29. Chapter 29
ELLIE
It was Tau's idea, of course it was, because a lion sees no reason a good thing shouldn't be a shared one.
He proposed it over the evening fire with the shameless ease of a man who'd never once in his golden life been told he wanted too much, that we should all of us take the king's shelter tonight, the whole tangle of us, because the great mammoth-bone hall had a crack down its smoke-hole since the last shaking and nobody had the heart to sleep under it while the wind worked at the split, and his own shelter was the warmest on the mound and deep enough in furs for a small pride.
He said it lightly, tossing another knuckle of bone on the fire, but the lightness couldn't hide the care beneath it.
He'd watched the crack in the great hall unsettle the whole settlement, and this was how a lion mended a frightened night, by gathering everyone he loved into one warm dark and daring the cold to do its worst.
"All of us together," I repeated, because I wanted to be sure I'd understood, my few hundred borrowed words still occasionally betraying me.
"Every last one of us." Tau's gold-brown eyes found mine across the flames, and the grin he gave me had lost every scrap of its old performance, worn down over the autumn into something that only wanted me to say yes.
"Bear, wolf, king, and the woman who's somehow got the three of us behaving like brothers instead of rivals.
Unless the notion frightens you. In which case I'll say I meant only the sensible warmth of shared furs on a cold night, and we'll all pretend I've a shred of restraint. "
Rivik made a low sound that might have been a laugh, there beside me with his shoulder near mine. "You've never had a shred of restraint in your life."
"None whatsoever," Tau agreed, delighted. "It's my finest quality."
Daska said nothing at all, which was his way, but I felt his hand find the small of my back where I sat, warm and steadying, a question asked without a word.
Only if you want it; you know you can say no to any of us, always.
Daska never let a moment get so loud that I couldn't hear my own wanting inside it.
And here is what surprised me, sitting there between the wolf and the bear with the king grinning at me across the fire, I did want it.
Not with the old guilt clawing up my throat, not with the two-year voice reciting my sins.
I wanted it plainly, the plain way a body wants warmth after too long in the cold, and for once I let myself feel the wanting without putting it on trial.
"Yes," I said, before the wanting could talk itself back into hiding. "All three of you, all of us together. Before I think better of it."
* * *
I want to set down what it was like, that walk to the king's shelter through the cold, because I think some part of me knew even then that I was receiving a thing I'd want to keep whole in my memory, unbroken, exactly as it was.
The four of us went together under a sky thick with more stars than the modern world had ever let me see, our breath smoking, the settlement quieting to sleep around us.
Tau walked ahead being golden and full of himself, telling some story that had Rivik shaking his head.
Daska came at my side with his careful unhurried tread, his hand loosely wrapped round mine.
And I felt, walking between these three men into the dark, something I had genuinely believed at the Savoy I would never feel again as long as I lived.
The feeling had a plain name, once I let myself say it.
I felt chosen, over and over, by three men who'd each in his own way looked at the whole broken sum of me and decided to stay.
None of them tolerated me, or endured me, or kept me on sufferance until someone better came along.
They'd looked, and they'd chosen, and they kept on choosing.
The old voice tried, once, at the threshold, as it always tried when I got too close to something good. This isn't yours to keep, it whispered as Tau drew back the heavy hide. Look at it, and know it gets taken from women like you.
But I'd learned a thing over this long, strange autumn, learned it at cooking-fires and council-fires and in the deep furs of three different men, and the thing I'd learned was this, that I didn't have to answer the voice.
I didn't have to argue it down or prove it wrong or win.
I could simply hear it, and set it aside, and step over the threshold anyway into the gold-lit warmth where the men I loved were waiting.
So that was what I did. I let it whisper, and I didn't answer, and I went in.
The king's shelter was deep and golden with warmth, the fat-lamps burning low, the furs piled thick enough to lose yourself in. Tau let the hide fall shut behind us, and the cold and the cracked hall and the whole uncertain world fell away with it. It was just the four of us now in the amber dark.
