33. Chapter 33
TAU
Ihave spent my whole life being looked at, and I learned young that a man who is looked at can hide anything, because people who watch you rarely trouble to see you.
I hid grief behind a grin and loneliness behind a feast and thirty years of wanting to be known behind the easiest charm on the steppe.
It worked so well and so long that I half forgot there was anything underneath the gold at all.
On the fifth night of Ellie's dying, kneeling in my own shelter with her cold hand in mine and no audience left to perform for, I found out exactly what was underneath.
It turned out to be terror, the plain animal kind, the kind that strips a man to the bone and leaves nothing golden anywhere on him.
She was slipping away from us. Daska had stopped saying otherwise, which frightened me more than any words could have, because Daska was the one among us who never gave up on a body while breath remained in it, and the healer's face had gone to a place I didn't recognise.
Rivik had talked himself hoarse and gone silent; the little carrier sat at her feet and wept without sound.
And I, who had spent my life certain that if a thing was splendid enough I could always find a way to keep it, knelt beside the most splendid thing I had ever been given and understood that my charm and my kingdom and my whole practised self were worth precisely nothing against what was taking her.
I could not dazzle death; I could not banter it into leaving. For the first time since I was a cub I had come up against a thing that would not be talked round, and the helplessness of it was a wound I had no idea how to dress.
So I did the only thing left to a man who has run out of his own tricks.
I stopped thinking about what I could do, and started thinking about what I knew, turned over everything a lifetime of being king had put in my head, every trader's tale and traveller's boast and rumour carried up the corridor on the tongues of men passing through, hunting for the one scrap that might be worth something now.
And somewhere in the small grey hours, it came to me.
There was a story I'd heard my whole life and never once had cause to test. I told them at dawn, when the thin grey light came through the smoke-hole and Ellie's breath had gone shallow enough that none of us pretended to be resting any longer.
"There's a healer," I said. "Far to the east, past where the corridor climbs into the mountains, a shaman, the traders call him, though that word carries more than the ones you have for it.
The stories say he mends the kinds of hurt no ordinary healer can touch.
He works past broken bones and fevers to the deeper things, sickness in the spirit, harm in the buried places of a person, hurts that live under the skin where hands can't reach.
" I made myself look at Daska as I said it, because he was the one who'd know whether I was talking sense or clutching at smoke.
"The wound you told me you couldn't find. "
Daska's head came up slowly. I watched the healer in him weigh it against everything he knew, watched him want to dismiss it and fail to, because he'd already told us plainly that what was killing her lived somewhere his craft couldn't follow.
"A story," Rivik said, rough from the night's talking. He wanted it to be more than a story. I could hear the wanting fighting the caution in him, the alpha who'd learned the hard way what it cost to walk a party toward a hope that turned out to be a trap. "How much of it do you believe?"
"I don't know," I said, and it was the truth, and giving them the truth instead of the confident answer they'd have found more comforting was itself a strange new country for me.
"I've never had reason to find out. He's a name I've heard the whole of my life, as you hear of a mountain you never expect to climb.
The traders speak of him with the wary respect men reserve for things they half fear.
Some of them swear they've met a person he brought back from a place no healer should have been able to reach them.
" I looked down at Ellie, at the grey stealing into a face that had been lit from within not a week ago.
"It's a story, I know that. It's also the only door I can find in a room that hasn't got any others, and I would rather carry her toward a story than sit here and watch the last of her go out because I was too sensible to hope. "
Nobody spoke for a moment, and the fire ticked into the silence.
Outside, the wounded pride went about the slow work of rebuilding a home the earth had half taken, and I thought about how strange it was that the two disasters had come together, the ground breaking and the woman breaking, in the same grey hour, as though the world had decided to take everything from me at once and see what was left standing when it did.
Dev said the word for east. He'd lifted his head from Ellie's feet to give us the one word in the lion-tongue he'd hunted down and learned, and then he did a thing with his hands that none of us needed translating, pointed east, toward the mountains, toward the place he and his dead scanner had been trying to steer us the whole time.
His eyes, wet and red, had something in them that hadn't been there a moment ago, and I understood that for the carrier this wasn't only a road toward a healer.
It was the road he'd been trying to walk since before the river took Ellie the first time.
The healer lay east; the thing the whole doomed mission had crossed the world to reach lay east. Nobody in that shelter said the word destiny, because it was too large and too cruel a word to say over a dying woman, but I saw it pass between Dev and Daska all the same, the sense that the only road that might save her ran in the exact direction she'd been meant to travel all along.
"Then we go east," Rivik said, and the alpha's certainty settled over the words, and I felt the whole shape of the thing tip from talk into decision.
He looked at me, and something passed between us that a season ago would have been unthinkable, a wolf who'd led his own pack ceding the road to a lion.
"You know the corridor east of here, and we don't. You've traded along it, you know the clans, you know the ground.
" It cost him to say it; I could see the cost. "So lead us east. We'll follow you to your shaman, and God help him if the stories are wrong. "
I had been leading people my whole life, but for once it didn't feel like a performance.
* * *
That was the easy part, as it turned out; deciding to go was nothing.
The hard thing, the thing I sat with alone that afternoon while the others tended her, was what going meant, because a king does not simply walk east out of his own kingdom in the teeth of a coming winter and leave it to fend for itself.
I'd watched a man do a version of this already, and watched what it cost him.
Rivik had given up his pack to follow Ellie, handed Hanging Rock to another man with his own mouth and walked away, and I'd seen the guilt of it ride him at odd hours all summer, the particular haunted look of a leader who'd left his people behind.
I'd pitied him for it, a little, as you pity a man for a wound you're sure you'd have borne more gracefully.
I understood now that I'd never understood it at all, because I'd never had anything I couldn't walk away from lightly.
Everything I'd ever held, I'd held with the loose grip of a man who'd been given it too easily to fear its loss.
The pride was a different thing entirely.
Whatever else I was, vain, spoiled, a coward in all the quiet ways that don't show, these people were mine: the lions, the lone wolves, the strays and the misfits, the whole ungainly settlement of those who'd fit nowhere else and washed up under my gold to be kept safe.
I had kept them safe; it was the one thing under the charm I'd never had to perform, because it was simply true.
And now the earth had broken their home in the same week a sickness was taking the woman I loved.
I was proposing to leave them wounded and half-housed and facing a winter, to carry her toward a story.
The old me would have found a way to make even this look effortless.
Would have swept out with a fine speech and let them believe the king had it all in hand.
I sat in the ruins of my shelter and found I didn't want to lie to them any more.
I'd spent thirty years being adored by people who didn't know me, and the one woman who did know me was dying in my furs, and somewhere in the horror of that I'd lost the taste for being loved by a lie.
So I would tell them the truth, and I would do the thing that frightened me more than the winter road. I would leave the pride in the hands of someone stronger than me, and trust them to hold it, and pray I hadn't left it too late to learn how.
* * *
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 wreckage and 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.