Page 69 of Dark Mate

And I’m good at this.

It lands quiet, in the middle of tasting a bitter medicinal leaf he holds out. I’m good at this because the Cage made me into an instrument—tuned my whole body to read the world through touch and taste and smell. They built me for presentation. For compliance. For being a woman whose senses ran in somebodyelse’s service. The canopy doesn’t care about any of that. It rewards the exact same skills for completely different reasons.

He watches me taste. “You learn fast,” he says.

“I was trained to.” The bitterness comes out before I can stop it.

He tilts his head—a bird’s motion in a predator’s body. “Trained to learn,” he says. “Not trained to use it.”

That lands. I hold onto it.

While he works, I ask him about the rest of it—the world I’ve only ever seen from inside his arms. He answers the way he answers everything now, plainly, one fact set down at a time, and a whole map opens up behind my eyes.

The Shades don’t live in packs, he tells me. Each one holds his own ground, miles of it, and they know each other the way neighbors know each other through a shared wall, by the scent-marks scored into the boundary trees, by the low vibrations that travel the root systems too deep for me to hear, a whole slow language passing root to root across the dark.Mine. I passed here. I hold this ground. I have a mate.He’s been reading it his whole claimed life. He knows which Shades hold the territories around ours, what color they are, how far their words have gone. He knows which ones have taken women, because a claimed male’s marks change—they soften, they start sayingtwowhere they used to sayone.

And past the ground he knows, there’s more he doesn’t. More Shades. More women carried into more nests built for one. And past all of that, more Cages, the eastern compound I came out of is one of how many, he can’t say, but the Ordained didn’t build a whole theology around a single house of forty-one women. There are settlements they raid. There are clearings they keep. There’s a thing out there older and wider than the pale rectangle I could once have covered with one hand from the air, and every part of it runs on women kept quiet in the dark.

I take it all in, and I feel the plan in my chest get bigger to hold it. Forty-one names was never the whole number. It was just the part I could see.

That evening the fire’s burned low, throwing gold up the curved wood walls, the woodsmoke and the deep heartwood-smell of the nest settled around us. Outside, the canopy works through its night chorus, layered insects, the drip of old rain still finding its way down, something tapping wood three trees off. I tell him there’s a sixth woman.

He’s carving by the light of it. Not a comb this time, something I can’t make out yet, but his hands move the way they must have moved over words once, back when he built meaning for a living. Now he builds it out of wood. I’m braiding the bark fiber he taught me, my fingers doing what the Sisters trained them to do to hair. Same motion, different material. The irony tastes like that medicinal leaf.

“Northwest. Past Tael’s ground.” I keep braiding. “Sola mentioned her. Claimed—but not by the male who’s holding her. He took her off another shade. Sola says she hasn’t been seen outside the nest in three months.”

His carving stops for half a second. Resumes.

“The rogue’s dangerous,” he says, level. “He doesn’t just mark his line. He challenged my eastern neighbor twice last season. The second time drew blood.”

“She’s alone in there. With everything coming.” I don’t have to say what’s coming. We both spent the morning on it.

He sets the carving down. “If I go into his range with you, he reads it as a challenge. A male who draws blood over a boundary will kill over a threat to what he thinks is his.”

“She’s not his. She’s his captive.”

“To him those are the same thing.”

The fire pops.

“Riven.” I set the braid down. “I can’t build something that only reaches the women it’s easy to reach. Especially not now.”

“You can’t build anything if you’re dead.” No heat in it. A fact, set down careful, the way he sets down every word that costs him.

“I’m not asking you to fight him.”

“You’re asking me to walk into his territory with my mate.” His eyes hold mine. “Thatisasking me to fight him.”

My mate.It does something to my chest—not the rut’s warm flutter, something with more edge to it. He means it. The same instinct that dug the nest and carved the comb and heated the water. He guards what he builds. I’m what he built.

I breathe. “Then we wait. Sola says he ranges wider in the warm season. When he’s out at the far edge of his circuit, we go in.”

He works his jaw. The tail twitches against the furs.

“Warm season,” he says. “Not before.”

“Not before.”

A nod. The carving starts again. The tension doesn’t break—it just settles, the way weight settles when you shift it to the other foot.