Inns, taverns, traders, small temples, all thinned out rapidly as they left Krateros behind, and so did the traffic that shared the road. Instead, the buildings were replaced with pastureland and orchards, and closer to the road, groves of wild trees that offered shady haven for sun-weary travellers. Some god was with them today, though: unseasonable clouds hid the sky, and now and then they felt a drop of rain. Tyrel hoped it would break by moonrise. The moons fed them anyway, and the full moon still felt good, but it was better under a clear sky.

At the border, bored guards, whose job had more to do with imports and exports than with invasions, gave them only a cursory glance before waving them on.

“And,” Kieran said, as they stepped past the twin stone pillars that marked the border proper, “we are now out of Enodia, as the Oracle advised, though with little time to spare before sunset.”

“You're always so conscious of borders,” Kaveri chuckled.

Kieran laughed. “Humans mark territories differently than amarogs do, and territories can be very large, for much larger groups, but it is all the same thing. This is my territory, that is yours, and so long as we both respect the boundary, there can be peace. Violate it, and there will be conflict.”

“I just had,” Lysandra said, and there was mirth in her voice, “the oddest image of a Diamantian duty being to travel around Enodian borders and piss on all the marker pillars. and perhaps on our ships as well.”

Narcissa rolled her eyes, but smiled; Mirren, from her perch on the cart, only mrrped with her tail twitching. Kaveri and all three men, though, laughed.

In the gradually deepening twilight, the clouds slowly parting and drifting off like so many sheep with no shepherd, Madoc took the lead. He'd gone out scouting the night they'd first been at the inn, looking for a good location, quiet but open to the sky.

What he found was a spring and shrine to Aithre and the Great Mother, at the edge of a clearing.

The statues were crude and stylized compared to the ones in the temples, but something about their unpainted simplicity appealed to Tyrel after two years of painted naturalistic striving for perfection. The lines of Aithre's curved sinuously, conveying the motions of a dance, with her arms raised, hips to one side and chest toward the other and a hint of swirl and shape to her skirt that might mean being mid-step; the serpents around her arms were clear, but the rest was indistinct and abstract.

The one of the Great Mother was even more so, an oval stone that had been given some shaping to create breasts and hips and buttocks, her arms only a suggestion with her hands resting on her lower belly, her legs parted around a deep groove that had a sapling sprouting in it, and her head and face little more than a ball with some vague indentations.

Near the two statues was a small altar, no more than two feet high, of piled rock with flat pieces of slate on top, and offerings on it were of highly varied age. A spring bubbled up from the ground into a pool that had been lined with river-smoothed white quartz pebbles. The clearing was almost certainly artificially maintained, but it was back from the road, and it seemed reasonably unlikely that anyone would come to it by night—other than possibly one of Aithre's followers, which they considered acceptable.

They unharnessed the donkeys and let them drink and tethered them to graze, then settled in to wait for moonrise. Mantles were unwound and left with the cart, in Kaveri's case with intense relief, and cloaks were spread on the wildflower-sprinkled grass to sit on. Mirren prowled around, playfully pouncing on blowing leaves and investigating the spring. Sandals were shed while they were waiting, and even hidden weapons.

Tyrel felt Talir before her leading edge broke across the horizon. Automatically, he turned in her direction, and sighed blissfully as the first of her yellow light touched him. What could ever equal the exhilaration of a full moon?

Well, multiple full moons, or at least moonbright nights, shared with his family were always good too, but that was different.

He had nothing on anymore save his tunic itself, and that was no obstacle to changing. Kieran beat him to it, though, already four-footed and shaggy by the time Tyrel made it to fox form. Mirren dropped to a crouch in the grass, eyes fixed on Kieran; her back end wiggled, and she charged at him.

Of course, he was so much larger that she actually ran all the way under him without stopping. Kieran looked down as she circled back, and nuzzled her, nearly knocking her right off her feet. Tyrel, mischievously, crept up on Mirren while she was distracted, and pounced on her.

Lysandra's soft, “Oh my,” distracted both from rough-housing, but Lysandra herself didn't notice. Her eyes were fixed on the pale blue moon that had just edged up over the horizon.

She might be rapt for moments, or for half the night, there was no telling, so they went back to their game, which expanded to include Madoc once Sanur rose, and after waiting through Sahen's rising, finally Kaveri and Narcissa as well. Truly outside, rather than in the restricted space of the roof, Narcissa's breathtaking speed and manoeuvrability as a hare became much easier to judge. Even with amarog and bobcat and fox and wildcat all trying playfully to catch her, while a raccoon watched from the spring and chittered excited encouragement, she could duck and weave around the clearing avoiding them all, and they couldn't even come close to keeping up with her on straight runs. They stayed out of a wide circle around the donkeys, which turned out to be adequate: the two jennies ignored them.

