(no subject)
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye
Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie
When the pie was opened the birds began to sing
Now wasn't that a dainty dish to set before a queen?
There were blackbirds in her dreams, and butterflies, small darting shapes that she could only find in the corners of her eyes, clustering along the sides of her vision. They swarmed there just out of sight and she knew that ahead of her and behind and above and below and about her was the Caer, and that something was slipping through that she'd never seen before.
Calerë and Mom walked beside her. From a distance she thought she saw Tintorë, red and black sleek shining shape slipping through, and the black shapes avoided her path. They avoided Calerë and Mom, too.
That wasn't how the rhyme went. Where was the queen? The blackbirds were laughing at her, she thought, and watching, and they shouldn't be because she was queen here, and her leopard-self with her, and if they displeased her she could order them to go - couldn't she? Unless there was a different queen, another queen, alien-strange as the butterflies-that-weren't, presence slowly infusing into the welcoming mesh of Caer Annwvn until the ground itself was steeped in Otherness, and she could not let that happen for all the blackbirds in the world, but all she had to fight it with was scattered pennies and a pocket full of grain...
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It was a different sort of waking than she normally experienced: slow, easy, little things slipping into her dreams until the dreams fragmented and wafted away. Warmth came first, and weight, and leopard-mind curled about her own - safety. People were breathing nearby, deep rhythmic sleep-breaths that shivered through the bed to her skin and ears. The air smelled like leopard, and the softness on her skin could be nothing but fur. Calerë. And Mom on her other side, purring on each exhaled breath.
Opening her eyes took longer than she expected. The light filtering through to the room was blue-gray and very faint, dawn an hour away at least, even for the middle of summer. Arthur and Sarah had wrapped themselves together nearer the head of the bed, traces of tension in their faces. In the corner was a small pale huddle of little girl, white skin and moonlight hair and shivering limbs.
That was not right. She made an abortive movement toward her daughter; the leopardess half on top of her stopped her quite effectively.
She's cold, Breeann thought.
Mom cracked an eye open, rolling away from Breeann's side, padding to the corner and very carefully tugging the child back, until Rána was snuggled into Breeann's side. The black leopard lay back down, bright line of warmth even as Breeann started to miss it.
Rána. She let the name linger in her mind. Hers. Her beautiful daughter.
Calerë chuffed in agreement and started grooming Breeann's scalp, making soft little chirruping noises to soothe her back down into sleep. It didn't take long at all.
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The next time she woke it was because she felt eyes trying to dissect her. A shudder ran down her spine, and she grumbled, turning her face into Calerë's neck-fur.
“Breeann?”
That was Sarah, voice unusually quiet and tense. She growled in the back of her throat, lazily, and ignored it.
“Bree. Look at us.” --And that would be Arthur. She absolutely did not feel like moving, but she suspected that, taut as both voices were, there would be hell to pay if she ignored them as completely as she wanted to, so she huffed a sigh and flopped her head sideways.
They looked worried, and nervous, and she really didn't know why...
Only....
Oh. It was morning. Fancy that. Wait, weren't they supposed to have some sort of conversation or something last night?
“Thought you were coming back last night so we could talk,” she forced out in her sleep-rough voice.
That absolutely should not have made their eyes go wide or provided opportunity for exchanged worried looks. She raised an eyebrow, blinking to bring their faces into sharper focus. Was something wrong?
“What is it?” she asked. “Did something happen?”
“You could say that,” Arthur said, and wow, his voice was scratchier than hers. “We got back and Calerë was pinning you, and you were completely out of it and wouldn't wake up, and she wouldn't let us get anywhere near. Started snarling at us whenever we tried, actually took a swipe at me, and then Mom came in and covered your other side --”
“You wouldn't wake up,” Sarah said. “Babe...”
