A Tapestry of Lions

by Jennifer Roberson

  Tears shone in Brennan’s eyes. “You are deserving of many things, not the least of which is care. Shansu, my young one—we will find a balance for you. Somehow, we will find a proper balance.”

  Torchlight streamed closer. Kellin looked beyond his grandfather and saw the royal guard. One of the men was Teague.

  Their faces had been schooled to show no emotion. But he had seen it. He had seen them, and the fear in their eyes as they had looked upon the cat who had been to all of them before nothing more than a man.

  Kellin shuddered. “I was—I was…” The wail was very near. He shut his mouth upon it, so as to give them no more reason to look upon him with fear and apprehension.

  They were the elite guard of a warrior who became a mountain cat at will. It was not new to them, who had seen it before. But Brennan was nothing if not a dignified man of immense self-control. Kellin was not and had never been a dignified man; self-control was nonexistent. In him, as a human, they saw an angry man desirous of shedding blood.

  In him now, as a cat, they saw the beast instead.

  They know what I have become. What I will always be to them. It spilled from Kellin’s mouth, accompanied by blood. “Grandsire—help me—”

  Brennan did not shirk it. “We will mend the body first. Then we shall mend the mind.”

  Fifteen

  He was but half conscious, drifting on fading awareness that told him very little save his wounds were healed at last, his broken bones made whole—yet the spirit remained flaccid. He wanted badly to sleep. Earth magic drained a man, regardless of which side he walked.

  His eyes were closed, sticky lashes resting against drawn cheeks. Earth magic reknit bones, but did not dissipate bruises or prevent scarring from a wound that would otherwise require stitching. It merely restored enough health and strength to vanquish immediate danger; a warrior remade by the earth magic was nonetheless well cognizant of what had occurred to require it.

  Kellin’s face bore testimony to the violence done him. The flesh across the bridge of his nose had been torn by a thorn; welts distorted his cheeks; his bottom lip was swollen. He had drunk and rinsed out his mouth, but the tang of blood remained from the cuts in his lip and the inside of his cheek.

  A hand remained on Kellin’s naked shoulder. Fingertips trembled against smooth, freshly sponged flesh; Aileen had seen to the washing. “Shansu,” Brennan murmured hoarsely, lifting the hand. He, too, was drained, for he had undertaken the healing alone. It would have been better had there been another Cheysuli to aid him, but Brennan had not dared waste the time to send for a warrior. He had done the healing himself, and now suffered for it.

  Kellin was dimly aware of Aileen’s murmuring. The Mujhar said something unintelligible, then the door thumped closed. Kellin believed himself alone until he heard the sibilance of skirt folds against one another, the faint slide of thin slipper sole on stone where the rug did not reach. He smelled the scent she favored. Her presence was a beacon as she sat down by his bed.

  “She is lovely,” Aileen said quietly. “This must be very much what Sleeta looked like, before she and Brennan bonded.”

  He lay slumped on one side with his back to her. A shoulder jutted skyward. Along his spine and the curve of his buttocks lay warmth, incredible warmth; the living bulk of a mountain cat.

  Kellin sighed. He wanted to sleep, not speak, but he owed Aileen something. Into the limp hand curled against his chin, he murmured, “I would sooner do without her, lovely or no.”

  “D’ye blame her, then? For being what you are?”

  It jerked him out of lassitude into startled wakefulness. He turned over hastily, thrusting elbows beneath his spine to lever his sheet-draped torso upright. “Do you think I—”

  “You,” Aileen said crisply; she was not and had never been a woman who deferred, nor did she now blunt her words because of his condition. “Are you forgetting, my braw boyo, that I’ve lived with a Cheysuli longer than you’ve been one?”

  It took him aback. He had expected sympathy, gentleness, her quiet, abiding support. What Aileen offered now was something other than that. “It is because of Sima that I—did that.”

