Page 73 of Dark Mate

It’s the best I’ve ever felt. It scares me a little, how good it feels.

The bill comes two days later.

It’s a green-gold afternoon, the light coming down through the crown in those solid-looking shafts, and I’m at the nest entrance with a bark-strip of Sola’s patrol notes across my knees when Riven goes still beside me.

He goes still the way he goes still at the worst things—every line of him locking at once, his nostrils flaring, his head turning a fraction. I’ve learned to read it faster than I can read my ownfear. I follow his stare down, down through the layers of green to the woven branches forty feet below.

And there they are.

Two figures, picking their way through the roots. Pale. Wrong. White cloaks hanging off frames that are too long in the wrong places, the stretched arms, the hunched shoulders, the heads carried at a tilt no living thing carries its head. Eunuchs. Even from up here, even small with distance, the wrongness of them crawls up the back of my neck. They don’t move like people. They move like something that was handed a diagram of walking and is doing its best to follow it. And they don’t look up. The whole canopy hangs over them, vast and green and full of things that could end them in a heartbeat, and they keep their sallow faces pointed at the ground, because the ground is the route, and the route is the instruction, and the instruction is all they are.

The sight of them puts the Cage straight back into my mouth. The taste of the tea. Mora’s smile. I haven’t been this cold since the dark.

Riven’s already gone.

I don’t even see him decide. One breath he’s beside me, the next he’s pouring off the nest into the passage below, silent, the wings snapping tight to his spine, the near-black of his skin swallowing the filtered light until he’s just a darkness moving through darker green, ink dropped into water. I lose him for three heartbeats. Then he comes out at the boundary, down where the pale things are, and he stands.

And the scale of it stops my breath.

I’ve mostly stopped seeing his size—in the nest he’s the shape of home and I forget. Down there, next to two thin pale things that barely reach his waist, he’s a different fact entirely. Ten feet of near-black muscle and scar, the broken horn jutting wrong against the green, and his wings opening, not all the way, not athreat, just a slow lazy half-spread, the stretch of something that has never once had to prove it was dangerous. His shadow drops over both of them and swallows them whole. The afternoon light pours down around him and doesn’t touch the dark of him at all.

He doesn’t say a word. I’m too far up to hear, but I can tell—he just stands. The Eunuchs talk, thin hands moving, careful, rehearsed, delivering the message they were built and sent to deliver. He gives them nothing back. No sound. No movement. Just the enormous still fact of him between them and the nest, and the silence of him is worse than any roar, because a roar is a thing you can brace for and this is a mountain deciding whether to fall on you.

I watch their hands begin to shake. I watch one of them take half a step back and then catch itself, hold its ground—because whatever the Ordained pour into their made things, it isn’t the sense to run.

Then they turn and go, threading back down through the branches until the green takes them. The whole thing lasts three minutes.

Riven comes back up. I’m on my feet at the entrance, my heart going, my hand pressed flat to the curve of my belly.

“What did they say?”

He doesn’t answer right away. That’s how I know it’s bad—Riven, who weighs every word, not reaching for these. He folds down beside me. The gold’s gone hard, the predator that lives under his calm surfaced all the way up in his eyes, his tail coiled tight to his thigh.

“They want you back.” Flat. “They called you property.”

“I figured that part.”

He’s quiet again. Then, because I’m waiting and he won’t lie to me, he gives me the rest. His jaw works like the words have a taste he doesn’t want in his mouth.

“They had numbers for you. What you’re worth to them. How many children your body’s still good for.”

And there it is. The thing that goes through me cold and all the way down.

It isn’t a threat I can be angry at the clean way you’re angry at a fist. It’s worse. They didn’t send those things up my canopy to take a woman. They sent them to recover an asset—to collect a number that walked off a chart. To them I was never a person who got out. I’m a thing they mislaid, and they’ve come to tally the cost of bringing me back, and the cost is written in how many babies they still think my body owes them.

My hand presses into my belly. Into the one that’s already there, four months of him and me, made in the dark by someone who chose me and asked me to choose him back. Not a yield, not a grade, not a line in a careful hand on a page in a crate.Mine.

I’ve been afraid of the Ordained my whole life without knowing I was afraid. I’ve been furious at them since the tea wore off in the dark.

Standing in the mouth of his nest with their numbers still hanging in the air, I find the third thing. The cold one. The one with patience in it.

I want to take their whole machine apart with my hands.

Below us, the canopy has already closed over the place the Eunuchs stood, the green folding back like water over a dropped stone, the afternoon light pouring down gold and indifferent as if nothing crossed through it at all. But I keep them. The stretched limbs. The careful steps. The sallow faces pointed at the ground.

They should have looked up.

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