Page 18 of Roar of the Wild

Of all the freed women, she was the one my grand gesture had cost the most, because she was the one with the most to lose and the most she couldn't say. The others had lost standing; Eleya had lost cover. The harem tradition, whatever cruelty was in it, had given her a reason to be near Sawa that no one questioned, a consort of the king kept close to the king's own sister was simply the shape of things, and no one looked twice. Dissolve the tradition, and the shape came apart, and the two of them were left holding a secret with no structure left to hide it inside. I'd protected them for years by looking the other way. In one impulsive morning of doing the honest thing, I'd stripped the walls off the very thing my dishonesty had been sheltering.

I found her at the edge of the women's fires, apart as she always kept herself now, and I sat down across from her without ceremony, king and consort both gone out of it, just two people who shared a dangerous secret.

"I owe you an apology," I said. "The truth is I didn't think it through. When I dissolved the harem, I was thinking of the wrong she was speaking against, and never once stopped to reckon what the tradition had been quietly buying you and Sawa. I took your cover and gave you nothing in its place. I'm sorry for it."

Eleya kept her face turned to the fire, letting the apology sit unanswered between us. She'd never been easy with me, even in the years I'd sheltered her, because she'd spent them braced for the day I might change my mind and demand what a king could demand, and no amount of my forbearance had everquite convinced her the demand wasn't coming. It shamed me, that bracing; it was the clearest proof I'd ever had of what the tradition truly was, whatever soft words we dressed it in.

"You're not going to tell anyone," she said, and there was no asking in it, only the thing she'd been most afraid of since the harem fell, laid bare.

"I've kept your secret for three years without once being asked to," I said. "I'm hardly going to spill it now that it's more dangerous, not less." I looked at her until she looked back at me. "Listen to me, Eleya. The council Ellie built, it changes things. There's going to be room in this pride, before long, for kinds of standing that never existed here before, standing that doesn't depend on whose bed a woman is or isn't in." I chose the next words with care, because they were the first time either of us had ever come close to naming the thing aloud. "A day may come when you and Sawa don't have to hide inside a lie of mine. I can't promise it soon. But it's closer today than it was a moon ago, and the woman who made it closer is the one you've been glaring at across the settlement."

Something moved in her face, some hope so long denied it had gone painful to feel. She mastered it, as she mastered everything.

"She doesn't know," Eleya said. "About Sawa and me, I mean."

"No, she doesn't, and she won't learn it from me." I got to my feet. "But I'll tell you what I've watched, for whatever it's worth. That woman took one look at a pride full of people with no place to stand, and built them one, at cost to herself, expecting nothing back. Whatever you've decided she is, I'd think again. She might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to the two of you, and you're spending your fear on the wrong target."

I left her there by the fire with more to think about than she'd had before, and I hoped it was a kindness, though with Eleya you could never be sure whether you'd given comfort or simply a new shape of dread.

Walking back through the settlement, I turned over the strange arithmetic of it. For three years I'd protected those two women at a cost to myself that no one would ever know, because the whole point of the protection was that no one could know. A king whose consort never once shared his furs was a king with something wrong in him, and the prides talked, and the talk had followed me for years, soft, wounding little questions about whether the golden king was less than golden underneath, whether the mane covered some lack; I'd let them talk. I'd worn the doubt as the price of keeping Sawa and Eleya safe, and I'd never once told a living soul the truth of why, because a good thing done for the sake of being seen to do it isn't the same good thing at all.

I'd hidden that piece of myself even more carefully than the loneliness, the fact that under all the performance, in the one place it truly counted, I was better than the man I let the world see. I gave the pride a spoiled, charming, faintly ridiculous king because that king was safe, and I kept the honourable one hidden where no one could turn him against me. It was, I saw now, walking through my own settlement in the dark, the exact mirror of what Ellie did. She hid a woman of formidable worth inside a captive who apologised for taking up space; I hid a man of quiet honour inside a king who apologised for nothing. Two people who'd spent their whole lives making certain no one ever saw the best of them, because the best of them was the part that could be broken.

No wonder the bond had chosen her for me. The goddess, it seemed, had a crueller sense of humour than I'd ever credited her with, and a kinder one.

* * *

Ellie herself was the reckoning I couldn't manage at all, which was a novelty, since managing people was the one thing I'd always been able to do in my sleep.

