Page 42 of Roar of the Wild

"I'd risk your version of the mission," I said, "which has always been the one where you get to decide who's expendable. I've watched you do that arithmetic, Nathan. You did it at a river once, standing dry on the bank while my..." I caught it and changed course. "While men went in to die for the crossing you chose. I'm not handing you that sum again. We go when the healers and the carriers say it's safe to go, and that's not a thing you get to arrange over honey cakes with a caravan."

For a moment he only looked at me, and I saw him recalculating, as he always did, a man for whom other people were variables, reassessing one that had stopped behaving. Then he stood, brushing off his knees with that fastidious precision, and gave me a thin cold smile that didn't reach anything.

"You've grown very brave," he said, "surrounded by monsters who'll do your fighting for you. I wonder how brave you'll be when the snow closes those passes and the mission dies here at your feet, and you have to live knowing your comfort was what killed it. Sleep well on that one, Ellie."

He walked away toward the shelters, unhurried, deniable as ever, leaving me at my coals with my heart going hard and the old poison working exactly as he'd designed it to. Because that was his craft; he didn't need to win the argument. He only needed to hand me a new thing to lie awake over, and he'd done it, slid it in clean beside the seven women and the debt I was already sure I owed the world for being happy:your comfort will kill the mission, and you'll have to live with it.

* * *

I didn't go to Daska that night, or to Rivik. I sat at my dying fire a long time on my own, which was a thing I could do now that I couldn't have done a season ago, sit with a hard feeling and not run from it into someone's arms, not because I couldn't have the comfort but because I was strong enough, some nights, not to need it.

The ache was back under my breastbone. I noticed it as Daska had taught me to notice things in a body, without panic, a plain observation: the borrowed weight had curdled and clenched sometime during Nathan's little visit, that sick cold flare I got whenever I was made small or made guilty, and it hadn't fully eased when he left. It sat there now, low and wrong, worse than it had been in weeks. Three nights ago, wrapped in the warmth of two men who loved me, it had gone almost entirely quiet. Tonight, with Nathan's poison in me and seven women's worth of guilt and the whole gathering weight of everything I had and didn't deserve, it throbbed like a stone in a boot.

Eases when I'm loved,I thought, turning it over.Worse when I'm made to feel I've taken more than my share.I'd noticed the pattern before and never quite let myself look straight at it, and I didn't have the strength to chase it tonight either, so I filed it with everything else, the traders' news, the count of days, the shape of the argument I'd won and would keep on paying for. A woman with nothing hoards information the way a starving one hoards seeds. I had a great deal now, and somehow more seeds than ever, and the growing sense that I was going to need every one.

Then the wind changed.

I felt it before I understood it, a shift in the dark, the settlement's smoke suddenly streaming sideways, the fires all leaning the same way at once. It came down off the eastern heights, off the far mountains I'd never seen but knew were outthere in the black, and it carried a cold in it that hadn't been in any wind all summer. A thin hard edge, a warning, the first breath of the season Nathan had come to threaten me with. It found the seams of my clothes and settled in them to stay, as the early-spring cold had done on a morning by a different river a lifetime ago, and I pulled my hides closer, understanding with the whole animal certainty of a body that had survived one ice-age winter already exactly what it meant.

The countdown had begun; all summer the leaving had been a thing out on the horizon, a someday, an argument we could keep having gently. That wind was the horizon arriving. Somewhere east of us the high passes were feeling this same cold, and the snow was gathering behind it, and the door that led toward everything we'd crossed the world to reach was beginning, slowly, to swing shut.

I sat at my fire with the new wind streaming my smoke sideways and felt the truth of it settle into me alongside all the other stones: that this home I'd built out of care and stubbornness and honey cakes was a thing I'd have to leave, and soon, walking out of the warmth into the teeth of exactly the winter that had nearly killed me the first time. Megan would have to be carried through it, secret and swelling. Dev's reserves would have to hold where they'd never yet been tested. And seven women I couldn't reach would stay unreached while I saved the ones I could.

And underneath it all was the golden thought I'd carried for three nights: I didn't want to leave before I found out what the space at the edge of my fire was for.

