“Of course there is truth to it. Does the painted animal shape mean there is no living lir?” Aidan shook his head. “A prophecy does not lie. At times circumstances change, and the fate itself is changed; they gave us free will, the gods. The ultimate result may be altered, but what served as catalyst was never a falsehood. It is not graven in stone.” He tapped fingertips against the heel stone. “This will remain here forever—for as long as the world has—to speak of the prophecy and all it entails. Eighteen words.” His smile was not condescending, but unadorned serenity; he was certain of his place within the prophecy. “Eighteen simple words that have ruled our lives since before we were even conceived.”
Kellin looked at the runes. “‘One day—’” But he broke off reflexive quoting. There was another matter he considered more important. “How can I be the Lion?”
“You are. No more than that. You are the Lion…just as I was the broken link.”
Kellin wanted to deny it all, to accuse the shar tahl who was also his father that purposeful obscurity offered no one an answer. But what came out of his mouth was a simple truth: “I do not understand.”
“That is one of my purposes here: to explain things more fully.”
Bitterness reasserted itself. “To other men whose lives have been twisted by their tahlmorras?”
“Come with me.”
It provoked. “Where? To that palace? I have seen it. You do not live there.”
“To my pavilion.” The smile, now lacking the unearthly quality of prophecy, was freely offered again with nothing more in its shaping than hospitality. “I am Cheysuli, Kellin. Never forget that.”
* * *
Aidan’s pavilion clustered with others in a smaller version of Clankeep. It was pale green with ravens adorning its sides; on the ridgepole sat the model.
Sima, sprawled on a rug before the doorflap, blinked sleepily in the sun. You found him.
Kellin scowled. As you meant me to. That is why you left me.
She was unrepentant. Teel and I thought it best.
I do not appreciate such secrecy in my own lir.
Nor does your jehan. She twitched her tail. Even now he chastises Teel.
He deserves it. So do you. He did not stoop to pat the cat but went on by her and into the pavilion as his father pulled back the flap.
Aidan seated himself on a brown bear pelt and gestured for Kellin to make himself comfortable. “We built the Keep here because I saw no sense in inhabiting a palace. We are Cheysuli. We are here to rebuild what we can of the old religion, while imbuing it with new.” He smiled. “I am somewhat controversial with regard to my beliefs; some elders name me a fool.”
Kellin said nothing. He had come for none of this.
“This is a place of history and magic,” Aidan continued, “and we treat it as such. Palaces have no place here.”
He disputed at once. “I thought the Cheysuli built it. There are runes in the pillars. Old Tongue runes, like those on the heel stone.” It was proof; it was enough; it trapped his traitorous father.
“Runes can be carved later, as those on the heel stone were.”
Kellin exhaled patience. He was wrung dry of it. “So, it is a Homanan palace after all. Should that matter? The Homanans are our people, too.”
Aidan smiled. “If that was a test, then assuredly you have passed it.”
In succinct Homanan, Kellin swore. “I did not come for this!”
“No.” Aidan rested his hands on his knees. “Ask what you will, Kellin.”
Kellin did not hesitate. The question had been formed nearly twenty years before. He had mouthed it every night, practicing in his bed, secure in his draperies as a child in its mother’s womb. Now he could ask it in the open, in the light, of the man who knew the answer. “Why did you give me up?”
Aidan did not hesitate. “It was an infinitely Cheysuli reason, and one you will undoubtedly contest, though you should know better; you, too, are Cheysuli.”
Kellin inhaled angrily on a hissing breath. “Tahlmorra. That is your answer.”
“The gods required me to renounce my title, rank, and inheritance. I was the broken link. The chain could only be mended—and therefore made much stronger—if I gave precedence to the next link. Its name was Kellin.” Aidan’s eyes did not waver. His tone did not break. His demeanor was relaxed. All of his self-possession was very much in opposition to the words he spoke. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done.”
Through his teeth, Kellin said, “Yet you did it easily enough.”
