Page 50 of Dark Mate

And the body doing the staying isn’t the body they kept. I feel it as I hold myself up into the burn, the strength in my own back, the muscle in my arms, the way the cold that would’ve folded the soft kept girl in half just makes me set my jaw and hold. Three weeks in the dark unmade the thing they spent thirteen years building and put something harder in its place. The Cage grew me soft so I’d always need their walls. I’m not soft anymore. I can sit in the cold and the brightness and the too-much of it, and shake, and stay. The wanting to crawl back down into the warm is real. The body that could’ve made me do it is gone.

Out past the gap in the wood, the world runs on forever—green, gold, loud, and not safe. Full of small things on their own errands. And somewhere out at the edge of it, men with torches who want me back inside a softer cage. I can’t see them. I know they’re there.

Let them come. I’ve been kept in the dark and kept in the light, and I am done being kept.

I’m going to walk out into all that brightness with my eyes open, and it’s going to hurt, and I’m going to choose it anyway. Every single day.

“Okay,” I say—to the light, to him, to myself. I wipe my streaming eyes and I hold them open. “Okay. Show me where I am.”

27

ELLIE

Ilast about ten minutes in the light before I have to come back in.

It isn’t the brightness. It’s theamount.Every leaf, every shifting shadow, every bright little thing crossing the gaps between the trunks comes at me at once, at full volume, and after three weeks of nothing but dark my head can’t hold it. My eyes stream. My legs shake under the weight of a world with no edges to it. So I climb back down into the hollow, where the air’s still warm and the walls curve close and his scent lives in the furs like something planted there, and I sit down hard and breathe.

I’m not giving it up. I want that on the record, even if I’m the only one keeping the record. I just can’t drink the whole ocean in one go.

He’s by the far wall, watching me. He’s been watching the whole time—through the gap, while I stood out there shaking and refusing to come down. Now I’m down, and he’s still at it, and in the filtered light of the hollow I finally get to look at him slow. Up close. With my eyes mostly working.

I learned him by touch in the dark. Every scar, every hard plane of him, the way he runs hot like something burning low. I thought I had him memorized.

I had no idea.

He’s enormous in here, folded into the hollow with his wings tucked tight and his horns nearly scraping the ceiling, all of him crammed into a space that was never built for something his size. Except it was. He built it. The near-black skin catches the light off the entrance in planes and hollows, the scars I traced with my fingers showing up now as pale silver lines laid all across his chest and arms. His tail lies curled beside him, the tip twitching in slow idle patterns. And his face, the heavy brow throwing shadow over the amber, the broken horn, the jaw built for a skull twice as wide as a man’s.

He’s the most devastating thing I have ever seen, and I don’t have a word the right size for it.Beautifulis too small, too human—a word the Cage used for tapestries and tea sets. What he is sits in a place language never built a room for: between terrifying and holy, between the thing that came through my wall and the thing that held the hum in my spine for three weeks while I slept. The thighs I couldn’t get both arms around. The chest broad enough to blot the light from the entrance. The hands that could close around my whole skull and instead learned, blind, in the dark, exactly how to hold me so I’d never once bruise.

I learned all of him by touch. Seeing him is like hearing a song I’ve had in my hands for weeks finally played out loud—and it’s louder than I was ready for.

“You’re staring,” I tell him. Which is rich, coming from me. I can’t stop.

“So are you.” Full sentences now. Each one set down with care, like he’s choosing it off a shelf he spent years rebuilding, and a huff underneath it, like the talking still half-annoys him,like he’d rather show me than tell me. In the dark I got single words.Good. Still. Words. Mate. Kept.Each one dragged up bleeding. Now they come whole, and I can hear the shape of who he used to be underneath them.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Deep canopy.” He tips his head toward the entrance, the green dropping away below us layer on layer into shadow. “Higher than the settlements build. Higher than the Ordained ever climb.” A pause, the careful reach for the next part. “The trees here are old. They grew into each other. The branches and trunks wove together until—” He laces his claws, slow, a demonstration. “—until where one tree ends and the next begins stopped being a question anyone could answer.”

I put my hand on the wall I’ve slept against for three weeks. It isn’t a wall. It’s the joined bodies of trees that quit being separate longer ago than anyone alive could say.

“You built this.” I feel the tool marks under the polish—the shaping, the hollow widened where a body needs the room.

“Over months.” He runs a claw down a groove I’d taken for natural grain. “This was solid heartwood. I dug it out.” His hand moves—the storage shelf, the fire pit, the fitted stones. “The stone holds heat. From the streambed. Keeps warmth longer than wood.”

He smooths the pelt beside him—thick, dark, the hair so dense my fingers vanish into it when I press. “The furs. Six months. Different animals, the warmest I could find.” He says it the way he says everything, one fact set down at a time, and somewhere in the middle of the list I understand what I’m actually hearing: six months of a creature’s life, every choice in it bent toward a woman who didn’t yet know he existed.

He talks the way he builds. No waste. Every sentence does one job—shows me one choice he made.

And the choices all say the same thing, when I stack them up. The widened hollow. The heat pooled where the furs are thickest. The stream run close enough to reach. Months of it.Somebody’s coming, and she’ll need this.

“For me,” I say. Flat. “You built it for me. Before you took me.”

“Yes.” No hesitation. No apology folded in. The word lands clean.

I wait for the anger. It’s there, always there somewhere now, the coal, but it isn’t what comes up first. What comes up first is the same ache I got when his tail tucked my hair behind my ear in the dark. He made a place for me. Not a cell. A home.

Which is the trouble, isn’t it. The Cage made a place for me too.