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Like his siblings, Skjo had moved out of his uncle's den some time ago, but he still paid his mother regular visits. She was the only lion in his acquaintance who had been trained by a lawspeaker and learned to fight as a reaver, and although Skjo was not altogether convinced that he wanted to hang around in the forest waiting for some nebulous day when...something might happen, he was more interested in what he could learn from his mother than what he could learn from the rest of his family. The fey ways of his grandfather's b*****d family did not appeal to him. He was simply too big for stealth, and disinclined to it anyway. There was also the fact that in this particular setting nobody could sneak up on him no matter how stealthy they were: he was a seer whose visions showed him his own family members. He need only think of his family and he would know, generally, where they were. He had been amazing at hide-and-seek as a cub.

"Back again?" Kazul asked her son. She didn't smile at him. She almost never smiled. She smirked and grinned, and had a sneer that almost passed for a smile if you didn't know what you were looking at, but smiling was simply not something she did.

"What do you hope to learn today? Or are you just here to have your a** handed to you again?" Whenever she fought, Kazul went all out, holding back only enough that she wouldn't maim a careless partner. All of her offspring were larger than she, but she was used to that and still tended to win more often than not. Part of the reason for that was she held to the teachings of a not-stupid outlander who said one should never tell everything you know.

"Hello to you, too, mother," Skjo greeted her. Without meaning to, he had adopted a few of his uncle's mannerisms, including his good manners. It made him seem deceptively mild-mannered, when in fact Skjo had a very short fuse and next-to no patience.

"You're not getting any younger, you know, mother. You should probably take it easy and not go picking fights with lions so much larger and stronger than you are." He was teasing her, but there was an edge to it. There was usually an edge to interacting with Kazul. Uncle Odd said she had always been prickly, but Skjo couldn't believe his mother had ever been anything as mild as prickly. She was a hardass, and had been for Skjo's entire life. Not that she had ever forced her children to do things against their will, per se, but still...

Kazul sent a half-hearted glower toward her son. She had wanted her children to be hard when they grew up, and part of that was having a certain amount of innate cruelty toward others, even her. It had not been completely successful with all of them, but with Skjo it seemed to have worked, though he was a disappointment in other ways. His recently stated indecision about whether he even wanted to be one of the Stormborn had infuriated her.

"Watch yourself," she warned him with false sweetness. "You're not so big that I can't take you down and give you some new scars."

She didn't press the matter though. She was still capable of feeling, despite her behavior since her father's exile, and she was curious what her son wanted. At least a little bit, anyway.

"Actually, I have some news for you that I thought you might want to hear. About Grandda. He's back with Grandmother."

Actually, now that he thought about it, Skjo wasn't sure he had told his mother about the period of time Aesir had spent recovering from his wounds with that other lioness. He hadn't seen it, but he strongly suspected that his grandfather was ******** the lioness. He hoped he had told his mother at least the first part of that. Otherwise he'd be in for it.

"They're both alive, and I think his one eye's healed completely," he went on, hoping to cover up his faux pas with more information. He didn't know how his mother would feel about her father being with someone other than her mum. She seemed to like her half-brother Odd well enough, but her relationships with the others in his litter were obviously complicated.

Kazul feigned disinterest, but she couldn't quite pull it off. She had never been terribly close to her mother, but her father had been her favorite lion until she met Ru. Now she wasn't sure who her favorite lion was. Maybe Odd. Probably Odd.

"I'm glad to know about his eye," she told Skjoldr. She didn't sound particularly glad, but she really was. He was not blind. There was a foolish part of her that hoped he would return and claim his rightful position, but she knew that would never happen. And, much as it pained her to admit it, the fight had been fair and so the position of warlord was no longer rightfully his. Even thinking that felt like a betrayal, but it was the truth, and Kazul would not allow herself to flinch away from it just because it was unpleasant.

She didn't say anything about the other piece of information. He had told her about the other lioness, in fact, and she thought she could understand her father's reasoning. Being back with her mum must be difficult for him.

"Thank you."

One thing Skjo appreciated about his mother that he would never, ever tell her because he guessed she would see it as some sort of failing on someone's part, was that she never forced him to try for visions of a particular family member. She always liked to know whatever he could tell her from his visions, but she rarely demanded information. The one exception to that had been when his cousin Burzum had gone missing for several days. It had taken him some time to figure out what was going on there, and he still wasn't quite sure. The popular theories were that Burz had either betrayed the family and was guarding one of Njal's daughters as a reward, or he had been enthralled and was guarding her as a punishment. Skjo tended toward the latter, since he had seen Burz take beatings that were entirely too harsh to indicate anything except an extremely low position. The only reason there was any question at all was Burz never carried himself with anything less than arrogance, which wasn't very thrall-like.

"Um."

Kazul didn't mind when Skjo fell silent. She knew he did that when he was trying for a vision, and she didn't disturb him while he was doing that. Her sister had visions, and she had hated to be disturbed during them. She could tell, however, when Skjo was not having visions, and was just being quiet. Silence didn't annoy her either. She had grown used to it, much to her half-brother's amusement.

It wasn't until Skjo uttered a non-word sound that she looked sharply at him and reprimanded him: "If you have something to say, say it. Don't mumble or grunt like a beast."

She had never minded that sort of thing in her youth, but people changed as they grew older, and Kazul had spent many seasons trying to keep a horde of increasingly large and boisterous cubs from getting into the sort of trouble that would get them killed. It had shortened her temper and diminished her tolerance for irritating habits. Like non-words, fidgeting, or time-wasting.

Skjo ducked his head. He couldn't believe he had actually said "um" in his mother's hearing. He had been lucky she hadn't cuffed him for it. Nevertheless, he didn't apologize. Kazul was rarely impressed by those. Instead he simply informed her, "You're going to have company soon."

Automatically Skjo had touched briefly on the location of his other family, just to reassure himself that they were not in any danger, and in doing so he had noted that there was family on the way to speak to his mother. He could be there when they arrived, he supposed, but he didn't much want to. Something about their expressions told him this wasn't a scene he wanted to be party to.

"That was all I wanted to tell you. Good day, mother."

"All right," Kazul said. She might have wished that Skjo had been more specific in telling her who was coming, but knowing about company in advance was an advantage she would not have had two years ago, and would have liked very much. Now she was becoming spoiled by Skjo's visions.

"Do not die in bed, Skjoldr." She used his full name rather than the shortened form because he had bid her a more formal farewell, which in her mind meant a full-name reply. It wasn't that she had anything against nicknames.

She watched her son depart and wished Odd was here. She relied on him more than she cared to consider for emotional support and stability, and she had the feeling that she would be needing him soon.