by Jean Johnson
“Neither am I,” Tava said, catching his hand in hers, hoping she had removed the last of the honey from her skin. “I’m very glad I’m alive.”
Several of the Family came into view on either side of the curving, tiger-painted walls. Kodan held up his free hand, gesturing them to stop. He was glad they hadn’t approached in time to see their illicit kiss, but this wasn’t the place for the coming discussion.
“Back to the center!” he ordered. “Someone sound the full assembly on the an-tak, and make a place where we can stand and be seen! All of our questions will have to wait until then, so that everyone can hear and understand.”
The nearest of the Shifterai started turning around, passing along his instructions to the others crowding up behind them. Kodan and Tava followed them, hands still clasped in the only public intimacy they were allowed. Someone blew the low-high, low-high notes on the spiraling horn, signaling a full assembly, and by the time the pair reached the front of the ageome, following the shuffling crowd, the clearing had been organized.
The benches and several folding chairs had been dragged into close-packed rows, with the elderly and nursing mothers given preferential seating upon them. Hundreds more—particularly the children—curled up cross-legged in front of them on the ground, and the rest found places to stand behind the seats. Though “behind” wasn’t entirely accurate; the benches and chairs followed the arc of the large, broad clearing at the center of the encampment, curving around the bonfire pit that had almost killed her.
A space had been left open near the edge of that pit, ironically right next to where Tava had fallen. The scent of charred linen and scorched wool wafted across the clearing, making several of those who smelled it rub their wrinkling noses, triggering a few sneezes. Seated bodies squirmed out of their way, making a narrow, meandering path toward that patch of empty, trampled grass.
Once they neared the fire, her exposed arm no longer felt the cold of the late-afternoon air, but that meant the fur blanket she was still holding around her naked body was also becoming increasingly warm. Ignoring it for the time being, Tava focused her mind on figuring out what she wanted to say, and how much she wanted to reveal.
Waiting until it looked like most of the Family had gathered, Kodan held up both of his hands for attention, then lowered them, stepping to the side and turning so that he faced the blanket-wrapped woman next to him. “Tava . . . please tell us what happened, and how you survived.”
Dropping gracefully, he settled cross-legged on the ground, leaving the attention of the Family focused fully upon her. Lifting her chin a little, wrapping her dignity around her like the fur quilt, Tava kept her explanation simple.
“I was dancing with the others, but near the edge of the bonfire pit. Someone bumped into me, we both stumbled, and when they bumped into me again, I fell into the pit. Not wanting to get burned . . . I shifted my shape and flew away from the fire.”
Her confession startled the gathered Family, though the adults seemed more surprised than the children. Tava could guess why easily enough. Children rarely paid attention to the finer details and nuances. The adults knew she was an outlander from the kingdom of Morna, and they knew the Mornai weren’t shapeshifters.
“Not to spoil your adoption into Family Tiger,” Rahala called out, “but everyone knows the Mornai aren’t shifters. Either you’re lying . . . or you’re a mage. And if you’re a mage, it’s rather insulting that you’d use a spell to try to be a princess.”
“Careful, Rahala . . . since ‘everyone knows’ shapeshifting abilities develop right alongside puberty,” Kodan countered. “Either you’re lying . . . about your age,” he conceded dryly, “or you’re a mage.”
The other woman flushed with anger at his words, but Tava could tell that Kodan’s rejoinder wouldn’t quell the doubt spreading across the Family. She hadn’t wanted to reveal her past, but it looked like the best choice at proving her words.
“My father was, is, and forevermore shall be Varamon Vel Tith, the Mornai scribe who raised me . . . but my mother, Ellet Sou Tred, of the kingdom of Zantha, was already pregnant with me when she escaped her captors. She had been kidnapped and held captive for two years by a group of shapeshifting men calling themselves Family Mongrel . . . and she never knew which of the men constantly forcing themselves on her was the one that sired me.” Tava had to wait until the exclamations of shock, disgust, and horror died down before she could continue. “I didn’t even know I could change my shape until I was about thirteen, which was eight years ago. That was the year I became a young woman.