Tyrel wasn't the only one keeping part of his attention on Lysandra, though: the moment she moved, the game broke up, and everyone reoriented. Four feet were better for some things, like playing, but it did make talking problematic. Narcissa claimed the spot on one side of Lysandra, and the others left the one on her other side to Kieran, filling in the rest of the circle themselves.

Narcissa closed a hand around Lysandra's. “See?”

Lysandra nodded. “Yes. So. Let's find out what I am. Just ask, correct?” She untied the bandage from around her arm, where of course only dried blood now remained, and tugged her skirt out from under her so she could kneel upwards and pull it off over her head. Given how little she liked being naked, presumably a reflection of her own love-hate relationship with the body that allowed her to dance but had a fundamental wrongness that had influenced her entire life, she did it more easily than Tyrel expected—but she left the dress across her lap.

Kieran echoed the nod. “I don't believe,” he said, in amusement, “we've ever had anyone join the family with the benefit of two years of close familiarity first.”

“Mostly,” Madoc said dryly, “it's been without the benefit any knowledge at all. Or of choice.”

Lysandra grinned at them. “I like to be unique.” Her gaze went back to Meyar.

That moment of brightening light, they knew very well. Tyrel sent a mental plea to the moons that Lysandra's other form would be something she'd like and would adapt to easily.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The animal left on the grass when the silver-blue light faded to more normal levels was... confusing. Smaller than Mirren, or was she?

“Oh my,” Kaveri breathed. “You have wings!”

Kieran, very gently, helped Lysandra get untangled, and kept a hand cupped under her belly to support her while she tried to figure this out. “Indeed. And in a very beautiful form. I believe in several languages, the name for what you are translates as winged fox or flying fox.”

“Honeyfox,” Narcissa said in delight. “I've seen drawings and paintings, and Iole told me about them. Red-gold with deeper red-brown wings and that thin nearly-white collar at the front continuing in a line part of the way down... that's a honeyfox, specifically. They winter in the western islands, and go north some way in the summer to feed on flowers and fruit while they raise their young. There are stories of them guiding humans to bees' nests, so they can have help reaching the honey, but it's well-documented that even without help they find honey irresistible.”

“I can see why they'd be compared to foxes,” Mirren said. “That's much prettier than the only bats I've ever seen. Much bigger, too.”

“Foxes with wings,” Tyrel muttered. “This world just never stops surprising me.” Lysandra really was a lovely creature, with that rich-coloured fur and the large eyes and admittedly foxy face.

But she was tiny, the length of body and head much less than a foot long, much of it fitting within Kieran's hand, and while Kieran was very strong, Tyrel thought she must weigh very little. She did, however, have those wings, which she was studying in perplexity, slowly working out how to flex what would have been fingers on a human. What would have been a thumb, on each side, was quite pronounced and bore a large hooked claw, but the other fingers were all incredibly elongated to support that membrane, which looked alarmingly fragile.

“I believe,” Kieran said, “this may be as difficult to master as being human was for me. Learning to fly cannot be a simple thing. But once you do, well... none of the rest of us can fly.”

Lysandra spread one wing—Narcissa edged back out of the way—and then the other, and then, experimentally, both as far as she could.

Suddenly, she looked less small. That wingspan had to be something like four feet. Shoulder and chest muscles rippled under her sleek fur, as she worked out how to move, and then how to beat them in a long slow stroke. That must have felt right, because she did it again, more quickly.

“Or maybe,” Kieran said in amusement, “you'll be a faster learner than I was. The instincts you need will be there and accessible.”

“The difficult part,” Narcissa said, “is to not think so much about what you're doing and how strange and impossible it is that you interfere with that. Although it may feel less strange, I suppose, after two years of observation.”

Kieran nodded. “It may indeed.” Still holding Lysandra, he got his feet under him, then stood up, taking care not to drop her or hamper her increasingly vigorous efforts to master her drastically-altered upper limbs. Tyrel wasn't sure she noticed the increased altitude.

She certainly noticed when he gave her a gentle toss upwards and quickly stepped back out of the way: she screeched, wings automatically beating hard.