Why did they sound so frightened? Irritation seeped through her brain - Calerë would never have hurt her, always protected her awake or asleep, and that was no different. Calerë was probably protecting her by keeping them back while she was so completely out of it, and they responded with fear? It was almost enough to start a spark of betrayal, a sense of hurt at being mistrusted, because obviously there was nothing more precious than her queen-self --
--Wait, wait, wait, wait, she chanted in her head, closing her eyes and focusing hard, disentangling her mind from Calerë's, and when she opened her eyes again she hissed at the expressions on their faces.
“Oh, hell. Loves, I am so sorry. Calerë --”
No, she wasn't going to let Breeann go for a while, so Breeann twisted enough that she could open her arms.
“Come on, it's fine, she thought she was protecting me but it's okay now --”
Sarah came first, practically collapsing beside her, hands skating desperately all over her body; Arthur followed a moment later, casting wary looks at Calerë, and then Breeann really couldn't have moved even if she wanted to, between the three of them, and shouldn't there have been a fourth...?
“Rána, where's Rána?”
“Kitchen,” Arthur answered, running his fingers over her face and neck, still looking decidedly askance at Calerë, “she woke up almost an hour ago insisting she was starving to death or something so we sent her off with Haley.” His hands were rough, calloused, on her cheeks and forehead. “Breeann --”
“Shh, shh, I'm here, I'm fine--” She paused, thought. “Better than fine, actually, I had had no idea and now it's so incredibly good and I really have to test it out or something --”
Arthur caught her head so that she was forced to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“It's - Calerë. I was right, she's way more than just a cat, or a normal leopard, and I can't believe I never figured this out before...”
“Babe, what are you talking about?” Sarah's voice sounded shaky, and Breeann reached up far enough to stroke her hair.
“Nothing bad, I promise. Just - apparently there's an actual reason I've always been so good with animals, only most animals aren't on the right level to communicate back, except for the parrots I guess, and those never tried to this way because they could vocalize and that was good enough.” Behind her, Calerë purred: vocalizing was all well and good, but this was better, was it not? and Breeann had to admit that yes, it was, in so many ways, and that fed into the leopard's smug satisfaction. “It's like - it's almost like telepathy, only not quite.” She frowned. “I'm not actually quite sure how to describe it, but it is totally awesome.”
“Then why wouldn't you wake up?” Arthur demanded. “That cat wouldn't let me near and then Mom kept me away from the tranqs and you wouldn't even move.” His voice crackled near the end, his face working through several interesting expressions before he turned his head away. “You wouldn't move,” he repeated, “and I couldn't do anything about it.”
“Arthur, love...” She moved her hand from Sarah's hair to Arthur's cheek. “I'm fine, I swear. I am. I think... I think that I exhausted myself, and my brain was too... open, or something, and touch makes it carry farther, and that's why she was guarding me, and I wouldn't wake.”
“You're not doing that again, then,” he said.
Okay, he was worried, yes, but still. She didn't even care if the surge of sarcasm was hers or Calerë's. “Yes, I probably am. I ought to be fine this time, though. Apparently I accidentally did something dangerous at first, before Calerë could stop me, and that's part of why I was so tired. It shouldn't happen again --” it won't, I won't let it, she understood from the leopard's rumble behind her -- “especially since Calerë was kind of ticked off at me for it before she realized I didn't know what I was doing, and I think she's planning on watching me like a hawk for the next few weeks until she's satisfied I won't kill myself or destroy my mind or something.”
Arthur and Sarah did not look to be much reassured by this pronouncement at all.
“But hey!” Breeann said brightly. “At least now I can figure out a bit more of what's going on. Did you know the cats can see magic?”
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Thank God for younger siblings who idolized her and thought that she was always right, even after all of these years. Really, it was like it never even occurred to Nick or Ike that they ought to doubt her word. If Breeann said something was so, then it was so, and that was that; hadn't she been right about everything in the past?
(She could have answered that one more honestly - there were a few times when she'd been rather drastically wrong. But she'd rather they not remember that right now.)
