Chapter 54: The Bear Is Shy. I Was Not Prepared For That!
Neve had expected someone like the leopard tribe warriors.
Loud and confident, like the kind of person who walked into spaces like they already owned them. Based on the size of Aldric and the way he had stepped through the snow, Neve had braced for that energy.
What he got instead was a large man standing close to his sister with his eyes on the ground.
Neve stared at him.
His sister grabbed his hand and shook it. "Go on, brother. Don’t be shy!"
Neve remembered the bears at the zoo.
Not the aggressive ones people imagined. The actual bears. The ones who heard him coming down the path on cleaning days and went immediately to hug a tree. They were not running away exactly; they just suddenly became very interested in bark, keeping themselves very busy with the tree. They could not possibly acknowledge the zookeeper right now since they were very occupied.
He had spent two years trying to make eye contact with bears who had decided eye contact was not something they were doing today.
The memory hit him so suddenly, he laughed.
He didn’t mean to. It came out before he could catch it.
Aldric looked up at him, confused.
Neve pressed his lips together and shook his head. "Sorry. It’s nothing." He cleared his throat. "Come in. It’s cold outside."
Aldric looked at his sister, and his sister looked at him.
He stepped inside.
They settled in the main space. Neve on one side, Aldric and his sister on the other. Cael positioned himself behind Neve in the way he positioned himself everywhere, close enough to be present.
Aldric looked at his own hands.
"I’m sorry for coming to visit you at this hour," he said. His voice was low and even and not what Neve had expected from someone that large. "We wanted to ask if you could teach us." He stopped. "The remedy. For the scorpion sting."
Cael looked at Neve.
"Scorpion what?"
Neve told him everything quickly—the girl on the path before the festival, the sting, the treatment. Cael listened, and his expression went through several things before settling on something that was trying to be neutral about the fact that Neve had stopped to treat a stranger in the snow on the way to the most important social event of the beastman season.
He did not say anything about it, which was very mature of him.
"I can teach you," Neve said, looking at Aldric. "But the herbs I need aren’t available right now. The snow has covered most of what grows here. I only have a small amount, and it’s not enough for a full lesson."
Aldric’s shoulders dropped slightly.
His sister leaned forward. "What herb is it? Our tribe’s physician might have it."
Neve touched his chin.
He reached behind himself with one hand, angled away from their line of sight, and opened the purse. He felt around, found the herb bundle, pulled a few stems out and closed it. He turned back and held it out like he had retrieved it from nearby.
"Something like this," he said.
The girl grabbed it before he had finished the sentence. She looked at it, turned it over and smelled it.
"I’ll be right back!" She was already heading for the entrance. "I’ll show the physician!"
She ran out into the snow, and the cave went quiet.
Neve, Cael, and Aldric sat in the main space.
Aldric looked at his hands again.
Cael leaned toward Neve’s ear. "I didn’t know bears were shy," he said, low enough that only Neve heard.
"They’re not shy with each other," Neve said quietly. "Just with strangers."
"Hm."
Cael’s arms came around Neve from behind. He wasn’t being possessive like Vaelthorn; he just wanted to be present around Neve, the way he had been half of the evening. His chin came to rest near Neve’s shoulder.
"How long is this going to take?" he said. "You need to sleep. The dragon king will burn us all down if you don’t rest properly."
"I won’t let him do that," Neve said.
He reached up and touched the side of Cael’s face without thinking about it. Cael went still the way he always went still when Neve touched him without warning.
Aldric was looking at the wall.
Giving them privacy in the only way available to him: pretending the wall was interesting.
Neve looked at the number above his head.
It hadn’t moved from six since he had arrived. That was fine. He had not asked for this and was not in a hurry.
The girl came back through the entrance at a run, breathing hard, holding a small skin pouch. She stopped in front of Neve and held it out.
"Is this it?"
Neve looked at the contents and nodded.
She jumped once in place. Then she turned and pressed the pouch into her brother’s large hands and looked at him like she was personally responsible for his success.
Aldric looked at the herbs. Then at Neve.
"How do I use them?" he asked.
"It takes about a month to learn properly," Neve said. "The preparation, the application, when to use which part of the plant. You’d need to come back after winter when I can show you with fresh growth."
Aldric nodded slowly. He looked like he was about to stand and leave.
His sister had other ideas.
"The physician said," she started, in the specific tone of someone delivering information they personally found excellent, "that you should stay here and learn it directly. You don’t have to wait until after winter. He said a month is a month wherever you are."
"What?" Neve said.
"What?" Cael said.
"What?" Aldric said.
All three of them at the same time. Aldric’s expression had gone from quiet to something approaching panic, his hands coming up slightly in front of him.
"I... I can’t just stay somewhere else, I don’t know anyone here, I can’t—" He was starting to stutter, his large hands moving in small agitated motions.
Neve watched him.
He thought about the bear at the zoo who had once refused to come out of its sleeping area for three days because a new keeper had been assigned to the enclosure. Three days. Because someone different smelled different.
He exhaled.
"It’s fine," he said calmly. The voice he used at the zoo when an animal was working toward a full stress response, and he needed to slow it down. "You can dig a space somewhere nearby. The tiger tribe is staying for the winter. You wouldn’t be the only guests." He looked at Aldric directly. "But you need the tribe chief’s approval first. Talk to Soren. If he agrees, you can stay."
The number above Aldric’s head shifted.
{Aldric: 20%}
Fourteen per cent in one sentence.
Neve looked at it and looked away.
The girl grabbed her brother’s hand and pulled him upright. She was already planning; he could see it in how fast she was moving.
"Let’s go find the chief now," she said. "Before the festival is over. Come on."
"Right now?" Aldric said.
"Right now." She was steering him toward the entrance.
"We just sat down—"
"Brother."
Aldric went.
He paused at the entrance and looked back at Neve. A look that was brief and quiet and said something he was clearly not going to say out loud, and then he was through the entrance, and his sister was pulling him into the snow, and they were gone.
Neve sat and listened to their footsteps get quieter.
He exhaled slowly.
So a bear.
The bear was one of his. He had known from the meter and the pounding feeling in his chest that always seemed to happen when the universe was placing someone in front of him on purpose. He had tried not to think about it too hard.
He was very tired.
He leaned back against Cael.
Cael adjusted without being asked, taking the weight, his arms settling around Neve properly.
"Please, take me inside," Neve said. "I want to sleep."
"Yes," Cael said.
He stood and carried Neve to the bedroom, pulled the covers back, and tucked him in carefully, like someone who had decided this was their job and was doing it thoroughly.
"I’ll go get the pot from the festival," Cael said. "The soup is probably gone, but I should bring it back."
"Okay," Neve said.
He watched Cael leave through the bedroom door.
Then he turned over and pressed his face into the pillow and his tail moved against the sheets and the lamp glowed warm on the drawer and the snow fell outside and Neve thought about Vaelthorn somewhere in the sky heading toward a mountain and Kael holding a dragon talon at the festival and Aldric being steered through snow by his sister and of course, Kelly who was going to need somewhere to sleep and the eleven tribes still at the festival.
Twelve. Maybe thirteen, Cael had said.
"I’ll check on the festival later," he muttered.
He was asleep before he finished the sentence.