Page 43 of Roar of the Wild

"I was a beautiful child," I said, "which sounds like a boast and is the opposite of one. I was the most beautiful child anyone in the pride had seen, golden even then, and my father, who was a hard man and a great king and never once in his life said a warm word to me that wasn't for an audience, my father understood before I did what a thing like me was worth. A beautiful heir is a kind of wealth. Prides sent their daughters. Allies sent their gifts. Everyone who came to the mound wanted to stand near the golden boy and be warmed by his shine, and everyone who wanted to stand near me wanted something, proximity, advantage, the reflected light of me, and I learned before I had the words for it that the wanting was never for me. It was for what I could give them."

The fire cracked between us. Somewhere out in the dark a lion coughed, and one of the children laughed and was hushed, and the ordinary warm life of my settlement went on around a king unmaking himself at a foreign woman's hearth.

"So I became this," I went on. "The charm and the open hand of it, I built it all deliberately, as you build anything, because I worked out young that if everyone was going to want a piece of me regardless, I could at least be the one who decided how much they got. Give them the gold. Give them the grin and the easy flattery, the king who remembers your child's name and asks after your bad knee. Give them so much of the surface that no one ever thinks to look for what's underneath, because a manwho seems to hold nothing back is the last man anyone suspects of hiding everything." I laughed, and it came out wrong, scraped. "I have been performing my own life for thirty years, Ellie. I am so good at it that I fooled myself for most of them. It took a small furious human falling out of a slaver's trade to make me understand that I'd built a magnificent gilded room and locked the only door from the inside, and that I was starving in it, and had been starving so long I'd stopped recognising the feeling as hunger."

"Tau, stop a moment." My name in her mouth, quiet, and there was no pity in it, which was the only thing that would have made me stop. What was there instead was harder and better than pity, there was recognition. "I know that room. I've lived in a version of it. Mine had different walls, but I know exactly the shape of starving in a place everyone tells you is a palace."

"I know you do." I found I could barely speak. "That's the thing of it. That's why I'm sitting here making a fool of myself instead of charming you and going to my bed. Because you're the only one who does."

* * *

I hadn't meant to tell her about the women. It came out of me sideways, as the truest things do, while I was still reeling from having said the rest.

"There was a girl," I said. "One of the ones I freed, when I dissolved the harem, you remember. The young one, the slight one who sat at the edge of the fires that first night not knowing where to put herself, because I'd taken away the only place she'd ever been given and hadn't the first idea what to put in its stead. That was my doing. I stood up in front of my whole kingdom and made a grand noble gesture and felt marvellous about myself, never once thinking what it would actually cost the women I was freeing, because I have never in my life had to wonder where my next meal came from or whether there was a place at the fire thatwas mine by right. The freeing was alms, in the end, a rich man's alms, given for how it made me feel and not for how it landed."

Ellie said nothing at all. She'd gone somewhere careful behind her eyes, and I understood she was letting me arrive at the thing myself, because a truth you're handed is worth less than a truth you walk into.

"And then I watched you feed them," I said, and my voice did something I couldn't control. "That's the whole of it, Ellie. That's the thing I came here tonight not knowing how to say. I stood on my mound and freed those women and left them to starve in the open. And you, a captive, a stranger, a woman who'd been in my settlement a handful of weeks and owned nothing but the clothes they'd dragged you in wearing, you sat down at your little fire andfedthem. You gave the lost girl a task and a full belly before she'd finished being frightened. You built them a council seat out of seed cakes and stubbornness because you couldn't watch a woman with no place at any table and do nothing. You saw that they were hungry, and I hadn't. I'd looked at those women my whole life and never once seen that they were hungry, and I am their king."

The shame of it was still fresh, weeks later. I'd carried it quietly under all my gold since the night I'd understood what she'd done, and I'd never said it to a living soul, because a king does not confess that a foreign woman with no power and no standing had seen his own people more clearly than he had.

"That's when I stopped wanting to win you," I said. "I told the wolf as much, out at the edge of camp, and he looked at me as though I'd grown a second head. But it's true, and this is the shape of it, I stopped wanting to win you the night I understood that you'd looked at the statusless and the hungry and the discarded of my own pride and seen worth in them that I, in thirty years of ruling, had walked straight past. Because a woman who can do that isn't a prize to be won. She's..."I searched all three of my tongues and found nothing large enough. "She's the thing I didn't know a person could be. And I found I no longer wanted you to choose me because I'd dazzled you into it. I wanted you to choose me as you chose that lost girl. Seeing exactly what I was, the hollow gilded truth of me, and deciding I was worth a place at the fire anyway."