Noel went along with the whole thing because he trusted and looked up to her, and probably was still in awe of her as some primal figure from myth stepped into the Real World. She wasn't sure exactly what the reason was, but he was almost as attached to her as that little dog had been, years back, Lissë the not-too-ugly Chihuahua mix she'd inherited from Grandma via her cousin. Poor Lissë had eventually been given to someone else; the stress of leopards and lynxes and wolves and whatnot had had her cowering in corners for a couple of years before Breeann had given up on bite-sized dogs. Noel followed her around rather like Lissë had, when he wasn't with Nicholas or working at something, and her word might as well be from God so far as he was concerned.
Haley, on the other hand.... Well, Haley was very bright, and very skeptical, and pretty much refused to believe that anything supernatural or unnatural could be going on at all. The only reason Haley obeyed her mandates so far as the children were concerned was that Breeann had laid down the law early on: She was queen, or close enough, at Caer Annwvn. She wouldn't usually interfere, but when she did, you could obey or you could leave, your choice. Kind of sad, really; Haley's mind would be a wonderful asset to dissecting this Midsummer madness.
Of course Kira was nervous and reluctant to accept supernatural explanations, too, but Kira also had worked with Breeann long enough to not question her sanity. Well, too much, anyways. And if Kira and Haley thought privately (or not so privately, in Haley's case) that Breeann was bonkers, Allen more than made up for them. The man could probably teach a class: the Care, Feeding, and Handling of Nutty Semi-Feral Geniuses.
(Or he could if she would ever let him escape Caer Annwvn for that long. He was one of hers, dammit, and she was bloody well going to keep him, so there!)
But there it was: he was pretty much irreplaceable, and she knew it, and he knew it, and luckily for her and for the rest of them he had no intention of leaving any time soon, if ever. Which was a very good thing, because if he thought he was leaving in the middle of this craziness she'd kill him herself. Or something. Who else was going to help her with the African greys and mini-gryphs?
Those came to the Caer a full two weeks before they were due to hatch. The incubators were all set and running; the entire building had been sterilized to the point of ridiculousness. Considering how many millions of dollars this project had cost, and also the cost of even just one of the precious eggs resting in the incubator, they were not going to take any risks. At all. Even remotely. And they did want, very much, to accustom the chicks - chicks? kittens? cubs? - to humans before they ever cracked through the eggshells, so there was always someone sitting in the room, singing or reading out loud or talking so that the chicks would be used to human voices. Even Michael and Ariel took their turns, after much begging.
In the interim, Breeann got used to this not-quite-new sense of hers, carefully interacting with Calerë and Mom, and then the normal leopards residing at Annwvn, and then Tintorë and the tigers, and then the rest of the cats. After that she tried using it with the dogs, starting with Áranyel and Vardo and then going through the rest of the packs, and the wolves, and then the parrots, and the raptors. Clarity was a problem; her animals were more intelligent than normal, but Calerë and Mom were unique in a number of ways.
The sentient parrots, though, were quite a pleasant surprise. The greys felt it, when she tried to reach them that way, and were surprised by it - and then figured out what she was doing and how to do it better. She really should have figured; if some legends were coming true, why not others? Then there was Falma, who promptly decided that this needed yet more testing and flew around everywhere seeing if he could talk to the cats - which worked, kind of - and the dogs - which really didn't work at all. It did let him play a good number of pranks on Breeann, though, until she was nearly exasperated enough to confine him to the courtyard.
Then, too, there were the season's prospective kitten owners. All of them needed to be walked around the place, and trained, and while the interns - especially Allison and Ted - were very good at handling the smaller cats, and showing the guests how to behave around them, Breeann and Kira couldn't avoid the fact that the big cats were different, and dangerous. Tintorë was a goof who loved everyone, Calerë was - well, Calerë - and Mom was trained to avoid strangers unless the children were being threatened, but that still left a handful of tigers, a pretty sizable population of leopards, several jaguars, four lions, a number of cougars, and six precious snow leopards at the Caer. And Breeann and Kira needed to oversee all interactions between the guests and those cats, and many interactions between the interns and the cats. It was enough, some days, to make Breeann stare at the poetry journals scattered around the house, drop her pen, and then collapse onto the nearest available surface. She really had to wonder, some days, just what she'd signed herself up for.
