11. Chapter 11
ELLIE
The trouble with tearing down a bad thing is that you're left standing in the rubble of it, holding the pieces, while everyone looks at you to say what comes next.
By that evening the settlement had curdled.
Tau's grand gesture had landed exactly as I'd feared it would the moment I understood what he was doing, the freed women drifting through the mound with the stunned lostness of people whose whole world had been rearranged before breakfast, the pride buzzing with the unsettled energy of a place whose oldest certainty had just been pulled out from under it. Nobody quite knew where the freed women stood now, least of all the women themselves. Yesterday they had been the king’s, and there'd been a cruelty in that but also a place, a name, a set of walls you could lean into and know their shape.
Today they were nothing the pride had a word for, and a person with no word for what they are is a person nobody knows how to treat.
I watched one of them, a slight young lioness who couldn't have been twenty, sit down at the edge of the cooking-fires at dusk and simply not know where to put herself, hovering at a distance from every group because she no longer had a claim to sit at any of them.
A day ago she'd have taken her place among the king's women without a thought, and there'd have been a wrongness in that place but there'd also have been walls, and warmth, and other women who shared her lot.
Now the walls were gone and she stood shivering in the open with nothing to belong to, and when an older lioness glanced her way there was no unkindness in it, only the blank uncertainty of someone who genuinely didn't know what this girl was to her anymore, or what she owed her, or whether the girl had any claim on the pride's food at all now that she was no one's.
I knew that exact look from the receiving end.
I'd worn the invisible version of it for two years, the woman at the edge of every gathering that used to be hers, the ex-fiancée nobody quite knew how to place, present at the party and belonging to none of it.
And something in me that had spent two years being precisely that woman stood up inside my chest and flatly refused to watch it happen to a stranger who'd done nothing to earn it but exist in a world that only valued her as long as a man did.
I went and got Megan, because Megan understood politics in a way I never would.
"He's made a disaster," I said, crouching by our shelter where she sat mending a tear in her ruined coat with a bone needle she'd charmed off a lion woman.
Her colour was better these days, my cooking and the safety of a settled place doing their slow work, and the sharp competent mind that had run Nathan's professional life was visibly glad of a problem to sink into.
"He freed the harem women out of some noble impulse and stripped them of every scrap of standing they had.
They've got nothing now. No place, no protection, no way to feed themselves that doesn't depend on a man's goodwill. He's swapped one cage for a cliff."
"Classic," Megan said, not looking up from her stitching.
"Grand gesture, no follow-through. Nathan does the same thing, except Nathan does it on purpose because the gesture's the point and the people are incidental.
" She tied off her thread and bit it clean.
"So what's the fix? Because you've already thought of one, I can see it on your face.
You've got the look you get before you rearrange someone's whole kitchen. "
So I laid it out for her.
I'd been building it in my head all afternoon, as I used to build a menu, starting from what the room actually needed and working backward to how you'd deliver it.
The freed women needed standing that couldn't be taken away by any king's whim, which meant standing that didn't come from a king at all.
It had to come from somewhere structural, somewhere woven into how the pride actually decided things, so that a woman's worth was a fact of the settlement's bones and not a gift she held at someone's pleasure.
And I'd spent eight days watching how the pride ran, which was to say it ran entirely through Tau, every decision, every dispute, every question of stores and hunting and who-got-what funnelled up to one golden man on a mound and back down again, with no one in between who had a voice that mattered.
"A council," I said. "Chosen speakers for each group: lions, lone wolves, other cats, hunters, hearth-keepers and the women he just cut loose. Give them a real say and their worth stops belonging to the king. It comes from what they do and what they know, not whose bed they're attached to."
Megan had stopped stitching entirely. She looked at me as she used to look at a proposal that was going to work, a sharp assessing brightness coming into her face.
"That's not a fix for the harem women," she said slowly.
"Ellie, love, that's a whole new way of running the place.
You're not patching his mistake, you're rebuilding the whole thing, do you understand what you're actually proposing?
You're proposing to hand a king's power to a committee, in a culture that's run on kings since long before your ice age started. "
"I know." I kept my voice level and my hands busy with the fire, because the alternative was letting her see how much the knowing weighed.
"Men have died for less."
"I know that too." I did know it. I'd known it since the idea first turned over in me, and it frightened me exactly as much as it had then, because the old Ellie, the numb one, the one who'd spent two years making herself small enough to give no one a reason to look at her, that Ellie would never in her life have stood up in a strange and dangerous place and proposed to remake how it governed itself.
But that Ellie was thinning at the edges, worn down by cooking-fires and stolen cakes and a golden king who liked me better for saying no.
What was left underneath was somebody I was still getting to know, somebody who apparently could not watch a woman with no place at any table and do nothing about it.
"But he's already broken the old way, Megan.
He did that this morning. The pieces are already on the ground.
The only question now is whether they get put back the way they were or built into something better, and I'd rather be the one holding the plan when he goes looking for one. "
Megan was quiet for a moment, and something moved behind her eyes that I was learning to watch for, the shadow that came over her whenever a thing struck too close to her own situation.
She set the mended coat down in her lap and looked at me with a directness the old Megan would never have allowed herself.
"You know what you're describing," she said quietly.
"A place where a woman's worth doesn't depend on whose she is.
Where she isn't a thing that stops mattering the day a man decides he's finished with her.
" Her hand drifted, without her seeming to notice, to the small curve of her belly that the loose hides still hid.
"I spent my whole career making myself indispensable to a man who could discard me the moment I stopped being useful to him.
That cliff, I know exactly what it looks like, Ellie.
I've been standing on the edge of it for years and calling it a career.
" She picked the coat back up, and her voice went brisk again, the mask sliding into place, but not before I'd seen what was under it.
"So yes, build your council, and build it well, because there's more than one kind of woman in this settlement with no place of her own to stand, and some of us are better at hiding it than others. "
I reached over and squeezed her wrist, and she let me, and neither of us said the thing we were both thinking, which was that the baby she carried would need such a world more than any of us.
* * *
Getting the plan into Tau's head was its own expedition, because I had perhaps two hundred words of his language and the idea I was carrying was made of nothing but abstractions, representation, standing, structural worth, none of which you can point at or mime.
So I did it the only way I could; I did it over food, and I did it with help.
I asked Tau to bring Sawa, because Sawa spoke enough of my wolf-tongue to bridge the places my lion gave out, and because I'd worked something out about that hard-faced woman over the days of watching her watch me: she was the only person in the whole settlement who ran the numbers on things, who saw the pride as a system with parts that had to fit rather than a stage for a king to be adored on.
If anyone was going to understand what I meant by standing woven into the bones of a place, it would be her, even if she'd sooner spit than admit I'd been the one to say it.
They came to my fire at dusk, the two of them, and I fed them first, because feeding people is the one argument that needs no translation.
I'd made the seed cakes and a good rich stew of the day's hunt, and I put it into their hands warm before I said a single word about councils.
I watched the ordinary animal comfort of good food do what it always does, soften the edges, open the ears, turn wary strangers into people willing to sit a while and listen.
Then I built the idea between the three of us, out of broken lion and broken wolf and a great deal of pointing. Nothing I'd done since coming through the stones had been harder or more worthwhile.