Kundalimon had the freedom of the city, now, by special order of Husathirn Mueri, who had been asked by Curabayn Bangkea to release him from house arrest. He could leave his little cell in Mueri House whenever he pleased, and roam into any quarter, even entering the holy buildings and the houses of government. Nialli Apuilana had made that clear to him. “No one will stop you,” she said. “No one will harm you.”

“Even if I go into the Queen-chamber?”

She laughed. “You know we have no queen.”

“Your — mother? The woman who rules?”

“My mother, yes.” Kundalimon still had trouble with such concepts as “mother” and “father.” These flesh-folk matters were only slowly becoming clear to him. The mother was the Egg-maker. The father was the Life-kindler. Coupling, the thing he did so pleasurably with Nialli Apuilana, was the means they used to kindle eggs into life among the flesh-folk. It was something similar to what was done in the Nest, and yet all so different, so deeply different. “What about her?” Nialli Apuilana asked.

“Is she not queen of the city?”

“Taniane’s title is chieftain, not queen,” Nialli Apuilana said. “It’s an old title, from when we were just a little tribe living in a hole in the side of a mountain. She rules the city — with the advice of my father and the offering-woman and the whole council of princes — but she’s not our queen. Not as you and I understand Queen-nature. She’s my mother, that’s true. But not the mother of the entire city.”

“Then if I go into her chamber, no one will stop me?”

“It depends on what she’s doing. But ordinarily, yes, you can go in. You can go anywhere you like. They’ll be watching you, I suppose.”

“Who will?”

“The guards. They don’t trust you, Curabayn Bangkea’s whole crowd. They think you’re a spy.”

He didn’t quite comprehend. Much of what Nialli Apuilana said was a mystery to him. Even now, after weeks of daily lessons, when his mind was flooded with the language of the flesh-folk and he even found himself at times thinking in their words and not with Nest-words, he often was puzzled by the substance of what she told him. But he listened, and tried to remember, and hoped that in time he would understand.

In any case he was achieving his purpose, here, and that was the important thing. He had come to bring Queen-love, and he was doing it. First to Nialli Apuilana, in whom Queen-love was already awake, for she had spent time in the Nest; and now, now that he was finally free to go out into the city, he was bringing it to all the others, those who were entirely without Nest-awareness.

He had expected that he would be frightened, the first time he went outside alone. Nialli Apuilana had taken him out a few times to show him the main thoroughfares and explain the pattern of the streets to him; but then one morning he had risked going out without her. It was a test, to see whether he’d be able to take more than a few timid steps without wanting to rush back into the safety of the building.

So huge a city, so many streets, such hordes of flesh-folk everywhere about! The thick clinging humid southern warmth, so different from what he had been accustomed to in the dry cool north. The strange sweet alien aromas of the place. The utter absence of Nest-bond. The possibility that the people of this place might look on him with hatred or disdain.

But he felt no fear at all. He walked down past the jeering, sour-faced guards and down cobbled Minbain Way, and turned left into an open-air marketplace on a side street he hadn’t traveled with Nialli Apuilana, and moved from stall to stall, looking at the fruits and vegetables and the dangling slabs of meat. He was altogether calm. And when it seemed to him that the outing had lasted long enough, he found his way back to Mueri House without difficulty.

After that he went out almost every day. He had never known such excitement. Simply to stand at a streetcorner, listening to a ballad-singer or a preacher or a peddler of little toys — how different that was from the life of the Nest! To step into a restaurant and stare in wonder at the sizzling meat on the griddle, and then point and smile, and be smiled at in return, and be handed some strange tender bit of flesh-folk food to eat — how wonderful, how transfiguring that was! It was like moving through the most vivid of dreams.

A steady diet of the food of the flesh-folk was having a profound effect on him. His fur was much thicker, darker, now. His body was becoming almost plump: he could pinch his skin and there would be a thick strip of flesh between his fingers, as never before. And also this new rich nourishment was entering his soul. He felt a fresh access of vigor. He was restless, almost jumpy with unfamiliar energy. Sometimes, when Nialli Apuilana entered his room, he seized her almost before she had had a chance to say a word and drew her down with him to the floor or to his couch. In the streets, too, he moved in long forceful strides, enjoying the jolt of the pavement against his feet. That was new, too, to be walking on paved streets. Everything was new, everything was exciting.

They all seemed to know who he was. People pointed and whispered. A few spoke to him, courteously but with some uncertainty, as if they weren’t sure how safe it was to approach him. With the children it was different. Platoons of them followed him about. There were children everywhere here; sometimes it seemed to Kundalimon that scarcely anyone but boys and girls lived in this city. They capered after him, shouting and whooping, calling out to him.

“Hjjk! Hjjk! There goes the hjjk!”

“Say something to us in hjjk-speak, hjjk!”

“Hey, hey, hjjk! Where’s your beak?”

They meant no mockery. They were only children, after all. Their tone was light and playful.

He turned to them and beckoned. They were wary at first, the way the older ones tended to be, but then they came to him and stood close about him. Some of them shyly let him take their hands in his.

“Are you really a hjjk?”

“I am like you. I am flesh, like you.”

“Then why do they say you’re a hjjk?”

Kundalimon smiled. Gently he said, “The hjjks took me away when I was very young, and raised me in their Nest. But I was born here, you know. In this city.”

“You were? Who’s your mother? Who’s your father?”

“Marsalforn,” he said. “Ramla.” He struggled to remember which was which. The mother, the Egg-maker, that was Marsalforn, Nialli Apuilana had said, and the father, he who had kindled, was Ramla. Or was it the other way around? He could never keep it straight. In the Nest it made no difference who your Egg-maker was, and who the Life-kindler. Everyone was really the child of the Queen, after all. Without Her touch there could be no new life. Makers, kindlers, they all served the Will of the Queen.

“Where do they live?” a little girl asked. “Do you ever visit them, your mother and your father?”

“They live somewhere else now. Or maybe they don’t live anywhere any more. No one knows where they are.”

“Oh. That’s sad. Do you want to visit my mother and father, if you don’t have any of your own?”

“I’d like that,” said Kundalimon.

“How did you come here?” another girl said. “Did you fly like a bird?”

“I rode a vermilion.” He made a sweeping gesture with his arms, indicating a beast of mountainous size. “Down out of the north, from the place of the Nest of Nests, traveling day after day, week after week. Riding my vermilion, heading for this city, this city Dawinno. The Queen sent me here. Go to Dawinno, She said. She sent me so that I could talk to you. So that I could get to know you, and you to know me. So that I could bring you Her love, and Her peace.”

“Are you going to take us back with you to the Nest?” a boy in back called. “Did you come to steal us, like you were stolen?”