“All I knew about shapeshifters was whatever my mother had told my father of her ordeal, which he had written down in one of his books. I didn’t even know what a Shifterai princess was until Priestess Soukut told me about them during my very first day of instruction. ‘Family Mongrel’ didn’t have any female shifters, according to my mother. Just violent, cruel brutes who could alter their shapes.” She glanced at Kodan. “It took a lot of effort by Kodan and the others to convince me that they weren’t violent. That I could trust them, instead of fear them. I know now that whoever or whatever brutalized my mother, they may have been shapechangers, but they were not Shifterai.”
“What shape did you form to escape the fire?” someone else asked. Tava couldn’t remember the name of the man, though she tried. “We never saw anything!”
“I turned myself into a hummingbird,” Tava said. That caused another stir. She waited for the mutterings to die down and elaborated on her reply. “I knew I had to escape my clothes before they could catch on fire, which meant taking on a very small shape. I also knew I had to fly, so that I could avoid having to land on the coals. But though I can also form the shape of an owl and a raven, I knew the owl was too big to escape my clothes, and the raven not deft enough to escape the flames. Unlike any other bird, a hummingbird cannot only fly swiftly, it can hover in place and even fly backward if necessary. Which it was.”
“If your shifting powers are so closely attuned to birds . . . then you rightfully belong somewhere in Clan Hawk, not in Clan Cat,” Rahala stated dryly.
Tava didn’t have to think twice about it to know the other woman was trying to get rid of her. She would have planted her hands on her hips if she hadn’t needed to keep holding the foxfur blanket in place. Instead, she lifted her chin a little. “I was informed by the priestesses that one’s affinity for true forms as a shapeshifter was not a requirement for maintaining residence in a particular Clan and Family. A transfer might be suggested for aesthetic reasons, but it isn’t required.”
So there; you’re not getting rid of me that way, Tava added silently. Aloud, she continued, keeping her tone rational and calm, though she couldn’t quite stop the slight bite to her words. The Mornai might have thought even a hint of irritation was disrespectfully insolent, but these Shifterai didn’t seem to give it a second thought.
“I was also told that one’s first shape is considered the most significant whenever there’s a possibility of changing Clans and Families. My very first shapeshift was a housecat, qualifying me for Clan Cat. And I have since successfully turned myself into a stripe-cat, which even by the most narrow-minded definition means I can be considered a suitable candidate for Family Tiger.”
Abandoning her chair, Rahala pushed to her feet, lifting her own chin. “Well, I can take on more than five forms! I have managed to learn two—three more in the last few days, and I know I’ll be able to learn more. It takes more than five shapes to lead this Family.”
“It takes more than learning any number of shapes to lead a Family,” Tava countered, struggling against her rising dislike of the other woman. Showing that distaste openly wouldn’t look good in the eyes of the others. The more she saw of Rahala, the less she liked the woman. “And I never said I’ve only mastered five pure forms.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you were a shapeshifter?” Siinar called out.
“At first, because I was still influenced by my mother�
�s perceptions and didn’t know how badly you male shapeshifters would react to the thought of a woman having similar powers. I also wanted to hold it a secret in case you proved to be just as cruel as I’d feared, and needed a means of escape,” Tava admitted bluntly. “But once I learned the truth of the Shifterai, I realized I didn’t want anyone thinking I was power hungry, or boastful. I also kept silent because I wanted to be liked for myself, not for what I could do.”
A glance in Rahala’s direction showed the other woman silently fuming, no doubt pricked by Tava’s verbal jab.
“I didn’t come here to be a princess. I didn’t even know I was a princess, by Shifterai standards,” she pointed out. “I came here because Kodan and the others were nice to me, and because they earnestly wanted to show me that the so-called Shifterai I’d read about from my mother’s accounts were not the real Shifterai. I came here because I wanted to know the truth.”