The first crack in Aidan’s facade appeared. “Not without regret. Not without pain. When I set you into my jehana’s arms—” Aidan broke it off, as if afraid to give up too much of himself after all. His tone was husky. “You were Shona’s child. You were all I had of her. But I was, in that moment, a child of the gods—”
“It is a simple thing to blame gods.”
Aidan’s lips parted. “It was done for Homana.”
“Homana! Homana, no doubt, would have been better off with a contented prince instead of one who lacked a jehan. Do you know what my life has been?”
“Now, aye—the kivarna has told me.”
“And what does it mean? Nothing? That I spent my childhood believing myself unworthy, and my adulthood cognizant that I mean nothing at all, save I can sire a son?” Kellin’s fists trembled against his thighs. “Use your famous kivarna and see what you did by renouncing a son in favor of the gods.”
“Kellin.” The chalk cliff sloughed another layer; soon it would be bare, and the true man uncovered. “I never intended for you to suffer so. I knew it would be hard, but it had to be done…and you are not, above all things, a malleable man. You choose your own path—have always chosen your path—no matter the odds.”
“I was a child—”
“So was I!” Aidan cried. “I had dreams, Kellin—nightmares. To me, the Lion was a vastly frightening thing.” With effort, he let it go. He smiled sadly, no longer hiding his truths. “Do you know what it is like for a jehan to at last acknowledge that the thing which frightens him most is his own son?”
Kellin was nearly incoherent with outrage. “Is this your excuse for giving me up? That you are afraid—”
“It was necessary. There was a purpose in it for me—and one, I believe, for you.”
Kellin jeered. “Facile words, jehan.”
“True words, Kellin.”
“Why would you be afraid of me? I am your son.”
“You are the Lion. You are meant to lie down with the witch. You are meant to sire the Firstborn.” Aidan’s eyes did not waver. “It is one thing to serve the gods, Kellin, knowing what you work toward—it is entirely another to realize that what you do matters in the ordering of the world.” His smile was without humor. “Men who honor no gods, who fail to serve the gods, cannot understand the enormity of the truth: that the seed of a single man’s loins can alter forever the shape of a world.”
Kellin was furious. “You will not blame me for this! You will not for one moment lay this at my doorflap! Do you think I am a fool? Do you think me so ignorant as to be led by facile words? By the gods, jehan—by any fool’s gods—I will not be turned aside by your faith, by your admirable devotion, by the mouthings of a madman when I want to know the answer to a single, simple question!”
“And I have told you why!” Kellin had at last shattered Aidan’s composure. It loosed the final layer of cliff and laid bare the underside of the man, not the shar tahl; the once-born Prince of Homana who had bequeathed it all to his infant son. “My tahlmorra. You should understand a little of that, now that you know what yours is.”
“Jehan—”
“Would you have me hold you by the hand and lead you through it? Are you so blind—or so selfish—that you cannot permit yourself to see another man’s pain?”
Kellin expelled a curse framed upon the Old Tongue. “What manner of pain could lead a man to renounce his son?”
“The pain in knowing tha
t if he did not, an entire race might be destroyed.”
“Jehan—”
“The throne was never meant for me. Here is where I was bound. The link—my link—was shattered in Valgaard; do you understand what I mean? I was broken, Kellin…I was…my link—a symbol—was destroyed. Yours was left whole. Whole, Kellin—to be joined with the rest of the chain when Brennan is dead, and a new king ascends. Do you see? I was in the way. I was unnecessary. The gods required a prophet, not another rump upon the throne…someone to proclaim the coming of the Firstborn. Someone to prepare the way.”
“Jehan—”
“You are the Lion. You are meant to devour the House of Homana.”
Kellin’s face spasmed. “You say first I am the Lion, and then I am a link in a chain…” He shook his head in emphatic denial. “I understand none of it!”
Aidan’s voice was hoarse. “We are all but links. Mine was shattered. Its destruction sundered the chain. Even now it lies in Valgaard, in Lochiel’s keeping.”
“A real chain?”
“A real chain.”
“Broken.”
