9. Chapter 9 #2
She caught me alone at the edge of the settlement as the light failed, in the flat unhappy way she had when she'd been saving something up.
"You're making a fool of yourself," my sister said, without preamble, because Sawa has never in her life softened a landing.
"The whole pride is watching their king trail after a human woman like a cub after its mother, combing her hair, bringing her amber, learning her barbarian tongue like a besotted boy. "
"Jealous, sister? I'll comb yours, if you're feeling neglected."
"Don't." The word came flat and hard, and it stopped my deflection where it stood, because Sawa deploys that voice rarely and I've learned to respect it.
She stepped closer, her hunter's eyes searching my face for whatever she was afraid she'd find there.
"I've watched people want things from you your whole life, Tau.
They've flattered you and used you and dressed it up as love, and you've let them, because you'd rather be used than alone.
I made my peace long ago with pulling their hands out of your stores when you wouldn't. But this one —"
"This one wants nothing from me," I said. "It is a remarkably effective way of becoming impossible to ignore."
"That's what frightens me." Sawa's voice dropped, and the anger in it turned out to be fear wearing anger's coat, as it so often does with her.
"A woman who wants nothing is the most dangerous kind, because you can't see what she's playing for.
She refused you in front of the whole pride, do you know what that bought her?
Everyone's watching her now, everyone's curious, everyone's decided she must be remarkable to have turned the king's head by turning him down.
That's not nothing, brother. That's the cleverest opening move I've ever seen, and you're too busy being charmed to ask whether she meant it. "
I opened my mouth to tell her she was wrong, that Ellie had refused me out of a wound and not a strategy, that I'd felt the truth of it in the way she flinched from kindness.
Then I closed it again, because I couldn't prove a word of that, and because Sawa had spent our whole lives being right about the people who wanted to hurt me, and because, the goddess help me, a small cold part of me had wondered the same thing at the trade, before the bond drowned it out.
"She has a fated bond with me," I said instead, quietly. "I felt it snap into place the moment I saw her. You know that can't be counterfeited."
For once my sister had nothing ready. Whatever she'd braced for, it hadn't been that, and I watched her recalculate, as she recalculated a hunt when the wind changed.
"A human," she said slowly. "A fated bond with a human. That's not possible, Tau."
"And yet," I said, and spread my hands, because beyond the pull of it I had no proof to give her.
She looked out over the settlement for a while, to the small distant fire where Ellie sat with the wolf-woman, the two dark heads bent together, and when she spoke again the fear had sharpened into something that sounded almost like grief.
"Then it's worse than I thought," Sawa said.
"If it's real, you'll hand her the stores, the guards and your judgement one gift at a time, then call the empty shelves love.
I've watched you do it before. I won't watch a bond finish what flatterers started.
" She turned away, then stopped with the real warning still in her mouth.
"Watch her, Tau, or I will. One of us has to love you enough to be suspicious, and it has never been you. "
She walked off into the dusk and left me standing there with the warmth of the evening gone cold around me, and the loneliness I'd thought a small furious human had chased off my own mound came creeping back, the particular loneliness of a man whose own sister couldn't quite believe that anyone might simply, freely, want him.
The worst of it was that Sawa loved me; that was what gave her words their teeth.
A rival's suspicion I could have laughed off; my sister's I could not, because she'd earned the right to it over a lifetime of being the one who noticed the hands in my stores while I was busy being charming at their owners.
She'd protected me from my own hunger to be liked more times than I could count, and she was trying to do it again, and the terrible possibility she'd laid at my feet was one I couldn't entirely dismiss.
What if the bond was a lie? What if Karik had somehow salted his goods, or the goddess was playing a cruel joke, or likeliest and worst, the bond was real and Ellie would learn to use it, as everyone eventually learned to use whatever I gave them freely?
I turned it over as I turned over any trade I wasn't sure of, and I couldn't make it come out as Sawa feared.
Because the woman I'd spent six days beside didn't take from me like someone playing a long game; she resisted the taking.
She wrapped my fur around another woman before herself; she turned my lessons into trades so she'd owe me nothing; she looked at my dazzle with the flat unimpressed eye of a person who'd been dazzled once before by a handsome man and paid dearly for believing it.
Whatever Ellie was doing to my heart, she was doing it while trying visibly not to.
And a schemer works to draw you in. She was working, with everything she had, to keep me out, and that, goddess help me, was exactly what had me lost.
I looked across the darkening settlement to her small fire, where the two dark heads still bent together, and I made myself a promise I didn't yet understand the cost of; I would not stop.
Not because she'd fall to charm, since she plainly wouldn't, but because somewhere in these six days I'd stopped courting her to win and started courting her to be near her, and there was no undoing a thing like that once a lonely man has felt it.
Sawa could watch her all she liked. I already knew what she'd find, because I'd been looking for the con since the moment the bond snapped, and all I'd found instead was a wounded woman refusing to believe that kindness could be free, which was, when I let myself see it, the very same wound I'd been dressing in gold my whole life.