It wasn't flight exactly, but it wasn't a straight drop to the ground, either. More like a glide with a brief moment or two of hovering. She stumbled a bit as her clawed back feet touched the grass, and dropped forward, supporting herself on one hand, or rather her wrist. The glare she turned on Kieran was distinctly accusing, in the body language of any kind of animal.

“You can't be hurt,” he pointed out, kneeling beside her. “Meyar is full above you. Short of drowning you in the spring, I could do you no true harm right now even if I wished to, and you know I would never wish to.”

She looked up at Meyar, and a few heartbeats later was human again, on her knees with one hand on the ground. “Not to anything but my pride,” she grumbled, sitting back, but there was no real anger behind it. “This is going to take a while to adapt to, and longer before there's any hope of being much use, but I think once I do, it could be a lot of fun. It helps to think of it something like dancing, move this and only this, and why are you all looking at me like that?”

Narcissa found her voice first. “Look at yourself.”

“What?” Puzzled, Lysandra looked down.

At breasts that were, while not large, of a comfortable size and emphatically real. And below that, to more pronounced hips, and a very definite change in anatomy. What she couldn't see, but the others could, was that her hair was at least a handspan longer and much thicker, and Tyrel would've sworn that her skin had never suffered from excessive unwanted hair or the prices of its repeated removal, anywhere.

She ran a trembling hand down her own body, lips parted and eyes wide.

And burst into tears, curling in on herself and burying her face in her hands.

Narcissa scrambled closer, her usual grace abandoned in concern, to slide an arm around her.

“Aithre's children aren't the only ones who see what's really there,” Kaveri said.

“I'm all right,” Lysandra said, past the sobs.

“We know that,” Mirren said.

Kieran wove a square of fabric from Talir's light and handed it to her. “We do,” he agreed. “Old injuries heal when we change. My friend Derius, a very long time ago, speculated as to whether a congenital deformity would be corrected as well, or whether it would be considered natural state. I suspect that the timing matters little, and self-perception is the deciding factor. I think Meyar has concluded that this is what is supposed to be your natural state.”

Lysandra looked up to the silver-blue moon, tears on her cheeks, and whispered, “Thank you.”

Someone outside the circle laughed.

A tall woman, her midnight hair loose in thick waves, dressed in a dancer's top and skirt of vivid saffron orange-yellow. The golden and indigo snakes around her arms, though, were alive.

“Mothers want their children happy,” she said, raising her arms and swaying lazily to music that was only in her own mind. “That's the natural state of mothers. Which isn't to say you aren't still mine. What you are can change, but never what you were, and that's a part of you always. If you ever need a rest from wandering, you'll always be welcome in my temples, whether it's for days or years.” She let her arms fall. “Meyar wanted her children to have a long life with few distractions so they could learn as much as possible about the world and then share that with others in one form or another, to help them better understand and appreciate it. Some of her chosen are scholars, philosophers, teachers. Some are artists, musicians, poets, dancers. Many, in time, cease to see a boundary between. You, sweet daughter, already understand much in a way that most people never will.” She spun in place, her skirt shimmering in the light of four full moons and a half-full one as it swirled around her, and after at least two full circuits she stopped, facing Narcissa now. “Lirit moved first,” she chuckled. “Meyar regretted not being faster when you changed, but it was entirely unexpected for everyone, with no time to think. But then, what you do crosses the boundaries between knowledge and the wilds, hm? Not the only boundary you've ever danced along. Your mother is pleased you feel free to leave Enodia.”

She laughed again, already in motion, and between one step and the next, was gone.

But her voice lingered. “Lysandra, stop crying and dance.”

The blue-white light around Lysandra strengthened, but she didn't change. Instead, the light gathered itself into a close-fitting top with only wide straps across the shoulders and a fairly low neck, and a full skirt sitting low on her hips, all of it dazzling white.

“I think Meyar seconds that,” Madoc said.

Lysandra looked down and laughed, though her breath still caught. “I think you're right. And I think it would be unwise to disobey both her and Aithre.” She got up, dropping the handkerchief.

“Think of it as your wedding dance,” Narcissa said. “Instead of asking for blessings on you and a husband...”

“Blessings on myself, three husbands, two co-wives, and my sister?” Lysandra said, laughing still.

Possibly we messed Narcissa's life up, or at least wrenched it rather violently onto a different road, but I think somehow in there we might have made Lysandra's right for the first time ever. And given how Narcissa feels about her sister, I think that helps to make hers right, too.

Tyrel watched, unwilling to miss even a heartbeat, as Lysandra gathered up everything she was feeling, joy and release and hope, tireless and ecstatic with Meyar's silver-blue light rippling around her, and danced.