Page 56 of Roar of the Wild

And I felt it; that was the marvel of it, the thing I turned over even as the power roared through me. I felt the whole of it, the terror underneath, the triumph rising over the top, the sheer impossible aliveness of being a person who could reach into a breaking world and hold it, and I didn't clamp down on a single scrap of any of it. For two years I'd have told you feeling was a thing that happened to other people, softer people, people who hadn't learned yet what it did to you. I'd built my whole survival on going quiet inside, on wanting nothing so that nothing could be taken from me, on shrinking myself small enough that no one would think me worth the trouble of hurting; that woman was gone. She'd been burning away since the first cooking-fire in this strange world so far from home, and now, in the ruin, the last of her went. What stood up in her place felt everything at full and terrible volume and did not look away from any of it.

For the first time since Nathan read me out of his life on that bright stage, I let myself feel the whole of what I was. And what I was, it turned out, had never once been broken. What I was, was this, a woman with a heart too big for the sums other people ran, with hands that could hold the earth still, carrying enough love to spend the world's one hope on the people in front of her and call it a fair price. They'd been trying to name it for me since the first night, and I'd been too frightened to feel it.

* * *

The men were in the disaster with me, each of them doing the thing he was made for, and through the roar of the power I was aware of all of them at once.

Rivik had the evacuation. I heard him before the shaking even stopped, his voice cutting across the ruin in the wolf-tongue with the flat certainty of a man who'd done this before and lost people doing it and learned from every one of them. He drove the able-bodied at the collapsed shelters in teams, set a line passing the wounded back from the danger, put himself where the next fall was likeliest and dared it to take him instead of any of his people. He'd given up a pack half a year ago to follow me across a killing river, and I watched him become an alpha again in the worst hour the pride had ever known. He hadn't wanted the mantle back. These people needed one, though, and he had never once stopped being the thing they needed, so he picked it up without a word and wore it. He moved through the wreckage like he'd been born to it, and people who'd known him a season followed him like they'd known him a lifetime.

Daska worked the wounded. I found him in the edge of my awareness on his knees in the dust exactly where I'd left him, his big gentle hands moving from body to body faster than I'd have believed hands that careful could move, holding a torn artery closed with his thumb while he talked a panicking mother through pressing her own hand where his had been, setting asnapped leg straight with a single clean pull, working past the point where his own strength should have given out and then working past that too. He was a healer in a place with a hundred wounds and one pair of hands, and he spent himself on it as he spent himself on everything, without stint, without noise, the steady thing everyone reached for in the dark. He would break himself on this night and mend himself later and never once mention the cost.

And Tau held the pride together by being Tau. That was his gift, and it had never mattered more than it did now, the golden king moving through the smoke and the wreckage with his voice raised over the din and steady under it, catching people as they came apart, turning panic into purpose with the sheer force of his certainty. A pride in a disaster looks to its king to know whether to despair, and Tau gave them no despair to catch. He gave them a king who moved among the ruins as though he'd expected them, unhurried, sure, gathering the frightened and the lost and pointing them at work that would save them, and they steadied because he had not let them see him waver. The performance he'd worn his whole life, the mask I'd once thought was all there was to him, had become in this hour the exact thing his people needed to survive.

And here is the strangest part, the part I'd never have believed a day before. With the power running open through me, I could feel them, as I felt the fault in the rock and the terror in the air, three separate warmths in the wrecked dark, each one moving toward the same thing from a different direction. Daska's steady heat was bent low to the wounded. Off to the north, Rivik's fierce drive threw itself again and again against the falling dark, and under it all ran Tau's golden certainty, holding the frightened upright by the simple refusal to fall himself. I'd spent the whole summer believing I was the one being held together by them, the broken thing they'd all agreed to carry. Kneeling in the ruin withthe world pouring out of my chest, I understood for the first time that it ran both ways, that a family is a thing that holds each of its people up at once, and that I had been holding, all along, without ever letting myself know I had the strength to.

My three men, each in his place, each himself, holding the pride between them while I held the ground beneath it. We had built something here over a long warm summer, the four of us and all of them. Now, in the cold and the ruin, I felt it hold, and I understood that a home isn't a thing that can't be broken. It's a thing that holds together while it breaks, because of who's in it. Ours held through the worst the earth could do.

* * *

I don't know how long I knelt there pouring myself into the ground; time had come unstitched. It might have been the length of a scream or the length of an hour, and either way it ended the same way, with the last of the great gathered wave rolling off harmless into the empty distance and the deep earth going still beneath us at last, truly still, as it hadn't been since before the dawn.

