Page 7 of Roar of the Wild

Dev told him, and added something of his own that landed on Nathan like a slap he couldn't acknowledge, and I decided I liked Dev.

* * *

We crossed back to the gear at the shallowest reach, roped and careful, and the crossing that had cost us everything an hour ago let us over now without a fight, which felt like an obscenity. The scanner was where the rope had left it, sodden but whole. Nathan seized on it like a drowning man on a spar, and I left him to it and went to read the ground, because reading ground was a thing I could do.

Every instinct that loved Ellie said we ran until we dropped and then crawled, though I knew pushing ourselves now would simply slow us down later. For the first time in my life the two halves of me pulled against each other so hard I could feel the seam, and I hated that the loving half won without a contest, because a good healer doesn't spend bodies to buy time and I was about to spend these ones without a second thought. I told myself I'd mend them properly when we had her back. I told myself a great many things that afternoon, walking fast along the river that had taken her, and believed about half of them.

The trail was easy for the first stretch and I hated how easy it was. Karik, the big scarred one; I'd not known his name until Dev said it, low, like a curse he'd learned over a winter of Hanging Rock fires, where Broken Ridge raids were half the cold season's grim talk, had made no effort to hide his line, and why would he have bothered? He had the women, he had a start on us, and he had no reason to think the ragged remains of a mixedparty would come after a Broken Ridge raiding band and live. The churned earth of a dozen heavy wolves ran plain along the near bank, heading downstream and east, and I followed it at a pace that made my healer's heart wince for Dev's mending.

Rivik ranged ahead, half in and half out of his skin, reading signs in ways my nose could match but my eyes couldn't. The bond was carrying me a truer bearing than any track, her direction tugged beneath my breastbone like a lodestone, swinging as she moved, but I said nothing of it to Nathan, who'd only want to know its range and reliability and whether it could be used to work his scanner. Some things a man keeps; the thread between me and Ellie was mine, and hers, and I'd not have it measured.

We'd gone perhaps two hours, the light beginning to fail, when the worry I'd been carrying since long before the river finally surfaced and named itself, and the name it wore was Megan.

I'd been watching her for weeks without letting myself finish the thought, circling it as a man circles a wound he's afraid to unwrap. The pallor at dawn; her turning off the strong-smelling dried meat and going faintly green at the fish. The new heaviness in how she moved, the tiredness that outran the march, the hand that drifted to her belly when she thought no one was near enough to read her. On their own, each was nothing. Cold did all of that to a soft modern body unused to hard travel, and so did grief, and so did fear. But a healer doesn't read symptoms one at a time; he reads the whole body at once, as you read weather off a dozen small signs, and the whole of Megan had been telling me a story for a fortnight that I'd kept setting down because it wasn't mine to pick up.

Now she was slung over a Broken Ridge wolf's back on a forced march east, and I couldn't set it down any longer.

If I'm right,I thought, and made myself think it plainly, as I'd make myself look at a wound that frightened me,then it isn't justEllie in danger out there. It's Ellie, and Megan, and the fragile life Megan carried, unable to withstand a hard road or a hard hand.I didn't know it for certain. I'd never laid a hand on the woman to confirm it, and she'd sooner die than let me, given who she was to Nathan and who Nathan was to Ellie. But I'd have staked my life I wasn't wrong, and the thought put a new kind of speed in my legs, an urgency the mission never could.

I said nothing of it to anyone; there was no one to say it to. Nathan would want it as leverage or dismiss it as women's business; Dev I might have trusted, but the words weren't there between us for a thing this delicate; and Rivik had grief enough to carry without me handing him a second life to fear for. So I carried it alone, as I'd carried it for a fortnight already, and I let it make me faster, and I promised the thread in my chest, the one still pulling east, still faintly warm, that I was coming. That we all were; that being taken was not the same as being lost, whatever the river thought.

The trail held east and downstream through the failing light, plain as a road, until it reached a wide slow bend where the bank flattened to a shelf of mud and shingle at the water's edge.

And there it stopped.

Rivik reached the spot first and went still in that whole-body way of his, nose working, and I came up behind him and read the ground he was reading. What I read there emptied me where I stood. The wolf-sign crowded down to the water and simply ended. No line continued along the bank; no trail climbed away inland. The heavy prints milled and churned at the mud's edge and then there was nothing, only the river sliding past, brown and patient and telling us nothing at all.

"Boats," Rivik said, his voice flat with the effort of not despairing. He crouched, touched a long straight scuff in the mud where something heavy and keeled had been dragged down into the current. "He's put them on hide boats, on the water."He looked up at me, and for the first time since the river his mask cracked all the way through, because he knew what I knew. "Water holds no scent, Daska. They could leave it anywhere for forty miles. The trail's gone."

