Page 47 of Roar of the Wild

So I chose my words as you choose your steps on breaking ice, for exactly where they'd bear weight, and nowhere they wouldn't.

"Whoever they're for," I said, gently, holding her eyes so she'd understand I meant every word and no more than I said, "they're lucky, lucky to have someone go to this much trouble, someone who'd grind seed to tears over making them something." I let that sit a moment, and then I gave her the rest of it, the true heart of it, plainly. "There's nothing wrong with loving someone enough to make them something with your own two hands, Eleya, nothing wrong with it at all, whatever anyone's ever made you feel. It's the best thing people do for each other. I hope you know that, and I hope whoever gets these knows exactly what they've got."

I watched her understand what I was telling her, and what I was carefully not telling her, and what I was promising by the not-telling. I watched her understand that I'd seen, and that I'd already decided, and that the deciding had come out somewhere she hadn't dared hope it would. Her face did a complicated thing, the fear and the disbelief and something breaking loose underneath, and for a moment I thought she might weep inearnest. Then she pressed her lips together and gave me a single small nod, and I gave her one back. Between us in that nod passed the whole of a thing neither of us had said and neither of us ever would.

"You are not what I thought," she said at last, very low.

"No, I don't suppose I am," I agreed. "I don't think I'm what anybody thought, lately. Least of all me."

* * *

Sawa came back from the morning's hunt while the last of the cakes were still cooling.

Her arrival reached me before I saw her, the particular note the settlement took on when the hunt-leader came in with meat, the calling back and forth, the shift in the pride's whole attention toward the returning hunters; Eleya heard it too. I watched her go still, watched her look down at the cakes she'd made and then toward the sound of Sawa coming, and I saw the terror come up in her again, the old fear of being seen, and I understood that we'd arrived at the exact edge of the thing I'd promised silently to protect.

I got to my feet. It was the only gift left to give, and I gave it without a word, I stood, gathered up my cracked quern-stone and the empty seed-bowl, and made myself into a woman with somewhere else to be, so that whatever happened next would happen without a witness who mattered. I'd give them that; a person deserves to hand their frightened heart across without a stranger watching to see whether it's taken.

But I didn't go far, and I'll admit that much freely. I went as far as the next windbreak and no further, and I looked back once, because I'm not a saint. I'd ground seed to my own sore arms for this, and I wanted, God help me, to see it land.

Sawa came into the little clearing by the cold fire, blood still on her from the hunt, moving with that blunt certainty she brought to everything, and she stopped when she saw Eleya,and something in the hard weathered line of her changed, some softening she'd never once let show in front of the pride. Eleya stood, shaking, and held out one of the warm cakes in a hand that trembled so hard I feared she'd drop it. She said something I was too far to hear. And Sawa looked down at the cake, and then at Eleya's shaking hand, and then, slowly, as a hard woman does a soft thing, she took it.

She ate it standing there in the cold with the blood of the hunt still on her, and whatever it tasted of, it wasn't only honey and seed, because her hard face did a thing I'd never seen it do in all the weeks of her watching me across the settlement. The whole hard weathered set of it came undone. Just for a moment, just for the length of a mouthful, the pride's fiercest woman stood in the thin autumn light and let herself be, simply and nakedly, someone who was loved.

And then she looked up. Over Eleya's head, across the clearing, to the windbreak where I stood with my stone and my bowl, pretending not to watch, and she found me. Our eyes met across the cold morning. And Sawa, who had watched me like a thief from the first day, who'd warned her king against me, who ran the numbers on everyone and trusted no one's sight but her own, Sawa looked at me for a long steady moment over the head of the woman she loved, with a warm cake in her hand that I had taught another woman to make, and the resistance she'd held against me all summer finally, quietly, gave way.

She didn't smile, because Sawa isn't a woman who smiles. But she inclined her head to me, once, the smallest fraction, a thing so slight that only someone watching for it would ever have caught it, and I understood that I'd just been given the one thing that woman had never given anyone in the whole time I'd known her, which was her trust, entire and unguarded, handed over across a clearing in the cold.

I inclined my head back. And then I took my stone and my bowl and left them to it, the two of them alone by the fire with the warm cakes between them. I walked back through the settlement toward my own hearth with my sore arms and my full heart, thinking about a fierce old woman at Hanging Rock who'd taught me to grind seed on a frozen morning and never once explained why she bothered.

I understood then what Sira had given me through all those cold mornings. The honey and seed were never the point; a recipe survived because someone passed it on, carrying the care of its first maker into hands and years they would never see. Feeding people told them they were worth keeping alive. Teaching them to feed others made that love travel further. Nathan was waiting on the path back to my fire.

He didn’t step out suddenly or arrange the meeting where no one could see us. He simply stood beside the stacked winter stores with one of Dev’s tally-strings looped through his fingers, watching me approach.

“We have enough dried meat for eighteen days if we ration it properly,” he said. “Twenty if Tau supplies two hunters and they can keep us fed on the road. The travelling hides will be finished within four days.”

I shifted the grinding-stone against my hip. “Have you come to inform me or issue another departure order?”

“Inform you.”

That stopped me more effectively than any cruelty might have.

“The lower route is still passable,” he continued. “Nine days from here to the foot of the mountains, perhaps ten with Dev’s leg and Megan’s condition. After that, we still have the passes themselves. The hunters expect the first hard snow within three weeks.”

“And Dev’s count?”

His fingers tightened around the tally-string.

“He still can’t tell us whether the remaining reserves are sufficient. Only that they aren’t increasing while we wait.”

There was no sneer in it this time. No mention of my fire, my men or the life I’d built. Only the facts laid one after another, cold stones marking the distance to a door that was closing.

“If we don’t leave within ten days,” he said, “twelve at the absolute limit, the decision will be made for us. The passes will close, and the mission ends here until spring.”

The modern world might not have until spring. Neither of us said it. We didn’t need to.

Nathan handed me Dev’s tally-string.

“Do whatever you need to do, Ellie. But count the days while you’re doing it.”