18. Chapter 18 #2
“Eleanor is essential to the mission,” he said. “What she carries may be the only means of preventing a catastrophe that will kill people beyond counting. This is not a question of what she wants.”
There it was, the thing underneath him. He spoke of her as he spoke of the broken instrument under his arm: valuable, necessary and his to direct towards its proper use.
“The hides will be ready,” I told him. “You will have food, guides and strong backs to carry what must be carried. But Ellie will leave when Ellie chooses.”
Nathan looked across the settlement to her fire. She was kneeling among three lion children, showing them how to press seed-cakes flat without splitting the edges, laughing as the smallest ruined his and tried to hide the evidence in his mouth.
“That,” Nathan said quietly, “is precisely the problem. Eleanor has never been capable of choosing the larger good over the person directly in front of her.”
I disliked him. That had been easy from the first.
More troubling was that, looking east towards mountains still white with the old snow, I could not dismiss everything he feared.
She stayed at my fire late, and we didn't touch, and it was the closest I'd felt to another person in my whole gilded life.
It was as she rose to go, as she gathered herself in the low red light and I watched her as I always watched her now, greedy for every ordinary movement, that I felt it.
At first I couldn't name the thing. It came as a wrongness at the edge of my own bond to her, a discordant note under the clear tone of what I felt when she was near, the wrongness of a second voice humming slightly out of true beneath your own.
I'd been feeling it grow for days, if I was honest, dismissing it as the ordinary jealousy of a man in love.
But it sharpened now, as my own tie to her deepened, into something I couldn't mistake.
There was another bond on her.
This one wasn't Daska's; I knew the shape of Daska's by now, the settled weight of it, a bond long acknowledged and answered, sitting easy.
This was a different thing entirely, and it was raw.
It had the particular jagged temperature of a thing held too long in silence, a bond that had snapped into place and never been spoken, aching and long hidden, months old, by the worn feel of it, far older than my own.
Its owner had been carrying it alone, clamped down, paid for in private, the private carry of a wound you've decided never to let anyone treat.
I went very still, and I let my mind walk back through the last weeks with this new knowledge lighting them, and everything rearranged itself at once.
It was the wolf; it was Rivik who carried it, and the signs had been there all along for a man with eyes to read them.
He held himself at the edge of every gathering; his eyes found her and flinched away.
There were the songs, too, I'd heard her humming a wolf-tune at her fire and thought nothing of it, and now I understood it was his, taught to her on some road I'd never walked, a love letter sung in a key she couldn't read.
Here was the alpha who should have faded as a lone wolf and hadn't, kept alive by something he'd never named.
He was bonded to her, had been for months, and he'd said nothing, carried it clenched down and burning, for the same reason I'd hidden the frightened thing under my gold and Ellie had refused to reach for anything good.
Three of us, I thought, with something between pity and dark recognition.
Three of us circling the same terror, each certain we're the only one who doesn't deserve the thing we want.
Ellie paused at the edge of the firelight, sensing my sudden stillness. "What is it?"
"Nothing." The old reflex, smooth as ever, though for once I meant the lie kindly. "Only a king's idle thoughts. Go and sleep."
She went, and I sat alone at my fire with the discovery settling heavy in me, and what I'd been handed was not mine to hold.
The wolf's secret was the wolf's to tell.
But I knew it now, and knowing it changed the shape of everything, because a man who's just decided to stop performing, to stop grasping, to want the woman's wholeness over his own claim on her, cannot in the same breath begrudge another man the same bond he carries himself.
The goddess, it seemed, was not finished teaching me.
She'd bound this woman to a king who feared being seen, a bear who'd never been chosen, and a wolf drowning in a silence of his own making, and somewhere in the cruel symmetry of it, I was starting to suspect she meant for all of us to be healed by the same stubborn hands.
I looked across the dark settlement toward the wolves' fires, where I knew Rivik would be sitting alone with a bond he thought no one could see, and I felt the strangest thing rise in me; it wasn't rivalry at all.
It was kinship, the recognition of one frightened man for another, both of us in love with a woman who couldn't yet believe she deserved to be loved by even one of us, let alone all.
"You poor bastard," I said quietly, to the dark, to the wolf who couldn't hear me. "You've got it as bad as I do."
And I sat with that a long while, and let the last of my triumph go, and found underneath it something far more dangerous to a king who'd spent his life alone, the beginning of understanding that I might not have to be.