Behind us Nathan was already asking, through Dev, what the delay was; I didn't turn round. I stood on the ruined shelf of mud with the light going out of the sky and the bond pulling faint but steady in my chest toward a woman somewhere out on that dark moving water, and for the first time I let myself be afraid we might not reach her in time.

Then I pressed my hand to the thread, and felt it pull, and made myself a promise instead.

I have your bearing,I told her, though she'd never hear it.The river can hide your tracks. It can't hide you from me. Hold on, and keep telling me to come, and I will follow this thread to the end of the world if that's how far he takes you.

Chapter 5

ELLIE

By the fourth day I had learned the exact weight of being nothing.

It settles into you, that knowledge, if you let it. The wolves who carried us east didn't hate me, which was somehow worse than if they had, hatred at least grants you the dignity of being a person worth the trouble. They simply moved me as they'd have moved a bale of hides, lifting me onto a back at dawn and dropping me off it at dusk, feeding me enough to keep the goods from spoiling and no more. On the water it was a hide boat, low and evil-smelling, two wolf-men paddling while a third watched us with the incurious patience of a man minding cargo he'd already been paid to deliver. Off the water it was the march, jolting and endless, the country sliding past in a grey blur of steppe, half-frozen marsh, and the huge indifferent sky.

I kept a count of the days scratched into the inside of my own head, because a count was a thing they couldn't take from me, and because if Daska ever did follow the thread to whereverthis ended, I wanted to be able to tell him how long.If.I hated that word and used it anyway. Four days of pushing the same message down the bond into a silence I couldn't read,I'm alive, I'm alive, find me, with no way of knowing whether it reached him or fell into the dark between us like a stone down a well. Being bond-deaf had shamed me my whole life, no bond reaching for me had ever made a sound I could hear. Out here even the answered thread had frayed with the miles, gone quiet by the second day, and having the one rope that might save me pull thinner with every hour was a special cruelty all its own.

He felt it at the river,I told myself, on the mornings the doubt got its teeth in.He's a healer to the bone, a man who reads what he can't see for a living. He felt you, and he's coming, and your job is to still be worth finding when he gets here.

They'd bound my wrists even though I was no threat, and everyone involved knew it, and the cord had rubbed the skin raw before one of the younger shifters loosened it a turn when he thought the scarred one wasn't watching; I filed that away. A small mercy from a captor is still information: it tells you where the cracks are, which of them still has enough conscience to flinch at a woman's raw wrists. I'd spent a lifetime reading rooms full of men who saw me as an asset, learning which ones could be moved and how. This was the same skill in colder weather, and that thought should have depressed me more than it did.

The cold was the enemy that never slept. The furs they'd taken us in were never quite enough at night, and Megan and I ended up pressed back to back in whatever fold of ground they dumped us, sharing what heat we had because pride was a luxury neither of us could afford anymore. She'd stopped flinching from me somewhere around the second night. That was its own small landslide, two years of frost between us giving way under the simple animal need to not freeze, and I lay awake in the darkwith her spine warm against mine and thought about how strange it was that it took being reduced to cargo to make us finally touch.

The river days were the worst of it, and not for the reasons I'd have guessed. The boat itself was miserable enough, a low thing of stretched hide over a bent-wood frame, riding so close to the surface that meltwater slopped over the gunwale and pooled cold around us, and the wolf-men paddled in a grim silence that gave me nothing to read. But it was the water that undid me. All that moving water, hour after hour, hissing under the hull and glittering grey to both horizons, and every mile of it carried me further from the only people in twenty-five thousand years who'd ever looked at me and seen a person. I'd sit with my knees drawn up and my bound hands in my lap and push the same message down the bond until my chest ached from the effort of it, hurling it into a silence I had no way to measure.I'm alive, I'm alive, find me.Nothing came back anymore. At the river his anguish had come down the thread with the force of a blow, near and terrible; the miles since had worn it to a silence I couldn't read, and the not-knowing was a particular torture I'd not wish on anyone. For all I knew I was screaming down a thread that had snapped at the river, comforting myself with a rope tied to nothing. I chose to believe it held. Belief was another thing they couldn't take, if I gripped it hard enough, and I'd got very good over the years at gripping things nobody could see.

Once, on the second river day, something huge and pale broke the surface a hundred metres off, a fish the length of the boat, or a thing that had been a person and was something else now, I never learned which, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath. Under my ribs the borrowed weight lurched toward it, hard, reaching as it had reached at the ambush river, straining after the water as if the water were calling it home. Out of a habit older than the mission I clamped down on it, and it subsidedsullen and unsatisfied. None of it made sense to me. What I knew was that water woke the thing in me, and that whatever it wanted, I couldn't afford to find out here, dressed as goods, watched by men who'd sell whatever they discovered I could do.

Being worth finding turned out to be its own kind of work, and the water made it harder every mile.

Food, in the end, gave me back a shape.