Page 28 of Roar of the Wild

I'd seen the proof of it that very evening, if I'd needed proof. She'd told the king's own council how to remake a kingdom, faced down the man who'd broken her, built a place where thediscarded could stand, and then wept in my arms because she wanted a second good man and thought the wanting made her a traitor. She could hold the whole pride's worth in her two hands and measure it true, and she had no scale that read her own. I'd watched a hundred bodies heal wrong over the years, bones that knit crooked because no one set them straight in time, and I'd learned that some breaks harden in a shape that has to be broken again before they can mend true. Hers, I feared, was one of those. I feared that before Ellie could believe what she was worth, something would have to break the old verdict clean across, and that the breaking, when it came, would not be gentle.

Outside, somewhere in the dark, my brother was walking off six months of silence, and I hoped he had the courage I'd tried to hand him. I hoped, too, that when the time came, Ellie would find the harder courage, the one none of us could give her, the one she'd have to forge herself.

The fire burned low; she slept against my heart. And I kept watch over her as I'd been keeping watch since the first night, and let her rest while she could, because I'd seen the ground shake twice now, and something in my healer's bones had started to whisper that the reckoning coming for all of us wouldn't wait much longer.

Chapter 18

TAU

Iheard about the blessing before Ellie ever told me, because a settlement is a settlement whether it's ruled by a king or not, and nothing travels faster through one than the shape of who's allowed to love whom.

The bear had stood aside. Word of it reached me as weather reaches you, a change in the pressure before the first drop falls, a lion woman mentioning it to another over the drying racks, a look thrown my way at the council that hadn't been there the day before, a new ease in how the pride watched me watch her. Daska, the great steady mountain of a man who'd crossed the world for her, had told the woman we both wanted that loving me took nothing from him. He'd opened his hands and let her go, or rather let her choose, which I was beginning to understand was a different and far braver thing.

I should have been triumphant; for a moon I'd been circling the one obstacle I couldn't charm my way past. Her fear I'd already gentled; the wall I couldn't shift was her loyalty, thrownup the day she understood the men she loved were coming for her. You cannot flirt a woman out of her loyalty. It's the one wall worth having, and I'd have thought less of her for a lower one. So when the bear tore it down himself, freely, telling her to come to me if her heart pointed my way, I ought to have felt the ground open into clear country at last.

Instead I stood at the edge of my own settlement in the blue evening and felt something closer to terror.

Because I understood, with the sharp uncomfortable clarity that lived under all my gold, that Daska had just done the cruellest kind thing a rival could do to me; he'd taken away my excuse. As long as her loyalty stood between us, I could court her and lose and tell myself the loss wasn't about me, she was spoken for, her heart was pledged, no man could compete with a bond like that. It was a comfortable thing to hide behind, that wall. Now it was gone, and if she still kept me at arm's length, there'd be no one left to blame but the man under the mane. The thing I'd spent thirty years making certain no one ever got close enough to reject.

I'd wanted the way cleared. Now it was cleared, and I could see all the way down it to the place where she might look at the real me, the one behind the performance, and find him wanting after all.

* * *

She came to my fire the next evening, which she'd never once done. In all the weeks of my courting it had been me seeking her out, me crossing the settlement to her hearth. That she came to mine, unasked, told me more than any words could have that something between us had shifted.

"You heard," she said, sitting down across the fire from me, and read the answer off my face before I'd decided what to do with it.

"The whole pride heard. You've cost the gossips a week of speculation, and they'll not forgive you soon." I kept my voice light, the old reflex, the charm sliding into place like a hand into a familiar glove. "Daska is a better man than I'd have been, in his position. I'd not have opened my hands. I'd have closed them round you and dared the world to pry them loose."

"I know." She looked at me steadily across the flames. "That's rather the difference between you, isn't it."

It landed harder than she could have known, because it was true, and because she'd said it without cruelty, as plainly as you'd name a fact about the weather. I looked at this small fierce human who saw through my gold to the grasping thing underneath and named it plainly, and I felt the familiar vertigo of being, for once, actually seen.

