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One of the less pleasant parts of Nadja's work was the work she did distilling bleach from urine. It reeked to the gods' own heavens. Nadja was used to it, as were the majority of her family, but that didn't mean her companions were. She tried to be considerate of their sensibilities, which meant bathing in the river with some nicely scented herbs in a satchel upstream.

Actually, Nadja enjoyed that process. The sudden shock of cold, faintly salty water scented by aromatic herbs flowing downstream over her fur and cleansing her coat of the unpleasantness odor of ammonia while simultaneously replacing it with a nutty, almost astringent scent that she preferred. Some might liken it to pine.

Yolla was acquiring a reputation for being a fastidious young lion. He did not know where people believed he would come by that kind fastidiousness. He certainly didn't get it from his father, and his mother had not been any more finicky by nature than any other mother.

In truth, he just liked to swim, which was a perfectly normal Stormborn pursuit. He'd learned that love early on in his tenure in the pride. His father would take him to the river to swim and bathe after he'd had a hard night drinking or a hard day fighting, and he and Yolla would goof off in the water. For a long time it was one of the only things the young lion had liked about the pride.

There was also the fact that he always met the most interesting people by the river.

Lying on the grass beside the water to dry off, Nadezhda was watching the clouds. Probably she should have been practicing reading the clouds for clues to the future, but clouds weren't here forte. Foretellings in general were not her thing. She could get by with runes and bones if she had to, but she was really more of a potions and curses kind of priestess. Or she would be once her mother died and she passed her test. And her mother was ailing.

"She has to know," Nadezhda murmured. "It's her own poison I'm using on her. Can it truly have no antidote?"

All right, so it wasn't wise to discuss poisoning someone aloud, even when all the evidence seemed to indicate that Nadja was alone, but Nadja was accustomed to doing what she wished. She also did not expect any action to be taken against her for her mother's death. This was the way her family did things.

At first Yolla thought he was hearing things when his ears picked up on a soliloquy about poisoning someone, but that wasn't the sort of thing his brain was likely to manufacture on its own. He never thought about poisons.

Mostly what he'd been thinking about for the past two days was how his dad had decided to abandon him without a word as to why. Sure, sure, there would probably be glory to be had on such a quest as his father had joined, but what about the low odds of him returning successfully? Sometimes Yolla was quite certain his father was an idiot.

"Um, who are you poisoning?" he asked, stepping out of the river. Sometimes Yolla wasn't all that bright either.

Nadja rolled over and stretched so that she could look at the speaker upside down. A cub on the cusp of adolescence. He was sort of cute, in that way boys his age always were. Nadja decided she would have some fun with him.

"My mother. Do you have a problem with that?"

She remained stretched so that her belly was exposed to the sun and to the young male's eyes. Her attitude said, Yes, go ahead and look. I'm not afraid of you, small thing. Even though you heard me talking to myself about poisoning someone and then confessed to intending to murder my own mother. Maybe you should be worried.

The subtleties of Nadja's posture and pose were completely lost on Yolla. He was only a boy, and a young one at that.

"Why would you want to do that?" he blurted out. "She's your mother!"

Yolla had encountered so many strange beliefs since coming to the Stormborn that he had long since stopped marveling at them and tried to just accept them and move on. Some of them he even considered adopting himself, if they appealed to him. The practice of killing a parent to take their place in the pride was not one he thought he would be adopting, even though there were times when he very much wanted to kill his father.

Nadja stretched and yawned, her claws stretching over her head and digging furrows into the ground there. The cub's shocked disbelief tickled her. It was such fun to toy with the young.

"And you think that should make a difference? I'm not killing her because I dislike her. I'm killing her to prove that I'm better than she is and that I am more deserving of her position."

That wasn't how most of the priestess positions were passed on. In fact, only one was, and that was the one her family had held for generations and generations. For all those generations, the new priestess tried to kill the incumbent and when she succeeded she was tested. It was accepted by the others.

"Um. What position is that?" he asked. Because he didn't want it.

Yolla shuddered at the awful thought of killing a parent just to prove worthiness. As far as he knew, that wasn't the way reavers did things. But then, he hadn't known anyone had that tradition. Did she also believe in killing siblings to prove which was the most worthy of trying to kill their parents?

"Don't worry. It's not one you'll ever hold," Nadja promised him. She laughed once again and rolled onto her stomach so that she could look at the young male right side up.

"I'm a priestess. Or, I will be once my mother dies. And you can't become one of those no matter how many of us you manage to kill."

She climbed to her feet and gave him a pointed look and then, just in case he was slow of thinking, she elaborated, "You just don't have the right parts."

Then she brushed past him, tapping his flank with her tail as she passed, and began heading back to her den. Or maybe she'd pay some visits first, while she still smelled nice.

Yolla made himself smile when the future priestess and murderess laughed even though he was incredibly uncomfortable with this conversation. He had not expected to be talking about assassination when he came for a swim that day.

His discomfort levels soared when the lioness turned her eerily pale gaze to him and looked him over so thoroughly, but for a completely different reason. He was only just reaching an age where he was aware of girls as, well, girls. It seemed to him that the attention she was paying was more like the way girls noticed boys, or...something.

She was gone before he figured it out, leaving him to stand dripping and bewildered on his own, breathing in her unique scent.