Chapter 4
"Your majesty! Your majesty!"
Zuzu came soaring down from the sky, alarm written across her features and her beak twisted in panic. She landed before Ahadi, who'd been reclining on a hill and surveying the pride lands. Ahadi sat up quickly when the hornbill landed before him, panting and sputtering and clutching a stitch in its side.
"Slow down, Zuzu, catch your breath. What is it?"
"Young master . . . Taka . . ." the bird paused and took a huge gasp.
"Taka? What about Taka?"
"Ran away . . . with Zira . . . they're heading to the thorn patch . . . and then to the desert!"
Ahadi let loose a roar of frustration. "Alarm the lionesses, then follow me!" he growled and charged away without another word.
Zuzu was rising on her wings again when a paw swiped out of nowhere and snatched her back by the tail. Zuzu was pinned to her back on the ground by a heavy, unsheathed claw. With the wind knocked out of her, she peered up, dazed and confused, into the furious face of the queen.
"You were supposed to report to me!" Uru growled. "Me and only me!"
"But it was an emergency, your highness!" Zuzu gasped apologetically. "Taka has gone to the --"
"He hasn't gone to the thorn patch! Don't you know anything by now? Taka is a liar, a born liar --"
"Just like his mother."
Uru looked over her shoulder.
A heavy lioness with a square face and small, gray eyes was standing behind Uru. Her name was Rai and she was Sarabi's mother. She smiled and moved forward, and with her nose, she gently nudged Uru's claw from Zuzu. Zuzu coughed and climbed to her talons, grumpily flapping herself and smoothing her rumpled feathers.
"I may be a liar," said Uru after a pregnant pause, "but I did it for my son and my husband. Taka will defy his father no matter the cost and if Ahadi discovers his betrayal, their enmity will only continue to grow. I . . . I'm tired of seeing my son and my husband constantly at war!"
"So you lied to protect them from each other. I understand," replied Rai with a motherly smile.
There was a pause as Uru gazed with a mother's worried frown off to the horizon. She was gazing in the direction of the elephant grave yard, that place on the edge of the pride lands where gray mist forever hovered and from which the constant stench of death and decay drifted. Rai waited patiently for Uru to speak.
"Will you help me?" said Uru at last, her gaze questioning as she looked to the older lioness.
"Darling," said Rai affectionately, "that's why I came."
