Page 12 of Roar of the Wild

There was no cruelty in it, none of the sharp bark of a man covering a wound to his pride. It came up out of him rich and utterly genuine, transforming the whole hard golden magnificence of his face into something younger and warmer and, God help me, even more difficult to look at. He laughed like I'd handed him the best gift he'd had in years, and he pressed one enormous hand flat to his chest as if the laugh had caught him somewhere vulnerable, and he said something to me in his own tongue that I couldn't understand but that didn't sound remotely like a threat. Then he tried again in broken wolf-words, shaking his head, still grinning.

"No," he agreed, delighted, as if I'd said something wonderful. "You say to me, no." He tapped his own chest, then pointed at me, and made a gesture I couldn't parse, something open-handed and almost helpless. "This is good, I think."

Good?I had refused this man in front of his entire kingdom and he was standing there beaming at me like I'd performed a marvellous trick, and the whole careful architecture of my understanding, the certain knowledge of exactly how men behaved when you denied them, cracked straight down themiddle. I had no framework for this; none of my hard-won rules applied. I'd been braced so hard for the blow that its absence felt like missing a step in the dark, that lurch of the stomach when the ground isn't where your foot expected it.

Beside me, Megan made a small sound that might have been a laugh smothered flat by terror.

He crouched then, this enormous golden creature, folding all that height down until he was closer to my level, which no man deciding my worth had ever bothered to do. Up close he smelled of woodsmoke and sun-warmed skin and some resin I couldn't name, and his eyes moved over my face with an open, frank curiosity that had no calculation in it that I could find. I hunted for the calculation, believe me. There's always an angle; kindness is a transaction and I have spent my whole life learning to read the invoice before I accept the gift. But he just looked at me like I was the most interesting thing to happen to him in a decade, and said, carefully, in his handful of my words: "You are safe in this place. No..." He mimed the bound wrists, then made a sharp cutting gesture, dismissing them. "No more of this. No selling. You are safe now."

Then he straightened, turned, and barked an order to a woman at the edge of the crowd, tall, hard-faced, watching me with a suspicion I'd have found more comprehensible than the king's delight, and within moments someone was cutting the cord from my wrists, and someone else was doing the same for Megan. The raw skin underneath sang with the sudden freedom of it.

The hard-faced woman didn't like it. She obeyed him, whatever the order had been, but her flat dark eyes stayed on me the whole time with an expression I knew intimately, because I'd worn it myself for two years: the look of someone braced for a con, watching a newcomer they've already decided is working an angle. She thought I was a schemer. She thought I'd playedthe refusal as some clever gambit to hook a king, and she was standing guard over him against me. In any other circumstance I might have been insulted. As it was, I felt an odd flicker of something almost like respect, because whoever she was, she loved that golden idiot enough to make an enemy of a stranger on his behalf inside a single morning, and loyalty like that was rare enough that I'd learned to notice it wherever it showed.

I stood rubbing my wrists and waited for the catch. I was still waiting for it when he did the thing that undid me more thoroughly than any cruelty could have.

He brought me a gift.

He crossed to a bundle one of his people had set down, came back, and crouched again, holding it out to me on both broad palms like an offering, a folded length of hide, worked butter-soft and lined with thick pale fur, the sort of thing that took a skilled woman days to make and that would keep the cold off a body through the hardest night. A cloak. He'd claimed me, been refused, and answered by making sure I wouldn't be cold.

"For you," he said, and grinned, and the grin was the worst part, because it was hopeful. This golden king with a kingdom at his feet was offering me a fur like a boy offering a wildflower, hoping I might not send it back.

I looked at the cloak; I looked at his ridiculous hopeful face. And something happened in my chest that I had no defences prepared for, because I'd spent years armouring myself against cruelty in all its shapes, and I had absolutely nothing ready forkindness offered to someone who'd just told you no.

Don't,I told myself, hard.Don't you dare fall for this. You don't know what this is. Beautiful men who give you things always want something, and this one's already told the whole world he owns you. A warm cloak doesn't unmake that. Nathan gave you a bracelet.

