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Later, after her son had returned from his hunt and the two of them had eaten their fill of his kill, Lysende began trying to figure out how to explain things to Kesä, since she had promised that she would do so. Her short explanation probably would have satisfied her, had she been on the receiving end, but Kesä was a smarter lion than she was. She knew that for a fact.

In the end, she decided that the best thing to do would be to simply tell him the truth, and answer any questions he might ask as accurately as she could. Of course, there was the danger of oversharing, but Lysende wasn't stupid. She could tell what sort of things her son would not want to hear, like the details of the act that had brought about his conception.

Probably her mother would have handled it more gracefully, or one of her sisters, but Lysende was not them. She was herself, and despite her recent period of brooding melancholy, she really was not a very cerebral lioness.

Kesä knew his mother was not generally someone given to deep thoughts or long-winded explanations, and while that had occasionally frustrated him in his youth, he had grown up since then, met other lions, and learned that it was unreasonable to expect someone to be anything other than what they were. So he ate in silence and didn't stare at his mother as she gathered her thoughts. He was resolved not to pester her, since this was clearly a topic that meant a great deal to her, and so could not be easy to simply talk about.

Kesä's resolve did not last as long as he had hoped. He was young and inquisitive, and since this related somewhat to him, it was more difficult than usual for him to contain his curiosity. At last he finally burst out with the reminder, "It's later, Lysende, and we have had our celebratory reunion meal, dutifully caught and killed by me, your loving son. Isn't it time for you to tell me what's on your mind now?"

"All right, Kesä," Lysende agreed. "Since you've waited so patiently."

She licked some blood from her dark muzzle before beginning. "On my first trip into the rogue lands to find a suitable consort to bring home with me I met a lion with a fish marking like mine on his flank. We agreed that this was a sign we were meant to meet, and it didn't take long for us to act on our attraction. I think both of us felt more than just physical attraction, but we were younger and I, at least, felt that I had a duty to the pride. I left him asleep."

She paused to make sure she hadn't left anything important out of her narrative so far, but from what she could tell she hadn't. Except, of course, for two very important facts: "The lion's name was Sukurys. He was your father."

Kesä accepted his mother's teasing with a good-natured grin. It was nice to be able to interact with her almost as equals. He wondered if this was normal, between sons and mothers. He knew that his mother and her mother did not act like this, but that was daughters and mothers, and in the Einaliai Thalassai that was a very different sort of relationship.

"You never told us our father's name before," he said softly. "Was that because you didn't want us to know, or because you didn't want to think of him?"

Immediately he regretted that question, since it was probably too personal, and he said, "You don't have to answer that. But I'm curious why you didn't bring him back to the pride with you as your consort. Surely that would have been an acceptable solution."

Lysende smiled faintly, pleased by her son's quick and clever mind, even though his incisive wit meant that she was forced to consider difficult questions. "No, it's all right. I'll answer it. I didn't tell you and your siblings the name of your father because that is not the way of our pride. I don't know my father's name, either. A father is not considered particularly important, I'm afraid. But it is also true that thinking of him was difficult once I realized that I had fallen in love with him, and that I would never see him again."

She sighed. "Which, I suppose, also answers your other question. I didn't want to admit, at first, that what I felt for your father was really love. I wasn't supposed to fall in love with the first lion I met, even if we were both marked with fish. That would have been ridiculous. Besides, I didn't want to bring him home and have him meet one of your aunts and decide that he had chosen the wrong sister."

Kesä had figured it was something like that, as far as why she had never mentioned his father's name. He would not have guessed that she had not brought him back as a consort out of fear that he would choose someone else.

"If he loved you, he wouldn't do that," he argued, although he was personally inexperienced when it came to things like romantic love. He loved his mother and brothers and sisters and aunts and grandmother and great aunts, but that was all familial love, and very different.

"Anyway, you didn't bring him back as your consort, but you did turn out to be carrying his cubs, right?" He didn't want to press her too hard on subjects that would be difficult to speak of, and so he let the matter drop and prompted her to continue with her story. He wanted to hear it, anyway, since they were coming to the part that would fill in the gaps since he'd last seen her.

"Well, maybe," she allowed. "But I didn't know for sure that he really loved me. I still don't, actually. That's what comes of leaving a man when he's asleep. Probably he's angry with me, if he even remembers me."

She shook her head. "Anyway. You're right. I was carrying his cubs, and you were all a delight to me. It was sometimes painful to look at you all, since you reminded me of Sukurys, whom I finally realized I loved and missed desperately, but I could not love you any less because of that. If anything, I loved you all the more. So when you grew up and I realized that I would be leaving half of you to the wilds and consigning the other half to a life that could be just as sad as mine had been, I began to realize that I could not stay around to watch it happen."

It was difficult to admit that, since it smacked of cowardice to Lysende's ears, but Kesä didn't seem to view it that way.

And, in fact, Kesä did not consider it cowardice.

"That makes sense," he said. "So you left the pride for a while, and then realized at some point that you wouldn't be coming back at all, even though it meant leaving your daughters and sisters and mother?"

He was guessing now, running ahead of the story like he always tended to do whenever someone told him stories. He couldn't seem to help it. He always wanted to know what happened next, and even the most direct narration couldn't satisfy him.

"Did you intend to find a pride to join, or just stay a rogue? Were you going to go looking for Sukurys?" he asked, his mind seizing on some new thoughts.

It was a relief to hear that her son did not think her a coward, and almost more of a relief to be spared telling the next part of her tale, since her thought process for that part was still not clear and she wasn't sure she could have explained it if she tried. Instead, all she had to do was answer, "Pretty much."

Lysende smiled despite herself at Kesä's next line of questioning.

"I admit, I hadn't really thought that far ahead. I actually only realized that I wasn't going back to the pride a few days ago, and since then I've been mostly concerned with finding dinner. Thank you for taking care of that, by the way."

She considered the questions more carefully and then said, "I don't think I'm ready to join another pride right away, but I don't want to be a solitary rogue forever, either. Do you think I should try to find Sukurys?"

To Kesä this was the most obvious answer in the world.

"Of course you should! And I'm going to come with you. That way you won't be alone and you won't die of starvation before you can find him. Besides, I want to meet my father. It would be interesting, I think."

It wasn't as if Kesä had any real plans for his own future, anyway, so why not join his to his mother's for the time being. If something came up and he changed his mind about wanting to go about with her, well, he could deal with that when it came up. In the meantime, it was good to see his mother smile the way she did when he said she ought to hunt down his father, and then offered to join her.

"This is going to be great," he said.