  “Did what? Killed a man? Two?” Aileen did not smile. “I’m born of the House of Eagles; d’ye think the knowledge of killing’s new to me? My House has been to war more times than I can count…my birthlines are as bloody as yours.” She sat very straight upon the stool, russet-hued skirts puddled about slippered feet. “You’ve killed an Ihlini sorcerer, and a Homanan who meant to kill—or maim—you; as good as dead to the Cheysuli; I know about kin-wrecking.” Aileen’s tone was steady, as were her eyes. “The first killing won’t be questioned; he was an Ihlini.”

  His mouth flattened into a grim, contemptuous line. “But the other was Homanan.”

  “Thief or no,” she said, “some will call you a beast.”

  Memory was merciless. “I was.”

  “So now you’re blaming your lovely lir.”

  “She is not my lir. Not yet. We are not fully bonded.”

  “Ah.” Aileen’s green eyes narrowed. She looked more catlike for it, with a fixed and unsettling stare. “And you’re for ending it, are you?”

  She read him too easily. Kellin slumped back onto bolsters and bedclothes. She was due honor and courtesy, but he was very tired. Bones were healed, but the body was yet unaware of its improved condition, save the blazing pain was gone. Stiffness persisted; after all that had happened in the space of two days, his resiliency was weakened. Youth could not usurp reality though its teeth be blunted. “I have no choice. She made me become—”

  “I’m doubting that.” Aileen’s tone was level, unforgiving; she offered no platitudes designed to ease his soul, but harsher truths instead. “By the gods, I’m doubting that! You’re the blood of my blood, Kellin, and I’ll not hear a word against you from others—but I will say what I choose. In this instance, I hide none of it behind kindness and love, but tell it to you plainly: you’ve only yourself to blame.”

  His protest was immediate, if incomplete. “Me?”

  “No Cheysuli warrior alive is without anger, Kellin. He merely controls it better. You control nothing at all, nor make any attempt.”

  He had no time to think, merely the need to fill the toothed silence yawning between them; to fight back with words from a heart that was filled to bursting with despair and desperation: could she not understand? She was his own blood. “I did not want to kill them, granddame—at least, aye, perhaps the Ihlini—he threatened me, after all!—but not the Homanan, not like that—he was a thief, aye, and deserving of roughness, but to kill him like that?” He gestured impatiently, disliking his incoherency; it obscured the strength of intent. “Kill him, aye, because he meant to kill me, or maim me in such a way as to cut me off from my clan, but I never wanted to kill him—at least, not as a cat…as a man, aye—”

  “Kellin.” She cut him off sharply with voice and gesture; a quick motion of eloquent hand. It was a Cheysuli gesture. “If you would listen to what you just said—or tried to say!—you would understand why it is imperative that you fully accept your lir.”

  All his muscles stood up inside flesh in mute repudiation. “My lir—or the beast who would be my lir—has nothing to do with this.”

  Aileen rose. She was in that moment less his granddame than the Queen of Homana. “You are a fool,” she declared. “A spoiled, petulant boy trapped in a man’s body, and dangerous because of it. A boy filled to bursting on anger and bitterness can do little harm; a man may do more. A man who is half a beast may do more yet.”

  “I am not—”

  “You are what you are,” she said flatly. “What are we to think? Aye, a man under attack will do as he must to survive—d’ye think I will excuse a man who means to kill my grandson?—but a man such as you, gifted so terribly, can never be a man.”

  Gifted so terribly. He had not looked on it as such. “Grandsire also wears the shape of a cat.”

  Her mouth
was compressed. She permitted herself no latitude in the weight of her displeasure. “No man in all of Homana, not even a Midden thief, need fear that the Mujhar of Homana would ever lose himself to the point he sheds his humanity and feeds as a beast.”

  It shook him. Her face was taut and pale; his own felt worse. He felt it would stretch until the bones of his skull broke through, shredding thinning flesh, thereby displaying the true architecture lying too near the surface.

  Human? Or beast? Kellin swallowed heavily. “I want nothing to do with it. You are not Cheysuli—surely you can understand how I feel. Does it not frighten you that the man whose bed you share becomes a cat at will?”

  “I know the man,” she said evenly. “I’m not knowing you at all.”

  “But—I am I!”

  “No. You are a bared blade hungry for blood, with no hand on its hilt to steady its course.”

