Offered to the Lion

The Lioness in Waiting

He invited her to ride with him on Saturday, which shocked her enough that she accepted before she thought it through.

"I cannot ride," she reminded him.

"You said you wanted to learn," he said. "According to Declan, you've been to the stables twice this week."

She had. She'd stood in the doorway of the stable speaking to the horses, which were big and placid and indifferent to her bloodline. "I've been observing," she said.

"That's how you learn," he said, with an evenness that was devoid of condescension, and she agreed again.

Declan gave her a horse named Sable — old, broad-backed, with the gentle disposition of an animal well versed in soothing skittish riders. Kael rode an unfamiliar horse of indeterminate name, dark and tall, that moved with an economy and grace identical to his own. She kept her focus on maintaining her seat and breathing without falling off and embarrassing herself, and at the end of the first half hour she found a steady enough rhythm to consider, and then she raised her gaze from her precarious center of balance to see the territory of Ashveil spread around her, and forgot about balancing altogether.

It was extraordinary land. She'd seen it before through windows, over garden walls, in the view out of a car window — all incomplete glimpses, framed. From horseback, she finally grasped its magnitude properly: the ancient forest hugging the borders to the north and east, the open meadows sloping southward to hills shrouded in morning mist, the river cutting its course through the lowlands, and everywhere the particularity of its light, which she'd noticed from the moment she arrived — a deep gold she'd assumed was October and was beginning to believe was inherent to the place itself.

"How much of this do you own?" she asked.

"Pride territory stretches to the river in the east and the ridge in the north," he said. "Sixty square miles." He stated it without the pretense of wealth — only fact. "My grandfather was given the core of it. I expanded the eastern portion."

"Expanded how?"

A pause. "Negotiated," he said, with that flatness that meant negotiation of a sort she needn't inquire about.

They continued riding. She asked him about the land — what crops they grew, how the pride supported itself financially between the estate income and the businesses, how they governed themselves between him and the senior pride members. He answered each question, and she noticed how he answered her: adjusting upwards, never explaining around the difficult parts. He believed she paid close attention. He was correct.

"Dismount here," he said, at the crest of a long hillside slope, and she dismounted Sable and faced him.

He had already dismounted and stood with his back to her, looking over the low meadow where the morning mist dissipated and the grass was glistening wet silver with dew. Then he turned and said, "I have something to show you."

"All right," she said, cautiously.

He said nothing further. She watched him lift his arms and begin to undo his shirt buttons, and her heart twisted into a peculiar, complex motion that she refused to examine while he hung the shirt over his horse's saddle and the shift began — she'd seen shifts before, pack wolves, the fluid, terrifying elegance of a human form remade — but not like this.

Kael Ashford's lion was colossal.

Not hyperbolically. It was genuinely immense — wide-chested and long-bodied, tawny in coloration and darker across the shoulders, with a mane that ranged from black to amber along its length. He walked a few paces away and turned to study her with gold eyes that were uniquely and unerringly his own — a pure animal gaze that carried the same I see you clearly that marked his human features.

She sat on Sable and looked at him, and thought, I am not afraid.

This was worth examination, she realized, but not at this moment, because she apparently decided to dismount and walk ten feet of meadow grass to where he stood.

She stopped two feet from him. He was watching her and breathing and completely still. She could make out the separate hairs of his mane shifting in the breeze and the distinctive gold of his eyes catching the light of sunrise, and she knew something with the certainty of a truth she hadn't yet comprehended: I know this. I know this in some way.

Her hand moved. She reached out — not inquiring, merely reaching — and touched the edge of his mane.

The response was instantaneous: he backed away in a smooth, complete shift that took three seconds, and then he was standing before her again in human form, breathing altered and hair askew, and he was too close. Closer than the outdoors justified, closer to another proximity entirely.

She did not step back.

His eyes were very gold and intensely focused, and his jaw was tight with something he concealed. She felt the heat of him at this distance, the distinct warmth of someone who operated a few degrees above average temperature, and she considered closing the remaining distance between them. He would not interfere.

She stepped back instead. Not to retreat — only to withdraw long enough to consider her next step. He exhaled. She returned to Sable.

They rode in relative silence back to Ashveil, but there was a new quality to the silence — charged and conscious and suffused with the knowledge of what nearly happened.

· · ·

She met Vashti at dinner that evening.

Vashti was a pride female, late twenties, with an unparalleled physical presence that spoke to a lifetime of knowing her presence rearranged rooms. She was extraordinarily beautiful in a way that bordered on intimidating — all dark-skinned and angular and deliberate. She came with her pride family, who appeared to have a social standing arrangement, and seated herself at the head of the dinner table to Kael's immediate left with the effortless confidence of one long accustomed to it, and for the first ten minutes ignored Rielle entirely in order to study her.

Then she looked at her, with the calculated kindness that was an overt assertion of dominance. "You must be the Voss girl," she said. "Kael mentioned that he'd taken in a guest."

Taken in. As if she was a stray, a creature needing shelter.

"I am Rielle," she said. "Yes."

"How do you like Ashveil?" The kindness in Vashti's voice had teeth.

"I like it very well," Rielle replied, which was entirely truthful and gave nothing away.

Vashti turned back to Kael with the same effortless authority that had been present from the moment she entered the room. She touched his arm twice during a story about an event in the southern territory, and referenced twice an incident during a previous visit that had been last time I was here. She was laying claim in the moment, and she was very skilled at it.

For his part, Kael was polite. He responded to her conversation. And then, about forty minutes into dinner, Vashti said to Rielle, across the table, with a smile so perfect it was almost admirable: "I must say, it's rather unusual, having a wolf girl in the territory of the pride. Wouldn't you miss your pack? They must wonder what possible use you can be here."

The room fell silent.

Kael placed his wineglass and said, in a small quiet moment, without raising his voice: "Rielle is here by choice. Her usefulness is not a subject for this table."

That was all. Said in the same tone as everything else. And yet Vashti's composure changed by several degrees, and the other pride members at the table found excuses to redirect their attention, and Rielle sat with this knowledge through the remainder of dinner — the precise awareness of being defended, without fanfare or theatrics, by someone who had no need to be asked.

She would have to be careful. She was beginning to like him in ways that transcended the pragmatic.

That night she dreamt of fire burning beneath her skin — painless, something struggling to emerge, something bright and ancient and outraged at its prolonged containment. She woke with the bracelet blazing hot on her wrist and her hands trembling slightly, and with a sensation that wasn't fear.