“One night,” Ruelle says. “You stayed one night.”
“One night.”
“And he told you this. An old male, dying, describing his own bond to an eleven-year-old.”
“Yes.”
“Did she say anything? The mate. Did you hear her speak?”
“She was asleep the whole time.”
“So you have his words. Not hers.”
“I have what I saw.”
Ruelle throws her hands up.
“Then we find another way. I fix the gland damage directly, stop the overproduction at the source. Your body stops overproducing, my tolerances stabilize.”
“You don’t know how to do that.”
“I don’t know how to do that YET.” She turns to face me. “I am not going to stop treating you. Stopping means you die. And I’m not going to let you die because of a story an old male told you when you were eleven.”
“It’s not a story. It’s what’s happening to your blood right now.”
“What’s happening to my blood is a problem I can solve if you give me time. I’m a poisoner. This is what I do. I find the mechanism and I fix it.”
“And if you can’t fix it? If the displacement keeps going? If you lose everything?”
“Then I lose it solving a problem. Not running from one.”
“I need to go outside,” I say.
I stand and walk past her, through the main chamber, through the gap in the rock, and the cold air hits my scales and I keep walking. Down the switchback, past the vent, into the scrub at the tree line where the hares run and the frostbark grows and nobody can see me.
I sit on a rock in the cold and press my palms against my face and breathe.
Every bite I’ve given her. Every morning. Every time she tilted her head and bared her throat and made that low noise and I bit down and delivered the dose and pulled back and told myself it was treatment.
It was treatment. It was also bonding, both at the same time, and I knew what bonding does and I did it anyway, because the alternative was dying and she was right there and her body was sayingyesand mine was sayingfinish it, and I held back and held back and held back and it wasn’t enough.
The small doses were enough. The holding back was enough. The bonding started anyway, quiet, incremental, each bite taking a piece of what she was and replacing it with me.
I hear Thassren’s voice. I hear my own.
I sit in the cold until the anger at myself burns low enough to walk back.
RUELLE
He’s been gone for an hour.
I’m in the cave. The vials are still on the shelf, the assay stone on the workbench.
He knew. He knew what bonding chemistry does to a mate’s body, and he didn’t tell me, and now he’s somewhere on this frozen mountain deciding whether to stop the treatment and die rather than keep changing me. As if I didn’t get a say in what happens to my own blood.
I hear him before I see him, claws on granite, the gap in the rock darkening as his body fills it. He comes through and stops.
I’m angry. I know I’m angry; the anger has been building for an hour. I’m about to say something when I see his scales flush.
