The days leading up to Kovu's presentation were windless, close and stifling - the weather that precedes a thunderstorm. Scar was restless and irritable. The heat made his head ache and gave him a sense of impending disaster that he could not shake off. He wished the ceremony could be brought forward, but ritual and precedent were an essential part of the process. The new heir had to be presented with the new moon, to ensure luck and success for the future king and a long reign.

Scar hissed gently; much good it had done Simba, whose ceremony had been conducted faultlessly under beneficent omens. But it would please the pride. The lionesses were upset by Scar's innovations? Here he was reinstating one of the oldest rituals of the Pridelands.

Scar had not the wisdom of Mufasa, who knew everything's proper place in the world. But he recognised the rules a king must follow if he is not to be toppled by an angry pride. Even the mightiest must obey the system, just as the sun and stars turn in their appointed path.

Once the words of the ceremony had been spoken and the sacred fruit smeared upon the cub's forehead, then he would become the true heir, bound by an ancient rite that could not be undone. And Scar's name would live forever.

He no longer cared that Kovu was not his flesh and blood. His flesh was weak - let it perish! His blood was the blood of Ahadi and Mufasa - let their strain die out forever! But his mind - ah, his cunning, his way with words, all his tricks, these he would pass on to the boy, making him his. He would mould and shape Kovu until the cub was more his own creation than if he had indeed sired him. He could not wait to begin.

Zira, too, was restless and impatient. Coming from outside the pride, she knew little of their tribal ways and cared less. Like Scar, she wanted the presentation safely over. She too was filled with foreboding, for in her short, unhappy life she had come always to expect the worst and to distrust hope and the offer of security.

Scar brought Rafiki to her. The baboon came unwillingly; he had not forgotten the vision that had staggered him when he first caught sight of the lioness and her cub. Were the current drought and famine the danger he had foreseen? He thought not; drought and famine he had seen and endured before. The presentiment Zira carried with her was of lion fighting lion, clash of claws and bloody violence. The headache swelled in his temples again as he approached her.

"I'm not letting that vermin touch my cubs!" Zira gathered Vitani and Kovu to her, insulted. "It's not clean!"

Like a child, Rafiki spread his pink palms out for inspection, smiling to show he took no offence.

"It is necessary, Zira," Scar said. "He is our shaman and the pride's rituals are in his hands."

"You're the king! Why can't you stop these ridiculous rituals?"

"Some things are stronger than a king's might," he replied in a purring growl. It was the phrase Ahadi had used to explain why only one of his sons could rule the pride. Father, oh father, look at me now!

Rafiki had always come and gone as he pleased. In the days of Scar's reign it was noticeable that he was gone more often than he stayed, though he always seemed to turn up if anyone was sick or troubled. On this occasion he had reappeared in Pride bounds just in time to receive Scar's summons. He had met the news of the King's heir impassively, his old face displaying no emotion. He did not have to obey Scar, who had demanded of him what Mufasa had humbly asked as a favour; he could simply walk away. Let Scar find someone else to perform his leonine ritual. But he was bound closely to Mufasa's family and wanted to see this story to its end; perhaps to play a part in it.

He looked at the brown cub. The constriction around his head eased a little, and he gave a small sigh of relief. Kovu came to him immediately despite his mother's growls, rubbing his head against the monkey's hands. For his part, Rafiki scratched between the soft ears and under the fuzzy chin.

"Hello, little one," he said. The wide baby eyes looked into his own, sunken in his wrinkled face. Rafiki felt a sensation like an electric shock pass into his fingers from the cub's fur, and he knew that here was a piece of the puzzle: Kovu was involved in the danger that Zira had brought with her to the pride, bound up in it intricately. He squinted, trying to get a better picture of the future. For a moment it seemed as if a pendulum swung above Kovu's head, a weighted string like the one the monkey used for divining water underground; Scar's heir stood balanced on the edge of twin destinies. Rafiki's bony finger stroked the quiff between the cub's ears.

"We must keep an eye on you, my boy," he said. Too swiftly for Kovu to feel pain, or for his watchful mother even to notice, Rafiki plucked a few hairs from Kovu's crown and concealed them in his palm. Bowing to Zira and Scar, he retreated from their presence and ambled away to his tree.

From now until the presentation he would be busy reading the omens of earth and sky, gathering ingredients and preparing the sacred ointment. As Scar had done, he pondered the signs that he had seen at the time of Simba's ceremony. He had predicted difficult times for the prince, certainly, though keeping his own counsel about them so as not to alarm Mufasa. But he had also foreseen a long and happy reign. How could he have been so wrong? Maybe he was getting old. In his mind he compared dark Kovu to golden Simba, and his expressive lips turned down.

As he thought of Simba the wind shifted minutely, suddenly undercut with a cool draught. Rafiki lifted his shaggy head, and his hand darted out to capture an airborne particle of fluff or plant matter. It touched Kovu's hair, still lying in his palm, and a piece of amazing knowledge was conveyed from the fragment to Rafiki's brain.

"Simba?" he breathed.

Simba! What would happen now?


A/N: I'd like to thank the talented and lovely Jurious, without whose gentle poking I might never have got on with these final chapters.]