Polly couldn’t tell if it was horror or amusement in the other woman’s voice, and she didn’t care. She crossed her arms over her chest and glared down at her.
“Stop,” she said. “Don’t say anything else about him. And don’t ever ask me again.”
And Tess, mercifully, let it go. Polly went back to her seat, picked up her abandoned comb, and started carving again. For once, the silence wasn’t good. It was sharp around the edges.
She didn’t stay long after that. She had already pushed past her usual limit, and the comb wouldn’t come out right, and Tess’s eyes were still on her, thoughtful in a way she didn’t like at all.
But the answer stayed with her.
It stayed with her while she walked the cold bright passage back towards Njkall’s quarters, and it stayed with her through the rest of the afternoon, while she sanded the comb teeth flat.Because he’s Njkall.As though his name were a whole argument. As though it explained the year of nights, and the wordlovehe’d let slip in the cave and then set carefully aside, and the way she’d asked him to hold her on purpose and he had, gathering her against him as if he’d been starving to hold her and refusing himself.
Because he’s Njkall.She’d meant it as a barrier to shut down the question. But she heard it now the way Tess must have heard it—not as a wall at all, but a door, standing wide open, with the whole answer just past it, plain as anything, if she’d only turn her head and look.
She’d said it the way Yasmin talked about her mate. She’d said it the way people saidbecause I love himwhen they were too shy to use the word.
She sat alone in his quarters, her heart thudding against her chest. All at once and far too late, she understood what she’d told a near-stranger about her own foolish heart—and worse, what she’d refused to tell herself for a year.
CHAPTER SIX
“No. Hold it like this. You’re holding it like it’s a weapon.” Polly’s small hands folded over Tess’s on the haft of the little knife, adjusting her grip. “Let the knife work with the stone.”
Njkall stood in the mouth of the healer’s cave with a basket of dried roots Cera had asked him to bring, and did not go in.
He’d meant to. He’d meant to set the basket inside the door and leave quietly, because he knew what the sight of him did in a room where a frightened female was learning to breathe. Instead, he stopped, and he watched, and the basket hung forgotten from one clawed hand.
Because the small dark-haired female bent over the knife, correcting a grip, and steadying a stranger’s shaking hands with her own hands was Polly.
This was Polly.
He carried the memory of another Polly in him always, the way a male carried an old wound that ached before storms. The one who’d crouched in a corner, filthy and naked, hiding from theworld behind a tangle of dark hair. The one who had made herself small in every doorway and who had watched every unfamiliar male the way a pikka watched a shadow with wings. The one who had taken his hand and climbed into his bed and finally let him wash away the dirt. The one who had needed him the way a drowning creature needs something it can climb onto, blind and desperate and without choice.
He had never resented that need. He’d have carried it gladly to the end of his days. But he’d have given a great deal, in those first months, to see her the way she was now—calm and patient, her whole attention poured out towards someone else’s fear instead of curled up around her own.
“There. See?” Polly held up the small bead, and the ghost of a smile crossed her mouth. “You did that.”
Tess grunted something that wasn’t quite thanks, and looked at the bead, and looked at Polly, and there it was—the thing that had rooted him to the doorway. The way the escaped female’s eyes rested on Polly. The way a person looks at the one solid thing in a shifting world. The way, he thought with a strange twist beneath his ribs, Polly had once looked athim.
Someone was clinging to Polly now, and she was letting them. She was holding the weight of that need, keeping the promise she’d made without ever once making a show of it.
Pride swelled in him, sharp and sudden. Here was the result of every hard-won step she’d taken—a female who could offer another person safety because she had built enough of her own to have some to share.
Look at you,he thought.Look what you made of yourself, little one. And you’ll swear it was nothing. You always do.
Then, riding in close behind the pride, came the other thing. The colder thing. He made himself look at it, because he was not a male who flinched from what was true.
She was healing. And a healing creature does not always keep the shape of its wounded self. She had needed him because everything else had been terror, and he had been the one fixed point in the dark. But what happened to a fixed point when the dark thinned out? When there were other lights? When she had learned to stand entirely on her own?
He wanted her whole. He had wanted nothing else, all this year, so fiercely that he’d throttled his own desire to a whisper rather than risk a single step of her healing.Give Polly whatever she needs to heal.He’d made that his one law. He’d kept it.
And now she was healing, and the honest question sat in his chest like a swallowed stone. When she no longer needs me, will she still want me?
The clinging had never been what he wanted from her. But gods help him, some low and selfish part of him had grown used to being needed, and did not know how to think about a Polly who might, someday soon, be able to walk clean away from him and not so much as stumble.
He would let her go if she did. He’d already decided that, long ago, in the dark. Her freedom was worth more than his own happiness, and it was not a noble speech he told himself, it was simply the truth of what he felt. But knowing a thing and standing ready to survive it were two different mountains.
Polly looked up and found him in the doorway. And instead of the reflexive step towards him for shelter, she gave him a smile—unhurried, certain, a little tired around the edges—and nodded at the basket.
“You brought Cera’s roots?”
