“Huh,” he says, soft.
“Say it.”
“Nothing to say.” He shifts the pack. “She’ll mend. Wolves are hard to kill, and witches are harder, and she’s built out of both.” A beat. “See she eats when she wakes. Past the point she argues.”
“The healer has a schedule.”
“Feed her past the schedule.” He says it and moves on before I can look at it too long. “What you did back there. That was the end of the open bond I told you about, or near enough to know what it feels like. A bear doesn’t take orders through that. You held longer than most would.”
“I didn’t hold.”
“No. You didn’t.” No blame in it. “So. When?”
“The day she’s strong enough.” My voice comes out lower than I planned. “She knows all of it now. There’s nothing left standing between her and a real yes. Soon as she can take the bear’s mark, I’m asking, and if she says yes, it’s done.”
Torbjorn looks at me for a moment. “First time you’ve answered me without handing me an argument first,” he says. “Took a building full of dead men to get there, but bears learn slow.”
His hand lands on my shoulder on the way past, heavy, and stays a second longer than it needs to. Then he’s in the doorway again, and he stops, and looks back—not at me. At her.
His nostrils move again. Whatever he found the first time, he’s found it twice now.
“Huh,” he says, mostly to himself, and then he’s gone down the hallway, the sound of him fading faster than a man his size should manage.
The room settles. The bag drips. Somewhere below, a truck starts and fades toward the gate.
For the first time since it swung east, the pull is quiet. Not gone—laid flat, facing a woman I can reach without standing up. The animal’s eyes are still open, but he’s stopped wearing me from the inside. She’s breathing eleven times a minute in a building I can hold, and everything he dragged me across a river to reach is in this room.
The mark sits where it’s always sat, waiting. It’s done waiting. When her eyes open, when she’s strong enough to hear the question and mean the answer, I’m done holding it back.
Her chest rises and falls. I match it without meaning to.
And underneath the counting, in the part of me that never learned words, the animal holds on to the one he used at her door, and won’t trade it back.
They.
Chapter 45
Grace
I wake up warm. Warm all the way through, for the first time since the draws. The cold is gone. The blanket over me is heavy, and it smells like him, and I know where I am before I open my eyes.
His quarters. His bed.
The pull under my ribs is quiet. Not gone. Close.
I open my eyes, and he’s there—chair dragged to the side of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped between them, watching me. He looks terrible. And beautiful. There are shadows under his cheekbones, and his jaw is dark with more beard than I’ve ever seen on him.
“Hey, bear,” I say. My voice comes out as a croak.
He’s up before I finish the word. There’s a glass of water already poured on the nightstand, and by the ring of others beside it, it isn’t the first. His hand comes behind my shoulders and helps me sit up against the pillows.
I drink the whole glass. He fills it again without my asking, and I drink half of that.
“How long?” I ask.
“A while.” He sits on the edge of the bed this time, not the chair. “Long enough that the healer stopped scowling at me yesterday.”
“That’s not a number.”