And then there were still other things to think about, like Calerë's insistence that yes, she really could change shapes if she wanted to, and the telepathy-project was maybe three week from beta-testing, and the full-sized gryphons were basically ready and waiting to see how the mini-gryphs turned out, and...
(“Y'know,” Allen said to her one day, plopping down onto a hay-bale beside her while she was going over projected problems with the gryphon-project and trying to plan for potential disasters, “you really ought to take a break. This summer is crazy enough already, push some of it off onto other people. That's kind of why we're here.”
“I can't,” she said, voice a little more frazzled than she'd wanted it to be, “there's the guests and the magic and the weird stuff with Calerë and Rána ar Ósanwë ar Cermië ar titta ráthori ar--”
“You just switched into Quenya accidentally,” he said, laying a finger over her lips. “You are far too tired. Also I think mini-gryphs is awkward and unwieldy. You should call them catbirds or house gryphons, but not mini-gryphs. Especially in Quenya. And you should go sleep before I find Calerë and sic her on you.”
“That is not fair,” she said, but she climbed the tower-rock and stretched out on the top and the next thing she knew it was nearly time for dinner, and Sarah was sitting next to her watching her sleep.
“Any better?” Sarah asked.
“Much,” she said, and made a wry smile.
“I'll have to thank Allen. Now come on, it's time for dinner.”)
So there were the house-gryphons, since catbirds were already an avian species naturally occurring in the United States, and a round the clock watch to keep on them, and then on July 23rd Ravennë raced into the house without Michael, and Breeann was out the door and into that specialized room before Ariel could even open her mouth, because Michael and Ariel never separated without very, very good reason, and it had been their shift to watch the eggs.
There were very faint lines and marks around one of the eggs, and Michael was on his feet straining not to actually touch the incubator whilst watching intently. She stood over him, looking down, and felt a shiver of happiness go through her - she'd dreamed about these, as a kid, and a teenager, and then after getting out of the university system with Masters' and then working through her first PhD - and now they were actually here, hatching before her eyes. It didn't take any thought at all on her part to grab a chair and settle in for a long, long bout of watching.
Night came, and went. At some point in time Calerë wandered in from wherever she'd disappeared to sit with her; Vardo and Áranyel were with the kids, but most of the hunting pack came and curled up around her feet, overseeing the proceedings with some curiosity. She registered Kira's presence, and Allen's, and Sarah's and Arthur's, and various other people coming and going, but she waited through all of it.
By the time she left the room for longer than it took to grab a fresh pot of tea and relieve herself, it was afternoon on the 25th of July. All of the eggs had hatched (which she'd expected, since they'd all been implanted at the same time, and incubated for the same length of time) and the kitten-chicks or whatever they were seemed to be healthy enough and doing fine. The genegineers had made them with a parrot's digestive system in mind, not a cat's, so she'd give them their first meal tomorrow, allowing time for the last of the yolk to be digested.
Sitting in the den across from Allen and Kira, mug of tea cupped in her hands, she smiled. All three of them looked exhausted, no doubt; or at the least they both did, and she was certain she looked no better. Luckily her loves had only rolled their eyes, well used to her shenanigans when dealing with particularly exciting births and hatches.
Sarah had been there, after all, with Hugin and Munin. Come to think of it, Arthur had been there for a great deal of it, too.
So she sat and drank her tea and relished the pure bliss that came of an uncomplicated hatch, and meolindi at the end of it, and family surrounding her. It was a brief moment of unadulterated peace... she had a feeling she'd need it, in the coming days.
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“I am very, very, very sorry I missed your birthday.”
“It's okay, Bree, I get it. Don't worry about it.”
“I'm sorry anyways.”
“I said don't worry.”
