“So do jealous bitches ever,” I said. “It is the sum of myth and story. Still I do not have his name, this miraculous father you gift me with.”

The name she gave me then seemed to come up from the coals of the fire and set the tent alight. I had not looked for such a thing, and while I had not, I had kept her words at bay, holding them from me. Having his name, my father, it cracked me wide, and let in all the rest like white-hot water.

For she told me I was the son of Vazkor.

4

My life was altered in a moment.

I remembered everything, each of the portents, the signposts that had been there for me, I, who was so unlike the tribes, different in all things, an outcast in the midst of my folk.

I thought of my boyhood dream—the white lynx mating with the black wolf, of the lynx-mask I had chosen, and the shock that had numbed my arm when I set hand to it. There had hung her frigid witch-spell on it still, that cat-goddess, Uastis, who wanted none of me.

I thought of my father, what he had been—the red pig, gross, stupid, snorting at his pleasure, my enemy from a child—and of my father as I found him—noble, a king, my own image painted on the history of all the land. I was back on the fortress rock where I had taken Demizdor. Who but my magician father had risen in me then, given me a portion of his Power, the ability to speak the city tongue as he had spoken it? The masked men had fallen on their knees, seeing his face in mine, hearing his voice in my voice. I remembered, too, the dream I had had before, the knives in the icy water, and the blindness, and waking to say aloud, “I will kill her.”

She had betrayed him, my mother, so much was clear; betrayed and murdered him, and next been rid of me because I was his seed. It was a wonder she had deigned to let me live at all.

Suddenly the female noise outside the tent rose to an abnormal gray keening. The moon was up, and the women were going to Tathra’s dead-couch to make the chant.

And between me and the vision of the dark glory there came the omen of her sunken lifeless face.

Tathra was yet my mother. Though not my flesh, though I had not been shaped in her body, still it was so. Her breasts had fed me, her arms rocked me before ever I knew it. The other, though she had carried me and given me my life, was less mother to me than the beast who eats her young.

I got to my feet and the tent seemed to have shrunk about me; I felt taller than the roof of it.

“Kotta,” I said, “I am done with this place. I thank you for opening the cage.”