9. Chapter 9
TAU
Six days into courting my fated mate, I had established two things beyond any doubt: that she was the most interesting person I had ever met, and that I did not have the first idea how to reach her.
This was a novel and humbling discovery for a man who had spent his whole life reaching people effortlessly.
Charm had always been the easy part, the thing I could do in my sleep, a word here, a gift there, a warmth turned on someone until they glowed under it.
I'd charmed hostile traders into fair prices and grieving widows into laughter and skittish cubs out from under the sleeping-furs where they'd hidden from thunder.
I had never, in thirty summers, met a person my charm simply slid off, like meltwater off oiled hide; Ellie was that person.
Every gracious thing I offered her, she took with a wary courtesy that made it perfectly clear she was cataloguing it for the trap she was certain lay underneath.
The whole business was maddening. It was also, and I want to be honest about this even in the privacy of my own skull, the most fun I'd had in years.
I'd installed the two women in a good shelter near my own, warm and dry and stocked, and made it known through the whole pride that they were under the king's protection and any hand laid on them in unkindness would answer to me.
Then I set about the pleasant work of winning her, in the way I knew how to win people, which is to say lavishly.
There was food first, the choicest cuts, the honeyed things, whatever the first of spring gave up.
After the food came furs, a comb of carved antler, a string of amber beads the colour of her eyes in firelight.
And every day I sat with her at the slow bridge-building of our few shared words, because I was the only soul in the settlement who spoke any of her wolf-tongue, which meant that for anything beyond gesture, she needed me.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy that part. A king takes his advantages where the goddess hands them out.
"This," I said, holding up a strip of dried fish, giving her the lion word for it slowly, as you'd teach a child or a very clever foreigner. "Nefu."
"Nefu," she repeated, and got the tone exactly right on the first attempt, which she always did, her ear quicker than anyone's I'd taught.
Then she pointed at the fish and said her own word for it, the wolf-word, and raised a brow at me until I repeated that back and corrected my clumsy attempt with a small ruthless precision that suggested she'd done this before, professionally, with people who paid her to be exacting.
That was the thing nobody had warned me about my fated mate.
She was teaching me as fast as I taught her.
Every exchange I engineered to make her dependent on me, she quietly turned into a trade of equals, until half our lessons were her learning lion and half were me learning wolf, and somewhere in the middle we were building a rickety shared country out of two languages and a great deal of pointing.
I'd meant to make myself necessary to her.
Instead I was becoming, to my genuine alarm, useful to her, which is a different and far more dangerous thing, because you can dazzle someone who finds you necessary and still keep your armour on.
Someone who finds you useful starts to see the man doing the work.
The pride watched all this with enormous interest. My people are lions at the heart of them, and lions are made for touch, we pile together in the sun, groom one another, sleep in warm heaps, greet with a press of the brow and a hand at the neck.
Affection among us is constant and physical and means nothing more sinister than you are mine and I am glad of it.
I'd grown up soaked in it, and never once thought about it, until I watched it land on Ellie like a series of small shocks.
She flinched from touch. Not dramatically, she was far too controlled for that, but I saw it, because I'd started watching her as closely as she watched everyone else, greedily, for information.
When Eleya reached to tidy a strand of her hair, as any of us would for anyone, Ellie went rigid until the hand withdrew.
When a cub barrelled into her legs and clung, as cubs do, she froze for a heartbeat before something in her softened and she let one careful hand come to rest on its back.
Touch, to her, was a language she'd been hurt in.
I understood that much without being told, and it did something painful and protective to me that I hadn't budgeted for.
So I was careful. It went against every lion instinct I had, but I gentled my hands around her as I'd gentle them around a wounded thing, and I let her set the distance, and I noticed the exact day, the fourth day, when she stopped angling her body to keep an exit at her back whenever I sat down beside her.
I knew because I'd been watching for it. That should have told me something about the state I was in.
There was a truth about myself I'd never once said aloud, and courting Ellie kept pressing on it like a thumb on a bruise.
All my life I'd loved people as I ruled them, from behind the performance, with gifts and warmth and dazzle, giving generously so that no one ever needed to look too closely at the man doing the giving.
Worship was the safe way to do it, because worship kept a comfortable distance in it; you can adore someone across a mound, hand them your best cuts and your finest amber, and never once risk them seeing the frightened, lonely thing you actually are.
I'd made a whole life out of that safe distance and called it kingship.
And here was this small wary human, taking my gifts with one eyebrow raised, entirely unmoved by the dazzle, wanting, as far as I could tell, nothing I knew how to give from behind my armour.
If I wanted her, truly wanted her, I was going to have to come out from behind it.
I could feel that already, six days in, like a door I'd have to walk through eventually, and I had no idea what was on the other side, because I'd never in thirty years let anyone find out.
On the sixth day I brought the comb.
It was a fine thing, carved antler worn smooth, and among my people combing another's hair is an ordinary intimacy, a thing you do for someone you're fond of while you talk.
I sat down at her side by her little fire, she'd claimed a fire of her own already and was cooking something over it that smelled better than anything in my settlement, which I filed away as its own separate marvel, and I held up the comb and mimed the offer.
I watched her understand it and go still.
I made myself say it in her tongue, clumsy and slow. "May I do this, your hair; only if you want it."
Something crossed her face that I was learning to recognise, the small war she fought whenever I asked her a thing directly instead of deciding it for her.
She looked at the comb; she looked at me.
And then, warily, like a woman agreeing to a thing against her own better judgement, she turned a little on the log where she sat and gave me her back, and the trust in that small motion hit me somewhere I didn't know was undefended.
I drew the comb through her dark hair slowly, working the tangles the road had left, careful as I'd ever been with anything.
She held herself tense at first. Then, by slow degrees, as nothing bad happened, as the only thing that happened was the patient pull of antler through hair and the crackle of her fire, the tension went out of her shoulders one notch at a time, until she was simply sitting in the spring evening letting a golden stranger comb her hair, and I was undone by it, quietly and completely, as no woman flinging herself at me had ever managed.
This is what she does to you, I thought, working a knot loose with a gentleness that would have astonished my council. She gives you nothing, and the nothing is worth more than everything the others ever piled at your feet.
"Why is it me?" she asked, after a while, without turning.
She'd caught enough lion by now, and I enough wolf, that we could stumble toward real things if we went slowly.
"Out of all of them, why would you choose me?
You have..." She gestured, taking in the whole warm settlement, the people who adored me, the wealth of it.
"All of this, and everyone in it. Why the broken foreign woman who says no? "
Because you say no, I thought, but I didn't have the words for it in her tongue, and I wasn't sure I'd have said it even if I had. Instead I gave her what truth I could fit into our small, shared vocabulary.
"They want the king," I said, drawing the comb slow.
"The gold, the strength, a warm thing to stand near.
" I searched for the words. "You do not want the king.
You are not dazzled by him. You look at me and you see...
" I couldn't find it and settled for laying the comb flat against my own chest, over the place the bond sat, the place no one had ever reached. "A man, and not a mane."
She turned then, and looked at me, and there was no wariness in her face at all, which I hadn't once seen since Karik's wolves set her down on my mound, only a startled recognition, as if I'd said aloud a thing she'd spent her whole life waiting for someone to notice about her; it lasted a breath.
Then the shutters came down again, gently, and she turned back to the fire, but something had changed in the air between us, some small door opened that would not fully close again.
"You surprise me, King of the Mound," she said, in careful lion, and it was the first time she'd used my title without an edge on it.
I was still riding the foolish warmth of that when Sawa found me.
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