Page 33 of Roar of the Wild

“A hunting party leaves east the day after tomorrow,” Nathan said. “They know a lower route towards the mountains. We go with them.”

“No,” Daska said.

Nathan looked at him. “That wasn’t a request.”

“And mine wasn’t an invitation to argue.” Daska crouched beside Dev and pressed careful fingers around the thickened joint. Dev’s face tightened despite his attempt to hide it. “This leg will not hold their pace. Not for several days.”

“The hunters said they’ll slow.”

“They said there is little water and no reliable shelter for the middle part of the route,” Rivik said. “They won’t slow enough.”

Daska rose and looked towards Megan. He had examined her that morning, privately, with me standing guard outside the shelter.

“She cannot make it either. She’s still weakened from the captivity, her blood is poor and the cold takes too much out of her. We don’t have enough winter hides for the whole party.”

Nathan barely glanced at her before solving the problem.

“Then Megan stays here.”

The silence that followed was very small and very complete.

“She isn’t essential to the mission,” he continued. “Tau’s people can care for her until we return. Ellie and Dev are the carriers. They’re the ones we need.”

Megan’s face didn’t move. Only her hand did, closing slowly over the fold of hide concealing Nathan’s child.

“No,” I said.

Nathan turned to me. “Eleanor—”

“We do not leave her behind.”

“She’ll be safer here than on the road.”

“Then we wait until she can travel safely with us.”

His expression cooled into the familiar arithmetic, one life weighed against all the lives he couldn’t see.

“The route may not remain open.”

“Then we find another route. Megan came through the stones with us, she survived that river with us, and she stays with us. You don’t get to decide she matters less because you’ve finished finding her useful.”

Across the fire, Megan looked at me.

Months ago, I’d have called the thing in her face shock. I knew her better now.

It was the first fragile shape of being chosen.

Rivik came to my fire after the others had gone to their furs, when the settlement had quieted to the small night-sounds of a place at rest, and I knew the moment I saw his face that something had come loose in him at last.

He'd changed the binding at his ribs; the healer in me registered it before anything else, the clean strips of hide where I'd left the field dressing that afternoon, Daska's careful work over mine; he moved stiffly still. But it wasn't the wound that made him stand at the edge of my firelight like a man at the edge of a cliff, turning something over in his hands that he couldn't quite bring himself to set down. I'd fled from him on the steppe that afternoon, fled from the thing I'd felt with his heartbeat under my palm, and I'd spent the hours since bracing for him to be cold with me, or careful, or worst of all kind about it. This was none of those; this was a man who'd come to say a thing that frightened him more than the bison had.

"Sit," I said, because he looked as though his legs might not hold him much longer, and because the not-knowing was worse than whatever was coming. "You're making me nervous, looming there. Sit down and tell me before you fall down."

He sat, folding himself down across the fire from me as he had a hundred nights on the road, and then he only looked at me, his amber eyes catching the firelight, his jaw working around words that wouldn't come. I'd known Rivik for the better part of a year and I'd never once seen him lost for what to do. He was a man who led, always. That was the whole shape of him, the alpha who always knew the next move, who'd got us across a killing river and through six weeks of hell and never let the fear show. To see him unmoored frightened me more than anger would have.

"Whatever it is," I said, gentler now, "just say it. You've earned the right to say anything to me, after today. You put yourself between me and a bull the size of a boulder. Say it."

"That's the trouble." His voice came out rough, scraped down to something raw. "I'd put myself between you and anything, a bull, a river, the whole world, if it came for you. And I've been telling myself for six months that I could do that, be that, and keep the rest of it locked down where it couldn't touch you. That was a lie. I can't do it anymore, Ellie. I can't stand at the edge of your fire and pretend the reason I'm there is duty."