I Eat Monster and Gain Powers

Chapter 15: Just Who Is He

The light was going by the time he finished with his leg.

He sat near the fire at the mouth of the cave with his trousers cut open above the knee and worked the mush of crushed leaves and root into the wound the way he had worked it into every wound for seven months, not because it was medicine, not because he had any idea whether it helped, but because doing something was better than doing nothing and because it was the only thing he had. The claw marks ran deep, four of them, still weeping, and every time his fingers pressed the mush into the torn edges his vision went white at the corners and a sound came out of him that he did not bother to hold back.

His arm was worse in a different way. The bite had gone through muscle and the muscle did not want to close. He packed it the same as the leg, working through the pain in short bursts, stopping when his hands started shaking too badly to be useful, waiting, starting again. He wrapped both in the leaves he had cut into strips, layering them thick, binding them with vine pulled tight enough to hold and not so tight it cut off the blood.

The whole time, some part of his mind was thirty feet away.

She was still where he had laid her, near the back wall on the bed of hide and dried grass, unconscious, her chest rising and falling slow and even in the firelight. He had cleaned the wound on her arm before he had touched his own, had packed it the same way, wrapped her shoulder and her knee where the wolves had caught her before he ever reached the clearing. His hands had not stopped shaking the entire time he worked on her, and it was not from the pain in his leg.

He wanted to look at her the way he wanted to breathe.

He hated it. He hated that some animal circuit in him had decided she was his the moment he killed for her, hated that every time his eyes drifted to where she lay he had to drag them back to his own ruined leg by force, hated the low insistent pull of it sitting in his gut like a second hunger stacked on top of the first. He finished the last of the wrapping on his arm and sat there in the firelight, breathing hard, and did not let himself look at her again until he heard her stir.

Her eyes opened slow, unfocused, then sharp all at once, the way eyes go when the body remembers danger before the mind catches up.

He was already staring at her.

He had not meant to be. He had meant to be doing something else, checking the fire, checking the meat, anything, but the sound of her breath changing had pulled his head around before he could stop it, and now he was crouched by the fire with his ruined leg stretched out in front of him, staring at her the way a starving man stares at food he has decided not to eat yet, and he could see the exact moment she understood that.

She went very still.

He reached for the leaf cup beside him, the water in it gone lukewarm, and held it out toward her without moving any closer. She looked at it. She looked at him. She did not move.

He grunted, low in his throat, and brought his own cupped hand to his mouth in a rough mime of drinking, then jerked his chin at the cup he held out. She watched him do it. Her eyes went from his hand to his face to the cup and back again, calculating something, and after a long moment she reached out and took it from him, careful not to let her fingers touch his.

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She did not drink right away. She looked around the cave instead.

She saw the fire first, small and banked low at the mouth of the cave, throwing orange light up the low stone ceiling. Then, to her left, the meat, dark strips of it hanging from cords tied off on outcrops of rock, more meat than she had ever seen stored in one place outside a keep’s larder. Then, past the fire near the entrance, the wolves.

All three of them. Whole, or close to it, dragged and stacked just inside the mouth of the cave where the cold would keep them from turning before he had time to deal with them properly.

She had seen the wolves take down a war party of six once, three summers ago, from a distance, through a spyglass, and it had taken all six of them working together with spears and a net and it had still cost two lives. She did not know a man alive who could kill three of them with his hands and a bone knife and then drag all three of them, plus himself, back to a den on legs that looked like they should not be holding him up at all.

She looked back at him.

His hair hung matted and filthy past his jaw. His beard had gone past unkempt into something closer to feral, thick and tangled and streaked with dried blood that was not entirely his own. His clothes were hide, badly cut, badly stitched, the seams uneven in a way that told her whoever had made them had never been taught and had not cared. He looked like something that had crawled up out of the ground of Edelmere itself, some old story told to frighten children, and yet.

Yet he had killed the wolves. Yet he had bandaged her shoulder, her knee, the gash on her hand, wrapped them clumsy and wrong, the leaves bunched too thick in some places and not thick enough in others, and looking at the mess of it now she felt something close to laughter rise up in her chest, entirely at odds with everything else she was feeling.

Whoever he was, he had been surviving out here. Not just surviving. This was not a man rationing his last scraps and waiting to die. This was a man with meat to spare, a den dug in and defended, wolves stacked at his door like trophies. This was the entrance to Edelmere, where the trees still had names and the monsters still had shapes a person could fight. Whatever he was, he was thriving in it, and she could not for the life of her understand how a human man had done that alone.

Just who was he.

He was still watching her.

He was looking at her skin now, the line of her throat above the torn collar, and he wanted to touch it again. He wanted to cross the three feet between them and put his hand back on her cheek and let it go lower this time, feel the soft of her throat, her collarbone, learn the whole shape of her under his palm. The wanting was not vague and it was not gentle. He wanted to pin her down and take her right there on the hide and grass, wanted it in his teeth and in his groin and in the flat of his stomach, and it did not care that she was frightened, did not care that she was hurt, only that she was soft and close and his by every law the animal half of him understood.

His jaw worked like he wanted to say something and had nothing to say it with. His hand twitched at his side, and it took everything he had to keep it there instead of moving.

Then he growled, short and rough, and turned away from her and dropped onto his hands and the one leg that would still take his weight and crawled out of the cave into the dark, growling low the whole way, like he was arguing with something only he could hear.

He came back a few minutes later with two flat leaves in his hands, folded into rough plates.

He set one down in front of her. A single piece of meat, cooked, still steaming faintly in the cold air. He kept the other for himself, and the portion on it was not a single piece of anything. It was ten pounds of meat if it was an ounce, stacked high on the leaf, and he settled back against the cave wall with his bad leg out straight and started eating like a man who had earned it, tearing into it with his hands and his teeth, not looking at her once while he did it, though she could tell, somehow, that he wanted to.