Page 51 of Dark Mate

He gets up, one smooth unfurl from sitting to standing, his head ducking the ceiling on instinct—and fills a stone basin from the thread of stream along the back wall. Sets it on the fire-pit stones. Then he kneels and presses his palms flat to it. His shoulders drop. His breathing goes deep. The water starts to steam.

His own heat. Hot enough to warm water through stone. I spent three weeks pressed against that and never understood the warmth was a furnace running under his skin—hot enough his touch always felt like leaning on something just out of a fire.

Then he breaks a piece of fruit off a stem and holds it out to me.

Not his tail. His hand.

After three weeks of berries fed off his tail tip in the dark, the plain domesticity of it—fruit in an open palm, offered, waiting—cracks something I wasn’t braced for. I take it. Our fingers touch. His are warm, of course they’re warm, everything about him is warm—and it lasts maybe two seconds, and my throat goes tight anyway.

“You’re going to have to quit doing things like that,” I tell him, “if you want me to stay mad at you.”

He doesn’t smile. I don’t think his face is built for it. But something moves through the amber, and he hands me another piece.

“You were kept,” he says, between bites.

Not the torn, growled version from the dark. This one’s measured, chosen off the full shelf, weighed againstcapturedandtakenandheld,and set down because it’s the exact one. I know what he’s doing. I found the scars on his throat in the dark. He knows the word from the inside, and he’s the first thing alive to call mine by its real name.

“Thirteen years,” I say. Steady. I build the steady myself now, out of the coal, since the tea’s not around to do it for me.

“I know.” Two words, his eyes not leaving mine. And the knowing in them is older than three weeks. Older than the rut. He was at my wall a long time before he came through it.

He takes my hand and cleans the juice off my fingers with his mouth, the heat of it, the careful press of his tongue—then sets my hand back in my lap like he’s returning something he borrowed. My stomach drops in a way that isn’t fear and isn’t hunger and lives in the exact spot the tea used to fill.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

It’s been sitting in my teeth since the dark broke. Down there he didn’t need one—he was the shape at my back, the hum in my spine, the arms that held. Up here, in the light, with fruit juice on his mouth, I need to know what to call him.

He goes still. The tail quits twitching. The amber turns inward, the translator weighing it, what a name costs, what it means to hand somebody the one sound that meanshim, alone.

“Riven.”

Two syllables. Hard R, short vowels. It drops between us like a stone into still water.

Riven.I know the word—the Cage taught vocabulary if it taught nothing else, and I was always good with words. Riven means split. Cleaved. Broken clean along a fault line. Something that was whole once and isn’t now.

And then the worse of it lands, quiet. This isn’t the name he was born with. He didn’t keep that one back from me—he can’t give me what he doesn’t have. The change took it whole, all the way down, no fault line left to trace, the same way it took his words and his tongues and the face of whoever once loved him. So somewhere in the long years alone he did the only thing left to do with a self that had no sound for itself. He looked at what he’d been broken into, and he named it. Picked the truest word he had and made it his.

Not the name he lost. The name he built to stand in the hole it left.

“Riven,” I say it back, testing the weight of it in my mouth.

His whole body goes tight at the sound of it in my voice, like he made the name alone, in the dark, for no ears but his own, and never once until now heard it come back to him in someone else’s mouth.

“Ellie,” he says. Rough. He already had it. I still don’t know how.

“Yeah.” My eyes are stinging again, and it’s not the light this time. “We established that.”

28

ELLIE

The shaking starts the second morning.

Not the fine tremor I’ve had since the rut broke. This is deeper—like whatever holds my muscles onto my bones has come loose. My hands won’t close right. I pick up a piece of fruit and watch my fingers shake around it, the grip pulsing instead of holding, and I set it down. Pick it up. Set it down.

Riven watches. He doesn’t say anything. The amber tracks my hands the way it tracked the lower canopy yesterday—reading, measuring, working out what’s needed.

Three things are leaving my body at once, and not one of them is leaving quietly.