Page 31 of Roar of the Wild

She wouldn't wait for Daska. We were an hour's hard walk from the settlement and the blood was coming freely enough that she planted me down in the lee of a boulder, tore into the healer's satchel Daska never let her leave without, and set about closing me up herself with a grim competence that would have made the bear proud.

I should have stopped her; a lesser wound, another day, I'd have waited for Daska and kept the distance I needed. But the bleeding wanted seeing to. She had the skill of it from a summer at the healer's side, and there was no good reason to refuse her that didn't give away the real reason, so I sat with my back to the cold stone and let her lift my torn hide away and put her hands on me.

That was the mistake that unmade all the others.

Because her hands were steady. They moved over my ribs with the clean sureness of a woman who'd found her footing in a task, cleaning the shallow gash the horn had left, pressing a poultice she'd bruised between her palms to the edges of it, binding it with strips of hide while she muttered under her breath in the three-tongued road-language about stubborn wolves who ran at bison. And I sat there under her hands with my control burning down like a tallow wick, because I'd spent six months not letting myself be touched by her and now she was touching me everywhere the wound demanded, her fingers warm against my bare skin, her face bent close to her work, close enough that I could feel her breath, close enough that the bond had stopped pulling and started to howl.

She didn't notice at first; she was deep in the task, in the safe country of being useful, where I think she felt worthiest and least afraid.

I held still for it the way a man holds still for a thing that could kill him if he flinches. Six months I'd kept a careful distance, choosing where I stood at every fire so she couldn't touch me by accident, taking the far end of every shared task, and now she was leaned in over me with her hands moving on my bare skin and there was nowhere left to put the wanting. The bond had gone past pulling. It roared in me, a physical thing, every point where her fingers pressed lighting up like a coal fanned to white, and I sat with my jaw locked, my hands flat on the cold ground, and rode it out as I'd ridden pain and grief before, by sheer bloody-minded refusal to move. Daska's blessing beat at me the whole time;The door is open, brother. You could turn your head three inches and be home.And still I held, because a door being open isn't the same as being welcome through it, and I'd sooner burn to the wick than take from her a thing she hadn't freely chosen to give.

But a body knows things a mind hasn't caught up to, and hers began to catch, her hands slowing on my ribs, her breath changing, the muttering trailing off into a silence that had a different weight to it. She went still with her palm flat against my side, over the bandage, over the hammer of my heart, and I watched her feel that heartbeat and understand that it wasn't the wound making it race.

Then she looked up at me; her face was a handspan from mine. I could see the flecks of amber in her dark eyes, the freckle at the corner of her mouth I'd spent a shameful number of nights on the road pretending not to have memorised, the pulse picking up speed at her throat, and she leaned in. Her body did it before her mind could stop it, a small helpless tilt toward me, her eyes dropping to my mouth, and everything in me that had beenholding for six months came loose at once, the bond roaring, Daska's blessing flung open behind me like a door in a gale, my whole starved heart lunging toward the one thing I'd sworn never to take.

I could have kissed her; she was leaning in, and the door was open, and Daska himself had told me the silence was the coward's road. Every reason I'd built to keep away had been dismantled, by the bear, by the bond, by the small tilting weight of her leaning toward my mouth in the bright afternoon. There was nothing left to stop me but the one thing I hadn't reckoned with, which was her.

Because she caught herself. I felt the exact moment she surfaced out of what her body wanted and back into the part of her that Nathan had taught to flinch, and the fear that crossed her face wasn't fear of me at all. It was fear of herself, of what she'd felt, of a want that in her ledger still read as a betrayal or a greed she'd be punished for. She pulled back as though she'd touched the fire, colour flooding her face, her hands coming off my skin like it had burned her.

"I have to..." She was already up, already gathering the satchel with hands that shook, already retreating into whatever safe cold place she went when feeling got too large. "The others will need, I should, you're bound up now, you'll keep till Daska. I have to go."

"Ellie." I didn't move to stop her. I'd never once make her stay. "You didn't do anything wrong."

But she was already going, half-running back toward the distant line of the hunt, fleeing the thing she'd felt as though it were the bull come back for her, and I sat alone against the cold stone with her poultice on my ribs and her touch still burning on my skin and understood, with the bleak clarity of a man at the end of his own strength, that I could not do this any longer.

