Page 8 of Roar of the Wild

On the third evening they made camp early in the lee of a long ridge, and one of the wolf-men gutted a brace of hares and a fat marmot and set them by the fire. Then simply left them there, no one among Karik's brutes had the least interest in cooking when they could bolt meat half-raw or shift and eat it off the bone. I watched the good meat sit there going tough in the cold and the part of me that had lain dormant for four days snapped alert. Waste offends me on a level that predates the mission, predates Nathan, predates everything. My father used to say I'd have made a fortune if I'd cared about money half as much as I cared about a properly rendered fat. He meant it as a criticism. He was right about the fact and wrong about everything else, as usual.

So I held up my bound hands to the young wolf-man who'd loosened my cord, nodded at the meat and the fire, and mimed the work,let me, I can make this better, and watched him weigh it. Cargo doesn't ask for things; cargo that asks for things is a complication, and complications get a cuff round the head. But he was young, and bored. I think some part of him was as sick of raw marmot as I'd have been, and after a moment he grunted, cut my wrists free, and jerked his chin at the fire:try anything and I'll break your arm.Fair enough.

I made them something worth eating.

Not much, I had a fire, a flat stone, a flint blade one of them lent me with enormous suspicion, and whatever I could scavenge from what they'd gathered and thrown aside. But cooking is mostly attention, and attention was the one thing Ihad in unlimited supply. I jointed the hares properly instead of hacking them, seared the pieces on the hot stone to hold the juices, rendered the marmot fat down slow and used it to keep the lean meat from going to leather. There were wild onions coming up green along the ridge that the wolves had trampled without seeing, and a handful of last year's hazelnuts a squirrel had been fool enough to store where I could find them, and the bitter early shoots that Sira had taught me over the winter were safe to eat if you knew them. I cooked as I'd cooked in a Michelin kitchen and as I'd cooked over a fire at Hanging Rock, the same craft, only the stakes had changed, which is a thing about craft that the people who've never had any never understand.

The smell of it did what smells do. One by one the wolf-men drifted over, pretending they weren't, and I served them off the stone with the flat competence of a woman who has fed hostile rooms before, and by the end of it I had four of Karik's raiders eating out of my hands in the most literal sense, and something had shifted in the arithmetic of my captivity. I was still cargo, but I was cargo that could do a thing they wanted, and that is a different and more survivable category of nothing.

The young one who'd freed my wrists ate three helpings and then hovered, working up to something, and finally pointed at the seared hare and said a word in the wolf-tongue I didn't have, a lion-tongue word, I realised later, though I didn't know yet that there was such a thing as a lion tongue. I shook my head to show I didn't understand. He tried again, slower, jabbing his finger at the meat and then at his own chest and then making a broad helpless gesture at the whole of it, and what he wanted, when I finally caught it, was to know how. How I'd turned the same marmot they'd been choking down raw for a week into a thing worth a second helping. There was no shared word forrenderorsearordon't boil the flavour out of it, you savages,so I showed him, mimed the low fire, the patient fat, the difference betweenmeat cooked with attention and meat merely heated until it stopped being alive. He watched with the total concentration of a boy being told a secret, and nodded, and repeated my gestures back badly, and I found myself correcting the grip of his imaginary knife before I remembered he was one of the men who'd hauled me off a riverbank like a carcass. It's a strange thing about feeding people. It gets past your guard, and theirs, in a language older than the ones we didn't share.

I made sure Megan ate first, and ate well, before any of them. None of them stopped me; I don't think it occurred to them to wonder why.

* * *

Because I'd been watching Megan closely since before the river, and what I saw was frightening me more with every day that passed.

The march was stripping her down to something underneath the person I'd spent two years resenting. Nathan's PA, the immaculate one, the woman who'd stood at his shoulder in a midnight-blue coat and never once let a hair fall out of place while my whole life came apart at the Savoy, that woman was gone. What was left was grey and sick in a way I recognised from other women in other kitchens, a sickness that had nothing to do with cold or captivity and everything to do with arithmetic.

She was sick at dawn; every dawn now, quietly, turned away into the dead ground, bringing up what little she'd managed to keep down. She couldn't bear the smell of the rendering fat that everyone else fell on, went green and had to move upwind of my fire, which the wolf-men found baffling and I found damning. Her exhaustion outran even this brutal road; she slept the instant we stopped and woke no more rested. Then there was the tell no amount of composure could train out of a body: the hand that kept drifting low across her belly when she thoughtherself unwatched, cradling, protecting, an old gesture older than language.

I did the maths I'd been refusing to do since Hanging Rock. Counted back to the last time we'd stayed anywhere long enough, to the weeks before we broke camp, to how she'd been even then. The number I landed on was small and terrible; five weeks, maybe six; early enough to hide. Early enough that she might not have told a living soul, not Nathan, not anyone, early enough that she might still be sitting on it alone, carrying the one spark of new life any of us had seen in a dying world, on the back of a slaver's wolf, on a forced march to a place none of us had a name for.

The cold that went through me then had nothing to do with the weather.

She's pregnant,I let myself think, all the way, for the first time.It's Nathan's, and she's out here being hauled like a sack of meal, and if this march doesn't kill the pregnancy outright then the hunger and the cold and whatever waits at the end of it might, and she is going through all of it alone because the father is fifty miles behind us across a river and she probably hasn't even told him.

