He said, “What if I told Oubadal that I’m demanding his help, not asking for it? What if I said that I am Prince Aliver Akaran now, but I will be King Aliver Akaran come the fall. What if I remind him that I’m a lion, and say I will not concern myself with the squabbles of the cubs at my feet. What if I tell him the Santoth sorcerers answer to me now and that with them I’ll wipe my enemies from the earth. He can join me and be of aid-on my terms-or he can suffer the wrath of powers he cannot imagine.”

“You could try that, I suppose,” Kelis said. “You will have to look him in the eye as you say it, though, to make sure he doesn’t bite your lip. If you call him a cub you’ll be insulting him…unless, of course, you are a lion. There’s no insult in the truth.”

Aliver rose and looked his friend in the eye. “I am still hesitating, aren’t I? You don’t think I should.”

“I believe that if you speak from your heart each time you open your mouth, you cannot go wrong.”

Aliver turned and looked back at the stronghold. From this distance the hides pinned to it looked like tiny things. Like the pelts of alley cats. He started walking. When he heard his friend’s footfalls beside his, he asked, “Tell me something, Kelis. All these people who claim they are descended from lions-what proof do they offer?”

Kelis smiled. “There is no proof. They just say it and try to sound convincing.”

Mena told no one what she intended, not even Melio, who had inadvertently helped her to form the plan. She took only the Marah sword and the few things that she could carry in a shoulder sack. She crept out of her compound and through the still streets, grayed with the coming day. Part of her was afraid of being discovered. Another part moved with quiet confidence. She could walk silently when she wanted to. Years before, as a girl, she had crept past the Marah guards to discover the horrors of the Kidnaban mines. If she had accomplished that, no Ruinat villager or slumbering priest would wake to question her now. Of course, it was the foreigners that had prompted this, made it urgent. They were Meins, Melio had said, disappointment in his voice. It was only a matter of days before they left Galat and came for her. They must do something, he’d said. So she was doing something. It was not the thing Melio had proposed, but it was something.

She chose a skiff from among those beached on the shore, tossed her sack inside, and shoved the craft into the water. An hour later she swung around the far tip of Vumair and caught sight of Uvumal. The island broke jagged and green out of the sea, like upright shards of broken glass poorly disguised beneath a covering of plant life. It was a short sail away, but she had never made the journey before. Nobody ever did. The island was considered sacred to the goddess. It was her home and sanctuary. Since the rise of Maeben worship it had been left wild. It had not been forested or hunted, no hillside plots cleared for tilling. It seethed with feral density. The undergrowth was a tangle of plant life. Here and there massive trees broke up out of the canopy. They were lopsided giants, with long stretches of trunk that erupted in knots of branches. They were twisted by age, torn at by the weather, each of them a totem to savage antiquity. Such was Mena’s destination.

The beach she dragged the skiff onto was a sublime stretch of bone-white sand, untouched by human feet. Palms secured to the higher sand leaned toward the water. Natural debris littered the beach-driftwood, coconuts and their husks. Crabs skittered sidelong through fallen fronds and…Something caught her eye, a surprising enough object that it snagged her attention and took her a moment to believe. The weathered head and upraised arm and upper portion of the torso of a child’s doll jutted up from the sand. It was a creepy, eyeless form, its arm frozen in what looked like a frantic gesture of greeting.

Nor was it the only man-made object. A length of rope and a fishing buoy lay a short distance away. Farther on, a piece of fabric draped a stone like laundry set out to dry. Mena’s eyes darted around for a few frantic seconds, until she was assured that she was alone. How strange. People may not have journeyed here, but their rubbish did. She walked a few steps toward the items, nervous lest the goddess spot the insults before she could snatch them up. If the priests knew of this, they would forbid the custom of dumping refuse into the current off the southern harbor point. She began to form the words with which she would broach the subject to Vaminee. There are a thousand ways to defile the goddess, she would begin. One must remember that a thing dropped in one place does not simply vanish…

Catching herself, she drew up and cursed under her breath. It was so easy to drop back into her prescribed role. She was not here as the domestic servant of the goddess! She was not here as her eyes and mouth. She had no plans to take any message back to the priests.

She spent the rest of the morning pushing into the forest. She had imagined the inner island would be silent and brooding, a place she would have to creep through, fearing every twig beneath her feet. Instead, the leaf-thick air thronged with a cacophony of birdsong. Monkey calls swept through the trees in waves. Insects screeched, chirped, whirred with abandon. She stepped on the woven mesh of mangrove roots, squelched through heavy mud that stank of bad eggs. The sword on her back snagged again and again. She grew so twisted and jammed within the undergrowth that at times she simply stopped moving and hung suspended, resting. And then she carried on.

She took a late breakfast sitting on a pebble wash beside a thin stream. She thought of the doll on the beach. Whose had it been? There were a thousand ways to explain how it might have been lost. Perhaps it was old. It might have been discarded by a child who did not care for it anymore, made a plaything for a dog who was careless with it. Was it a lost treasure swept away with the tide, mourned with small tears? Had it been tossed to the sea by grieving parents? Or had it fallen from the sky? She regretted leaving it. She should have at least dug it from the sand and set it in the skiff and promised it that she’d return and bear it away.

By noon she was scrambling, often on all fours, to ascend the interior hills. For all the difficulties of the terrain, it did not take her long to find what she was looking for. Standing on the trunk of a fallen tree and gazing through the slit its descent had cut in the canopy, Mena spotted the aerie. It perched near the crest of a hill three ridgelines away. The tree that housed it pierced the canopy and rose up to a singular height. It was a giant, ragged beam. Much of it looked dead. It was bone white where long swathes of bark had peeled free. Many of its branches were broken halfway or nubbed close to the trunk. The nest perched near the top. From a distance it looked like a crosshatched confusion of debris, flotsam deposited there by a strange act of nature. She could see no movement in it.

From the moment she started toward it, she lost sight of the nest, so thick was the woodland. Down a ridge and then up, down another and then up, down and up. Cresting each rise she veered intentionally to the right. Once atop the third ridgeline she turned left and progressed along it, hoping this would take her to her goal. It took two hours, during which time she could not see more than a hundred feet. She feared she might walk within a stone’s throw of either side of it without noticing.

In the end she found it with her nose. There was a stench. A reek of decay, of rot. She wanted very much to avoid it. It repelled her, and for that reason she turned toward it. Within a few minutes she approached the base of an enormous trunk. It was larger than any near it, wide enough around that it would have taken four or five of her arms’ lengths to embrace it. The smell rose from a putrid mixture of bird droppings and flesh and bones that littered the ground: rib cages, femurs cracked open, bits of dried organs, a rodent’s skull, a leather sandal, the withered stick of a forearm…a child’s forearm and a hand.