Chapter 53: The Bear Tribe Found Me. Of Course They Did!
Neve finally got to the cave after being carried all through the walk by Cael. He hit the bed and let out a groan.
Not in pain. In relief. The specific sound of a body that had been through an entire festival evening, including a dragon king, a public kiss, Isabella serving soup on her knees, a dragon talon, and being carried home on a leopard’s shoulder, finally made contact with a mattress.
He stared at the ceiling.
The lamp on the bedside drawer glowed steadily and warmly. Snow was falling outside. He could hear it in the particular silence that heavy snow created, the world going muffled and soft beyond the cave walls.
He had deliberately left the talon with Kael. It was heavy, and he needed an excuse to have that conversation about where exactly Kael was going to be living, what the arrangements were going to look like and how he was going to explain it to Cael without starting a territorial incident.
Tomorrow. That was a tomorrow problem. Not today. He needed to rest.
"Are you hungry? You didn’t eat much earlier."
Neve turned his head.
Cael was kneeling beside the bed. Not sitting. Kneeling, with his arms on the mattress edge, looking at Neve with the expression he got when he was checking on something he had been worried about.
Neve sat up.
He looked at Cael kneeling by the bed and then at the space beside him, and then back at Cael.
He had not once seen Cael on this bed. Since the system had given it to him, Cael had slept on the mat in the main room the way he always had. He had never once gotten into bed, even after Neve had moved into the bedroom.
Neve shifted sideways and tapped the space beside him.
"Lie down," he said.
Cael looked at the bed. At the white sheets. At the mattress that his fingers had sunk into the first time he touched it.
"Isn’t it for females?" he said.
Neve grabbed his ear.
Cael made a sound like a child being caught doing something wrong and went still.
"Am I a female?" Neve said.
"No," Cael said quickly.
"Then what does that have to do with anything?"
He let go of Cael’s ear. Cael straightened slowly with the look of someone reassembling their dignity.
"What if it gets dirty?" Cael tried.
"It won’t," Neve said.
The sheets were system-given. He had noticed early on that nothing stuck to them. Whatever happened to them, they were clean again by morning. He had not asked the system to explain this and had decided to simply accept it. Anything that was given to him by the system was premium.
He reached over and grabbed Cael’s hand and pulled.
Cael was much larger than Neve and could not actually be moved by Neve pulling his hand unless he chose to be moved, which meant that the fact that he toppled sideways and landed on the mattress beside Neve was entirely Cael’s own decision dressed up as cooperation.
The bed did not break.
Neve had wondered, briefly.
They lay facing each other. Close enough that Neve could see Cael’s eyes properly in the lamplight. The sheets were soft between them. Outside, the snow kept falling, and the cave was warm and quiet.
Cael reached up and touched Neve’s face. Two fingers along his jaw, the way he touched things, he was being careful with.
The silence had a specific texture to it.
"How is it?" Neve asked.
Cael looked at him.
"Beautiful," he said. "Very beautiful."
He was looking directly at Neve’s eyes when he said it.
Neve’s face went warm as he covered it with both hands.
"I was asking about the bed," he said.
"Oh," Cael said.
Neve lowered his hands enough to look at him.
Cael’s expression was doing something that had too many components to identify quickly. He opened his mouth to say something else, but he froze when he heard footsteps outside the cave.
Cael was off the bed before the sound had fully registered, moving through the bedroom door and into the main cave. Neve sat up and heard him stop.
"Who are you?" Cael said in a flat and not welcoming voice.
Neve pushed himself off the bed with a wince and walked to the door.
In the cave entrance, framed by falling snow and the last of the festival’s distant light, was the girl from the forest path. Brown hair. Hand still wrapped where he had treated it. She was looking at Cael with the specific wariness of someone assessing a large animal that was between them and where they needed to go.
"It’s you," Neve said.
She lit up immediately. "Yes! It’s me!"
Cael looked back at Neve.
"You know who she is? This... Young female?"
"I met her before the festival," Neve said. He moved past Cael and crouched in front of her. "Is the hand still hurting?"
"Swollen a little," she said. "But I can use it." She flexed her fingers as proof. "You really did fix it."
"Good." Neve tilted his head. "Why are you here?"
She glanced at Cael.
Then back at Neve.
The glance said everything. She can’t say whatever it is she wanted to say with Cael standing there.
Neve looked at Cael, but his expression said he was not going anywhere.
Neve looked back at the girl. "You can say whatever you came to say. Cael is my mate."
Her eyes went wide. Then a grin spread across her face. "And the dragon king, too? I saw—" She stopped herself. Cleared her throat. "Everyone saw."
Neve chose not to respond to that.
"Why are you here?" he said again.
She straightened. The grin faded into something more formal. "I came on behalf of the bear tribe. Our chief would like to meet you."
"No," Cael said.
She looked at him.
The specific look of someone who had been told no by someone they had already decided to find inconvenient.
Neve put a hand up before the situation developed further. "Who is your chief?"
"He’s not at the festival himself," she said. "My brother came as a representative. He was sent to find out about you." She paused. "He sent me first. To see if you were approachable."
Neve looked at her.
She had mentioned her brother twice now. The specific emphasis of someone who thought the mention of this person was relevant information.
He did not know why it felt relevant yet, but his instincts were doing something.
"I’ll meet him," Neve said.
"Neve," Cael said. His hand came to Neve’s shoulder, firm and present.
"It’s fine," Neve said. "It won’t take long."
Cael did not remove his hand. He looked at the girl and at the cave entrance and at the festival noise in the distance and made the specific face of a person who had already decided something.
"Either I take you there," he said to the girl, and his arm came around Neve and lifted him onto his shoulder again in one smooth motion, "or you call him here."
Neve made a sound of protest that Cael did not acknowledge.
The girl looked up at Neve on Cael’s shoulder. Then at Cael. Her expression shifted from wary to something more entertained than she was trying to show.
"Fine," she said.
She turned her head sideways and put two fingers between her lips.
The whistle was sharp and clear and cut through the sound of falling snow.
Then, footsteps.
It was coming from the direction of the festival, unhurried, crunching through snow that was deep enough now to hear.
He stepped into the light of the cave entrance.
Dark skin. Tall, the kind of tall that came with a build that suggested he had never once struggled to lift something. He moved calmly and naturally, without rushing or trying to show off. He looked at the cave entrance first, then at the girl, then up at Neve on Cael’s shoulder and finally at Cael.
He said nothing immediately. He just stood there, like a pillar.
Neve looked above his head, and the meter appeared.
{Aldric: 6%}
Six per cent.
He didn’t know how it was not 0%. Maybe he had watched him when he was at the podium with Vaelthorn, and he fell in love somehow. Or maybe it’s when he heard the news about how Neve saved his precious sister, it increased. Neve couldn’t tell.
Neve lowered his head slowly and stared at the snow on the ground in front of the cave.
He breathed in once.
"Fuck," he said quietly. More to himself than anyone.
He had known. The moment she started saying brother with that specific emphasis, something in him had already started calculating. He had hoped he was wrong, but he was not wrong.
He looked at the meter again.
Six per cent and climbing. He could practically watch it, thinking about going higher.
"I knew it," he muttered.