“I got here about a year ago,” she said. Her voice came out very level, the way it did when level was the only thing holding the rest of it down. “I don’t know how long I was in the other place. I stopped counting on purpose. When I got here I decided the counting starts from the day I left it behind. That’s the only number I keep.” She turned the comb over. “So. About a year. That’s the answer you get.”
For once, Tess didn’t push. Maybe she understood. Maybe she had a number of her own she refused to say aloud.
“Sorry,” Tess muttered, and it sounded like it hurt her to say it. “I do that. I poke. It’s… I need to know things. Where I stand. What’s real. I can’t sit in a place and not understand it. It makes me want to—” She stopped and took a deep breath. “On the ship. The one I got off. You didn’t ask, but… I need to say it once and then I don’t want to say it again. Is that all right? Can I just tell you once?”
“Yes,” she said, even though she knew it was going to cost her. “Say it once. I’ll listen. You won’t have to say it again.”
And Tess told her. Not all of it—Polly could hear the parts she stepped around, the way you’d walk around a hole in the ice—but enough. The expensive linens and the soft carpet, which she said was the thing she hated most, that they’d made it nice. The others who’d been on the ship with her, and the weight of not knowing what had happened to them. The stop at Hothrest, the confusion of it, the way it had felt when the metal bar had cracked the guard’s skull, and the running. The cold that had nearly finished what the ship had started.
She listened to all of it, the way she’d promised. She didn’t flinch and she didn’t cry, because she’d learned that crying made the other person feel they had to stop and take care of you, and this wasn’t a moment for that. She just held Tess’s gaze and listened and, when it was over, she slowly reached across the small space between them for Tess’s hand, slowly enough that she could pull away if she needed to.
Tess didn’t pull away. Her whole body was shaking.
“Once,” Polly said softly. “And now it’s done. You did it.”
Tess wiped her face hard with the back of her wrist, angry at her own tears, and for a while neither of them said anything, and it was a good silence, the kind that had weight to it instead of threat.
Then Tess ruined it.
“So what’s the big male to you?”
Polly blinked. “What?”
“The big male. Njkall.” Tess said the name carefully, like she’d been saving it up. Her eyes had gone sharp again, but there was something underneath the sharpness now that hadn’t been therebefore—not suspicion of Polly, exactly, but fear for her, which was somehow more difficult to answer. “You live with him. Cera mentioned it like it was nothing. Like it’s just the arrangement.” Her jaw worked. “So I have to ask. And you have to not lie to me, because you’re the only one here I’ve decided to believe. Is he your owner?”
Polly was on her feet before she knew she’d moved. The half-made comb fell from her lap and skittered across the stone floor and she didn’t look at it.
“No,” she said fiercely, her voice loud, in a way her voice almost never was, and it rang off the rock. “No. Absolutely not. Don’t—don’t ever say that. Not about him.”
Tess had gone very still, watching her.
“No. I’m not owned. Not by anyone. Not ever again.” Her heart slammed against her chest, the same way it slammed on the bad nights, except this wasn’t a bad night, this was rage, clean and clear, and it felt so foreign in her body that it almost frightened her. “He’s not my owner. Take it back.”
“Okay.” Tess held up both hands, palms out, and there was something almost gentle in her gaze now, something searching. “Okay. I hear you. I take it back.”
Tess hesitated, watched her stand there shaking with a fury neither of them had known she had in her.
“Then what is he?” Tess asked again, more quietly. “Why do you live with him? Why does he let you sleep in his bed? Because males like that, they always want?—”
The sudden image of Njkall’s arousal pressing against her, of his big body straining to stay still under her touch, flashed into hermind, and heat rushed through her at the same time as a fierce, protective anger.
“Don’t.” She kept her voice low, but it had turned to iron. “You don’t get to say things like that about him. He would never, ever force me to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
Tess searched her face again.
“Then why do you sleep with him?”
Polly opened her mouth, but nothing came. Because there was no small safe explanation. She couldn’t say it was because she was afraid of the dark, because that wasn’t it, not really, not anymore. She couldn’t say he was just a friend, because he wasn’t. He was her anchor. He was the wall that held the world back. He was the only reason she ever felt like she could close her eyes and let go, even just a little. She could say all of that, but it was too big, and she had no words for it.
So she said the only true thing she had.
“Because he’s Njkall.”
Tess frowned. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
“Oh,” Tess said. “Oh, shit.”
