“No.”
“How—” Neazzos started. Stopped. His curious mind was already running it, I could see it in the slight crease of his brow, the way his tail went still when he was processing something that didn’t immediately fit a framework. “How does he do that? He’s a serpent. You can’t just—become someone with legs.”
“Clanfather Zyxel has a gift that’s rare. It’s a natural biological trait of his people—the Rkekh.” I kept my voice steady, matter-of-fact, because the most extraordinary things landed best when you didn’t dress them up. “He can transform. Change his form completely. The serpent form you know—the coils, the scales, the spines—that’s called his Ezzaska form. But he has another form. A demi-human form.” I looked at the figure below, at the long black hair damp at the temples, at the horns catching amber light like polished stone. “That’s it. He’s been practicing holding it longer. It costs him—it’s uncomfortable for him, the way holding an awkward position for hours is uncomfortable. But he needs to do it. For where we’re going.”
Neazzos was quiet for a full five seconds. That was unusual enough to mean something.
“It’s a disguise,” he said finally. Working it out.
“Exactly. Where we’re going, Clanfather Zyxel has enemies who would recognize him in his Ezzaska form. People who’d cause serious problems for him—for all of us—if they knew he was there. In this form, they won’t know. They’ll see a demi-human who happens to look vaguely like Clanfather Kaede.” I let that settle. “Which is exactly what other demi-humans look like. Human mixed with somethingotherdue to their breeding.”
“Like going undercover,” Neazzos said, with the authority of someone who had absorbed a great many adventure serials and filed them as practical reference material.
My cubs have been highly interested in becoming spy assassins like their Clanfather Kaede and the Fab Five. It was only natural for him to conclude that Zyxel was in a secret mission.
“Exactly like that.”
He turned back to the yard with a new quality of attention—not just combat-study now, but something more careful. Reassessing. Filing Zyxel into a new category, one that had layers.
“His eyes are the same,”Meti said.
Still quiet. Still facing the yard. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t joined the back-and-forth. Just sat in my lap with that deep-water stillness, and now produced this: precise, simple, completely true. She’d been watching the whole time and had found the one thing that didn’t change between forms.
“Yes,” I said. “They are.”
She nodded once, satisfied. Like she’d been sorting something and that was the last piece.
“Which is why this is a secret,” I said, looking between all three of them. Neazzos, Nocrez, Meti still settled in my lap. “His safety—and ours—depends on no one knowing who he really is while he’s in that form. What I’ve just told you cannot leave this family. Not the household staff. Not anyone. No one outside of us.” I held the pause. “Do you understand how much that matters?”
Neazzos straightened. Drew himself up with the deliberateness of someone accepting weight. “We won’t say anything. Not to anyone.”
“I would never,” Nocrez said. Quiet, but absolute.
Below, Zyxel looked up again. Found us immediately—that scholar’s precision, knowing exactly where to aim attention. I sent a small pulse through the crimson thread: warmth. Acknowledgment. Something that didn’t need words.
His answering pulse carried relief he probably hadn’t meant to broadcast.
“You’re leaving.”
Meti. Still facing the yard. Quiet, flat, final—not a question and never going to be one.
The tightening of Nocrez’s grip on my arm. Neazzos going absolutely still—tail frozen, ears pitched forward, the particular stillness of a cub bracing for something he doesn’t want to hear but is going to listen to anyway because not knowing is worse.
I closed my eyes for one breath. Two.
They always knew. I’d stopped being surprised by it, theoretically. And yet every time it still landed somewhere raw, because I wanted to protect them from this and every single time they simply reached past my protection and named the thing themselves. They’d known about Zirene before I’d found the words. They’d known about the Festival. They carried some gift for upheaval—some instinct that read the emotional weather of the adults around them and translated it into truth—and no amount of careful redirection had ever gotten ahead of it.
I opened my eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “Come here. Both of you—come sit with me.”
Neazzos came off the railing in two steps and pressed himself against my side opposite Nocrez, the bright vibrating energy of earlier gone, replaced with something younger. Something that didn’t know quite what to do with itself. Meti remained in mylap, and I tightened my arm around her and looked at the yard below while I found the words I’d been working out for two days.
“You know about the bad people,” I started.
“The Verya,” Neazzos said. Flat. Certain.
I’d half-expected to have to build to that. Had prepared a softer approach. But Neazzos had been listening—had probably been listening to far more of our adult conversations than anyone had intended, filing the pieces away in that precise internal catalogue—and he’d already assembled the picture himself. The adults who went quiet mid-sentence when the cubs came into the room. The strange males who’d arrived at the villa and been folded into the family before anyone explained why. The training. The urgency underneath everything.