Two years I'd wanted this woman to suffer. I'm not proud of it, but I won't pretend otherwise, I'd lain awake in the numb grey months after the rejection and wished Megan Hartley a fraction of what I was feeling, wished the perfect PA a single crack in her perfect life. And now I had my wish, all of it and more. It turned to ash in my mouth exactly as my father always promised revenge would and never had the decency to be right about anything else. Because whatever she'd done, whatever she'd known and not stopped, she hadn't earned this, and nobody on earth earned a thing like this. And the spark she carried had done nothing at all except begin, in the worst possible place,at the worst possible time, against odds the whole mission had crossed twenty-five thousand years to try to change.

I looked at her across the fire, grey and swaying and pretending she wasn't, and the last of my two years of resentment went quietly out like a coal nobody had fed.

I didn't say anything. It wasn't the moment, and it wasn't my secret to open, and if I was wrong, I wasn't wrong, but if, then saying it aloud where Karik's wolves might catch even the shape of the word could put a price on her they hadn't thought to charge yet. A breeding female in a world starved of them. I made myself not think about what that would be worth to a man who trafficked in women. Instead I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing I'd always done, the only language of care I'd ever been fluent in.

So I fed her. I gave her the tenderest of the meat and the marrow cracked warm from the bones, along with the shoots that settle a sour stomach, and I did it without a word or a look that would tell the wolves it mattered, tucking the care inside the ordinary act of a captive cook doing her captive job; she ate all of it. She met my eyes over the last mouthful, and something passed between us that didn't need translating, and her own eyes filled and she blinked it fiercely away, because tears out here were a currency neither of us could spend.

And under my ribs, while I watched her eat and felt the tension in my chest ease that had been clenched for days, the borrowed weight I carried shifted again, but gently this time, almost warm, nothing like the wrenching heave it had given at Karik's hands. It settled when I was doing this. I'd started to notice the pattern without at all understanding it: the thing curdled and ached when I was shamed or made small, and it quieted when I was of use, when I made warmth out of nothing and pushed it toward someone who needed it. As if whatever lived in me kept its owncount of my worth, and marked the days I earned my place against the days I was only ever cargo.

That can't be right,I thought, pressing a hand flat to my sternum where the ache had been.Power doesn't care whether you feel useful. That's the sort of thing mad people think.

But I filed it away with everything else, next to the loosened cord and the count of days and the shape of Megan's secret, because a woman with nothing hoards information the way a starving one hoards seeds, and I had a growing sense that everything I noticed out here I was going to need.

We reached the top of a long rise on the fifth evening, the wolves slowing, something changing in the set of them that I'd learned to read asnearly home.And I looked down into the shallow bowl of land below us and forgot, for a moment, to be afraid, because it was vast, and it was warm with the smoke of a hundred fires. It was alive in a way nothing had been since the river, a great sprawling settlement of hide and bone and banked flame stretching further than the eye could easily hold.

Then the wind carried up the sound of it: voices, laughter, the ordinary music of a great many people living close together. And not one word of it, not a single syllable rising up out of that warm and enormous place, was in any language I understood.

Chapter 6

ELLIE

They didn't take us down into the settlement that night.

Whatever Karik meant to do with us, it wanted daylight and an audience, and so the wolves made a last cold camp on the shoulder of the rise with the great warm sprawl of fires glittering in the bowl below us, close enough that the wind brought up the smell of roasting meat and woodsmoke and something sweeter underneath it that I couldn't name. They fed us, better than usual, which frightened me, because you feed goods up before you show them at market, and then they left us largely alone, four of them dicing over a flat stone by the fire while the scarred one sat apart and watched the settlement below as a man watches an investment.

Megan and I huddled together at the edge of the firelight, and for the first time since the river we had something like privacy, two women speaking a language none of our captors bothered to learn.

I kept my eyes on the fires below and tried not to let my mind do the thing it wanted to do, which was to run ahead into the morning and take the market apart detail by detail. I'd been sold before, in a manner of speaking. My father had done it with lawyers and good champagne, a room full of people congratulating me on my luck, and I'd smiled and worn the bracelet, telling myself it was love; there'd be no champagne tomorrow. But the essential transaction was one I understood in my bones, the oldest one there was, a woman changing hands, her worth set by men across her head in a language she didn't get a vote in, and knowing the shape of it didn't make it easier. It made it worse, because I could see exactly how it would go.

I thought about Daska, then, letting myself do it only in the worst moments, like a sweet I was rationing. Somewhere behind us, across a river and five days of hard country, he was coming. I believed that as I believed the sun would come up, I had no proof of it, only the certainty that the alternative was unliveable. He'd promised me a home once, on a cold morning that felt like another century,you are my home now, wherever you go, that's where I belong, and I clung to that even out here, even reduced to goods, even with the auction block waiting in the morning light. And underneath the thought of Daska, quieter and more confusing, was the thought of Rivik, of a half-drowned voice singing across a killing river to tell me they'd follow. I didn't have a name for what Rivik was to me. I only knew that both of those men were somewhere out in the dark with my direction in their chests, and that whatever got sold in the morning, it would not stay sold, because they were coming, and I had to be worth arriving to.