“No.” He turns the strip over. “What a man’s willing to give up is his own business. I don’t weigh another man’s sacrifices for him.” He sets the hide down, and the humor goes out of him, and what’s left is old and flat. “The open bond’s another matter. I’ve watched what it does to a male who sits on it. Fix it. Fast.”
“It’s in hand.” I think of the corridor running south and the threads Vanya is following. That’s the clock I’m running against. Get the sister out, clear the ground under Grace’s feet, and then there’s nothing left she doesn’t know and nothing left to hold the bite off. “I’m working the thing that’s in the way. When it’s done, the rest follows.”
He’s quiet a beat too long.
“You’re hearing me wrong,” he says. “I’m not talking about whatever you’ve got your hands on down there. I’m talking about him.” He tips his chin at my chest, at the animal behind it. “The bond wants finishing. It’s half-made, and half-made things pull. The longer you keep him off her neck, the harder he rides you—you’ve felt it already, you just didn’t know what it was. It doesn’t level off. It climbs. A bear can carry an open bond for a while.” A pause. “Not forever. And you don’t want to feel what it’s like at the end of it.”
“What happens at the end of it?”
“Nothing you want,” he says, and that’s all he gives me. He looks at me a moment longer than the words need. His eyes go over me the way they went over the two of us in the yard, top to bottom, nostrils moving once. Something crosses his face, and he draws a breath like a man starting a sentence.
Then he lets it out and picks a shorter one.
“Soon,” he says. “I mean it. Don’t make them wait.”
Them.The bear. The wolf. They knew before we did.
There was more in that pause. I feel it. But my head’s full past the brim already: bonded, for life, half-made, her. I’ll deal with Torbjorn and his cryptic pauses later. After the sister’s out. Afterthe ground’s clear. The bear can wait the few days it takes to make her free, and then I’ll give him what he wants.
Whatwewant.
Torbjorn stands and pulls the last buckle tight on his pack.
“I’ve got clan waiting and weather coming in,” he says, which is the closest he’ll come to goodbye. His hand lands on my shoulder, heavy. “You did all right, for a first-timer. Now get off my log and go find her. You’re no use to anybody twitching.”
He walks off along the tree line and doesn’t look back.
I sit for one more minute. Then I go find her.
Chapter 35
Decker
It’s dark when Marek sees me coming and pushes off the wall. I watch him work out which conversation this is going to be.
“Decker.”
“She’s with me until morning.”
“She’s not supposed to—”
“I know what she’s not supposed to.” I keep walking. “You can log it, or you can not log it. Either way she’s with me.”
He looks at me a long moment. He’s a solid man, and solid men know which orders are about safety and which are about paper.
“Shift change is at six,” he says, and turns back to his stretch of wall, and that’s Marek done with it.
Her door opens before I knock.
She’s standing there in the low light with her hair loose, and I can see the day has weighed on her. She looks at my face and reads whatever’s on it, because she always does.
“Something happened,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Good or bad?”
“Get your boots.”