The power guttered low in me. I felt it go, and I let it, because there was no holding back a thing I'd already spent, and there was so little of it left. Some part of me had known there would be. I'd known before I opened my hands what I was choosing, and I'd chosen it clear-eyed, and I didn't take a word of it back even as I felt the great reserve I'd carried across twenty-five thousand years run down to the bottom and stop.

Dev found me in the settling quiet.

He came stumbling through the wreckage grey-faced and wild-eyed, the small carrier, the only other soul alive who could feel what I'd just done and knew what it meant. He dropped to his knees in front of me and took my face in his hands and looked at me with a grief so total it stopped my breath. He didn't need the words we didn't share. He'd felt it go, as onlyanother carrier could, felt the great reserve pour out of me into the ground and not come back, felt the level drop and drop and never once stop dropping. He cupped his hands in front of me, the old gesture, the imagined water. Then he turned them over and let the last of the nothing run out between his fingers, and he shook his head, and his eyes filled.

It's gone,his hands said.You spent the thing we crossed the whole world for, and there's no getting it back, not ever.

"I know what I did," I said softly, though I hated saying it to him. "I know exactly what I spent, Dev, and I'd spend it again."

And I did know. I knew it with the terrible clarity that comes after, when the thing is done and can't be undone and the cost of it lands in full. The power had been meant for the rift, for the dying world, for the wound at the heart of everything that Dev and I had carried the only known cure to across the whole of time. There'd been a question all along of whether even the two of us together held enough to heal it. That question had an answer now, and the answer was no, because I'd poured the greater part of what I carried into an ice-age fault to save one settlement, one grey frightened woman, one small early life, when the cold arithmetic of the mission said those lives weighed nothing against the world.

I had done the exact thing Nathan named when he called me weak. I'd chosen the people in front of me over the sum on the page, and spent the world's one hope on a pride of shifters twenty-five thousand years dead and a baby that might not see the morning, when the cold arithmetic of the mission said those lives weighed nothing against the world. In doing it, I might have doomed every soul who would ever live.

The triumph drained out of me as the power had, and left the cold thing standing in its place.

* * *

The dust settled slowly over the ruined settlement, silver in the first grey light of the dawn that had finally come. All around me the pride was already doing the work of survivors, pulling the last of the trapped from the wreckage, tending the wounded, gathering the frightened children, counting themselves and finding, against every expectation of a night like this, that they were nearly all still there. Nearly all of them alive, because of what I'd done.

I should have felt only that, only the saving of them. Every argument I'd ever had with the voice, every time it had called me worthless, every ledger anyone had ever run on my life and found it wanting, I'd answered all of it in the space of one impossible hour, with the whole pride living to prove it. I had reached into the breaking world and held it, I had felt myself do it, and I was undeniably and completely alive for the first time in two years.

But feeling everything means feeling everything. That's the thing no one tells you about coming back to life after two years numb. The wall I'd taken down to pour out the power hadn't been a wall around the good feelings only. It had been a wall around all of them, and with it gone I felt the triumph and I felt, rising up hard behind it, the other thing, the thing that had been waiting two years for exactly this crack to come through.

Look what you've done,the voice said, and it had never been so quiet, or so certain, or so terribly kind.You've killed the world. Every soul who'll ever live and die of the drain, you've just spent their only hope on people who turned to dust before history began. Nathan was right about all of it, right about you, right that a heart like yours is a fault in the foundations of anything that matters. You couldn't do the sum, could you, not once in your whole soft life. And now the world will die because a broken woman couldn't bear to let one baby go.

I knelt in the settling dust with the dawn coming up grey over a settlement I'd saved, the power spent to nothing in my chest, every nerve in me screaming back to life after two years of silence, and the guilt came down on me like the second wave I'd held out of the ground, an enormous blind weight impossible to brace against, because this one wasn't in the rock. This one was in me, and there was no pouring anything out to hold it back.

I'd held the whole earth still; I couldn't hold this.

Somewhere close, Daska said my name. I heard the change in it, heard the healer hear something wrong, heard him leave a wound half-tended and start toward me through the dust. Every part of me wanted to answer him, wanted to tell him I was all right, that I'd saved them, that it had worked. I couldn't find the breath for any of it. The guilt had both hands round my chest now and was pressing the air out of me, the dawn had gone strange and swimming at the edges, and the ground I'd fought so hard to hold steady was tilting slowly up to meet me.

The last thing I felt, before it took me down into the dark, was that after two years of feeling nothing at all, I was feeling this, and that of all the things to come back to life for, this was the one I'd have given the power back to hold at bay.

Then the grey dawn folded over, and I went down into the churned earth I'd saved, and the dark came up and had me.

Chapter 32