"He's given us his blessing," I said, and heard my own voice go careful. "So the thing that stood between us is gone. You could let me in now, Ellie, if you wanted to."

And there it was, the flinch. Small, quickly mastered, but I'd spent weeks learning her face and I caught it, the flicker of something that wasn't fear and wasn't loyalty and was, I realised slowly, worse than either.

"It's not that simple," she said.

"These things rarely are. Tell me anyway."

She turned a piece of kindling over in her fingers, offering it to the fire and taking it back twice before she spoke, and when it came it came slow, dragged up from somewhere she didn't often let anyone look.

"Daska took away the reason I was allowed to say no," she said. "And I thought, I honestly thought that would be the hard part, the loyalty. Getting past feeling like wanting you was a betrayal of him." She turned the kindling over again. "But he took that away, and I found something underneath it I didn't know was there. Something worse." She looked up at me, and her eyeswere raw in the firelight. "Even with his blessing, even knowing it takes nothing from him, even wanting you, there's a voice in me that says I don't get to have this. That a king and a bear and a wolf all loving me isn't a thing that happens to a woman like me. That it's too much, and I'm not, that I don't deserve this much good, and if I reach for it, it'll be taken away to teach me not to be so greedy."

And I sat there with the whole careful architecture of my courtship falling down around me, because I'd been trying to win a woman who was afraid of me, and I'd just discovered I was trying to win a woman who was afraid of herself.

"Ah," I said softly. "There it is."

Because I knew that voice. Goddess help me, I knew it in my own bones, the one that whispered you're wanted for the wrong reasons, that the good thing is a performance the world will see through, that you don't get to be loved for the frightened real thing under the gold. I'd spent thirty years feeding my voice with worship and calling the hunger fed. She'd spent hers refusing to reach for anything at all and calling the starvation safety. Two people running from the same wound in opposite directions, and the goddess in her terrible humour had bound us together to see if we might turn and face it at last.

So everything I'd thought I was doing had been wrong. I'd been courting her as I courted everything, with gifts and charm and the dazzle that made people feel chosen. But you cannot dazzle a woman into believing she's worthy. The dazzle is the very thing she distrusts, because a performance is what you give someone you're trying to win rather than someone you actually see. The comb, the amber, the honeyed words, every one of them had saidyou are a prize I want to claim, when the only thing that would ever reach her was the opposite. She didn't need to be wanted; she'd been wanted her whole life, wanted andtraded and claimed. She needed to be known, and to survive the knowing, and to find that the person doing the knowing stayed.

Which meant I'd have to stop performing. I'd have to let her see the man under the mane, the lonely, grasping, frightened creature I'd spent my whole reign hiding, and trust that she wouldn't flinch from him as I'd always been certain the world would. The very thing I feared most was the only currency she'd take.

"You think you don't deserve it," I said slowly, feeling my way, setting down the charm like a weapon I was choosing not to carry. "And I've been trying to convince you that you do, with gifts and pretty words, as though worth were a case a man argues well enough to win." I shook my head. "I've been a fool. You can't be argued into it. I know that, because I've spent thirty years trying to argue myself into believing anyone could want the thing I actually am, and no amount of gold ever did it." Her eyes came up to mine, startled. Holding them cost me something, but I set the gold down anyway and let her see. "I'm not going to try to convince you you're worthy, Ellie. All I'm going to do is stay. However long it takes you to believe it, whether you ever let me into your bed or not, I'll stay, and keep seeing you, the real you, and go nowhere. Because that's the one thing no one ever did for either of us. They wanted us, and then they left when we stopped being what they wanted. I'm not going to leave."

She stared at me across the fire like I'd struck her, the light catching the wet in her eyes. Neither of us reached for a word. What passed between us instead had no gold in it at all, two frightened people recognising the same wound across a fire and deciding, tentatively, not to run.