  “Granddame—”

  “He is old,” Aileen said, and the cracks of desperation in her self-control began abruptly to show. “He is the Mujhar of Homana, in whose veins the Old Blood flows, and he serves the prophecy. There is no doubt in him; what he does, he does for the Lion, and for the gods who made the Cheysuli. What I think does not matter, though he honors me for it; he does what he must do.” Her hands trembled slightly until she hid them in skirt folds. “How do you think it felt to be given a tiny infant and told the future of a realm depended on that infant, because the infant’s father was meant for the gods, not men?”

  Kellin did not answer. There were no words in his mouth.

  “How do you think it felt for him to realize the entire fate of Homana and his own race depended solely on that infant; that there would be no others to shore up the claim. If that infant died, the prophecy died with him. Aidan can sire no more.”

  Beside him, Sima stirred.

  “How do you think it has been for him to watch what you became? To see you waste yourself on whores, when there is a cousin in Solinde…to see you risk yourself in the Midden, when there are safer games nearby…to hear you rant about fatherlessness when he has been a father in every way but seed, and even then he is your grandsire! How do you think it feels?”

  He wet dry lips. “Granddame—”

  Aileen’s face was white and terrible. “How do you think it feels to know that your grandson—the only heir to the Lion—lacks the balance that will maintain his humanity; that if he does not gain it, the beast in him will prevail?” Aileen leaned close. “He is my husband,” she declared. “He is my man. If you threaten him with this, be certain you shall suffer.”

  It shocked him. “Granddame!”

  She was not finished. “I wasted too many years not honoring him enough. That time is past. I will do what I must do to keep him from destroying himself because a spoiled, defiant grandson refuses to grow up.”

  “Granddame, you cannot know—”

  “I know,” she said. “I saw his face when he looked at you. I saw his fear.”

  The Erinnish possessed his tongue. “I’m not knowing what to do!”

  Aileen stepped close to the bed. Her hand touched Sima’s head. “Be what you are. Be a Cheysuli warrior. You’re in need of the gods’ care more than any man I know.”

  It filled his mouth before he could prevent it, lashing out to punish. The question was utterly unexpected, yet even as he asked it, Kellin knew he had desired to frame the words for many, many years. “Does it mean nothing to you at all that your son repudiates you?”

  Color spilled out of her face.

  Kellin was appalled. But the words were said; he could not unsay them. “I only mean—”

  “You only mean that he deserted his mother as well as his son, yet she does nothing?” Aileen’s eyes were a clear, unearthly green, and empty of tears. “She has not done nothing, Kellin—she has done everything within her power to convince him to come home. But Aidan says—said—no, when he answered my letters at first. He answers nothing now; he said I need only ask the gods.” Her chin trembled minutely. “He has a powerful faith, my son—so powerful it blinds him to the needs of other people.”

  “If you went there—”

  “He forbids it.”

  “You are his jehana!”

  Her fingers folded themselves into her skirts. “I will not go as a supplicant to my own son. I have some measure of pride.”

  “But it must hurt you!”

  Her eyes dimmed behind a glaze of tears. “As it hurts you. As it hurts Brennan. We are all of us scarred by the absence of Aidan.”

  Cold fury filled Kellin. “And you wonder why I want nothing to do with a lir, or with the gods! You have only to look at him, and what obsession has made of him. I will not be so bound.”

  “You will be Mujhar one day. That will bind you even as it does your grandsire.”

  Kellin shook his head. “That is different. What kind of a Mujhar risks himself by bonding with an animal who might be the death of him? Does he not therefore risk his realm as well—and the prophecy?”

  Aileen’s voice was steady. “What is worth having if you are naught but a beast, and your people desire to kill you?”

  Sixteen

  One hundred and two steps. Kellin counted them as he climbed down from the Great Hall into the undercroft of Homana-Mujhar, where the Womb of the Earth lay within lir-warded walls. As a boy he had gone once with Ian, and once with the Mujhar. He had never gone alone.

  Not entirely alone. The cat is with me.

  He did not want her there. But she was the reason he went down to the Womb at all.

