Page 59 of Roar of the Wild

I called Sawa to me at dusk.

My sister came as she always came, unhurried and unfooled, and she took in the shape of me sitting alone in the wreckageand knew before I said a word that something large was coming. She'd been the one who saw me clearly my whole life, the one who'd loved me enough to tell me hard things, the sister passed over for a leadership she'd have worn better than I ever had, purely for the accident of being born a woman in a pride that handed its crown to men. I had let that stand for years. I had let a great many things stand, because standing still was comfortable and I have always liked to be comfortable, and it had taken a foreign woman with a cooking-fire and a hard question to make me start pulling the comfortable wrongnesses of my kingdom down.

"I'm leaving," I told her. "East, with the others, to carry Ellie to the shaman past the mountains, if he's real, and if we reach him before the snows, and if she lasts the road." I heard my own voice not perform it, not soften it, just set it down. "I don't know if I'm coming back, though I mean to. The road's long, the season's wrong, and she may die on it whatever we do. I could die on it too. I won't stand here and pretend to you that I know how this ends, because you'd know I was lying and I'm finished lying to the people I love."

She didn't flinch, because Sawa had never in her life flinched from a hard truth set plainly in front of her. "Then the pride's leaderless with a winter coming and half its shelters down," she said, flat, laying the problem bare as she always did. "You've thought about that, I hope, past the part where you gallop east being heroic."

"I've thought about nothing else all afternoon." I looked at my fierce, clever sister. "The pride isn't leaderless. It has you, and it always has. I held the title while you did the work because I lacked the courage to change what had always been done. I'm changing it now. You'll be regent in full, ruling with the council and answering to no one, whether I walk back through that gap or not."

It landed on her, and for the first time in our lives my sister had no words.

"You'd hand it to a committee and a woman," she said at last, and there was something raw working under the flatness now. "The prides will say the golden king lost his mind along with his consort."

"Let them say it. I've spent my life buying their good opinion with things that mattered more, and I'm done paying. You'll rule better than I did. Anyone who can't stomach a regent who hunts her own meat can take their opinion somewhere colder." I took her hard hunter's hand. "I've been known by two people in my life. You're one of them. Let me finally be worth the knowing."

My sister, who did not weep, who had not wept in front of me since we were cubs, turned her face away for a moment and pressed her mouth flat and did not quite manage it.

* * *

There was one thing more, and it was hers as much as mine, and I'd carried it toward this moment for longer than either of us knew.

"There's the other matter," I said, when she'd got her face back. "The one we've never spoken of plainly, you and I, in all these years."

She went still, the old wariness snapping back into her like a blade returning to its sheath. Even now, even here, the habit of guarding it ran deeper than anything.

"Eleya," I said gently, and watched my sister brace as though I'd raised a hand to her. "I've known since the beginning, Sawa. You know I've known. I've kept the harem-right over her all these years and never once touched her, and worn the prides' whispers about it, because I'd sooner have them think me half a man than use a woman whose heart was somewhere else. Her heart is with you. It always has been. And when I abolished the harem, I broke the tradition that gave her standing, but I neverfinished the work, never freed her from the lifetime bond that still ties her to a king who was only ever her jailer, however gentle. I'm finishing it now, before I go, while I still have the standing to finish it."

Sawa's breath had gone ragged; she was a woman who could gut a bull-elk without changing expression, and she stood in the wreck of my shelter and shook.

"When the council sits tomorrow," I said, "I'll dissolve the last of it, in front of the pride, as king, while I still am one. Eleya's bond to me is ended. She's bound to no one, free to stand on her own place at that council table, and free to choose where her heart goes, and if it goes to my sister, then it goes with my blessing, spoken aloud where the whole pride can hear it, so no one ever again makes either of you afraid of a thing that was never wrong." My own voice went then, just for a breath, because I'd kept these two people's happiness in the dark for so long that saying it into the light undid something in me. "You've hidden long enough, both of you. I won't have the last thing I do here be one more year of the two people who know me best hiding what they are. Love her in the open, Sawa. I command it, if it helps, the king's last command before he hands his crown to his better."

