Page 2 of Roar of the Wild

"Move," I told him, rocking down onto his cock, greedy for the friction. "Please move."

He began to move, deep slow strokes with no hurry anywhere in them, the trunk solid at my back and his hands taking my weight, his cock dragging thick and perfect through me on every pass. I met him, my hips rolling to his rhythm, the heat building again already, faster this time. He kept his forehead against mine so I had nowhere to look but into him, and the intimacy of that was almost more than the rest of it, being seen, being fucked sure by someone who wasn't going anywhere. Through the bond I felt his pleasure feeding mine, a loop tightening between us until I couldn't tell whose want was whose, and when he groanedmy name and his rhythm finally broke he reached between us and pressed his thumb to my clit again, and that was all it took. I came around his cock a second time, clenching and shaking, and felt him spill hot inside me on a low broken sound with his face buried in my throat.

We stayed like that a while, breathing, his weight a warmth I'd have happily stood under until spring turned to summer. His heart slammed against my palm where I'd flattened my hand over his chest, and mine was going just as hard to answer it.

"Firewood," I said eventually, and felt him laugh, the whole of him.

* * *

We put ourselves back together in the companionable quiet that came after, him retying the laces I couldn't reach, me plucking a curl of bark out of his beard and refusing to acknowledge the smugness on his face while I did it. The cold reasserted itself the moment his heat left my skin. Spring in this world was a rumour the land hadn't fully agreed to yet.

I gathered the deadfall again, actual firewood this time, since we'd have to arrive back with something to show for ourselves, and he shouldered the bigger limb, and we started back toward the thread of smoke rising through the trees.

"You're happy," Daska said, and it wasn't a question. He could feel it, the same way I could feel the low contentment radiating off him. It still caught me off guard, being read like that. Being an open book to someone gentle, after a lifetime of hiding the pages from people who'd only ever wanted to see the balance sheet.

"I am." I turned the word over, testing it for the guilt that usually came stapled to any good feeling. It was there, faint, the way it always was, the sense that I had no business being happy while everything we'd crossed twenty-five thousand years to fix was still broken, while Dev fretted over reserves and the modernworld drained quietly toward its death and I walked through an ice-age morning warm from a man's hands. But it was quieter than it used to be. I let myself have the moment anyway. "I really am happy, and you're not to tell a soul, because I've a reputation for gloom to maintain."

His answering smile crinkled the corners of his eyes.

The camp resolved out of the trees ahead of us: the low hide shelter Daska had rigged the night before, the fire Dev had nursed back to a decent blaze, the hobbled bundles of our gear. Megan sat closest to the flames, drawn in on herself, her immaculate modern coat gone shapeless and stained with weeks of hard travel. She'd been quiet since we broke from Hanging Rock, quieter than the cold alone explained, and the grey cast to her face snagged my attention before other things crowded it out.

Nathan crouched over the scanner where he'd been all morning, turning the dead device in his hands with a chemist's precision that never seemed to bring it back to life. He looked up as we came in, took in the firewood, took in whatever he took in from my face, and decided to dislike it.

"There's a route south the corridor keeps offering," Daska said mildly, dropping his limb by the fire. He said it in the wolf-tongue and looked to me to carry it, since Nathan had made no more effort with the language than a man makes with a task he considers beneath him. "Broken ground, but it keeps us wide of the water. Rivik went to scout it at first light. He'll want to talk about it when he's back."

I put it into English for him, and Nathan heard me out, then shook his head before I'd finished.

"We're not adding three days to skirt a river," he said. "The scanner's dead, we're behind, and every day in this cold is a day Dev's leg doesn't heal and the reserves don't get where they need to be." He set the device down with the care of a manwho'd like to have thrown it. "Rivik identified a crossing east of here two days ago. We use it, recover the lost time and keep the mission on schedule. I'm not interested in detours dressed up as caution."

"The crossing he flagged aspossible," I said. "He never once called itgood, and the difference between those two words is about a metre of meltwater."

"Then we cross carefully." He held my eyes. Two years ago that flat, certain look had made me feel small, made me fold myself down into whatever shape gave him the least to object to. It didn't do that anymore. Something had changed in me over the winter, some spine grown back where he'd worn it away, and I met the look and didn't drop mine. "Leadership means making the necessary decision before everyone else has finished discussing their feelings about it, Eleanor. You might understand that one day, if you ever stop playing house."

Playing house.I felt Daska go still beside me, felt the bond flush hot with an anger that wasn't mine, and I put a hand on his arm before it could become anything. This wasn't the fight worth having, not here and not yet.

"Rivik knows this country and you don't," I said evenly. "I'd wait for him before I decided anything."

But Nathan had already turned back to the scanner, the conversation closed in his mind as everything closed once he'd decided it, and I knew what was coming. We'd take his crossing and cut straight across, because the one man among us who could actually read the water wasn't back yet to say no, and Nathan had never in his life waited for permission he thought he could take.

I crouched by the fire and started feeding it the smaller branches, coaxing it wide enough to warm Megan properly, and tried to shake the cold that had nothing to do with the morning. Off to the east, faint under the wind and the birdsong, the riverwent on grinding its ice downstream toward the place Nathan meant to make us cross.

Something low in my chest stirred at the sound of it, and it wasn't the bond. It was something else entirely, a restlessness I had no name for, the borrowed power I carried and never touched shifting like a sleeper turning over, reaching, as if the running water had called to it and it wanted to answer. I pressed my hand flat against my sternum until it settled.

That's new,I thought, and didn't like it.

I fed the fire another branch and said nothing, and waited for Rivik to come back and tell us all the thing I already knew.

Chapter 2

RIVIK

The tracks were three days old and belonged to a bull bison gone lame in the off-hind, which meant meat if we moved before the cold hardened his trail past reading. I crouched over the print, pressed two fingers into the churned earth at its edge, and felt the give of it. It was soft ground, the kind that took a beast's weight and told you afterward exactly how it had carried it, and the kind that a swollen river left for a hundred paces up its banks, waiting to swallow a careless boot to the knee.

I didn't like this country. I'd said as much to Daska at first light and got his slow nod in return, which was the closest thing to agreement a bear ever gave you before he'd finished thinking. The land here ran downhill toward water in every direction, all of it rushing with the winter's melt, and a man who'd led a pack for eleven years learned to distrust ground that wanted to funnel him somewhere.

I'd walked out to Nathan's crossing the day before and come back at dusk with the truth of it, swollen with the melt, ice stillriding down out of the high country. I'd laid that truth at the fire and watched him weigh it against his schedule and choose the schedule. So today was for meat, because whatever tomorrow's water did to us, we'd meet it better fed.

Ellie moved up beside me, quiet on her feet in a way she hadn't been in the autumn. She'd learned that from us over the winter, how to set a heel, how to let the earth take her weight without announcing it, and watching her do it now, unthinking, sent something unbearable through the coal I carried under my ribs.