25. Chapter 25
TAU
Ihad been a king for thirty years, and I had never once let anyone see me afraid, which is a thing I understood, that autumn evening, was about to end.
The first hard wind had come down off the eastern heights three nights past and put a knife in the air that hadn't been there all summer, and the whole pride felt it.
You could see the season turning in a hundred small ways if you knew where to look, and a king who wants to keep his people fed learns early to look.
The herds had begun their long drift south; the children were pulled in closer to the fires at night.
And the leaving I'd refused to think about all summer, because thinking about it meant thinking about the day Ellie walked east out of my settlement and did not come back, had stopped being a thing on the far horizon and become a thing with a date on it, because the passes she had to cross would close with the snow.
The snow was no longer a rumour on the wind.
I had spent the whole of that summer being remade, and I hadn't decided yet whether to thank her for it or curse her, and I suspected I would spend the rest of my life failing to decide.
She came to my fire that evening. She'd taken to doing it, these last weeks, since the night the whole thing between her and the bear and the wolf had settled into whatever it was now, a thing the pride had a hundred opinions about and I found I had only one, which was that she seemed, for the first time since Karik's band had dragged her into my settlement half-frozen and furious, to be at something like rest. It suited her better than the fear ever had.
The rest had put a colour in her that fright never could, and I hated a little how much I noticed it, because noticing was all I'd allowed myself since I'd stopped trying to win her, and a man can starve on noticing.
"You've a face on you," she said, settling across the flames with the ease she'd never had at my fire in the early weeks, when every visit had been a negotiation and she'd sat like a woman counting the exits.
"I've learned that face by now. It's the one you wear when you're about to be charming at me to cover something you don't want looked at. "
And there it was. The thing that had ruined me for every other soul in my kingdom, that she saw straight through the gold, always had, from the first day she'd refused my claiming in front of my whole pride with her chin up and her wrists still raw from the cord.
Everyone else in thirty years had looked at the mane and stopped there, content with the shine of me.
She'd looked at the shine, been unimpressed by it, and gone hunting for the man underneath, found him, too, which was the part I could never get past, and then, impossibly, stayed anyway.
"Perhaps I simply enjoy your company," I said, reaching for the charm, feeling it slide into place as it always did, the familiar glove.
"Perhaps you do, at that." She didn't call me on it.
She only looked at me across the fire with those dark eyes that missed nothing, and waited, as she waited on a pot that wasn't ready, patient and certain it would come right if she gave it time.
That was the other thing about Ellie, the thing that had disarmed me by degrees all summer: she never once chased.
She'd learned, somewhere in the wreckage men had made of her, that the surest way to make a frightened thing bolt was to reach for it, and so she simply sat, and left the door open, and let you come through it or not as you could bear.
I found, to my alarm, that I could bear it, and worse, that I wanted to.
* * *
I want to tell this properly, because it is the most important thing I ever did, and it did not look like anything.
There was no battle in it, no hunt, no grand gesture before the assembled pride.
There was only a man and a woman at a small fire in the cold, and the man deciding, for the first time in his gilded miserable life, to set down the performance and let himself be looked at.
"Do you know," I said, and heard my own voice come out without its polish, which frightened me more than any blade ever had, "that you are the third person in the whole of my kingdom who has ever seen the actual me?
The one under all of this." I gestured at myself, the mantle, the amber, the whole golden apparatus I'd built.
"There is my sister, who was born seeing through me and never had the grace to pretend otherwise.
There is Eleya, who I keep a secret for, which is its own kind of knowing.
And there is you." I made myself hold her eyes.
"Three people in thirty years. Do you understand what a thing that is to admit, for a man everyone in this settlement would tell you is the most beloved creature for a hundred miles? "
She went very still across the fire. She didn't reach for me, didn't soften into the easy comfort a lesser woman would have offered, because she understood, she always understood, that comfort would have let me off the hook I'd just hung myself on.
She only watched, and listened, and gave me the terrible gift of taking me seriously.
"Tell me," she said.
So I told her.
"I was a beautiful child," I said, "which sounds like a boast and is the opposite of one.
I was the most beautiful child anyone in the pride had seen, golden even then, and my father, who was a hard man and a great king and never once in his life said a warm word to me that wasn't for an audience, my father understood before I did what a thing like me was worth.
A beautiful heir is a kind of wealth. Prides sent their daughters.
Allies sent their gifts. Everyone who came to the mound wanted to stand near the golden boy and be warmed by his shine, and everyone who wanted to stand near me wanted something, proximity, advantage, the reflected light of me, and I learned before I had the words for it that the wanting was never for me. It was for what I could give them."
The fire cracked between us. Somewhere out in the dark a lion coughed, and one of the children laughed and was hushed, and the ordinary warm life of my settlement went on around a king unmaking himself at a foreign woman's hearth.
"So I became this," I went on. "The charm and the open hand of it, I built it all deliberately, as you build anything, because I worked out young that if everyone was going to want a piece of me regardless, I could at least be the one who decided how much they got.
Give them the gold. Give them the grin and the easy flattery, the king who remembers your child's name and asks after your bad knee.
Give them so much of the surface that no one ever thinks to look for what's underneath, because a man who seems to hold nothing back is the last man anyone suspects of hiding everything.
" I laughed, and it came out wrong, scraped.
"I have been performing my own life for thirty years, Ellie.
I am so good at it that I fooled myself for most of them.
It took a small furious human falling out of a slaver's trade to make me understand that I'd built a magnificent gilded room and locked the only door from the inside, and that I was starving in it, and had been starving so long I'd stopped recognising the feeling as hunger. "
"Tau, stop a moment." My name in her mouth, quiet, and there was no pity in it, which was the only thing that would have made me stop.
What was there instead was harder and better than pity, there was recognition.
"I know that room. I've lived in a version of it.
Mine had different walls, but I know exactly the shape of starving in a place everyone tells you is a palace. "
"I know you do." I found I could barely speak. "That's the thing of it. That's why I'm sitting here making a fool of myself instead of charming you and going to my bed. Because you're the only one who does."
* * *
I hadn't meant to tell her about the women. It came out of me sideways, as the truest things do, while I was still reeling from having said the rest.
"There was a girl," I said. "One of the ones I freed, when I dissolved the harem, you remember.
The young one, the slight one who sat at the edge of the fires that first night not knowing where to put herself, because I'd taken away the only place she'd ever been given and hadn't the first idea what to put in its stead.
That was my doing. I stood up in front of my whole kingdom and made a grand noble gesture and felt marvellous about myself, never once thinking what it would actually cost the women I was freeing, because I have never in my life had to wonder where my next meal came from or whether there was a place at the fire that was mine by right.
The freeing was alms, in the end, a rich man's alms, given for how it made me feel and not for how it landed. "
Ellie said nothing at all. She'd gone somewhere careful behind her eyes, and I understood she was letting me arrive at the thing myself, because a truth you're handed is worth less than a truth you walk into.