Out at the pickets, faint under the new wind, I heard Rivik begin, very low, to sing.

Chapter 25

TAU

Ihad been a king for thirty years, and I had never once let anyone see me afraid, which is a thing I understood, that autumn evening, was about to end. The first hard wind had come down off the eastern heights three nights past and put a knife in the air that hadn't been there all summer, and the whole pride felt it. You could see the season turning in a hundred small ways if you knew where to look, and a king who wants to keep his people fed learns early to look. The herds had begun their long drift south; the children were pulled in closer to the fires at night. And the leaving I'd refused to think about all summer, because thinking about it meant thinking about the day Ellie walked east out of my settlement and did not come back, had stopped being a thing on the far horizon and become a thing with a date on it, because the passes she had to cross would close with the snow. The snow was no longer a rumour on the wind.

I had spent the whole of that summer being remade, and I hadn't decided yet whether to thank her for it or curse her, and I suspected I would spend the rest of my life failing to decide.

She came to my fire that evening. She'd taken to doing it, these last weeks, since the night the whole thing between her and the bear and the wolf had settled into whatever it was now, a thing the pride had a hundred opinions about and I found I had only one, which was that she seemed, for the first time since Karik's band had dragged her into my settlement half-frozen and furious, to be at something like rest. It suited her better than the fear ever had. The rest had put a colour in her that fright never could, and I hated a little how much I noticed it, because noticing was all I'd allowed myself since I'd stopped trying to win her, and a man can starve on noticing.

"You've a face on you," she said, settling across the flames with the ease she'd never had at my fire in the early weeks, when every visit had been a negotiation and she'd sat like a woman counting the exits. "I've learned that face by now. It's the one you wear when you're about to be charming at me to cover something you don't want looked at."

And there it was. The thing that had ruined me for every other soul in my kingdom, that she saw straight through the gold, always had, from the first day she'd refused my claiming in front of my whole pride with her chin up and her wrists still raw from the cord. Everyone else in thirty years had looked at the mane and stopped there, content with the shine of me. She'd looked at the shine, been unimpressed by it, and gone hunting for the man underneath, found him, too, which was the part I could never get past, and then, impossibly,stayed anyway.

"Perhaps I simply enjoy your company," I said, reaching for the charm, feeling it slide into place as it always did, the familiar glove.

"Perhaps you do, at that." She didn't call me on it. She only looked at me across the fire with those dark eyes that missed nothing, and waited, as she waited on a pot that wasn't ready, patient and certain it would come right if she gave it time. That was the other thing about Ellie, the thing that had disarmed me by degrees all summer: she never once chased. She'd learned, somewhere in the wreckage men had made of her, that the surest way to make a frightened thing bolt was to reach for it, and so she simply sat, and left the door open, and let you come through it or not as you could bear.

I found, to my alarm, that I could bear it, and worse, that I wanted to.

* * *

I want to tell this properly, because it is the most important thing I ever did, and it did not look like anything. There was no battle in it, no hunt, no grand gesture before the assembled pride. There was only a man and a woman at a small fire in the cold, and the man deciding, for the first time in his gilded miserable life, to set down the performance and let himself be looked at.

"Do you know," I said, and heard my own voice come out without its polish, which frightened me more than any blade ever had, "that you are the third person in the whole of my kingdom who has ever seen the actual me? The one under all of this." I gestured at myself, the mantle, the amber, the whole golden apparatus I'd built. "There is my sister, who was born seeing through me and never had the grace to pretend otherwise. There is Eleya, who I keep a secret for, which is its own kind of knowing. And there is you." I made myself hold her eyes. "Three people in thirty years. Do you understand what a thing that is to admit, for a man everyone in this settlement would tell you is the most beloved creature for a hundred miles?"

She went very still across the fire. She didn't reach for me, didn't soften into the easy comfort a lesser woman would have offered, because she understood, she always understood, that comfort would have let me off the hook I'd just hung myself on. She only watched, and listened, and gave me the terrible gift of taking me seriously.

"Tell me," she said.

So I told her.