25. Chapter 25 #2
"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 and fed them.
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 me amber and combing my hair, every instinct I had said find 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 newer thing 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.