Page 60 of Roar of the Wild

* * *

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 knewit 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, andthe 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 handand 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.

I hadn't planned to. It came up out of me in the middle of the channel, low, pitched for her ear alone as I'd first sung it to her on a hunt in the spring, the hunting-song, the old one, older than my grandsire, the one wolves sing walking into country they don't know to tell it they come as guests and not as thieves. I'd sung it to her when they took her, thrown it across the water after her so she'd know we were coming. She'd hummed it at her own fire before she knew I'd hear. Now I sang it against her hair in the middle of a river that wanted her, and I felt her breath change against my throat, the faintest catch, the smallest lift, some drowned part of her rising toward the sound as a hand rises toward a hand in the dark.

She didn't wake for it, but she heard it, all the same. I would stake the whole of what I am on the fact that somewhere down under the grey she heard the song and knew it and knew who was singing it, and knew that this time the water was not goingto have her, because this time no one was carrying her away from us across a river. We were carrying her home across one, by four men who would have drowned to the last of them before they let the current take so much as her shadow.

I brought her up the far bank with the song still in my throat and the snow falling on both of us, and I did not let go of her until Daska was there with his hands out to take her. Even then I let go slowly, because a part of me had been waiting half a year to carry her back across that water, and I was in no hurry at all to set the finishing of it down.

* * *

We made camp early that night, on the far side, because the crossing had taken everything we had and because a wolf knows when a party has reached the end of a day whatever the light says. We got a fire going in the lee of a fallen bank, out of the wind, and we settled her close to it wrapped in the warmest of the hides, and for a little while the seven of us were simply still in a way we hadn't been since the ground first shook.

Then Tau began to cook.

I watched it happen without understanding at first what I was watching. The king took the day's small kill, a hare Dev had snared, not much for seven mouths, and he set himself down by the fire with it and Ellie's own scavenged cooking-stone, the flat one she'd carried east wrapped in hide because she wouldn't leave it behind, and he began, clumsily, with the great hands that had never in his gilded life needed to feed anyone, to make the food she'd spent all summer preparing for everyone else.

He did it badly. He'd watched her enough to know the shape of it, the fat rendered first, the meat laid on the hot stone with attention rather than flung on to char, the wild garlic he'd pulled on the day's march crushed in at the end as he'd seen her do it. He got half of it wrong; the stone was too hot and then not hot enough. He swore softly in the lion-tongue at a piece that stuck,and Daska leaned in to murmur some correction a healer had no business knowing and a king had no business needing, but he did it. He knelt at her fire in the snow and cooked for her, with a devotion that had no elegance in it anywhere and needed none. When a little of the broth was ready he lifted her against his chest and got it into her a slow spoonful at a time, patient past anything the golden king had ever been asked to be.

I understood, watching, what I was seeing, and it went into me deep.

All summer she had fed us. Every one of us at this fire had been kept alive and cared for by her hands, Megan through her fear, the pride through its hunger, a whole council built out of stew and stubbornness, each of us mended in some place we hadn't known was broken by the plain fact of being fed by someone who thought us worth the feeding. She'd poured herself out into all of us without ever once letting us pour anything back, because being of use was the only way the woman knew to believe she was worth keeping. And now, with her too far gone to lift a hand, the pouring had finally reversed. Now it was Tau clumsy over her cooking-stone, Daska teaching him the fire, Dev saving her the choicest scrap of the poor hare, and me holding her upright against the cold so the king could feed her, all of us sending back toward her, in the only language she'd ever fully trusted, the thing she'd spent her whole life sending out and never once letting herself receive.

She'd taught us this. She'd taught us that feeding a person is how you tell them they're worth keeping alive, and here we were, the four of us and the small carrier and even the cold man at the edge of the firelight, telling her the only way we knew how. I hoped she could feel it, wherever she was. I hoped the broth reached down to the place the song had reached and told her the same thing the song had told her, that she was not alone, and would not be, and that a great many people who loved her werepouring everything they had into the simple work of keeping her in the world.