I had failed to listen…

I had not intended to listen.

I had gone looking for Scar, or perhaps I had simply wished to know where he was, which is not quite the same thing, though I am no longer certain I know the difference. His voice carried from where he spoke, and I recognized it before I understood the words. There was something in the sound of it that made me pause, something measured and deliberate, and I remained where I was, hidden from sight, listening to a conversation that might never have been meant for my ears.

At first, I listened with the same suspicion I might give a stranger speaking of me around a trading fire. I expected to hear a man defending his choices, justifying his claim, perhaps boasting of the wild Panther he had managed to put in steel. I had heard men speak of women that way before. I knew the language of possession, and I knew the arrogance of men who mistook the wearing of a collar for the breaking of a spirit. I was prepared to be angry. I was prepared to despise his words.

What I was not prepared for was the beginning.

Years.

He had watched me for years before I ever knew he existed. He had seen me passing through the trading grounds when I was nothing more than a stranger to him, a woman moving through her own life, and something about that fleeting sight had remained with him. He had waited, watched, learned where I might be found, and followed at a distance, patiently studying the woman I was long before he ever approached me.

I stood very still.

I had never known any of this. I had never imagined that the man who could infuriate me with a single look had once been content to watch me from the shadows, asking nothing of me, making no demand upon me, allowing me to pass through the world without knowing he was there. I could scarcely reconcile that patient, silent man with the one I had fought, challenged, and accused of trying to bend me to his will. Yet they were the same man. The difference was that I had only ever known what he chose to show me, and I had been far too certain that I understood what I saw.

Then he spoke of choosing me as his equal.

My throat tightened, and my fingers curled against my palms.

His equal.

I had heard those words before, in one form or another, and had never quite known what to do with them. I had been raised to believe that a woman such as I had no need of a man, that freedom was something to be guarded with teeth and blade, and that allowing anyone to stand too close was to give them the means to hurt me. I had carried those beliefs into every encounter with Scar, measuring his words against the life I had built for myself and finding fault whenever his expectations threatened the walls I had spent so long constructing.

He had chosen me to stand beside him, and I had heard a threat where perhaps I should have heard an invitation.

That did not mean I had been wrong to question him. I would not rewrite myself into some foolish creature who had never had reason to distrust a man. I had demanded that he prove himself, and he had accepted the test. He had followed the ancient customs, met the demands placed before him, and returned with the Homestone and the rope. He had done what was asked of him, and still I had found myself dissatisfied, unable to settle into the very thing I had demanded he prove he wanted.

I had told myself that I was protecting my freedom. I had not considered that I might also have been protecting myself from the terrifying possibility that I wanted him just as much as he wanted me.

His words grew harder as he spoke of my temper, my stubbornness, and my refusal to moderate myself, even in the quiet hours when we lay together. I felt my jaw tighten. There were things I still disputed, and I would not pretend otherwise. I was a Panther, not some soft city woman who had been taught to make herself agreeable for the comfort of a man. My voice, my temper, and my feral ways were not things I had acquired to spite him. They were part of me, shaped by the Forest and the women who had raised me, and I would not be ashamed of them simply because they sometimes displeased him.

Yet beneath my anger was something less comfortable.

Recognition.

How many times had he tried to explain himself to me, only for me to hear the demand beneath his words and miss the meaning he had been struggling to convey? How often had I answered before he had finished speaking, turned away before I had understood, or taken his attempts to guide me as an effort to strip away the very things that made me who I was? He had spoken of patience, and I knew he had shown it. I had tested him repeatedly, sometimes deliberately, sometimes because I could not seem to help myself, and he had returned to me again and again, still trying to make me understand something I had not known how to hear.

I had thought his restraint meant he did not understand me.

Perhaps I had never stopped to consider that he understood more than I gave him credit for, and that it was I who could not understand him.

Then he spoke of leaving me to go North.

I remembered his absence. I remembered the anger, the hurt, and the dreadful uncertainty of not knowing what his departure meant. I had told myself that he had grown tired of me, that I had disappointed him beyond his willingness to endure, or that he had finally decided I was more trouble than I was worth. I had been so certain that his leaving was an answer to something I had done that I had never considered the possibility that he had left because he believed I needed room to breathe.

He had thought distance might help me. He had intended to return.

And somewhere along the way, while he was far from me, he had discovered that it was not a woman’s touch he wanted, but mine.

I lowered my eyes, though there was no one there to see me do it.

There was a peculiar sort of ache in learning that one had been missed. I knew what it was to miss Scar. I knew the humiliating habit of listening for sounds that were not there, of turning at the faintest suggestion of his presence, of finding my thoughts straying toward him when I had far better things to occupy them. I knew the anger that came with longing, because longing made a woman vulnerable, and vulnerability was a thing I had spent much of my life learning to survive without.

But I had never truly allowed myself to believe that he might suffer from my absence as I suffered from his.

He had turned back when he learned the Kurii had entered the Northern Forest. He could have continued North. He could have pursued the hunt he had set out to undertake. Instead, he had chosen to return to find me, to embrace me, to shelter me, and to protect me. He had said those words plainly enough, and yet I had not understood the weight of them. I had been so occupied with the manner of his return, with what it meant for my freedom and what he expected of me, that I had failed to see what had brought him back.

He had come because he loved me.

The realization did not make me suddenly pleased with the collar at my throat. It did not erase my objections, nor did it answer every question I still carried. Love, I was beginning to learn, did not necessarily make a man gentle in the ways I expected, nor did it mean that he would always choose the path I wished him to take. Scar was not a man who offered promises merely to soothe me, and I could not pretend that his decision to claim me had been made without regard for what I wanted. He had been brutally honest about that. He desired me, and he had removed my ability to make him optional.