For a moment nobody moved, and I felt the shyness come up in me, the ordinary human shyness of a woman standing in warm lamplight with three men who all loved her and a night with no shape agreed to it yet. Then Tau, because he was Tau, broke it as he broke everything, by making me laugh.
"Now," he said gravely, shrugging out of his mantle, "I feel it only fair to warn the assembled company that a lion's stamina is a matter of some renown, and that if the bear and the wolf mean to keep pace tonight they'd best pace themselves early.
I'd hate for anyone to strain something.
I'm told it's very embarrassing at your age. "
"A bear," said Daska, with the driest patience I'd ever heard from him, unlacing his own furs without hurry, "does a thing once, and does it properly, and doesn't spend the next morning boasting to the hunters about the count."
"I've never once boasted," said Tau, wounded to his golden core.
"You told Sawa the count over breakfast," Rivik said, "loudly enough that the whole eastern fire heard you, and then you told her again in case she'd missed it."
"Sawa asked me a direct question and I gave her an honest answer, which is more than either of you managed." Tau's grin flashed white in the lamplight. "I refuse to be shamed for my candour by a bear who blushes and a wolf who broods."
And I laughed, standing there in the gold-lit warmth with the three of them ribbing each other like brothers over a thing that would have mortified me a season ago, and the laughing undid the last of my shyness, because you cannot be afraid of men who are being this ridiculous.
This, I understood suddenly, was the thing none of my old life had ever had room for.
It wasn't the wanting, and it wasn't the heat, it was the ease of it, the warmth of people who'd stopped performing for one another, who could be foolish together in the dark because they trusted the dark to hold them.
I'd been starving for it far longer than I'd ever been starving for a man's hands, and here it was, being handed to me by three of them at once.
"Come here," Tau said to me then, softer, all the play gone out of his voice. "Let us look after you. You spend the whole of every day looking after everyone else. Let us have tonight."
And I went to them.
* * *
It was Daska who reached me first, because it was always Daska who reached me first, the anchor, the ground, the fixed point every other thing in my strange life orbited.
He drew me in against the great warm bulk of him and tipped my chin up and kissed me slow, unhurried, thorough, as he did everything, giving me time to arrive in my own body before anything else began.
His beard rasped soft against my skin. His broad healer's hands moved over me as if he were learning me by touch, mapping me with the same patient attention he brought to a wound, except there was no hurt here for him to mend, only me, only the wanting, and his mouth against mine said the thing his few words never could.
You're safe here with all of us, and nothing in this warm dark is going to ask a single thing of you that you don't want to give.
"Safe?" he murmured against my lips, drawing back just far enough to find my eyes, and the old ritual word went through me warm as it always did.
"Safe," I told him, and meant it to my bones.
Then Rivik was behind me, and where Daska was patience, Rivik was fire.
He gathered my hair off my neck and set his mouth to the bared skin there, and the sound that came out of me was not a decorous one.
His hands came round to the ties of my hides with the focused urgency that was his whole register in this, a man who'd starved for half a year in silence and still could not quite believe he was allowed to feed.
He pressed the hard heat of himself against my back and murmured rough things into my hair in his own tongue, love, want, my name broken up among the wolf-words, and I felt the bond between us flare bright, as it did whenever he touched me, six months of held-back fervour let loose at last.
And across the shelter Tau watched us with his gold-brown eyes gone dark, unhurried, a king surveying the thing he loved most in the world and in no rush at all to hurry his own pleasure when he could take this much in the watching.
That was Tau's register, even here. Where Rivik brought urgency and Daska brought patience, Tau brought joy, the open sensual delight of a man who'd spent thirty years pretending he wanted nothing and now meant to want everything out loud.
"Look at you," he said, low, coming to us at last, sinking down into the furs where Daska had drawn me. "Three of us in here and you're still the most beautiful thing in the room by a distance. It's almost rude of you."