Grateful she hadn’t mentioned his bargain regarding her belongings, Kodan decided he would also keep to himself the fact that he had known all along she was a shapeshifting princess. At the edge of his vision, he could see the sun starting to sink down below the domed roof of the blue teaching geome and remembered the next step in the disrupted adoption celebration. Rising, he recaptured the attention of the others.
“As much as I’m certain all of us could spend the rest of the day and well into the night asking Tava . . . Atava plenty of questions,” he amended, giving her the honorific prefix to denote her newly revealed rank, “it is almost time for the moving-in ritual. Kelsa, you are the chief resident of the South Paw maiden’s geome. I want you to—”
“—I want to see her change her shape,” a voice called out, interrupting him. Several others quickly agreed.
Someone else added their own opinion. “I want to see Rahala fully shift, too.”
“The Council of Sisters agrees!” he heard his own mother assert. Sinya continued tartly. “You cast doubts upon Arahala’s abilities, and she casts doubts upon Atava’s. The Council is willing to permit the delay in settling our newest member into her quarters by a few minutes past sunset . . . so long as the questions of both their abilities are satisfactorily answered. And we do have questions.”
Seeing both agreement and curiosity on far too many faces in the Family, Kodan gave in. Lifting his hand, he gestured for Rahala to join him and Tava. It’s just as well, I suppose, though I could have used at least a day’s reprieve to consult with Tava. And I still don’t know how many shapes Tava can shift into, nor how pure her forms might be, considering she didn’t learn them under our tutelage and standards.
He’d gladly take her as his wife even if she never managed a truly pure form. Such things didn’t matter to him. Unfortunately this wasn’t about taking her as his wife; this was about accepting her as a Princess of the People.
“Rahala, you were the first to make the claim of being a Princess of the People. You will therefore go first. You will be judged on their purity by the Council of Shifters . . . so try not to make any mistakes,” he reminded her. “I call upon Sakro, Casten, Tofris, Jumaj, Tekelis, and Kamar, the other warlords of Family Tiger, to come forward and represent the Council of Shifters as the judges of her true shapes.”
All of the warband leaders were multerai. There were a handful more beyond the eight warlords—though Tailtip Warband technically wasn’t present—but Kodan figured six would be enough to thoroughly reassure the rest of the Family without unduly crowding either of the two women during each examination.
“Begin with your first shape,” he instructed Rahala as soon as the men had assembled.
Nodding, she unbuttoned her linen chamsa, peeling back the pink fabric to reveal a chest as heavily furred as her arms. She toed off her mocasha and untied her breikas, letting them drop to the ground before nudging them to one side with her foot. It looked like she had donned a tightly fitted fur suit, rather than having grown it, but it did cover her decently. Smoothing her dark locks back from her face, Rahala shifted herself into a tawny, brown-striped tigress.
The transformation was startlingly fast for someone who had supposedly learned how to manage it only in the last few weeks, but it was also a thorough one. Kodan didn’t have to poke at her coat to check for underhairs, nor run his hands over her flanks to know that her muscle structure was accurate. Rahala had managed to turn herself into a very convincing stripe-cat on the first attempt. She even sat on her haunches and groomed her shoulder like a cat would, smoothing her fur with her broad, rasping tongue.
Once the other warlords pronounced themselves satisfied with her first demonstration of skill, she shifted back to her fur-covered self, then shifted again into the bulk of a dark bay mare. From there, she took on the form of a bear, a goat, a sow, a sheep, and a deer, each time returning briefly to her human form before transforming into the next. Her last—eighth—shape was a rabbit, requiring the warlord to pick her up and display her in her mottled fur to the rest of the Family so that they could more easily see such a small shape.
