Chapter 4 In Which I Explain My Cat’s Name
In Which I Explain My Cat’s Name
I woke up from dreams of a stony riverbank and a bizarrely attractive picnic basket, lavishly appointed with a gingham blanket and gloriously curvaceous woven wicker sides.
My feelings about the picnic basket were so vivid and distressing that it took me a minute to remember where I was. I lay on the floor with a pounding head and dry face. I ground the heels of my palms into my eyes but the pounding didn’t stop. I covered my ears, scowling.
The pounding continued.
This, I realized, was because someone was knocking on the door.
With a groan, I heaved myself upright. I had to pee terribly. “Hello?” I called, my voice hoarse.
“Wake up, Miriam. You should eat before your morning call.”
“I’m awake.” I stalked across the wood floor—still in my sneakers—and yanked the door open.
Sahir stood outside, dressed in a gray suit with silver threads.
His black hair was pulled back into a small bun at the nape of his neck.
In one hand he held a large cat carrier, and on the floor next to him was a suitcase that looked a lot like mine.
His hands were both covered in red scratches, and there was a long thin line down his throat like a claw mark.
I frowned at him, then at the cat carrier.
“What is this?”
“You seemed distraught about the cat, so I found your address in the employee records and brought it here.” His lip curled. “Your cat is very irritated.”
“Maybe because you’re very irritating,” I snapped, and dove for the carrier. I lifted it up, arms shaking. Doctor Kitten was indeed inside, staring at me with the disdain he usually reserved for my neighbor’s dog.
“You are welcome,” Sahir said, his lip curling as he glared with an identical expression of disdain at the back of the carrier. “Now leave the cat here, and change into something clean. We will go to breakfast.”
“He needs food, too.” I went back to the bed, nearly tripping over the nest of sheets on the floor, and opened the carrier to let Doctor Kitten out.
He just sat there, staring up at me, breathing hard.
I put a hand on his back, feeling the warmth of his fur, shushing him in what I hoped was a calming way.
Sahir inclined his head. “Of course he needs food.”
“And litter.” I glared at Sahir.
Sahir’s dark eyebrows had drawn together over his brown eyes, and he looked like a glowering portrait in a very old house.
“Miriam, I brought your cat everything he needs.” He waved his left hand, a languid, too-long gesture, and something shot past me.
When I turned around, Doctor Kitten’s food and water bowls sat next to the desk.
His litter box was in the corner next to the toilet.
“Now change so we can depart, please,” Sahir said, closing the door.
I started to turn back to the door but stopped halfway, because my suitcase had appeared on the bed next to Doctor Kitten’s carrier, unzipped. I snatched up the shirt on top, not caring what it looked like, and scuttled over to the toilet to pee.
Doctor Kitten followed me and rubbed his head against my calves.
He sat on my foot while I washed my hands and splashed my face with water, and mewled when I slid out from under him.
After I put the new shirt on, I picked him up and nuzzled his face. He licked my chin and wiggled until I put him down on the bed.
Then I picked him up again and took him to the door.
“Ready,” I said, hefting Doctor Kitten in one arm and opening the door with the other hand. Sahir frowned at me.
“You are not bringing the cat, are you?”
“I am bringing the cat.” I set my jaw and glared at him.
He sighed in a way that indicated decades of suffering.
“I’m sorry you’re inconvenienced by my kidnapping, Sahir,” I said. “Please feel free to release me at any time.”
“You do not seem to understand.” He stalked down the hall, farther into the hill. I glanced in the direction of the exit but couldn’t see any light.
“You said that last night.” I shifted Doctor Kitten so I was cradling him like a baby. He stuck his white front paws in the air, toe beans on display, and lolled his head over my forearm.
“It was true last night as well.”
“Then explain,” I snapped.
Sahir’s jaw set, and he spoke through clenched teeth. “Perhaps humans cannot understand. Faeries are just and fair. If the Princeling committed a wrong against you, he will make it right. And if he detained you from your chosen path, he did so for a reason.”
I tsked a hopefully dubious tsk but had nothing to say. Sahir was just a guy on the other end of a customer service line: fundamentally powerless, shoved into my path so I could abuse him verbally and encounter the manager completely exhausted.
He glanced down at me, brow furrowed. “You did not call the police last night.”
I jerked to a stop. “What on earth would the police do against faeries?” I imagined a bevy of police officers pouring into Central Park and then maundering about on their Segways, looking for a glimmer of light, a tear in the fabric of human reality.