“Okay, okay, fine. I won't. But...”
“Breeann...”
“No, no, this is something you'll like. You know I can't spare either of you right now what with everything going on.”
“Well duh.”
“So instead, I got you and Noel booked on a Mediterranean cruise in November.”
“.............”
“I take it you'll accept that as a gift, then?”
“Of course!”
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So that was one thing taken care of, at least.
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Rána.... She concentrated, trying to find the silver-bright cloud of her daughter's mind. It was easier than her other children, usually; the triplets, she'd found, were too focused in on each other, even at such a young age, and Michael and Ariel seemed not to hear her, usually. Rima was too young, unformed, but from the feel of her mind the name Tavaril would suit her perfectly. There was something vaguely other about both of her fair-haired girls.
Rána was playing, the circle-game, she thought. Where had they come up with that rhyme, anyways? It wasn't in any of the faery tales she told them, or in a book or story. She had tried Googling it, once, to no avail: it was unique to the children of Caer Annwvn. Originally she had thought it adorable. Now, in the face of everything else, she found it more than a little nerve-racking.
But they did love playing it so, and it was such a good way to engage their imaginations...
From the scent-feel of Rána's mind they were outside in the meadow near the tower-rock. One of these days the thing would probably acquire a more permanent name, considering that everyone, including Calerë and Mom, used it as a reference point, but she couldn't think of too much that wasn't vaguely phallic in image or connotation. Calerë thought of it as the watch-stone, in her thoughts; that was probably as good a name as any, and shorter and more formal than tower-rock. Perhaps she would propose the name as a formal alteration on the maps of Caer Annwvn to her consorts.
Laughing at herself, she made her way outside to the watch-stone. Climbing was as easy and fun as it had always been, and when she reached the top she wasn't even remotely surprised to find Mom already lying there, keeping watch over the children.
“Hey,” she said, running her hand over the leopard's back and letting her mind reach out to do the same. “Everything okay?”
The answer came as a placid sun-lazy surge of contentment, amusement twining around the edges. Everything was fine, nothing would dare disturb the kittens at their play with such fearsome guardians.
(Mom had a healthy respect for the dogs. Probably this was because she'd tangled with them a few too many times as a kitten, and the dogs, well used to big cats, had pinned her quite easily. Raumo's sire, especially, had been key in those particular lesson, as had Aranyel's older sister, and the one time Mom had tried to mess with one of the Borzois, thinking that such slender things would be easier targets, the entire hunt-pack had converged on her. She'd never tried it since.)
She had been a kitten, Mom reminded her. It was different now. But she had also watched the dogs hunt bears, and chase off the bear that was bigger than she was, and that was worthy of respect.
Breeann remembered that incident. A grizzly had escaped from someone's private collection, back in 2018, and somehow gotten through the security and inside the Caer's grounds. Luckily none of her children had been born, and John had been an infant tucked safely inside the Caer proper, but the bear was unafraid of humans and hungry, and had killed a horse and mauled two interns before they managed to mobilize enough of a force to stop it. The forest-pack had driven it off, eventually, the Irish wolfhounds and the pair of Akitas and a couple of Catahoulas, but even the cats had been afraid of it. --The incident had spurred on the big AR movement that culminated in 2019, and it had been the devil's own task to fight that hellspawned set of initiatives down. She'd managed it eventually, but if she'd not been so respected already for her work with big cats and African greys --
Mom yawned at her, and Breeann let out a wry chuckle, because Mom was pretty much ignoring her. She stretched out beside the leopard, breath-taking in her black on black coat and sun-drop eyes, and looked out at the kids and their circle-game. Radulf's turn was finishing up, it looked like, and Rána was next.
What did Rána look like through Mom's eyes, she wondered. Mom huffed, and so she sank her mind into the leopard's own, peering out through feline eyes as Rána started to spin, and the circle moved.
