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On the night of our marriage, Astolfo opened his great jaw and showed me what he had brewed there: the secret silver liquor of the wed, the bride-milk meant for me. It tasted like frost on the honeycomb. It tasted like a new life. It flowed between us as we kissed, his face to the mouth of my belly, and when I had taken it all he kissed the place where my head is not and I moved my hands once more in his dark hair. He never spoke much, but from the draughts he mixed in his jaw I took communion, and comfort.

But he did not love my orchard, nor the work of cutting and quartering the pages from the trees. He hated the taste of ink steeping in his mouth, the bitter iron gall, the grease of musk-glands. I showed him the tree of my mother’s hands, and he wept bitterly for the loss of his old life, where he knew every step through every row of green and curling vines. This happens sometimes—it is unavoidable. I tried to show him how beautiful a finished book could be. The crispness of the paper, the scent of it, the ghost-patterns of the old hide that had made it, like a story, even before a story had graced the pages. I tried to sweeten the ink with honey and cane. We were very young, both of us, and trying with all our strength to get older as fast as we could.

Hadulph, the red lion who brought me these very pages on which to write the long tale of my life, who cut them from his uncle’s hide and wept all the while, met me first in those days, when Astolfo sat sullenly by our hearth, letting the least offensive of my favorite brown inks darken against his teeth.

In those days Hadulph was a satirist—you see how even writing this is a crime, small or great. I betray him with every stroke of the pen, betray all of them, all my friends and even myself: I tell you who we were then, and who we would become, and do not grant any of us the Abir’s privacy. Let me be forgiven or despised—I am what I am, and a historian knows no propriety.

Hadulph embraced his profession with typical leonine relish. He savaged our mule-headed king Abibas in sketches and poems, the braying lord of velvet nose and chronic indigestion, all on my paper, in my books. Abibas did not take it personally—everyone must make a living.

Now, among the lions of Pentexore are two tribes: the white and the red. They grow enormous, less like cats and more like horses. Their language rolls and drawls and was easy to learn. Much philosophy separates them: the white lions live in solitude on the slopes of the freezing mountains, often bearing the panotii of those snowy wastes upon their backs through long hunts. They hunt by singing, each to each, like the whales of the sea, and are devoted to the faith of the panotii: a godless cosmos, governed only by their own pale paws and what tenderness they feel in their thundering hearts. The red lions do not allow themselves to be ridden, and worship Yiwa the Nine-Horned Antelope Whose Eyes Weep Milk, the gentlest of all the gods, who allows herself to be continually and eternally devoured to nourish her people.

Once, I remember, I told John of the red lions’ god. He expressed amazement that they would worship an antelope, and I said: They think you childish, that you insist your god looks just like you. That is how a baby thinks, because she has only her parents to protect her, so all the power in the universe bears her own face.

But red lions are city cats, while their white cousins remain wild highland beasts. They stamped the streets with their scarlet paws, in Shirshya, in Silverhair, in Nural where the al-Qasr shone and stood. Hadulph, with his broad blaze of white on his red chest, had been born of such delight: a red mother, a white father. Some cross-mating between the two tribes does occur. Pentexorans bear children but carefully, for if we did not we would soon be overrun with a million deathless babies. Still, we are flesh and bone, and the forbidden is always alluring. Sometimes I think Queen Abir perforated our lives in