“I broke it. I broke me to strengthen you.”
Kellin bared his teeth. “What good does it do, then, if Lochiel holds it?”
“Someone must get it back.”
“From Lochiel?”
“Someone must take the two halves and make them one again.”
Kellin understood. He sprang to his feet. “By the gods—not I! I will not be used in a personal revenge that concerns only you.”
Aidan’s eyes were infinitely yellow. “Lochiel killed your jehana.”
Kellin recognized the battle and struck back at once, using all his weapons. “I never knew her. What does it matter?”
“He cut you from her body as he burned down all of Clankeep.”
It hurt desperately. He had blamed himself so long for his mother’s death. “No—”
“He wanted the seed,” Aidan said. “He wanted to raise you as his own, to turn you against your House…to defang the Lion utterly before it reached maturity.”
Kellin fastened on a thing, a small, cruel thing, because he needed to, to salvage his anger, to shore up his bitterness. They were things he knew. “Where were you,” he asked viciously, “while Lochiel the Ihlini cut open my mother’s belly?”
Aidan’s eyes mirrored Kellin’s desperation. “Where do you think I got this?” A trembling hand touched the white wing in his hair. “A sword. It broke open my skull and spilled out all the wits, all the words, all the things that make a man…and turned me into someone no one, not even I, can truly understand.” His face was wasted. “Do you think, in all your hatred, when you lie awake at night cursing the man who left you, that any man, any father, would ask the gods to give him such a fate?”
Kellin was shaking. He could not stop himself. “I want—I want…” He wet dry lips. “I want to be free of the beast.”
“Then kill it,” Aidan said.
“How?”
“Go to Valgaard. Rejoin two halves of a whole.”
“And that will make me whole?” Kellin’s wild laugh tore his throat. “Expiation for your weakness does nothing to destroy my own!”
“Go to Valgaard.”
Kellin bared his teeth. “You have not seen what I have become!”
“Nor has Lochiel.” Aidan rose and opened the doorflap. “Perhaps the beast in you is a weapon for us all.”
“I killed a friend!” Kellin cried. “Do you say it was necessary, that the gods required this to fashion a weapon?”
The chalk cliff shapechanged itself to granite. “The gods required me to give up my son. Now that son provides a way for us to destroy an Ihlini who would, given the chance, bring down all of us. He would smash the Lion to bits, then feed it chip by chip into the Gate of Asar-Suti.” Aidan’s tone was unflinching. His eyes condemned the weakness that would permit a man to refuse. “Make the sacrifice worth it. Make the death of your friend count for something—as Shona’s death did.”
Kellin’s throat hurt. “This is not what I came for.”
“It is,” Aidan said. “Have I not said I am the mouthpiece of the gods?”
Kellin gestured helplessness. “All I ever wanted—all I ever wanted—was some word, some indication you cared, that you knew I existed…but you gave me nothing. Nothing at all.”
Silence lay heavy between them. Then the faintest of sounds, so subtle that in another time, in another moment, no one would have marked it. It was the soft sibilance of a man’s hand crumpling fabric.
Tears stood in Aidan’s eyes as he clung to the doorflap. “What I gave you—what I gave you was what I believed you had to have.” His mouth worked briefly. “Do you think I did not know what it would cost you?”
“But you never came.”
Aidan’s laugh was a travesty. “Had I come, I would have taken you back. Had I sent word, I would have told you to come. For the sake of your son, Kellin, I had to give up my own.”
“For my son!”
“Cynric,” Aidan whispered, and the blackness in his eyes ate away the yellow. “The sword and the bow and the knife—”
“No!” Kellin shouted. “What of me? What of me? I am your son, not he! What about me?”
Aidan’s eyes were empty of all save prophecy. “You are the Lion, and you shall lie down with the witch.”
“Jehan—” he said brokenly. “Is this what they have done, your beloved gods? Made you over into this?”
“The Lion shall devour the lands.”
For the first time in his life, Kellin put his hands on his father.
