16. Chapter 16 #2
"Enjoy your cakes," he said, the words quiet and full of venom, and turned and walked away toward the fires, and left me standing at the drying racks with my heart slamming and my hands not quite steady.
Somehow, against every expectation, I'd won.
I knew I'd won; I'd seen the mask slip, I'd said the true thing and watched it land.
And still I stood there shaking, because winning an argument with the voice that had lived in your own head for two years doesn't silence it.
It just proves, for one moment, that you can talk back; the proving costs something.
And underneath the small fierce triumph, the old wound throbbed where he'd pressed it, whispering in his voice that maybe, maybe, he was a little bit right, as it always did.
I went to find Daska. I didn't decide to; my feet simply took me, as they'd been taking me to him for months, because Daska was where I went when the ground under me shook.
The walk took me through the middle of the life Nathan had just sneered at.
I passed the seed-cake fire where two of the freed women now cooked for anyone who came hungry, a thing that hadn't existed a season ago.
A cluster of hunters argued good-naturedly over a council ruling on the summer grounds, and a cub broke off from her game to press a sticky hand to my knee in greeting before tearing away again.
Every step of it was evidence against the thing Nathan had said, proof laid out in front of me that the soft useless woman he'd discarded had built something real out of nothing but care and stubbornness.
And every step of it, the old voice kept whispering underneath, that a place could love you and you could still be, in the deep unfixable centre of yourself, precisely as unworthy as one cruel man on a dais had decided you were.
Nathan's cruelty needed no accuracy; he didn't have to be right, he only had to press the bruise and let the bruise do the rest.
* * *
He was at the healers' shelter, grinding something pungent in a stone bowl, and he looked up the moment I ducked through the flap and went still, reading me in a heartbeat as he read everything.
"What happened?" He set the bowl aside. "Come and sit down, you've gone grey. Who did this to..." His face changed, went carefully flat in a way I'd learned meant he was furious and hiding it. "Nathan. This was Nathan's doing."
"It's fine, I handled it. I actually..." A shaky laugh escaped me, surprising us both. "I handled him, Daska. Two years I'd have crumbled, and today I looked him in the eye and told him he was wrong, and I watched it land." I sat down heavily on the pallet beside him. "So why do I feel like this?"
"Because being right doesn't close an old wound," he said, with the plain certainty he used over an injury.
"You can win and still bleed. One doesn't cancel the other.
" He reached over and took one of my hands in both of his enormous careful ones, turning it palm-up, his thumb moving over the old scar there in the slow absent way that had become its own language between us.
"Tell me what he said, or don't. Either way I'm here. "
Daska didn't demand the wound. He simply opened his hands and waited, making it safe to set the burden down or keep carrying it, whichever I needed. That sheer uncomplicated safety finally slipped the lock I'd kept on the words I was most afraid to say.
Distantly, the sick curdled clench Nathan had left in my chest had already begun to loosen the moment Daska took my hand.
It happened like that with him, and at my fire, and at the council, the weight banking down to something almost warm whenever I was somewhere I was wanted for myself.
I'd stopped questioning it; there were too many strange things about my own body since the stones to chase them all, and this one, at least, was kind.
Sitting in the warmth of a man who'd crossed the world for me, I felt the thing in my chest go quiet, and I let it, and I finally let the truth out with it.
Because it wasn't really Nathan's cruelty that had sent me running to Daska; Nathan I could answer now.
It was the other thing, the thing that had been building in me for weeks, the guilt I'd been carrying and calling by other names, and it came up out of me all at once, because Daska's hands were warm and his face held no judgement. I couldn't hold it in for one more day.
"I've stopped being afraid of Tau," I said.
Daska listened as he listened to a heartbeat through his palm, without moving.
"That's the thing I came to tell you, except I didn't know it until just now.
" The words tumbled out, tangled and urgent.
"When Karik first sold me to him, when Tau claimed me, I refused him out of fear, because he was a stranger and a king, and I'd been handed to men my whole life and couldn't bear it happening again.
At the start, that was all it was. Just fear.
" I made myself look at Daska's face while I said the next part, because he deserved to have me look at him.
"But it's not fear anymore. Somewhere in the last weeks it stopped being fear, and now when I refuse him, when I keep him at arm's length, I'm doing it because of you.
Because I have you and Rivik and a bond that's real, and reaching toward another man feels like a betrayal of the best thing that's ever happened to me.
I refuse Tau out of loyalty to you now." My voice broke on the next words.
"And the worst part, the part I can't stand, is that the loyalty doesn't stop the wanting.
I want him, Daska. Every time I look at him it's there, and it makes me feel like I'm betraying you just by having a heart that won't behave.
I hate it, and I didn't know how to tell you, because how do you tell a man you love that you—"
"Ellie, love." He said my name gently, and his hands tightened around mine. "Stop for a moment. Just breathe."
I did as he said and made myself breathe. Outside, the pride went about its ordinary day while Daska held my hand in both of his. His expression held none of the hurt I'd braced for, nor anger, nor even surprise.
He looked, if anything, like a man who'd been waiting for me to catch up to something he'd already understood.
"You've been carrying that," he said slowly. "How long has it been sitting on you?"
"Weeks. Longer than that, maybe, I don't really know." I scrubbed at my face with my free hand. "I'm so sorry, Daska. I never once wanted to—"
"Don't." The word was firm, but his thumb kept moving over my scar, gentle as ever.
"Don't apologise to me for your own heart, love.
Not ever." He drew a breath, and I watched him gather something, some large thing he'd clearly been turning over for far longer than this conversation and brace himself to say it.
"I need you to listen to me now, Ellie, because I've been thinking on this a good while.
I've got it clear in my head, and I need you to hear the whole of it before you argue. "
Every muscle in me braced, because I'd spent my whole life learning that this was the moment the good thing got taken away, the quiet voice, the gathered breath, the I need you to listen.
This was how Nathan had started, on a dais, in front of five hundred people. This was the shape of the blade coming.
I'd just confessed to a man I loved that I wanted another man.
In every version of this that my battered heart could imagine, it ended with me losing him, with hurt closing over his gentle face, with the careful hands letting go of mine, with the one steady thing in my whole upended life pulling away because I'd proved, finally, that I was exactly the greedy, disloyal, too-much creature the worst voice in me had always said I was.
I'd handed him every reason to leave. Part of me had almost wanted to, I realised, some self-punishing part that would rather break the good thing on my own terms than wait for it to break on someone else's; that was Nathan's real legacy.
The rejection itself had healed, more or less; what hadn't was how it had taught me to flinch from love before love could flinch from me.
So I just sat there with my hands in his and waited for the ground to open.