Then I saw the crowd waver, draw apart. Over one of those spear barriers leaped Murri, soaring as he had in the dance. He carried in his mouth a rod the end of which glittered in the sun.
The priest stumbled back, clutching the crown, his face showing his fear. However, the Grand Chancellor stood her ground, her hand going to the Sword of Presence at her belt, even though that weapon of ceremony might be as nothing against this raider from the outlands.
In a single bound Murri reached me and I took from his jaw hold the sandcat-topped staff Ravinga had wrought. Though I did not relinquish the other which bore the leopard symbol.
On my left side the Blue Leopard, belly down, ears flat to skull, sounded a hiss. At my right Murri stood tall, his yellow eyes round on the beast who disputed his coming, showing no fear, no sign of warning of battle to come.
With the two beasts and the two staffs, I faced the people, whose shouts had died away, and who were staring back at me as if amazement had struck them dumb. An age had ended, a new one begun. In one hand I held the ancient symbol of the past, in the other I gripped that which had come to me by my own efforts. What the Essence would demand of me in the future I had no way of foreseeing, but it was true that I must be my own man, that much I had learned. At that thought, near bare of body, stained with blood, the hair released from my shorn topknot tossed by the wind, I claimed what was mine and what I would hold, even as my fur brothers claimed and held what they had won.
Epilogue
RAVINGA HAD LIT only one of the lamps, but by that I could see well her face, and I recognized the strength of purpose in her expression.
“He has won,” I said. That that win had astounded me was a simple way of expressing how I felt. This Hynkkel, what had he in him anyway? To be made to twist my thoughts of him in another pattern was difficult to accept.
“He but begins,” Ravinga corrected me.
“They must accept him—it is custom—” I caught part of her hint.
“You speak so, knowing what you know, what you yourself have endured, girl? Do not play the simpleton. Shank-ji may have lost a hand, he has not lost a head. There is a slinger to be accounted for—that need is immediate. Beyond lies much more—
Her gaze swept beyond me to that shelf on which stood the figure of Ylantilyn.
“Therefore,” now she spoke briskly as one who had finished one task only to turn to another, “we move again. You, Allitta have now the right to claim your heritage. Custom decrees that what one Emperor has done, a new one may undo. The last of your House shall do homage with all her peers, shall claim all rights and privileges due her line—all rights.” She repeated that as one who could not be crossed.
Past bitterness arose in me so strong I could almost taste it. “No!” Still—a second thought—was this not what I had once dreamed of? If strange circumstances brought it about, why should I throw it away?
“Yes!”
I could not stand against her. I could not even stand against that part of me which wanted what she took so easily as a fact. A new life—a dangerous one—but I had lived with danger for many seasons—it would not be new or daunting for me.
“We move,” Ravinga continued. “Even as the mobile swings, we begin to move.”