I couldn't keep the silence and stay near her. I couldn't watch her lean toward me and flee from herself and pretend I was protecting her by staying quiet, when the quiet was its own slow cruelty to us both. Daska had been right, and right for weeks. A bond kept secret to spare her was just one more man deciding her life without asking, and I was done being that man, even if the telling cost me everything. She deserved the truth, and the choice that came with it, and I'd been calling my cowardice a kindness for six months because the truth terrified me more than any bison ever could.

I would tell her, tonight, if I could find the courage, and soon after if I couldn't.

I got myself up off the cold ground, her binding tight around my ribs, and started the long walk back toward the settlement with my resolve set harder than it had been since I'd left my pack. And when I came at last to the edge of camp in the failing light, footsore, the day's blood dried on my hide, sure at last of what I meant to do, I found the one man in the world who already knew exactly what I carried standing squarely in my path, gold in the dusk, waiting for me.

It was Tau who barred my way. He looked at me with those unreadable amber eyes, the king who missed nothing, and the set of him said this was no chance meeting, and that whatever he'd come to say, he'd been waiting for me a long time.

"Wolf," he said. "You and I need to talk."

Chapter 20

TAU

I'd been waiting at the edge of camp for the better part of the afternoon, and a king does not wait for anyone, which tells you something about the state the wolf had reduced me to. I could have summoned him; that was the maddening thing. I could have sent a runner and had him brought to my fire, and instead I'd stood out here in the lengthening shadows like a lovesick boy, because what I had to say to Rivik was not a thing a king says from a mound with his people watching. It was a thing one frightened man says to another, in the open, where no one could see either of us flinch.

He came out of the dusk looking like a man who'd been in a fight and lost, though I knew from the runners that the hunt had gone well and the meat was already coming in. The blood on his hide was his own, a binding showing at his ribs where something had opened him. He walked with the careful gait of the freshly wounded. And under all of it, plain to me now in a way it hadn't been a fortnight ago, he carried the other wound,the one that didn't show, the bond I'd felt on Ellie the night I'd finally understood what the wolf was sitting on.

He stopped when he saw me barring his path, and his whole body changed, the exhaustion hardening into the wariness of an alpha who's found a rival between himself and his den.

I understood the wariness, and I even respected it, but it wasn't what had brought me out here to wait half an afternoon in the cold. What had brought me was a thing I'd only recently learned to name in myself. I'd spent my whole life being managed. Handlers, advisors, the old men of the pride, my own dead father before them, all of them arranging the truth of my life at a careful distance from me, deciding what the king should know and when he should know it, feeding me the shape of things they'd already agreed on. It had taken me thirty years and one small human who told me the truth to my face to understand how much I hated it, the being handled, the being spared, the whole apparatus of people who called their concealment a kindness. Ellie had never once done it to me. From the first day she'd looked me dead in the eye and told me exactly what she thought, and it had been like drawing a clean breath after a life spent underwater. So watching the wolf do to her the very thing I'd hated all my life, arranging her feelings from behind a wall she couldn't see, deciding for her what she was allowed to know, put a fury in me that had nothing to do with rivalry and everything to do with the one truth I'd bled to learn. You do not get to spare someone by lying to them. You only get to keep them small.

"Wolf," I said. "You and I need to talk."

"If this is about Ellie—"

"Everything is about Ellie. Let's not pretend otherwise, you and I. We're long past it." I kept my voice easy, the old reflex, though there was nothing easy in me. "Walk out with me a way.What I have to say to you shouldn't be shouted, and you look like a man who'd rather not stand up any longer than he has to."

He didn't want to. I watched him weigh it, the wounded pride of an alpha asked to walk at a rival's side, against the plain fact that refusing would look like fear. Pride lost, as it usually does with his kind. He fell into step beside me, stiff and silent, and we walked out along the edge of the settlement where the fires gave way to open dark, two large men who both wanted the same woman, neither of us looking at the other.

"You're wondering how I know," I said, when we were clear of the last fire.

"I'm wondering a great many things about you, lion. That's near the bottom of the list."