7. Chapter 7 #2
This is the thing I am good at, the one genuine use I've ever found for a lifetime of performing: I can hold a still face over a burning house.
I looked at Karik with the pleasant, faintly bored expression of a king considering a middling purchase, and inside I was doing arithmetic of a different kind entirely, how fast I could get this man and his dire-wolves off my land, how much I'd have to overpay to make it happen without haggling, how to buy both women without letting the price reveal that I'd have paid anything at all.
"The human's no use to me," I said, and it cost me something to say it lightly, to look at her and dismiss her with my voice while the bond howled.
"Skin and bone, and I've cooks enough. But I'm short of wolf-stock, and I dislike sending a trader off empty over one unsold female.
Let me take the pair together off your hands and I'll make it worth the walk. "
Sawa's head turned a fraction. She knew me too well, my sister, and worth the walk from a king who haggled over everything was a wrong note, and she'd caught it; I didn't look at her.
I named a price that was lavish and climbing, hides and rendered fat and a cache of good flint blades.
I watched Karik's scarred face do the greedy arithmetic and land, as I'd known it would, on yes.
He'd have haggled a wiser man up further.
He took the overpayment for a fool's generosity and a king's whim, which is exactly what I needed him to think it was, and within the span of a hundred heartbeats the thing was done.
The two women were mine in the eyes of the pride, and Karik of the Broken Ridge was being walked back down through my settlement toward the edge of my land with his profit on his back.
Only then, with his back going away through my settlement, did I breathe properly for the first time since she'd stepped off the wolf.
Mine, said something in me, warm as a hearth, and I distrusted it even as it filled me, because I distrusted everything that felt this good, having learned the hard way that nothing given to me freely ever came without an invoice.
But she was here, on my mound, and she was safe now in a way she hadn't been a hundred heartbeats ago, and whatever this bond was, however impossible, whatever game the goddess was playing with a king who'd stopped believing in her, the woman was out of the slaver's hands and under my protection. That, at least, I did not regret.
Now I only had to tell her.
I got up off the earth and came down the mound toward her, and I watched her track my every movement, her bound hands coming up a little, her body angling to keep herself between me and the tall one, guarding the woman wolf shifter even now, wrists tied, worn to nothing.
At the lowest hour of her own life she was standing watch over someone else's, and the rope round my sternum pulled so hard I nearly laughed aloud, and I covered it with the easy warmth I covered everything with.
I stopped a careful distance from her, closer than a stranger and further than a claim, and I did the thing a king does.
I turned to the pride, to the gathering crowd, drawn by the trade, watching their golden king with the fond hunger they always watched me with, and I told them, in the lion tongue, in the rolling formal cadence of the mound, that the goddess had this morning sent me a fated mate.
That the small dark human before them was mine, chosen by the bond itself, and that she was to be honoured as the king's own from this breath forward.
The crowd made the sound a pride makes at good news, a warm rising rumble, delight and astonishment braided together, because their lonely, untethered king had at last been given someone, and they loved me and were glad.
Then I turned back to her, this woman who understood not one word of what I'd just told my people, and I dropped into the trader's wolf-tongue that a road-worn wolf-pack captive might just have a few words of, and I gentled my voice, and I gave her the gift.
I told her she was safe; that she'd never be sold or bound or handled again.
That the goddess had made her mine and me hers, that she was mate to the king of this place, and that everything I had was hers now, and no harm would ever come near her while I drew breath.
I said it as a gift; the best gift I had ever had to give anyone. I braced, absurdly, for gladness, for the relief and the wonder I'd have felt if someone had lifted me out of a slaver's hands and set me down safe and wanted in a warm place at the end of the world.
She stared at me. The clever dark eyes went from warm to something cold and blazing, her bound hands curled into fists, and her worn-thin body drew up to the whole unimpressive height of her.
Then she gave me my answer in the wolf-tongue, low and shaking with a fury I felt in my teeth, and it was not the answer a king expects.
"No, I am not yours, I will not be given, not to you, not to anyone."
A handful of broken words in a language she barely had, and I understood every part of it, because refusal needs no fluency.
She would not be given, not to me, not to anyone, not as any king's gift or prize.
She'd been handed across the world by men totting up her worth over her head, she had reached the absolute end of allowing it, and she'd sooner stand there bound and starving, blazing with defiance on a stranger-king's mound, than accept one more man arranging her life for her, however golden he thought his intentions.
And the goddess help me, in the ruin of my beautiful gift, in the total wreckage of every gracious thing I thought I was offering, for the first time in my golden, worshipped, unbearably lonely life, I felt something crack open in my chest that had nothing to do with the bond at all.
Because no one, in thirty years, had ever told me no.
They'd wanted me, flattered me, needed me, worn me smooth with their wanting, and not one of them had ever once cared enough about anything but my favour to refuse me to my face.
This ragged furious little human, who had nothing, who I could have taken with a word and didn't, had just looked the king of the mound in the eye and denied him.
I stood there in front of my whole astonished pride and felt, of all the mad things, the first clean spark of joy I'd known in years.