For the second time in Aidan’s life, he put arms around his son. “Do not be ashamed,” he said. “There is no shame in tears.”
Muffled, Kellin said, “I am—a warrior.”
“So am I,” Aidan agreed. “But the gods gave us tears nonetheless.”
Three
They stood upon the dock, facing toward the city of Hondarth sprawled indistinct on the distant shore: the former Prince of Homana, who might have been Mujhar, and the present prince, his son, who one day would be.
The sea-salt breeze blew into their faces, ruffling hair, tickling eyelashes, softly caressing mouths. Behind him, silent wolfhounds gathered at the border between wooden dock and paler sand, waiting for their master. Perched in a nearby tree sat the raven called Teel, while the lovely mountain cat, blue-black in the light of the sun, waited mutely beside her warrior.
Kellin slanted a pensive, sidelong glance at his father. They did not, he had decided, much resemble one another. The son of Shona and Aidan appeared to be a mixture of everyone in his ancestry—which was, he felt, a stew of hybrid spices—save that the cat at his side and the gold on his flesh marked him as something more distinct than merely human.
He does not look so old as I thought yesterday. Kellin stripped a wayward lock of hair from an eye, blinking away the sting. Yet if one looks at the eyes, he seems older than anyone else. “So—you expect me to go.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”
Aidan’s smile was faint, with a hint of irony in it. “It would be folly indeed to expect quite so much acquiescence…surely you still have questions.”
“A multitude. This one, to begin: how can you say I am the Lion who is meant to lie down with the witch? What witch? Who is it? How can it be done?” Kellin gestured incomprehension. “Even now my grandsire discusses a marriage between me and Dulcie—and I sincerely doubt Dulcie is this witch.”
Aidan’s smile was unabated, as was the irony. “Marriages, no matter how well planned, do not always occur.”
It provoked Kellin to retort sharply. “As one nearly did not occur between Aileen of Erinn and the Prince of Homana?”
Aidan laughed, unoffended. “Old history. They are well content, now; and that marriage did occur.”
“What of mine?”
“Oh, I believe you will indeed be married.” Aidan nodded. “One day.”
It seemed importan
t to know. “To this witch?”
Aidan’s tone was deliberate, akin to Rogan’s when the tutor labored to instruct an easily distracted student. “What precisely have I said, when I prophesy?”
“That the Lion will lie with the witch.” Kellin sighed. “I have heard it more than once.”
“Lying down with a ‘witch’ does not necessarily mean you will marry her.”
“Ah.” Black brows sprang upward. “Then you advocate infidelity.”
Aidan showed his teeth in a challenging grin that Kellin saw, in surprise, was very like his own. “I advocate merely that you do what must be done. How it is done is up to you.”
“To sleep with an Ihlini…” Kellin hitched his shoulders because the flesh between them prickled; the idea was unattractive. “That is what she is, this witch, is she not? An Ihlini?”
“It has been done before.”
“Oh, aye—grandsire did. Ian did. I know the stories.”
“Do you?” Aidan’s brows slanted upward in subtle query. The wing of white hair, against deep russet, was blinding in the sunlight. “Do you also know that I slept with one?”
“You!” It was entirely unexpected from a man who was shar tahl. “They say you bedded no one after my jehana died.”
“I did not. I cannot. Surely they told you the cost of kivarna, when the partner dies. It is much like a lirless warrior, save the body does not die. Only the portion of it that might, given opportunity, given the wherewithal, sire another child.”
“But—I am the only one.”
“And will ever be.” Aidan looked at him. “In Atvia, before I married Shona, I bedded an Ihlini woman. And the second time, I knew it.”
“Willingly?”
“With Lillith?” Aidan sighed. “To excuse myself, to justify my action, I might prefer to say that even that first time she ensorcelled me…but it would be a lie. What I did, I did because I desired it; because I could not, in my maleness, deny myself the gratification found in a woman’s body, despite whom she might be.”
“Lillith…” Kellin tasted the name and found it oddly seductive. “It was she who lay with Ian and bore him a child.”
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