Silver lines of energy twisted around the circle, intensifying as the children chanted and fell. Then Rána spun alone, and the gathered silver-webs whirled in towards her until it was impossible to tell whether they were touching her or not, and Rána spun, and the last line came, and she pointed and made her wish, and the cloud about her gathered to a pinpoint and lanced outward at Michael. It flared around him for a moment before going dormant, and as he stood and went hunting for a wish Breeann slipped back into her own self and stared, eyes wide.
What the hell was that?
Magic, obviously. And whether it was accidental or not, Rána had looked quite comfortable in the midst of it, disturbingly so. Something twisted in her stomach, and she shuddered.
Beside her, Mom lapped at her paw. So the children were essentially calling up magic with every circle-game; so what? It was good for them to practice that way, so that when they were older they could protect and hunt for themselves, and why should it be surprising that the moon-bright kitten was best at it? She did, after all, take after her mother.
Oh, hell no.
She left the watch-stone and Mom behind, climbing down as fast as she could manage and heading for the Caer. Arthur was holed up in a lab hours away, Sarah was in Raleigh, and Kira was showing a small group of the guests the proper way to clean out a tiger's cage, but Allen would be watching the meolindi. She could talk to Allen.
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Allen was no help.
“So the cats can see magic - we knew that already. And that rhyme of the kids' invokes it somehow? And Rána's better at it than the rest because she takes after you.” He looked at her curiously. “Makes sense, actually.”
Betrayed. Utterly betrayed. “What do you mean it makes sense? Of course it doesn't make sense, that's insane, I don't care how much weird stuff is going on, it's not--”
“--Breeann. You talk to leopards in your head and your daughter has been turning herself into a leopard with some regularity. And we knew you were different well before any of that started happening. What with everything else going on, yes, it really does make sense.” He paused. “It's kind of like... heh.”
“Like what?” Her patience was eroding.
“...It's almost like magic, or something, or whatever, is seeping over, and so whatever you might have been able to do is getting... I don't know. Unlocked, maybe, or catalyzed. I mean, otherwise why would it happen now, instead of thirty years ago, or thirty-two, when you were Rána's age? But it makes sense if you think of it in terms of catalyzing.” He stopped again, looking at her in a way that meant Trouble. “Have you tried shape-shifting yet?”
She didn't answer.
“You really didn't,” he said, astounded. “Why - were you too afraid, or something?”
“Something like that.”
“Why?”
“Because it changes things. This whole thing with the leopards - it might just be me, you know? Nothing new there, Breeann's always been good with animals, ha-ha, she's just a little delusional is all. But if I actually can turn myself into a leopard, and then back again...”
“Then it's the final straw, and you have to believe. Got it.” He looked at her for what seemed like a very long time. “I think you should.”
Something bitter like helplessness was at the back of her tongue, and all up and down her spine felt hollowed out and fragile. “How do you just accept it?” she demanded. “It doesn't make any sense and it's dangerous and we can't control any of it or tell anyone because they'd be convinced we're nuts, and now all this, and I'm halfway convinced this is just an extraordinarily lucid dream, or, or, a story someone's writing just for kicks or something that I got stuck in, and it doesn't make any sense at all!”
Allen reached out and grabbed her shoulders and shook her, lightly. “Because I trust the birds and those damned cats more than I do myself, and because every other explanation makes even less sense, so what can I do about it except deal?” He shook her again. “You're good at dealing. Settle down, and trust that you're not dreaming, and then adapt to all this so you can make sure the rest of us don't get killed by something with a name we can't even pronounce.”
“Oh, please, it's just Welsh, it wouldn't kill you to pronounce it - okay. Okay. Fine. I'll stop freaking out and start digging out spell-books or something instead. And I'll try skin-changing tonight, I swear.”
He tugged her in and held her for a minute before letting her go. His touch calmed her as fast as it would a nervous cockatoo, and by the time he freed her to step away she was feeling substantially better. “You better let me know first,” he told her. “You'll probably make an absolutely fantastic leopardess.”
“Will do,” she said, and smiled.