Those words ought to have made me furious.

They did make me furious.

But they also frightened me in a way I could not easily explain, because some small, unguarded part of me had spent a very long time believing that if I remained difficult enough, fierce enough, and determined enough to need no one, I could never be abandoned by someone whose absence would break my heart.

I had made myself impossible to hold, and then I had been wounded when he let go.

Or perhaps I had mistaken his attempt to give me room for a willingness to leave me behind.

I did not know which truth hurt more.

When he spoke of teaching me, of expecting me to listen when he spoke, to learn when he taught, and to follow wherever he went, my first instinct was to bristle. That instinct had not deserted me, and I doubted it ever would. I was not suddenly eager to be ordered about, nor had the Panther in me grown tame because a man had finally put a name to what he wanted from me. I would have questions. I would have objections. I would undoubtedly have moments when my tongue moved faster than my wisdom.

But for the first time, I wondered whether I might listen without preparing my argument before he had finished speaking.

I wondered what I might learn if I stopped assuming that every lesson was a weapon aimed at my independence. I wondered what it would be like to follow him not because I had been forced to yield, but because I trusted him enough to discover where he meant to lead me. And I wondered whether I had been so afraid of becoming less myself that I had failed to see the possibility of becoming more.

He had said that where he went, I would go. What he said, I would do. What he taught, I would learn.

I could not yet promise that I understood the life he intended for me. I could not even promise that I would like all of it. But I was beginning to understand that he had never wanted a useless ornament to display beside him. He had chosen a huntress, a survivor, a woman who knew how to think, how to fight, and how to endure. He knew what I was capable of, and he intended to use those abilities. He did not want me to become helpless. He wanted me to become useful within the life he had chosen for us, and he intended to teach me his ways rather than leave me to stumble through them alone.

That, too, was something I had failed to hear.

Then came the words that cut deepest, though not for the reason I would once have expected.

He said that whether I loved him or hated him was no longer his concern.

I stared at the ground, my heart beating hard enough that I could feel it in my throat. A bitter, unkind thought rose in me that he had no right to say such a thing after all the times he had spoken of wanting me, after all the tenderness he had shown me, and after the things he had just confessed to his fellow traders. Yet beneath that thought was another, quieter one. He had spent years wanting me, months trying to reach me, and countless moments offering me patience I had not known how to accept. Perhaps he had simply reached the point where he could no longer bear to leave his place in my life dependent upon my willingness to acknowledge it.

I could understand that without agreeing with everything he had done.

And perhaps that was the beginning of wisdom: learning that understanding a man did not require me to surrender my own mind, just as loving him did not require me to cease being the woman I had always been.

I had been so busy wondering whether Scar would ever truly understand me that I had never properly asked myself whether I had been willing to understand him.

I had seen his strength, his authority, and his certainty. I had seen the man who expected to be obeyed, who spoke as though the world had been arranged in a particular order and saw little reason to apologize for knowing his place within it. I had fought against those things because I feared what they might demand of me. But I had also seen his patience, his tenderness, his willingness to teach, and the care he had shown me even when I made it difficult for him to do so. I had accepted those moments when they pleased me and resisted the meaning they might carry when they frightened me.

I had wanted him to understand my wildness without ever considering what it might mean to step into his world. I had wanted him to accept my ways, yet I had not always been willing to give his the same consideration. I had expected him to meet me in the middle while I stood stubbornly on my own side, blade in hand, daring him to cross the distance.

And still, he had tried.

That was the truth I could no longer escape.

He had tried to tell me who he was. He had tried to show me what I meant to him. He had tried to be patient with a woman who seemed determined to interpret every unfamiliar thing as a threat. Perhaps he had not always chosen the gentlest words, and perhaps I had not always been ready to receive them, but the effort had been there all along. I had simply been too busy defending myself to recognize it.

I remained where I was until his voice fell silent, carrying the weight of everything I had heard and everything I had not yet learned how to reconcile. I did not go to him immediately. I needed time to sit with the uncomfortable truth that I could be clever enough to track prey through the Forest, perceptive enough to recognize danger in a single broken twig, and still be astonishingly blind when the danger was not a beast in the shadows but the possibility of being loved by a man whose ways were so different from my own.

I loved Scar. That had never been the question.

The question was whether I could learn to love him without treating every difference between us as a battle I had to win.

I could not promise that I would become the woman he imagined. I could not promise that my temper would vanish, that my tongue would suddenly learn restraint, or that the Panther in me would ever be fully content to lie quietly at a man’s feet. I was still Melete, and I had no intention of pretending otherwise. But I could listen. I could ask rather than assume. I could try to understand what he meant before deciding what I thought of it, and when he taught me something, I could give him the courtesy of believing there might be a reason for it beyond the simple desire to command me.

Perhaps that was what he had been asking of me all along.

Not that I cease to think, but that I learn his thoughts. Not that I cease to be a huntress, but that I learn to hunt beside him. Not that I abandon everything I am, but that I discover how to make room for the man I have chosen to love.

I touched the steel at my throat, feeling its cool weight beneath my fingers.

I still had much to learn about being his kajira. More, perhaps, than I had ever cared to admit. Yet there was something else I needed to learn, something no collar could teach me and no command could force into my heart.

I needed to learn how to hear Scar.

For all the time I had spent believing that I understood him well enough to fight him, I was only now beginning to understand how little I had truly listened.

And that, I think, may be the most humbling thing of all.