Page 16 of Roar of the Wild

I knew that exact look from the receiving end. I'd worn the invisible version of it for two years, the woman at the edge of every gathering that used to be hers, the ex-fiancée nobody quite knew how to place, present at the party and belonging to none of it. And something in me that had spent two years being precisely that woman stood up inside my chest and flatly refused to watch it happen to a stranger who'd done nothing to earn it but exist in a world that only valued her as long as a man did.

I went and got Megan, because Megan understood politics in a way I never would.

"He's made a disaster," I said, crouching by our shelter where she sat mending a tear in her ruined coat with a bone needle she'd charmed off a lion woman. Her colour was better these days, my cooking and the safety of a settled place doing their slow work, and the sharp competent mind that had run Nathan's professional life was visibly glad of a problem to sink into. "He freed the harem women out of some noble impulse and stripped them of every scrap of standing they had. They've got nothing now. No place, no protection, no way to feed themselves thatdoesn't depend on a man's goodwill. He's swapped one cage for a cliff."

"Classic," Megan said, not looking up from her stitching. "Grand gesture, no follow-through. Nathan does the same thing, except Nathan does it on purpose because the gesture's the point and the people are incidental." She tied off her thread and bit it clean. "So what's the fix? Because you've already thought of one, I can see it on your face. You've got the look you get before you rearrange someone's whole kitchen."

So I laid it out for her.

I'd been building it in my head all afternoon, as I used to build a menu, starting from what the room actually needed and working backward to how you'd deliver it. The freed women needed standing that couldn't be taken away by any king's whim, which meant standing that didn't come from a king at all. It had to come from somewhere structural, somewhere woven into how the pride actually decided things, so that a woman's worth was a fact of the settlement's bones and not a gift she held at someone's pleasure. And I'd spent eight days watching how the pride ran, which was to say it ran entirely through Tau, every decision, every dispute, every question of stores and hunting and who-got-what funnelled up to one golden man on a mound and back down again, with no one in between who had a voice that mattered.

"A council," I said. "Chosen speakers for each group: lions, lone wolves, other cats, hunters, hearth-keepers and the women he just cut loose. Give them a real say and their worth stops belonging to the king. It comes from what they do and what they know, not whose bed they're attached to."

Megan had stopped stitching entirely. She looked at me as she used to look at a proposal that was going to work, a sharp assessing brightness coming into her face.

"That's not a fix for the harem women," she said slowly. "Ellie, love, that's a whole new way of running the place. You're not patching his mistake, you're rebuilding the whole thing, do you understand what you're actually proposing? You're proposing to hand a king's power to a committee, in a culture that's run on kings since long before your ice age started."

"I know." I kept my voice level and my hands busy with the fire, because the alternative was letting her see how much the knowing weighed.

"Men have died for less."

"I know that too." I did know it. I'd known it since the idea first turned over in me, and it frightened me exactly as much as it had then, because the old Ellie, the numb one, the one who'd spent two years making herself small enough to give no one a reason to look at her, that Ellie would never in her life have stood up in a strange and dangerous place and proposed to remake how it governed itself. But that Ellie was thinning at the edges, worn down by cooking-fires and stolen cakes and a golden king who liked me better for saying no. What was left underneath was somebody I was still getting to know, somebody who apparently could not watch a woman with no place at any table and do nothing about it. "But he's already broken the old way, Megan. He did that this morning. The pieces are already on the ground. The only question now is whether they get put back the way they were or built into something better, and I'd rather be the one holding the plan when he goes looking for one."

Megan was quiet for a moment, and something moved behind her eyes that I was learning to watch for, the shadow that came over her whenever a thing struck too close to her own situation. She set the mended coat down in her lap and looked at me with a directness the old Megan would never have allowed herself.

"You know what you're describing," she said quietly. "A place where a woman's worth doesn't depend on whose she is. Whereshe isn't a thing that stops mattering the day a man decides he's finished with her." Her hand drifted, without her seeming to notice, to the small curve of her belly that the loose hides still hid. "I spent my whole career making myself indispensable to a man who could discard me the moment I stopped being useful to him. That cliff, I know exactly what it looks like, Ellie. I've been standing on the edge of it for years and calling it a career." She picked the coat back up, and her voice went brisk again, the mask sliding into place, but not before I'd seen what was under it. "So yes, build your council, and build it well, because there's more than one kind of woman in this settlement with no place of her own to stand, and some of us are better at hiding it than others."

I reached over and squeezed her wrist, and she let me, and neither of us said the thing we were both thinking, which was that the baby she carried would need such a world more than any of us.

