13. Chapter 13 #3
Over her shoulder I saw Rivik standing frozen, his own face open in a way he never let it be, and his bond was screaming exactly as loud as mine.
He held himself back, that was Rivik all over, an alpha to the marrow, letting the healer go first because someone had to keep watch on the pride while the rest of us fell apart.
But I'd travelled six weeks beside him, and I'd felt how his own thread had pulled him half-mad on the nights the trail went cold, and I knew what it cost him to stand there with his hands empty while she wept into my chest. When Ellie finally saw him past my shoulder, when she reached one hand out toward him without letting go of me, I watched the alpha's rigid control crack straight across.
He crossed to us, folded his big hand over the back of her head, and bent to press his brow to her hair, and for a moment the three of us stood tangled together in a knot of relief that had no words in any language.Nathan let us have perhaps three breaths.
“Is she fit to travel?”
He spoke to Dev, not me, and not Ellie, though she was standing close enough to hear him. Dev straightened with visible effort, one hand braced against his badly mended thigh.
“Nathan,” Ellie said, warning already in her voice.
“We’ve lost six weeks.” His gaze travelled over her with the same cold assessment I’d use on a wound, except there was no care in it.
“I need to know whether the reserves are intact, whether she can still carry them and how soon we can move. This place plainly has food, hides and men who know the eastern country. If its king will provide a guide—”
“She has been safe less than a minute,” I said.
Nathan’s eyes came to me. He had learned enough of our tongue on the road to understand, though he rarely troubled to use it.
“And Megan has been captive six weeks,” I continued. “Dev’s leg has knitted badly because you drove him on it. None of them goes anywhere until I’ve examined them, and after that they rest.”
“We don’t have time for rest.”
“Then you should have chosen the safer river.”
The words landed. His face didn’t change, but something behind it went still.
A warmth gathered at the edge of us. The golden king had come closer, and though he could not have followed Nathan’s words, he’d read the shape of the exchange easily enough. He looked to Ellie.
“What does this man want?”
She told him, wearily. Tau listened, his amber gaze resting on Nathan with an attention that held no welcome in it.
“My pride will feed your people,” he said when she’d finished. “They will have hides, healers and shelter for as long as they need them. When they wish to leave, I will help them.”
His eyes did not leave Nathan’s.
“But they are my guests. They leave when they choose.”
Nathan understood the tone if not the words. He looked around at the hundreds of lions watching from the fires and measured, at last, the precise limits of his authority.
Then he nodded.
“Fine,” he said. “Examine them. Then we make a plan.”
That was the thing Nathan would never understand, watching from the edge of it.
We hadn't come six weeks for a possession.
We'd come for her, all of us, each according to the shape of his own heart, and none of us needed to be the only one to matter, because a woman like Ellie made more room in a man's chest than he'd known he had, rather than less.
But we weren't alone, and the pride was watching, and there was a king somewhere in all this who'd been told a small dark human belonged to him.
I became aware of him by degrees, a stillness at the edge of the gathering, a warmth and a weight, the awareness that comes over you when the largest predator in a place is near, before you consciously see it.
When I finally looked up over Ellie's head, he was there, golden, enormous, taller even than me, a great mane of tawny hair and a face that would have been called beautiful in any age of the world, watching Ellie weep into a stranger's chest with an expression I could not read at all, and that not-reading frightened me more than open hostility would have, because I know what to do with a threat I can see.
Ellie felt me go tense. She pulled back, scrubbing at her face, and turned to follow my gaze, and when she saw the golden king standing there a whole complicated weather moved across her fac. I suddenly understood, with a lurch, that whatever he was to her, it was not nothing.
"Daska," she said, and her voice was careful now, the voice of a woman about to explain something difficult.
She looked between me and Rivik and the golden giant, and I watched her gather herself.
I braced, because I'd spent my whole life bracing for the moment the good thing got taken away.
"There's so much I have to explain, all of it, the bond and the claim and why I said no.
" She stopped, pressed her lips together, and I saw her decide to simply tell the truth, as she always did in the end.
"His name is Tau. He's the king of this pride.
The day the wolves sold me to him, a fated bond snapped into place between us, real, undeniable, the same as ours.
He claimed me in front of everyone, I refused him, and he's been courting me ever since. "
Somewhere behind us a child laughed, oblivious, and I stood in a king's settlement at the edge of the world with the woman I loved in the circle of my arm and a fated rival watching us with unreadable golden eyes.
I understood that whatever we'd crossed six weeks of steppe to rescue her from, it was going to be a great deal more complicated than a locked door and a fight.