Returning to her bipedal form, Rahala smoothed back her hair, accepted her chamsa from the warlord of North Paw, and spoke. “. . . I realize I haven’t mastered any flighted forms just yet, but I have faith I will succeed. I was thinking maybe I should try for a duck next, so I could shape myself into something that can swim, or at least float.”
She shrugged back into her chamsa, then smoothed her hair back again . . . and the fur covering her arms and her legs, the latter visible through the slits down either side of her tunic, retracted back into her skin. She lifted her arms, displaying her lightly tanned flesh to all, then carefully stepped back into her breikas.
The other warlords turned to Tava. Sighing, she shifted fur of her own for modesty and unwrapped her gift blanket. Despite the thick pelt she had grown, Tava felt rather naked without clothes to conceal her figure.
As soon as the foxfur was folded and set aside, she shrunk herself down into the body of a calico cat. Like Rahala’s rabbit, she had to be picked up to be displayed to all, as well as gently poked and prodded. As soon as they set her down, she shifted into a nanny goat without bother to return to human form as her rival had done, then shifted herself into a barn rat, which again required her to be scooped off the ground and held aloft.
Next, she shifted into a chestnut horse, then a bigger, paler version of the black and cream pig that Rahala had formed, following it with a smallish brown bear. For her seventh form, she chose her river turtle form. That seemed to confound the warlords, for they spent extra time examining her, poking and prodding, and even turning her over. Disliking the helpless feeling of being on her back, Tava squirmed and tried to talk, but her vocal cords were inadequate for speech in this body. She endured the torment of being manhandled belly-up until she was set down again. The moment she was done, she shifted back into her human form.
“Did you have to poke and prod me so long?” she demanded, irritated into speaking her mind. “And never turn me on my back when I’m shaped like that! It’s very uncomfortable.”
“We’ve never seen a tortoise that looked like that,” Warlord Tofris stated, folding his arms across his middle-aged chest. “I’m not sure it should count as a pure form.”
“It is not a tortoise form,” Tava corrected him, still uncomfortable inside from the helpless feeling of having been held belly-up. “It is a river turtle. I spent several weeks practicing it a couple years ago. I even passed the scrutiny of my father, who compared me to some of the real river turtles we had found on the banks of the Morning River, and he found no significant differences.”
“The shapes of natural-born animals not found on the Plains are still accepted by the Council of Shifters as valid for purity, even when they’re not forms familiar to the rest of us,” Kodan reminded his fellow warlords, speaking up for the first time since the evaluations had begun. “It is the function of the muscles, the proportion of the limbs for each of their given functions, and the overall naturalness of
the appearance which is judged in such cases. Under those guidelines, did she pass for a real animal?”
Tofris and the others nodded. Kodan turned his attention back to Tava. “You have shown us seven forms. You have also mentioned two more which you have yet to display, the forms of a tiger, and a hummingbird. If you wish all nine to be counted, you must assume your last two shapes for scrutiny and judgment.”
“I would prefer not to form my hummingbird shape again. At least, not for today,” Tava stated. Noticing the dubious look on Rahala’s face, she defended her decision. “The metabolism of a hummingbird is not the same as a human. When I fly as a hummingbird, I look and act and fly just like a real hummingbird, but doing so devours all the energy in my blood.
“I can only manage the shift for short periods of time because of this, before I have to shift back and eat a lot of sweet things to ensure I don’t collapse . . . and I already ate most of the remaining honey in the ageome. Unless someone has a fresh honeycomb for me to devour, I’d rather not risk my health with a second shift of that form today,” she told the warlords. “I’d gladly do it another day, but not today, and not without a pot of honey or a cauldron of barley water close at hand.”
“What about your tiger form?” Kodan prompted her. “Can you shift into that?”
Tava didn’t bother to speak. She just melded her flesh from two feet to four, and recolored her light brown bodyfur into a striped pelt of orange, black, and white. The warlords prodded her muscles and ruffled her fur until her ears went flat and her tail snapped, but they eventually pronounced her indistinguishable from a real grass-cat.