* * *

Having said it, I felt flayed, every wall I'd spent thirty years building gone and no charm left between her eyes and the man underneath. I made myself sit in the silence without reaching for the grin. A thing kept hidden couldn't be chosen, and I was tired of being wanted only for the gold.

And then Ellie did a thing she had never done in all the weeks I'd courted her, all the amber and the combing and the careful patient bridge-building of our few shared words.

She got up, and came around the fire, and sat down beside me.

Not across from me, where she'd always sat, the safe width of the flames between us. Beside me, close enough that the backs of our hands nearly touched, and she did it slowly and deliberately, as she did everything that frightened her, giving herself the room to stop and choosing not to take it. This woman who flinched from touch, who'd gone rigid the first time Eleya reached to tidy her hair, who'd taught me over a whole summer to read the small war she fought whenever anyone came close, crossed the fire, sat down at my side, and set her hand, feather-light, over mine.

I did not move; I was afraid that if I moved she'd remember to be afraid.

"I've spent this whole summer," she said, to the fire rather than to me, "waiting for the catch with you. Everyone who's ever wanted me wanted something else through me, a match, an asset, a way to look generous. My father did it in a boardroom, Nathan at a ball, and even Karik, God help me, only ever wanted the price I'd fetch. So when a golden king started bringing meamber and combing my hair, every instinct I had saidfind the angle, Ellie, there's always an angle, work out what he's really after before it's too late." She turned her head, and looked at me from close up, closer than she'd ever let herself be, and there was something in her dark eyes coming loose that I'd watched her hold clenched all summer. "And I never found it. That's what's undone me about you, if you want the truth of it, since we're apparently doing truth tonight. I kept waiting for the price and it never came. You freed those women badly and then let me fix it. You handed my council real power when every king in your world would have strangled it in the cradle. You stepped back when my men came for me rather than fight to keep me, because you'd sooner I was whole than yours. All summer I turned you over looking for the catch." Her voice went to almost nothing. "And the catch was that there wasn't one. You meant every word of it, which is more than any man ever gave me, and I don't, Tau, I don't know what to do with a man who actually means it, because I've never in my life been handed one."

I turned toward her then, slowly, because everything with this woman had to be slow, and I lifted one hand, the hand that had waved careless benediction over a thousand fawning subjects, the hand that had never in thirty years reached for anything it truly wanted for fear of what it would mean to be refused, and I let it hover a breath from her face, and I asked.

"May I touch you?"

Because I'd learned that too, this summer, from watching the bear. That the asking was the thing. That for a woman taught her whole life that men simply took, being asked was a language she'd nearly forgotten how to hear, and that a king who wanted to reach her had to learn to speak it.

She looked at my hovering hand, and I watched the small war move across her face, the old instinct to flinch, the deeper newerthing pushing up underneath it, and I watched, with my heart going like a hunted thing in my chest, as the newer thing won.

"Yes," she said, and the word came steady, chosen. "Yes, Tau, you may."

I laid my palm against her cheek, and she didn't flinch, and something thirty years in the building came quietly apart in me and let the cold clean air in at last.

Neither of us moved to more than that; there was no need. Her cheek was warm against my hand and her eyes held mine in the low firelight, and the whole enormous terrifying weight of being known, actually known, past the gold, all the way down to the frightened hungry boy who'd built a palace round his own starving, came down over me, and it landed like the first easy breath I'd drawn in three decades rather than any burden I'd feared. She saw the whole of me, and had done all along. And sitting there with her hand over mine, my other palm against her face, and the first snow-wind moving through the settlement around us, I felt the wall she'd kept between us all summer, the last one, the refusal underneath all the others, begin at last to give.

Chapter 26

ELLIE

His palm was warm against my cheek, and I didn't flinch, and that small impossible fact undid something in me that two years of careful frost had been holding shut.

We sat like that a long moment at his fire, his hand against my face and my hand resting light over his, and I felt the last wall I'd kept between us all summer come quietly down, the one underneath all the others, the one I'd never had a name for until Daska put it in my hands weeks ago and told me it wasn't greed, it was only the size my heart had grown to. I'd crossed the fire and sat down beside a golden king who'd just shown me the frightened hungry boy under all his gold, and I found, to my genuine astonishment, that I wanted to stay.