  One hundred and two steps. He stood in a small closet made of stone and depressed the keystone. A wall turned on edge, and the Womb lay before him.

  Air was stale, but did not stink of an ending. The passageway walls were damp-slicked and shiny. He carried a torch; it smoked and streamed, shedding fragile light as he put it forward to illuminate the Womb.

  Kellin tensed, though he knew what to expect; three visits were not enough to diminish the impact. Lir leapt out of walls and ceiling, tearing free of stone. They were incredibly lifelike, as if a sculptor had captured living animals and encased them in marble rather than carving them. They stared back at him from hard, challenging eyes: creamy ivory veined with gold.

  The Womb gaped. Its rim was nonexistent in distorting light, so that he could not see the rune-worked edge. Only the deeper blackness that marked its mouth.

  Kellin wet drying lips and moved past the lir-carved door slowly, holding the torch outthrust so he did not mistake the footing and tumble to his death.

  But would I die? I am meant to be Mujhar…those to be Mujhar can survive the rebirth.

  He did not have the courage to accept the challenge.

  Kellin stepped inside. The Womb’s maw expanded as the torch, held in an unsteady hand, illuminated the truth: a perfectly rounded hole that had accepted men before and refused to give them a second birth.

  “Carillon,” he murmured. “The last Prince of Homana to enter into the Womb and be born in the shape of a king.”

  He had learned the histories. He knew his birthline. Carillon of Homana, the last Homanan Mujhar.

  “After him, Donal. Then Niall. Then—Brennan.” Kellin’s jaws tightened. The next should have been my jehan, had he the courage to understand.

  But Aidan had renounced it. Aidan had been a coward.

  Should I leap into the Womb to prove my worthiness? Can I atone for my jehan’s weakness with my own strength? He stared hard at the marble lir. “Is that what they want?”

  No answer. The lir stared back in silence.

  Kellin turned and set the torch into a bracket. Carefully he took three steps to the edge of the Womb, then squatted down beside it. Buttocks brushed booted heels. Sore thighs protested, as did newly knit ribs.

  Silence.

  Kellin’s mouth went dry. In the presence of the Lion, he had felt many things. But the Womb was not the Lion. It spoke to him of a heritage far older than the Lion’s, who was,
in the unbiased nature of measurement, naught but a newmade thing. A cub to the Womb’s adulthood. The walls were man-made, and the lir carved within stone, but before men had meddled to glorify what they perceived as the tangible proof of power, there had been the Womb.

  “A gate,” Kellin murmured. “How many have gone through it?”

  Movement caught his attention. A black shadow paced into the vault, then rounded the Womb. It sat down across from him so that the Womb lay between, black and impenetrable. Gold eyes threw back smoky torchlight, opaque and eerily slanted.

  Now, she said. Your choice.

  He did not speak as a lir. “Is it?”

  It has always been your choice.

  “According to the prophecy, there can be no choice. If a warrior repudiates his tahlmorra, his service to the prophecy, he is denied the afterlife.”

  Her tail twitched once, then folded over arched toes. He had seen housecats sit so; incongruity. She was not and could never be tame. A man may turn his back on life after death. It is his right to do so. It is the price of living.

  “To choose how he will live after he is dead?” Kellin grinned derisively. “I sense obscurity. I smell the kind of argument that must content my jehan, who trafficks with the gods. How else could a man be made to repudiate his son?”

  He did not. He answered his tahlmorra. Her tail twitched again. He created your tahlmorra in the following of his own.

  Kellin frowned. “I mislike oblique speech. Say what there is to say.”

  That it is a warrior’s choice to be other than the gods might prefer him to be.

  “And therefore alter the prophecy?”

  Your jehan might say that altering of the prophecy also follows its path.

  Kellin swore and sat down upon his rump, letting his heels slide forward. With blatant disregard for proprieties, he dangled both legs into the void. “You are saying that a man who turns his back on the prophecy also follows it by that very repudiation. But how? It makes no sense. If I made myself celibate and sired no more children, there would be no Firstborn. How would that serve a prophecy that exists solely to make another Firstborn?”