Offered to the Lion

What Lives Beneath

Freedom, it seemed, was a lesson she needed to learn.

Not in theory. She had known the theory, in the abstract sense of understanding a word you couldn't use in any language. Freedom as the gradual accumulation of little actions unchallenged, as the dawning knowledge that she could eat whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, that she could sleep whenever she wanted, that she could spend a whole afternoon reading in the garden without fear of someone coming up with a list of chores undone — that she had never known. Her nerves were still reacting to this fact with alarm.

For the first week, she was on edge in ways that were hard to articulate to someone whose childhood had never been governed by the constant specter of disapproval. She had grown used to feeling it coming well before it arrived, the way animals sense changes in the atmosphere before a storm. She always anticipated the arrival of people coming to check on her, and did little things that made no sense to herself — folded her sheets neatly even when no one was expecting that from her, appeared in the kitchen early in the morning, and offered to help with other people's chores. She was aware that Lena had been watching her do all of those for the past three days, because on the fourth day Lena said, quite bluntly: "You're allowed to just sit still," and Rielle had never heard the woman use such a phrase as an act of great compassion.

"I'm not good at that," she replied.

"No one is, really," Lena answered, "But you learn."

Rielle was slowly learning.

First to learn it, she learned from the garden. It was the wild English-style garden at the eastern edge of the property, full of lavender, late roses, and herbs going to seed in the October sun. There was a bench at the corner of two ancient stone walls that captured the heat of the afternoon, and this bench belonged to her for some reason she couldn't quite define. She came here with her books. She sat there. She observed how the sunlight changed. She felt, almost imperceptibly at first, a slow relaxation of the tension she carried behind her sternum, which had tightened from her earliest memory, from the age of seven or eight.

· · ·

He moved through her life at a certain distance, with a certain deliberate purposefulness. She met Kael Ashford at the evening meals on three occasions during her second week, which was, apparently, not common. According to Lena, who had told her that without any hint of approval or disapproval, he preferred to work through supper. During his supper, Kael sat at the long table of the dining room with four or five of his closest subordinates, and they talked about territorial matters and the practicalities of running Ashveil business operations. He let her be among them without making her an object of the conversations, which she appreciated.

He was good at that.

She noticed some things. When she mentioned at some point that she had not been able to find books of a certain category in the library — namely, those on pre-colonial territorial laws of the northern territories, she noticed that, somehow, they appeared on the library table the next day. No message, just the books. She noticed that the kitchen, in her third week at Ashveil House, started preparing a specific variety of bitter-orange tea after she asked to try one of those only once, noticing it among the cans. Lastly, she noticed that when Soren, still watchful and professional and occasionally calculating, joined them at the table one day, starting asking her questions about the Voss pack's political hierarchy, he made no attempt to direct the conversation elsewhere or answer for her. He let her answer on her own.

She answered more than she had intended.

· · ·

"Soren," she said to Soren on one of her mornings, who appeared in the garden path as if out of nowhere. "He's not safe to love."

This statement made without a single preface, like an obvious continuation of the conversation they were already having.

"He doesn't deserve your love," Rielle repeated.

"But I haven't said anything about love," Rielle answered with an equal calmness.

"No," Soren confirmed. "But I've been watching you."

"Watching? Really?" She glanced at him with disbelief. "If watching means observing that I've been thrust into unfamiliar territory by a man with an infamous reputation and keeping track of his every move, then yes. Otherwise no."

Soren smiled a very slight smile. "The kind of watching you're talking about is something specific."

She decided not to reply to that statement.

"I have no plans to fall in love with him."

"Not necessarily," Soren replied. "But you're already in trouble."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because I'd prefer if you went into this with your eyes open," Soren answered. "Because he hasn't been himself since you showed up."

· · ·

Her father rang at Thursday afternoon.

By now, she had been given a telephone — Kael's housekeeper had delivered it to her on her second day. She carried it with a vague sense of dread, but also with hope that he wouldn't call at all. She answered it while sitting in the window seat of her bedroom, looking out onto the meadow turning golden in the late autumn sunshine.

"Well," her father said with his characteristic pitch of voice, pretending to be amiable to some unseen audience. "How have you been settling in?"

"Fine," she replied.

"Good, good. Kael has been hospitable?" Damon Voss asked, and she recognized this tone — the tone of someone trying very hard to be amiable despite being annoyed with his interlocutor.

"Yes," she replied again, still watching the sunset colouring the meadow below.

"Well, Kael mentioned, in a brief letter to me, that he needed some time to discuss the business. I wanted to assure you it is absolutely fine — you must allow this to develop naturally. Still, I wanted you to consider the possibility that it may be useful to show some enthusiasm for the partnership —"

"You want me to promote your deal," she clarified.

There was an uncomfortable pause on the line. "I want you to represent our family's interests," Damon said, returning to his familiar tone. "You have to realize that you're there as an extension of his pack's —"

"I've left the pack. You forced me to leave."

"Rielle," he warned. This warning she had known ever since she was old enough to understand it — from the time when her parents stopped caring about her and started seeing her merely as their tool.

"You cannot come for me," she thought. "I'm almost three hundred miles from there, and there is Kael Ashford standing between you and me."

"I'll be in touch," she said, and disconnected the line.

She looked at her steady hands, surprised that they were calm. And then she went downstairs to check the dinner hours.

· · ·

He had dined with her alone that evening. She had no idea if it was supposed to be so or just happened that way – when she came down to the dining hall, the table was already set for two and a few minutes later he came down as well. There were no comments from the kitchen staff.

The silence between the two of them was different from the silence in the library. More charged, more... Not unpleasant.

"You got a phone call today," he said. Again, as if it weren't a revelation or even something unusual. "From your father."

"He asked me to promote his business deal."

"I know," Kael replied. "You don't have to."

"Of course I know," she echoed him. "I promised I'll be in touch. He will call again."

"And?"

"He wanted me to promote a deal with no idea what it entails," she replied after pondering briefly. "My father mentioned a certain geographical location — Maren valley. He knows it very well. So what's the actual deal? What does he want to do there?"

"Land consolidation," Kael replied, studying her carefully. "Farming settlements in the lower valley, which occupy several thousands of acres. He wants to gain leverage over the water rights, which will give him a complete control over the irrigation system. The settlements are human, by the way."

Silence. It took her a moment to digest this news. Damon Voss, the same man who had taken care of her mother, her biological parent. "He wants to displace human settlements?" she asked.

"Or control them. They are interchangeable." He picked up his fork again.

She thought about her father, sitting in his study with his smug face and paper he had been smoothing, about her mother, with amber eyes, laughing, warm. About twenty-one years of manipulation and obedience. And then, something hardened in her chest, not quite anger, but something close to it.

"Father won't get my help with that," she said.

"He won't," Kael replied simply, and started eating again.

They ate in comfortable silence, as she realized halfway through. Silence that didn't have to be filled with anything. Silence that was so rare in her life she had never experienced it.

Later, lying in the bath, in the water already getting cold and feeling the bracelet drying against her wrist, she thought about the gold piece her mother put on her arm before she drew her second breath, and wondered — not for the first time, but with a new curiosity — what it was supposed to mean, what it did there.

It was heavier than gold. Lately, especially in the warm bath, she felt as if she could sense it under her skin, like a faint hum. Warmth moving under her skin.

She pressed her fingers against the bracelet, and the warmth faded, and then she laid back in the cooling water, gazing at the ceiling above her. "I'm not who they say I am," she thought. "I have never been who they say I am."

She didn't know who she was. She hadn't known yet. But she had a feeling that maybe it would be allowed to figure that out.