* * *

Getting the plan into Tau's head was its own expedition, because I had perhaps two hundred words of his language and the idea I was carrying was made of nothing but abstractions, representation, standing, structural worth, none of which you can point at or mime.

So I did it the only way I could; I did it over food, and I did it with help.

I asked Tau to bring Sawa, because Sawa spoke enough of my wolf-tongue to bridge the places my lion gave out, and because I'd worked something out about that hard-faced woman over the days of watching her watch me: she was the only person in the whole settlement who ran the numbers on things, who saw the pride as a system with parts that had to fit rather than a stage for a king to be adored on. If anyone was going to understand what I meant by standing woven into the bones of a place, it would beher, even if she'd sooner spit than admit I'd been the one to say it.

They came to my fire at dusk, the two of them, and I fed them first, because feeding people is the one argument that needs no translation. I'd made the seed cakes and a good rich stew of the day's hunt, and I put it into their hands warm before I said a single word about councils. I watched the ordinary animal comfort of good food do what it always does, soften the edges, open the ears, turn wary strangers into people willing to sit a while and listen.

Then I built the idea between the three of us, out of broken lion and broken wolf and a great deal of pointing. Nothing I'd done since coming through the stones had been harder or more worthwhile.

I used the food to explain it, because the food was what I had. I laid out the cakes in a circle on a flat stone, and I named them as I went, in whatever words I could find, this one the lions, this one the lone wolves, this one the other cats, and one each for the hunters, the hearth women, and the ones he'd freed that morning. Each speaks for their own, I told them. And then I put my hand flat in the centre of the circle, over the empty space all the cakes faced. I said the word I'd learned for the mound, the word for the king, the word for the deciding, then I took my hand away and gestured at all the cakes at once, at the circle, at the whole of them together, so they'd understand: all of them deciding as one, and no single one of them deciding for the rest.

Sawa went very still.

I watched her get it, watched the idea land behind her sharp dark eyes and catch, watched her turn it over as I'd seen her turn over a hunt, testing it for the places it would break. She fired questions at me through her broken wolf and Tau's translating, hard practical questions, the questions of a woman who'd spent her life keeping a settlement alive: who chooses the speakers,what happens when they disagree, what stops it becoming just another way for the strong to eat the weak. And I answered as best I could across the gulf of the languages, and where I didn't have an answer I said so, because I'd learned long ago that pretending to know things you don't is how kitchens burn down.

And somewhere in the middle of it, without either of us deciding to, it stopped being me explaining a plan to Sawa and became the two of us building one together.

"The strongest hunter will want the loudest voice," she said through Tau, jabbing a finger at my circle of cakes. "That kind always does. What stops him simply taking it, as the strong always take?"

I thought about it properly, because it deserved a proper answer, and because a plan that fell apart the first time a strong man leaned on it wasn't worth the cakes I'd built it out of. "The others," I said at last, moving the cakes closer together. "One strong voice against one weak voice, the strong wins, every time. One strong voice against all the others together, in the open, where everyone can see him trying to take more than his share..." I pushed the single cake back from the rest. "That's a far harder thing to do; that's the whole point of doing it in the open. He can bully one woman at a private fire, but he can't bully the whole pride while it watches him try."

Sawa was quiet for a moment. Then she made a low sound in her throat that I was coming to understand was as close as she came to approval. She reached out and shifted two of my cakes herself, moving the freed women's place a little nearer the centre, the hunters' a little further out, and just like that, without a word about it, she'd stopped picking my plan apart and started making it better.

She saw things I hadn't. She knew the pride's actual fault lines, who resented whom, which of the freed women had the standing to speak and which would be shouted down, where thereal power sat that no tradition acknowledged. I had the shape of the thing and she had the substance of the place, and between us, over the cooling cakes and Tau's careful patient translating, we made something neither of us could have made alone; Tau himself said little. He mostly watched, his gold-brown eyes moving between the two of us with an expression I couldn't quite read, and it was only much later that I understood what it was: a man watching his sister, who had been passed over for leadership her whole life because she'd been born the wrong sex, come alive over a plan that would finally give her a place her worth had always deserved.

By the time the fire burned low we had the bones of it. A council of speakers, one from each group of the pride, the freed women among them by right. The king at its head but not above it, his voice one voice, weightier than the others but not the whole. Disputes settled in the open, in front of everyone, so power had nowhere to hide. It was rough and it was incomplete and it would need a hundred adjustments before it worked, but it was real, it was possible, and it was built to make sure that no woman in this settlement ever again had her worth handed to her or taken from her by a single man on a mound.