She crossed the space between us and put her arms around me, my sister who did not embrace, and held on hard, and neither of us said anything for a while because there was nothing left that needed saying. All those years I'd protected them in silence, thinking the silence was the gift. The gift, it turned out, was this, the ending of the silence, the thing said out loud at last. Ellie had taught me that, though she'd never know it. She'd taught me that the loudest love in the world means nothing next to being known, and that the bravest thing a person can do is let the truth of them stand in the light and trust the light not to kill it.

* * *

It was done the next day, in front of the pride, as I'd promised.

I stood before my broken kingdom in the grey autumn light, the shelters half-raised, the wounded mending, the whole settlement gathered in the ruin to hear what their king had called them for, and did the last work I would ever do as their king. First I named Sawa regent and set the council at her side to rule with her, and the pride absorbed it and, after a startled murmur, began to nod, because they'd known the truth of who did the real work as well as I had. Then I dissolved the last binding of the old harem-right and freed Eleya from it, in words plain enough that no one could mistake them. Last of all, standing there in my ruined kingdom, I blessed my sister and the woman she loved, out loud, before everyone. Eleya's face crumpled at the words, and Sawa's hand found hers in front of the whole pride at last, and up went the sound a people makes when it decides, in the same breath, to be glad for two of its own.

It was the finest thing I ever did as king, and I did it on my way out the door, with the woman I loved dying in my shelter and a winter road ahead of us that might kill us all. I would have traded every golden year before it for that one grey morning of finally being real.

Then it was over, and there was no more time for ceremony, because Daska found me in the crowd with his healer's urgency and told me what I already knew from the set of his shoulders.

We were out of days. Ellie was fading faster, and the first true snows were a week off the high passes at most, and if we were going to carry her east toward a story with any hope of reaching the end of it before either the winter or the sickness took her, we could not wait for her to be stronger, because she was not going to get stronger here; we would leave within days. We would carry a dying woman up into the teeth of the closing mountains, chasing a healer who might be a rumour, on the last road openbefore the snow sealed the world, and it was the only road there was, so we would take it, and we would run.

Chapter 34

RIVIK

Awolf learns the trail in his body before he ever learns it in his head. My grandsire taught me that on my first long hunt, walking me until my feet bled and then walking me further, until the reading of ground and weather stopped being a thing I thought about and simply became a thing I was. I have travelled hard country my whole life. I know the weight a body can carry and the distance it can make in a short autumn day and the exact colour the sky goes before it turns on you.

None of it had prepared me for the particular labour of carrying a dying woman east into the closing year, one careful mile at a time, with her heartbeat fluttering against my chest like a bird gone quiet in the cold.

We'd rigged a litter the first day out and abandoned it by the second, because the ground was too broken for it and because none of us could bear the distance it put between our hands and her. So we carried her instead, in turns, as you carry something you have decided the world will not have. Daska took the longestturns, his great arms so tireless it frightened me, because I knew what it cost him and knew he'd never once say. Tau spelled him, the king's easy strength bent to a use no one had ever asked of it. And I took my turns with her tucked against me and her head under my chin, matching my stride to the shallow rhythm of her breathing, murmuring the low travel-words of my language into her hair so that some part of her, wherever she'd gone, might feel the road moving under us and know we were carrying her somewhere.

She surfaced sometimes from wherever the sickness had taken her. Never often, and never for long, and never all the way. Her eyes would open onto the grey sky and travel over whichever of us held her, and something would move behind them that might have been recognition and might have been only the habit of a face turning toward warmth; once she said Daska's name. Once she said mine, so faint I felt it against my throat more than heard it, and I had to stop walking for a moment and let Tau go on ahead so no one would see what it did to me. Then she'd sink again, back down under the grey, and we'd close ranks around the going of her and walk on.

The first snow found us on the third day.