere on this journey into something I liked much less about myself, because whatever she'd done or not done, no one deserved to be flung over a beast's back as carelessly as butchered meat with a life she hadn't told a soul about growing quietly inside her. I filed the fear away where I filed everything I couldn't fix yet, next to the cold, the ache in my ribs, and Rivik’s drowning song. There'd be time to be frightened properly later; there was always time for that.

And under it all, quieter and more shameful than any of it, ran the thought I couldn't stop: that being taken like this, handled and hauled and reduced to a thing worth trading, was not new to me. It only wore a new shape. My father had done it in a boardroom and called it a good match; Nathan had done it at the Savoy and called it fate; and now a scarred monster of a wolf had done it in a river and called it nothing at all, because he didn'tneed a pretty word for it. The pretty words, it turned out, had only ever been for the people watching.

They ran us until the river was long behind us and the light had gone flat and grey, and then they let the wolves drop back to a jolting trot that was somehow worse, because it gave me room to feel every separate ache. My wrists had been bound at some point I didn't remember with a cord of twisted hide, and the wet had shrunk it tight. When they finally halted in a fold of dead ground out of the wind, the wolf beneath me simply tipped sideways and let me fall, and I hit the frozen earth hard enough to see white.

I got my knees under me and looked for Megan first. She was a few paces off, dumped the same careless way, curled around herself with her bound hands pressed to her middle and her face the colour of tallow. Our eyes met across the churned ground. Neither of us said anything, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't cost us breath we needed, but I held her gaze and tried to put into it the one thing I could still offer her.I see you, and you're not alone in this, and I think I already know what you haven't told anyone.Whether she understood, I couldn't tell, and after a moment she closed her eyes.