The thought steadied me, the sharp jolt of it like cold water flung in my face. Nathan had given me a bracelet, delicate and thoughtful, and I'd worn it every day and called it love. It had turned out to be a leash with a pretty clasp. I had let a small gift make me believe in a large lie once already. I would not do it again on a mound of dirt at the edge of the world because a stranger with a beautiful smile had worked out that the fastest way past my guard was through decency instead of force.

But I was cold. And Megan, beside me, was colder, and carrying more than herself through it, and a warm fur was a warm fur whatever the man's intentions.

So I took it, not for him, and not because the grin had done anything to me, but because refusing warmth to spite a king was the sort of pride I could no longer afford. I took it and I wrapped it round Megan's shoulders first, in front of everyone, before I let a scrap of it touch me. Let him make of that what he liked.

His face changed when I did it. The grin didn't fade so much as deepen into something more thoughtful, and he watched me tuck the fur around another woman before myself with the unnerving attention of a man revising an estimate upward, a man shown something he hadn't expected, who'd found it more interesting than compliance would have been.

I didn't want to be interesting to him, because interesting was dangerous, and interesting was a hook.

"What is your name?" he asked then, slowly, in careful wolf-words, and it stopped me, because it was a question, an actual question, the first anyone in this new claiming had bothered to ask me, noyou are mine, noyou will, only the asking of who I was.

I should have refused him that too, and I fully meant to. But five days of being cargo with no name had worn something raw in me, and being asked, being asked anything, being treated forone moment as a person with an answer worth having, got under my guard before I could stop it.

"Ellie," I said. "My name is Ellie."

He said it back to me, turning it over in his mouth like something he was tasting, getting the shape of it slightly wrong and then right. "Ellie." He smiled again, softer this time, and touched his own chest. "Tau."

I hadn't wanted his name; a name made him a person, and a person was so much harder to keep at the safe cold distance I needed. But it was too late; I had it now, as surely as I had the fur round Megan's shoulders and the ache of the cut cord fading from my wrists and the terrible dangerous knowledge that the most powerful man for a hundred miles had answered my defiance with delight instead of punishment.

I pulled the loose edge of the fur across my own shoulders at last and stood in the ruin of everything I thought I knew about men, in a warm enormous settlement where I couldn't speak a word to anyone, claimed by a golden king I'd refused and who seemed to like me better for the refusing.

The fur was warm. That was the treacherous thing about it, the small physical fact my body accepted before my mind could file its objections, it was warm, and I'd been cold for five days, and the animal part of me that just wanted to survive didn't care in the slightest about the politics of who'd provided the warmth. I made myself hold both truths at once, as I was learning to hold most things now. The cloak was a kindness and the cloak was a claim. Tau's delight was genuine, and Tau's delight was still the delight of a man who'd decided I was his before he knew my name. Both things were true at once. I would not let the warmth talk me out of the wariness, and I would not let the wariness make me refuse the warmth. Somewhere between the two was the narrow ledge a woman like me had to walk, and I'd gotten good at walking it.

Somewhere behind me, five days and a river away, three men were coming to find me. I held on to that; Daska, who checked I was safe before he ever reached for me, who'd made himself my home. Rivik, whose song I'd carried across a killing river like a coal in cupped hands. And Dev, small and stubborn, twice as loyal as anyone had a right to be, who'd have talked himself hoarse arguing they should turn back for me; all of them were coming. However long it took, however far Karik had carried me, they were putting one foot in front of the other in my direction right now, and that certainty was the one solid thing left in a morning that had knocked every other one out from under me.

Whatever this golden king thought he'd bought, I wasn't for sale. I was already spoken for, by men who'd never once decided a single thing about my life without asking me first. Tau just didn't know it yet.

And Tau, King of the Mound, watched me pull his gift around myself and looked, for all the world, like a man who had just decided he was in absolutely no hurry at all.

Chapter 9

TAU