Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Nine: The Other Side

The river came up out of the dark fast and wide and black, and Fenric didn't slow for it.

"Trust me," he shouted, and then his arm was around my waist and we hit the water together.

The cold drove the air out of me. The current grabbed my legs and tried to take them, and I felt Fenric's gold flare against my side, hot even through the freezing water, and something in the river answered it. The water in front of us seemed to thin, to part, the way the air had parted when we'd stood together on the marking ground. He was making a path. I didn't understand it and I didn't have breath to ask.

Behind us the hunters reached the bank.

I twisted to look and wished I hadn't. A dozen of them, maybe more, silver eyes catching the moon, lined up along the water's edge. And not one of them came in. They stood there, that whole flood that had torn through a pack to reach me, and they would not put a foot in the river.

We came up the far bank soaked and shaking, and Fenric pulled me up out of the water and we both collapsed into the wet grass, and behind us across the black river the hunters watched and did not follow.

"They can't cross running water," I said, when I could talk. "That's it. That's the thing."

"Old water. Living water." Fenric was on his back in the grass beside me, chest heaving, gold guttering low under his soaked skin. "It breaks whatever the bargain did to them. They can go around, upstream, there's a ford two days north. But tonight, right now, we're on the other side of it." He turned his head to look at me. "You're on the other side of it."

And then it hit me, all of it, all at once.

I'd knelt on a stone to be marked as nothing this morning. Since then I'd burned an Alpha, watched my whole life turn out to be a lie somebody was paid to tell, broken a seal I never knew I carried, been cast out of the only home I'd ever had, and run through the dark from things that had murdered my entire bloodline. And now I was lying soaked in the grass on the far side of a river with a stranger, and every wolf and every thing that had ever wanted me small or dead was on the other bank, and none of them could reach me.

I started shaking, and it wasn't the cold.

Fenric sat up. He didn't touch me. He just watched me come apart in the grass, and there was nothing careful or performed in his face, none of Aron's practiced kindness.

"It comes now," he said quietly. "Always does. You hold it together while you have to, and the second you're safe your body cashes it all in at once." He was still catching his own breath. "Let it. There's no one here to use it against you."

That was the thing that undid me. No one here to use it against you. Twenty-three years of holding still, of giving them no reason, of swallowing everything so it couldn't be turned into a weapon, and this man I'd known for a handful of hours had looked at me once and understood the whole shape of it.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and I let it come. Not for long. But I let it, and he sat beside me in the dark and let me, and he didn't say a single word to fill the quiet or make it smaller.

When I finally dropped my hands, he was closer than he'd been. Not touching. Close.

"Better?" he said.

"No." I laughed, wet and cracked. "Yes. I don't know."

His mouth curved. Water ran off the ends of his hair, and in the low light of the two of us still glowing faintly under our skin, I could see him properly for the first time since he'd walked out of the trees. Not the terrifying thing the pack had folded away from. Just a man, soaked and tired, with gold in his eyes the exact shade of mine, looking at me like I was something he'd stopped believing existed.

"You keep looking at me like that," I said.

"Like what."

"Like you're checking I'm real."

He was quiet a second. "I've been the only one for a hundred years," he said. "The last. I stopped letting myself want anything else, because wanting a thing that doesn't exist is a good way to lose your mind." His gaze moved over my face. "And then this morning I felt the old blood wake up on a marking stone. I told myself not to hope on the way there. I hoped anyway."

The air between us had changed. I felt it the way I'd felt everything else tonight, low in the body, before my mind caught up. My heart was going hard, and this time it had nothing to do with hunters.

His eyes dropped to my mouth. Just for a second. Then back up.

And I wanted him to close the distance. That was the terrifying part, the part that scared me more than the silver-eyed things across the water. I'd spent one whole night refusing to belong to anyone, refusing Aron, refusing Selene, refusing Renna, refusing to be owned or used or kept small. And here was this man, and every part of me was leaning toward him, and I didn't know if the wanting was mine or just one more leash held by prettier hands.

I pulled back. Barely an inch. But he felt it, and he read it, and he didn't chase.

"You don't have to decide anything about me tonight," he said, low. "I told you I'd never keep you small. That includes this. Whatever this turns into, you choose it, in your own time, or you don't." He got to his feet and held out his hand, and this time it was just a hand, an offer to help me up, nothing under it. "For now we walk. There's shelter half a day east. Dry, warm, and a locked door between us and the ford they'll come around by."

I looked at his hand. At the gold still faintly moving under his skin, answering mine.

I took it, and I let him pull me up, and I noted that he let go the second I was standing.

We walked east into the dark, both of us soaked, the river and everything on the other side of it falling away behind us. And I was aware of him the whole way, the heat of him a foot from my shoulder, the wanting still there under my ribs, patient now, waiting.

I'd chosen not to kneel this morning. I was starting to understand that choosing what I wanted was going to be a whole lot harder, and a whole lot more dangerous, than choosing what I didn't.

Somewhere behind us, far off across the water, a horn sounded. Turning north. Toward the ford.

We had half a day. Maybe less.

Fenric heard it too. He didn't say anything. But his hand found the small of my back, just for a moment, guiding me faster into the dark, and I let it stay there, and neither of us said a word about it.