“Njkall.” She got the word out between breaths, and she found his face with her hand and made him look at her. “Listen to me. Because I know what you’re thinking, and it’s wrong.”
“Polly—”
“I’m not scared,” she said fiercely, and it came out with none of her old tentativeness at all, because she was certain right down to the ground. “Not of you. Not of what’s between us. I felt it, and I know exactly what it is, and I’m not running from it. I’ve spent a long time being afraid of things and I know what that feels like. This isn’t fear.”
He was very still under her hand. But it was a different stillness, the way a held breath is different from a calm one.
“Then why did you stop?” he asked quietly.
She took a deep breath and said the thing that had taken her all day to say.
“Because I need you to know that I’m doing this on purpose.Notto feel safe.Notbecause I’m sad and you’re warm and I need holding. I’m doing it because Iwantto, and because I want to find out where it goes.” She leaned her forehead down against his, felt his slow exhale wash over her mouth. “I’m asking younot to be patient anymore. I’m asking you to come down this path with me. Slowly. Butwith me.”
He was silent for a long moment, and she thought that he’d tell her to wait again, tell her that it was too soon. He didn’t. Instead his hand came up to cup her cheek.
“Then slowly,” he said. “And together.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
She isn’t afraid of me.
Njkall turned the thought over in the grey pre-dawn while Polly slept nestled against his side, one small hand still fisted loosely in the fur over his heart.
I’m asking you not to be patient anymore. I’m asking you to come with me.
He’d waited a year to hear something like it. And now that she’d said it, now that she’d told him fiercely in the dark that she knew the difference between fear and new, now that she’d told him that she wanted him—he found the wanting had grown teeth he hadn’t known it had.
That was the cruelty of it. Her fear had made restraint easy. Her fear meant be still, be safe, take nothing, give everything, and wait. He was good at waiting. He’d built a whole life on the strength of it.
But she wasn’t afraid anymore. She’d taken away the one thing that had made his self-denial simple, and left him with a small warm female asleep against his ribs, her breath moving the furat his throat, her hand over his heart, andpermission.And permission was so very much harder to survive than a locked door.
Because she’d also said slowly. And slowly was right. Slowly was the only honest pace for what she was and what she’d lived through and how far she still had to walk. He knew that. He believed it. He would hold to it if it took the rest of his years.
It was only that she’d shivered against his mouth last night and made that small helpless sound, and something in him had roared awake that he’d kept chained for so long he’d half convinced himself it had died in there.
It had not died.
He sighed quietly, then eased himself from beneath her hand, and got up before the wanting could make him stupid.
Clan business, thank the gods, did not care what a male wanted.
By the time he entered the council chamber, he had three separate messages waiting and two clan members standing at the entrance with the particular patient hunch of people who’d been told to wait but had things that could not keep.
“Two of the offworlders from the resort went up the north ridge,” the first said. Sennt, young and earnest, still growing into his shoulders. “In their soft little boots. They said they wanted to see the sarlag herd to take pictures. By the time the guide found them, one of them had frostbite in two toes. The medic at the resort is tending to him.”
“Only two toes?”
“The guide was fast.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Whose party?”
“The mining consortium’s. The ones who booked the whole east wing.”
Of course. The ones with the money, who therefore believed the planet would negotiate. It never did.
“Tell the resort no more ridge walks without two guides and proper gear checked at the door,” he said. “If the consortium doesn’t like it, they can freeze at their own expense somewhere else. But put it politely.”
The second one had a longer face and a longer list of problems from the port. A trader had set up a stall selling what he swore were licensed weapons and were not. Another trader was selling fake crystals and each time he was ordered to move on, he’d simply move forty paces and reopen. The eldest son of one of the clan members had spent a month’s earnings on a gambling table that hadn’t existed the week before.