I found her at her own fire that night, as I found her most nights now, drawn there as the whole pride was drawn there, because her fire had become the warm centre the mound itself used to be. She was teaching a knot of lion children a game with pebbles, losing to them theatrically, and the sound of their delight carried across the settlement. I stood at the edge of the firelight for a moment before she saw me and simply watched her, and the wanting rose in me so hard and so total that it frightened me the way deep water frightens a creature that can't swim.

This was the thing I'd spent thirty years arranging my whole life to avoid. Every person who'd ever wanted me had wanted the king, the gold, the stores, the protection, the reflected warmth of standing near the mound. I'd made my peace with it. I'd told myself that being wanted for the crown was better than not being wanted at all, and I'd become so good at the performance that I'd nearly convinced myself the hollow underneath didn't ache. And now here was a woman who wanted nothing I'd built my whole defence around, who'd refused the king in front of the entire pride, who turned my gifts into trades so she'd owe me nothing, who looked past all the gold and asked, at a cooking-fire, whether there was a man underneath, and the terror of it was exactly proportional to how badly I wanted her to find one worth keeping.

Because if she wanted the king, I knew precisely what to do. I'd been handling that my whole life. But a woman who wanted the man, a woman I'd have to stand in front of with the performance stripped away, letting her see the frightened, lonely, unglamorous truth of me and simply hoping it was enough, that was a country I had never once set foot in, and I was thirty years old and terrified to learn I didn't know the way.

She looked up then and saw me, and something crossed her face that wasn't the wariness of the first days, some warmer andmore complicated thing. She nodded me toward the log beside her fire in a way she never would have a fortnight ago.

I went, of course I did. I'd have crossed the whole cold width of the world to sit at that fire, and the knowledge of it sat in my chest like a swallowed coal.

We didn't speak much. She went back to losing at pebbles. I let a small bold cub climb into my lap and fall asleep there, and Ellie glanced at me doing it with an expression I tucked away to take out and examine later, when I was alone and could afford to hope; it was almost peace. For a man who'd never had the thing he actually wanted, sitting at her fire in the ordinary dark, wanting it, was nearly enough on its own.

I let myself imagine it, just for the length of that firelit hour, which was a dangerous thing for a king to do and I did it anyway; a life where she stayed. Where the wariness went out of her by slow degrees, as the tension had gone out of her shoulders under the comb, until one day she looked at me and there was no ledger in it at all, only the simple warmth I saw her give the children and the old lion and the wolf-woman she guarded. Where I got to be, at last, the man under the gold to someone who'd wanted that man before she'd ever seen the crown. I knew better than to build on it. A king who has spent his life being wanted for the wrong reasons learns not to trust the first person who seems to want him for the right ones. But the imagining was sweet, and I was so unused to sweetness that I let it run longer than was wise, and that was my mistake, because I was still inside it, still warm with the foolish hope of it, when the world sent its answer to whether I was allowed to keep her.

And then the runner came, and the hour ended.

He came in hard from the north-west edge of the settlement, a young lone-wolf scout still half in his skin, breathless, and the whole easy warmth of the fire went cold as he blurted his news across the mound to whoever would carry it to the king.Strangers were coming, a party of them, up the corridor from the north-west, moving with purpose, tracking a scent trail days old. Too few for raiders, and too deliberate. Men who knew exactly what they were following, and were following it here, to my pride, to my fire, to the woman losing at pebbles beside me.

I looked at Ellie, and I watched her catch the change in the air before she understood a word of it, her chef's-quick eyes going from the runner's face to mine and back, reading trouble as she read everything, fast and whole.

"What is it?" she said, in her careful lion. "Tau, what's happened?"

And I understood, with the cold clean certainty of a man watching a door open onto weather he'd known was coming, that whoever these strangers were, they hadn't crossed a corridor of ice-age steppe tracking a days-old trail for anyone but her, and that the small, hard-won, firelit almost-peace I'd been foolish enough to sit in was already over.

Chapter 13

DASKA

Ifelt her before I saw the settlement, as I'd felt her for weeks, the bond pulling steady in my chest, warmer and stronger with every mile we closed, until on the last morning it was so bright and so near that I could have wept from the pull of it. We'd been six weeks on the road after her. Six weeks of following a thread through country that tried to kill us a dozen ways, of Rivik tracking, of Dev limping gamely on a leg that had knitted crooked, of Nathan chafing at every delay and being overruled at every turn because the one who could actually feel the direction of her was me, and I'd not once let the bearing waver. The trail had died at a river weeks ago; the bond never had. It had pulled me east and south through the thawing steppe like a lodestone that only pointed one way, and now, cresting a long rise in the grey spring light, I finally saw the thing it had been pointing at.