“Yes.”
“Do you know,” she whispered, and now he heard the two things twined together in her voice and pulling opposite ways, “that that’s the safest I have ever felt in my whole life? That you’ll never, ever take one single thing I don’t hand you?” Her hand had found his chest again, over the war drum of his heart. “And do you know how much Ihateit? Right now? That you won’t—” The laugh cracked apart. “You infuriating, patient… I kissed you, Njkall. I kissed you, and you lay there like arock, and it makes me feel safe and it drives me out of my mind and I don’t know which one I’m feeling and I think it might be both at once and I don’t know what todowith that?—”
“What do you want me to do with it?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Polly ruined three carvings before mid-morning. The first she cut too deep, the little bird’s wing snapping clean off in her hand. The second she gripped so hard the blade skipped and left a pale gouge straight across where the eye should go. The third she simply stopped in the middle of carving, the blade resting against the stone, and stared at nothing while the same two seconds played themselves over again behind her eyes for what had to be the hundredth time since the crystals had come back up.
Her mouth on his. His absolute stillness. The way he had let her stop.
You infuriating male,she thought again, and set the knife down before she could ruin a fourth carving.
She had said too much last night. She knew she had. She’d meant to kiss him and then go to sleep with a win, and instead the whole tangled mess of it had come pouring out of her in the dark—safe and furious both—and he had lain there and taken every word of it the way he took everything, patient as stone, and then he’d asked her what she wanted and she’d frozen. Andeventually, when she couldn’t answer him, he’d told her,when you know, little one, you tell me. There’s no hurry. There never will be.
Which was the kindest thing anyone had ever said to her. And she had wanted, absurdly, to hit him with a pillow.
“You’re doing the thing again,” Tess said, and Polly blinked as she focused on the healer’s cave again.
“What thing?”
“The thing where your brain goes somewhere else and your hands stop moving.” Tess turned her own carving over. She’d announced last night that the lumpy, stubborn little shape was going to be a fish even if it killed her, and it looked like it might. “You’ve been doing it all morning. It’s either a male or a stomachache.”
“It’s not a stomachache.”
“So it’s a male.” Tess snorted, but there wasn’t much bite in it. That was new, the bite leaving her in small amounts, like a splinter working its way loose. “The big one.”
“His name’s Njkall.”
“I know his name.” Tess shaved another fragment off her fish with more force than the fish required. She was quiet for a moment, then asked, “How long until I can leave?”
Polly’s knife went still again, but for a different reason this time.
“Leave,” she repeated.
“This planet.” Tess said it flatly, the way she said most things, but Polly had learned to hear underneath the flatness now, and underneath it was something raw. “I appreciate—” She stopped,jaw working. “I do. I’m not stupid, I know that you saved me. But I can’t stay here, Polly. I can’t.”
“It’s only been?—”
“It’s cold.” Tess set the fish down, her hands trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature and Polly knew it, because she knew that tremor from the inside. “It’s cold, and it’s dark half the time, and everything’s stone, and every time somebody big walks past that door I’m back—” She swallowed hard. “I keep waiting to wake up somewhere worse. I need to be somewhere warm. Somewhere with the sky over it that isn’t trying to kill you. Somewhere that isn’t this, nothing against you, but this whole place is a cave and I have had enough of dark confined spaces to last me the rest of my life.”
Polly looked down at the stone in her hands. She could have said that the caves were warm and safe and the walls were protection, not imprisonment, but she remembered that need to be anywhere else. To be free of the place where your fear had happened, as though the fear lived in the walls and not in you.
“Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll get you somewhere warm.”
Tess gave her a startled look, like she’d expected an argument and didn’t know what to do without one.
“It’s not simple, though,” she said it gently, because it wasn’t a no and she needed Tess to hear that it wasn’t a no. “I want you to understand that part. Not so you’ll stay, but so you’ll be safe when you go. The Empire’s big, Tess, and there are too many places where what happened to us is a business. And a human woman traveling alone—” She shook her head. “You’d be walking straight back into the nightmare you just crawled out of.Somewhere warm and full of the wrong strangers is worse than somewhere cold and full of the right ones.”
“So I stay in the freezer forever?”
“No. You stay until we find somewhere safe. Njkall’s friend Baralt has spent a lot of time away from Hothrest. He knows people, and he knows places. It might take time to find the right place and time to find the right person to get you there safely.” She leaned in a little, holding the other woman’s tired gaze. “But when it’s found, nobody here will stop you. Not Cera, not the clan. Certainly not me. You’ll go, and someone will make sure you get there whole, and that’ll be that. That’s a promise, and no one is going to break it. No one gets kept here who wants to go.”
Tess returned her look for a long moment. Then she smiled, and it was the worst kind of smile, the kind Polly had worn herself, the kind that had given up.
“Sure,” Tess said.
“I mean it.”
