The Lioness

“Perhaps someone of your own tribe does.” Kerian lifted her head, met the woman’s eyes coolly. “For the sake of what I did for you, I ask that you take me to your people so I can ask.”

Ayensha laughed, a low, bitter sound. “All right. I’ll take you into the forest and you can ask your questions, but don’t blame me if you get an answer you don’t like.”

Ayensha lay down again. Kerian sat the night out, watching owls.

Gilthas dripped honey onto both halves of the steaming apricot muffin on his breakfast plate. He took a long slow breath of the scent of the honey, of the apricots and minted tea in his cup. A wealth of strawberries filled the bowl at his elbow, waiting to be dressed in thick cream. From beyond the open doors, twinned and paned in dimpled glass, the scent of his mother’s garden drifted into the small breakfast room. Rich green scents of her herb garden, and the ancient perfume of autumn as leaves changed from green to gold.

It was the autumn he thought of: leaving, going, changing. Kerian shaped his mood and all his thoughts.

Stubborn woman! He shouldn’t have let her go. He should have held her, kept her. He was not only her lover, he was her king!

His mother filled a crystal goblet with icy water poured from a crystal carafe. The two chimed, one against the other, a perfect note.

Stubborn woman… he should have forbidden Kerian to leave, ordered her to abandon her fool’s errand. Iydahar was nothing if not capable of taking care of himself.

“If you had ordered Kerian to stay,” said Laurana, picking a peach muffin from the covered basket, “if you had, my son, you would have lost her as surely as though you’d commanded her into exile.”

His mother’s words, dropping right into his thoughts, no longer startled Gilthas. They did, as at times like this, often annoy him, but they didn’t startle. Laurana had had the skill of reading her son’s thoughts from the first moment he had thoughts, or so it seemed to him. She smiled her golden smile, and went on buttering her muffin.

Her tone had, he thought, contained just a note of the acerbic. The Queen Mother had a true liking for Kerian but also the kind of respect that could sometimes appear cautious.

“Mother,” Gilthas said, seeking to turn Laurana’s thoughts from his. “I’ve had all the news Rashas is willing to give this morning, which is news hardly worth having. The watch was kept calmly through the night. There was only a minor altercation at a tavern near the western bridge where the Knights go to drink. The festival will move out into the countryside today, people will light bonfires in the fields. Rashas isn’t as happy about that as the people themselves.”

Laurana looked up, only a small glance. Morning breeze ruffled her golden hair, nothing seemed to ruffle her composure. It was always that way with her, Gilthas thought.

“Mother—”

“Listen,” said Laurana, she who in lands beyond Qualinesti was yet known as the Golden General. She held up a hand to still her son. She placed a finger to her lips.

In the garden beyond the open doors, birds sang. The whisper of voices washing in from the city lay under those songs, and the sound of the gardener speaking with her apprentice, ordering the final clipping of the roses for the season.

Gilthas frowned, his mother mouthed the word again.

Listen.

He did, and in the next breath he heard the click of nails on the marble floor of the patio beyond the doors. He saw the hounds before he saw the elf woman, two long-legged beasts trotting across the patio with perfect confidence. They cast shadows behind them, and it seemed the woman appeared from those very shadows, the substance of her rising from the darkness. Gil caught his breath, startled. Here was Nayla Firethorn, a woman of his mother’s household. Times were when the woman would be gone from the city for days, even months. Sometimes she would come and go alone, sometimes with Haugh Daggerhart, a man said to be her lover. These two, and others like them, were the voice and will of the Queen Mother beyond Qualinesti’s borders, her trusted warrior-heralds.

“Nayla,” said the Queen Mother.

Laurana lifted her hand and Nayla dismissed her hounds, sending them in to the garden before she came forward to the open door. A beautiful woman, Nayla wore her golden hair in a thick braid hanging as far down as the small of her back. Gilthas imagined that, unbound, the woman’s hair would cover her like a shimmering cloak.

Nayla saw Gilthas and swept him a courtier’s bow, a flourish of the arm, a bending of the knee.

“Good morning, Your Majesty,” she said, rising. One flickering glance she gave to Laurana—it was not lost on Gilthas!—then, having received some signal indiscernible to the king, she seemed to relax. She stepped into the room and stood before Laurana. “Your Highness, I have returned early, leaving the completion of the task to Haugh. All will be well.”