10. Chapter 10
ELLIE
The trouble with Tau was that he was charming, and being charming was exactly what made me not trust him.
I'd had eight days to study the golden king of the mound, and I'd studied him as I studied everything now, greedily and for weakness, because information was the only currency I had left.
And what I'd learned was that he was a performer of the very highest order.
The gifts arrived beautifully timed; the warmth switched on like a lamp turned toward whoever needed lighting.
The charm was so effortless, so total, so exactly calibrated to make a person feel like the sun had chosen to shine on them alone, that I recognised it instantly for what it was, because I had loved a man once who could do a lesser version of the same trick.
Nathan had been charming too, in his controlled English way.
Not warm like this, never warm, but he'd known precisely how to make me feel chosen, back when it suited him, and I'd mistaken the performance for the man and married my whole heart to it and got two years of frostbite for my trouble.
So when Tau turned the full golden force of himself on me, brought me amber and honey and drew a comb through my hair like I was something precious, every alarm I owned went off at once.
A show, the old wary voice in me said. It's a beautiful show, and shows are for audiences, and you have been someone's audience before.
The strange thing, the thing I turned over at my little fire in the evenings, unable to make it lie flat, was that the show kept slipping.
It slipped in small moments he didn't seem to plan.
When a cub fell against his shins and howled, and he scooped it up without breaking off what he was saying to me, absent and tender, a man's hands remembering a thing his face wasn't performing.
When he thought I wasn't looking and the golden ease went out of his face for a heartbeat and left something underneath it that looked, of all things, tired.
When I said a thing in my clumsy lion that was genuinely funny rather than merely charming to agree with, and he laughed, not the warm court-laugh he gave everyone, but a startled bark that seemed to catch him off guard, like I'd got past something.
Those were the moments I couldn't file; the performance I understood.
It was the cracks in it that unsettled me, because you can't perform a crack.
I decided, around the eighth day, to stop reacting to the show and start aiming at the man behind it, to see if there was one.
The chance came over food, because with me the chance always comes over food.
I'd claimed a fire early, a woman needs a territory, and a cook's territory is a hearth.
Mine was a modest one at the edge of the shelters Tau had given us.
I'd built it up over the days into something that worked: a flat cooking-stone I'd scavenged and set just so, a windbreak of propped hide, a stock of the things a kitchen needs that aren't food, which is to say fat and salt-ash and patience.
And cook I did, all day and half the evening.
I cooked for Megan first, always, watching the colour come back into her face over the days as I fed her the things a body needs in the early weeks, the marrow, the liver a wolf-woman traded me for mending her child's torn boot, the green shoots that settle a turning stomach.
Feeding her was the one thing in this whole impossible place I knew for certain was worth doing, and the doing of it steadied me as it always had.
But a fire that smells good does not stay private for long, and by the eighth day I had an audience of a different kind, lions, drifting over one and two at a time, drawn by the smell, hovering at the edge of my firelight with the frank curiosity of a people who touched and shared and had never learned to pretend they weren't interested; at first they only watched.
Then a thin old fellow with a grey-shot mane crouched across the fire from me one evening and pointed at the sizzling stone and said something hopeful, and I gave him a strip of what I was cooking.
He ate it with his eyes closed and made a sound of such uncomplicated pleasure that I laughed out loud for the first time since the river.
After that they came for the food, and I made them work for it, because that was how I learned.
"Sha," I said, holding up the meat, and the old lion gave me his word for it, and I gave him back the wolf-word, and we traded like that, food for words and words for food, until I had a mouthful of the lion tongue and every word of it was a food word.
Sha was meat, nefu was fish, ru-ka was the fire itself, and ilit was the honey they prized above everything, which I earned a whole delighted crowd's worth of goodwill by knowing how to fold into a hot-stone cake.
My first sentences in the language of the pride were all things you could eat, and there was a rightness to that I felt in my chest, that I was learning this new world as I'd always learned any world, through my hands and the feeding of people, the one language I'd been fluent in since long before I could speak it.
The cakes were what won them, in the end.
I'd carried the recipe out of Hanging Rock cradled close, the careful hold you keep on anything you can't afford to lose, Sira's honey-and-berry cakes, taught to me by a fierce old wolf-woman over a winter of frozen mornings, and I made them now at my lion fire out of what this warmer country gave me.
Wild grass seed, dried by the fire and rubbed clean of its chaff between my palms, ground long and patient between two stones until it gave up a coarse pale flour.
A knuckle of rendered fat worked through it.
A thumb of the honey they called ilit, and a scatter of dried bilberries traded off a woman with a baby on her hip, and the whole of it pressed into small rounds and set to cook on a stone I'd heated at the fire's edge until a drop of water danced across it.
They came off crisp at the edges, soft in the middle, sweet as anything in that whole cold age, and the first time I handed one to the grey-maned old lion he went so still that I thought I'd poisoned him.
Then his eyes came up to mine wet with astonishment, and he said something low and reverent that I didn't need translated.
A child stole the next one, a scrap of a thing with a lion's tawny eyes, darting in under her mother's arm to snatch it off the stone and bolt, and the whole crowd laughed.
I laughed, and I made a show of guarding the rest with a scowl that fooled no one and delighted the children so thoroughly that within a day I had a permanent audience of small thieves at my hearth.
It was the first thing since the river that had felt like mine.
Not given to me by a king, not a thing I was doing to survive, just mine, a fire, a craft, a small crowd of people who came to me for no grander reason than that I fed them well and let them steal from me.
And something eased while I did it; I registered it only as a fever breaking.
The dull curdled ache the borrowed weight had carried since the march, the thing that flared when I was handled and shamed and made small, went quiet at my fire, banked down to a warmth I could almost forget was there.
I didn't understand it and I'd stopped trying to.
I only knew that feeding people, being of use, watching a grey-maned old lion close his eyes over a strip of properly cooked meat, did something to the thing in me that no amount of Tau's amber ever had.
The numbness that had wrapped me for two years was thinning at the edges, here of all places, in a captivity at the edge of the world, over a cooking-stone I'd scavenged out of the dirt.
Tau found me at my fire on the evening of the eighth day, and this time I was ready for him.
He folded himself down across the fire from me with the easy grace of a very large man who'd never once been unwelcome anywhere, and he watched me work the stone, and he did the thing he did, the warm attentive thing, the golden thing.
And I looked up from the meat and, in my careful stitched-together lion and wolf, I aimed past it.
"Stop," I said. Not unkindly, but plainly, as you'd tell a musician to stop playing so you could hear him speak.
"Stop the shine, the gift-giving, the beautiful-king performance.
" I gestured at the whole gorgeous performance of him and watched it falter, watched genuine confusion cross his face, because this was clearly not a move anyone had made on him before.
"I don't want the king. I've had a charming man.
He was very good at it, too." The old bitterness came up and I let it, because it was true and he should hear a true thing.
"I want to know if there's someone under all the gold.
Because if there isn't, if it's shine all the way down, then we have nothing to say to each other, you and I. "
He didn't answer at once. He turned the strip of meat I'd handed him over in his fingers without eating it, and then, slowly, something I hadn't seen before happened in his face, a kind of settling, the performance draining out of it and leaving behind a man who looked younger and considerably more real.
"No one has ever asked me that," he said, in his own tongue, slow enough that I caught most of it. "In thirty years, no one has ever wanted the thing under the gold. They only want the gold." He looked at me across the fire with those tired honest eyes. "You are a strange woman, Ellie."
"I've been told."