7. Chapter 7
TAU
The morning Karik of the Broken Ridge came to sell me two foreign females, I was bored, which is the most dangerous thing a king can be.
Boredom is the tax you pay on having everything.
I'd learned that young, watching my father hold court over a pride that never once told him no, and I'd sworn I'd rule differently.
Then I'd grown up and discovered that ruling well is even lonelier than ruling badly, because when you rule well the people love you, and love from people who need something from you is the emptiest coin there is.
They brought me the best cuts and the softest hides, their prettiest daughters and their cleverest sons.
They laughed at my jokes a breath before the jokes were finished, and not one of them in all my years on the mound had ever looked at me and seen a man rather than a mane.
So I performed. I did it well, the golden king, generous and quick and untroubled, who could charm a hostile trader into a fair price or a nervous child into a laugh, and never once let anyone close enough to find the hollow place where the performance was stitched to the man.
That morning I lounged on the packed earth before the great shelter with Sawa at my shoulder and Eleya somewhere behind me, and I watched the Broken Ridge band come up through the settlement with their goods slung over dire-wolf backs, and I made myself ready to be charming at a man I disliked on principle.
There were exactly two people in the world who saw past the performance, and I kept them both close, which is a thing a lonely man does whether he admits it to himself or not.
Sawa was the first of them. My sister had never in her life been fooled by me, had been passed over for the leadership she'd have worn better than I did purely because she'd been born female, and stayed at my shoulder anyway, sharp-tongued, unbribable, guarding a kingdom she'd never be allowed to rule out of a loyalty I'd done nothing to earn.
She saw the king and the man both and had no patience for either when we behaved stupidly.
Eleya was the other, though hers was a different kind of seeing.
She was mine by the old harem-right, bound to me for a lifetime by a tradition I'd inherited and had come to despise, and I had never once taken her to my bed, because I knew where her heart truly lay and I'd sooner cut off my own hand than use a woman who loved someone else.
That secret was ours to keep, hers and Sawa's and mine, and keeping it cost me a reputation among the prides, a king whose consort won't share his furs is a king with something wrong in him.
I'd decided long ago that my reputation was a cheap enough price for two people's happiness.
It was the one genuinely good thing I did, and I did it where no one could see it, which tells you everything about the sort of king I'd made myself.
Those were my confidants; a sister who wasn't allowed to lead and a consort I could never touch. Between them they knew the real shape of me better than anyone alive, and even they didn't know the half of what it cost to be adored by thousands and known by two.
I disliked Karik on more than principle, if I'm honest. My pride was built out of the ones who didn't fit, lone wolves and stray cats and lions gone strange, everyone the ordered packs of the north had spat out.
I'd made a home for the lot of them and called it a kingdom.
Karik was the ordered packs' rot made flesh.
He trafficked in females, forced bonds, sold the sacred right of choice for hides and worked flint.
Everything my pride existed to shelter people from, Karik did for profit and he did it wearing the same wolf-shape as men I'd have died for.
I should have turned him from my land the day he first came trading.
I hadn't, because a king who wants to know what moves along the corridor keeps a door open even to the rot, and tells himself it's strategy rather than appetite for the news it brings.
Get it over with, I told myself. Take his measure, send him off, go back to being bored in peace.
Then his men set the two females down on the earth before my mound, and the boredom died, and something I had no name for was born in its place.
I saw the tall one first, because she stood as people stand when standing is all the dignity they have left, a wolf-shifter, I could smell, pale and worn thin by the road, her chin up out of pure defiance.
She'd have fetched a good price on her own.
Sawa made a low sound beside me that meant she'd priced the woman too, and disapproved of the whole transaction, and was going to say so the moment we were alone.
And then the tall one shifted her weight, and I saw the other one behind her, the small dark one she'd been half-shielding with her body, and the world stopped being a place I understood.
It hit me as the stories said it would and I'd never believed, because I'd stopped believing in the stories somewhere around the time I stopped believing anyone would ever want me for myself.
A bond, snapping into place between one breath and the next, total before I'd finished the breath, and without so much as asking my leave.
One instant I was a bored king on a mound.
The next I was a man with a rope tied round his sternum and the other end of it knotted to a small filthy exhausted human woman I had never seen before in my life, and the rope pulled, and everything in me lit up like dry brush going to flame.
She was human, that registered somewhere far off, past the roaring, human, not shifter, which should have been impossible for a fated bond and wasn't, apparently, because there it was, undeniable, humming in my chest like a plucked sinew.
She was small, worn to the bone, someone had bound her wrists, and even filthy and half-starved she had a face I wanted to look at until I died, dark eyes almost black taking in my pride with a quick devouring intelligence that missed nothing, cataloguing the drying racks, the fires, the people, as if she were pricing the lot of us.
She looked at everything except me. And when at last she did look at me, when her clever frightened eyes came up the mound and found my face, something crossed them that I would spend a long time trying to name, and none of the names were gladness.
Her look was my first warning that none of this would go as a king expects.
No, I thought, with the part of me that had survived thirty years of being wanted for the wrong reasons.
No, absolutely not, you do not trust this.
A bond to a stranger, delivered to your door by a slaver, on the one morning you were fool enough to be bored, is a trick or a trap or a madness, and you will not let it move you.
The rope round my sternum pulled anyway, and it was already sinking in that my not trusting it would make no difference at all.
That was the cruelty of the thing, and the wonder of it, tangled so tight I couldn't get a blade between them.
All my life I'd wanted exactly this, a pull toward one person that owed nothing to my crown, a wanting that had chosen me before it knew a single thing about what I could give.
The bond didn't care that I was a king. It hadn't consulted my mane or my mound or the size of my stores.
It had simply looked at a starving stranger with clever eyes and decided her, and mine.
The wanting of it was so pure and so unearned that for one dizzy moment I felt like weeping in front of my whole pride, which would have been a first for the golden king.
Then the old wariness closed over the wonder like water over a dropped stone.
Because I had spent thirty years learning that everything which arrived feeling like a gift turned out, in the end, to carry a price, and here was the largest gift of my life delivered by the ugliest man on the steppe, and only a fool takes a slaver's word that the goods are sound.
Perhaps the bond was real; perhaps it was some working of Karik's, some trap baited with exactly the thing a lonely king couldn't refuse.
There was no way for me to know. What I knew was that I wanted her with an intensity that frightened me, and that wanting anything that much had never once ended well for me, and that I was going to buy her regardless and sort out the trusting later.
Karik was still talking, and I made myself hear him.
"...both sound, both broken to the road, no trouble in them now the fight's gone," he was saying, in the trader's wolf-tongue we shared, the flat sales-patter of a man who'd done this a hundred times.
"The tall one's a full shifter, strong stock.
The little one's only human, but she cooks, my men haven't eaten so well in a season, and she's got a face on her, you'll grant.
I'll take hides, flint, or fat, and I'll hear your offer, King of the Mound. "
The little one's only human, but she cooks.
He said it as he'd have described a serviceable knife.
He had her wrists bound and her worth totted up in hides and he had no idea, none, that he'd just carried my fated mate five days across the steppe slung over a wolf's back and was now trying to sell her to me by the measure of her hands.
If he'd known, if he'd had the first idea what she was to me, the price would have been my whole kingdom and he'd have known to ask it.
He didn't know a thing about it, and I made very sure my face didn't tell him.