“You have not told anyone.” It wasn’t a question.
“Creepy that you know that, but no, I haven’t, because I’m hoping you’ll all come to your senses and let me go.”
“I know you. Will you tell any humans?” He sounded curious but not concerned.
I wanted very desperately to ask questions, like Can we reprioritize for a moment? or Do you feel that your unfailing trust in your leader is truly warranted? But I needed Sahir on my side if I was to get out of here. So instead, I said, “Jeff knows.”
He shrugged. “Your colleagues may know,” he said, trailing a hand along the wall. “But they are unlikely to care.”
Ouch.
Specks of dirt dusted down in his wake.
Sahir turned right at a break in the corridor and led me along an identical brown hallway, lit at intervals by chittering will-o’-the-wisps.
They swooped and dipped down from the ceiling like hawks riding imperceptible air currents, tiny bodies subsumed by their own luminescence.
I squinted but couldn’t discern their shapes.
Instead of continuing to batter my own self-esteem, I suavely changed the subject.
“Don’t they get bored?” I asked, nodding at one.
He looked at me. “Who?”
“The, uh, lights.”
Frowning, he stopped in front of a large wooden door. “This is our communal dining hall. Do not embarrass yourself.”
“I don’t want to eat faerie food,” I protested.
“It is a little late for that.” He pushed and the door swung inward. “And I do not know if the will-o’-the-wisps get bored, Miriam. Do pigeons get bored? I suppose you will have to ask them.”
Inside, the communal dining hall looked depressingly like a high school cafeteria, a large room full of long tables.
Along the far wall, three faeries stood behind a counter, serving scoops of food to a line of people with wide wooden trays.
Behind the counter I could see windows into a kitchen area.
There were rows of tables like the one we’d sat at the night before, long wooden rectangles crowded with stools. A series of small holes in the ceiling let in light, and more tiny faeries flitted through the air above the tables, bringing flashes of illumination with them.
I didn’t see the Princeling or any of his retinue.
“We will eat here, and then I will bring you to your room before I leave,” Sahir said.
“If you’re going into the office, why can’t I?”
Doctor Kitten had started getting restless so I hefted him over my shoulder, his front paws on my back and his back paws on my stomach.
“You must not leave Faerie,” the Gray Knight said, appearing out of nowhere to glower like a very hot and foreboding bodyguard next to me. Sahir walked toward the food line. I felt the eyes of everyone in the room on us as the Gray Knight and I followed him.
But Thea and I had spent a summer teaching ourselves Elvish so we could read the inscription on the One Ring in its original language. Jordan had once created a monthslong campaign whose mechanics hinged on the precise wording of a mysterious letter. I was primed for verbal loopholes, is the point.
“Must not or cannot?” I asked the Gray Knight.
Sahir grabbed a tray for himself, looked at me with the cat over my arm, and then grabbed a tray for me, too.
The Gray Knight said nothing, the haughty tilt of her chin almost but not quite hiding the way she clenched her jaw.
“Must not or cannot?” I repeated, glaring at her.
“Must not and cannot,” she snapped. “The food you consumed has altered your body, and the attempt would disintegrate you into a fine mist of blood and bone shards.”
I recoiled, thinking about how the grain bowl had warmed me, how my arms and legs had tingled. It clearly wasn’t from the spices. It was magic.
I clutched Doctor Kitten tighter. I’d been such an idiot.
She pointed to Sahir, who was putting a bowl onto my tray. “You might enjoy the porridge, Miriam. It is made with wilderberries.” Then she stepped ahead of us in line, skipping the porridge entirely.
“Sahir,” I pleaded, hoping he’d intervene, but he kept his back to me. We went along the line together.
The first faerie serving breakfast scowled at me. I stared back, the word cannot pounding along my veins with every frantic beat of my heart.
The second pretended not to see me. The third—who looked like a Dallas Cowboy with a day of stubble, big arms, and the faded blue eyes of a person who spends all his time in the sun—nodded in greeting.
I blinked.
Sahir led me back across the wide room to the table closest to the door, where the Gray Knight had already made herself comfortable. Her silver hair lay in a thin sheet down her back, and her silver tail flicked in time to some music only she could hear.
“My lady,” he said, hooking a stool with one foot and straddling it. He put both of our trays down with the expected inhuman grace and then glanced at me.
I put Doctor Kitten on the table. “Please sit,” I said. Doctor Kitten stared at me for a second and then sat.