Chapter Thirty Cat
CHAPTER THIRTY
Cat
Elician and Cat spend two days in Ines. It feels simultaneously like too much and not enough.
Madame Leonde gives them a room at her inn, but Cat barely has time to sleep.
Every moment, he feels drawn in one direction or another.
He is asked endless questions. What does it feel like to be a Reaper?
Can he really kill with a touch? How does he actually help any of them?
How does he know he hasn’t condemned their souls by doing this?
Should they not accept it’s their time to die?
Cat answers what he can. He asks questions of his own.
What does it feel like to not be a Reaper?
What would they want in their king? Where did they learn how to treat the ill without the powers of the gods?
Where could he learn such a thing as well?
And – how can they believe that their souls were ever at stake?
‘If I am touched by Death, and Death must come for all things, then I am inevitable. But I am not here to kill you, and so that must be inevitable too. It’s not your time. ’
As he speaks to his people, his Blue Guard ebbs and flows.
Some remain steadfast and alert at his side, others filter through the city to subtly sing his praises.
He spies Partho in the morning of the second day juggling balls and telling tales.
Cat watches him, struck by a nostalgia he cannot quite name out loud.
He never gets a chance to think on it too deeply, as the moment he is seen, he is approached by more of the town’s councilmen.
Each want to hear what his and Elician’s plans are.
Each wants to debate. Each, also, wants to take Elician to task for the simple fact he is Soleben and they have found it in themselves to loathe him more than they fear the notion of a Reaper on the Alelunen throne.
Elician doesn’t react outwardly to the not-so-subtle barbs thrown against him.
He stays close to Cat and nods his head as elder after elder castigates him for the war and for generations of grievances.
Every town in the country has offered its people up to fight in the war.
They are all familiar with the sting of loss.
But he offers no apologies for their suffering, because these veterans offer no apologies for the pains they too have inflicted.
Both sides have fought and died. That’s the problem with this war, after all; everyone involved has been hurt, everyone involved has felt pain.
And so, while Elician does not argue with them, he does listen and he offers no judgement in turn.
‘And what of the rest of our soldiers?’ Leonde asks. ‘What can we expect of them?’
‘They’re in Altas,’ Cat tells her, though Leferge steps in soon after to provide an official account of her army’s diminished troops once the citizens began looking for their loved ones.
Leferge reports on the Altasian attack, the orders that the Reapers were given and her decision to refuse those orders.
She confesses her mutiny and offers herself to the city for judgement.
They are lucky. None of the soldiers who joined the attack on Altas hailed from this village, and once the returning soldiers have spoken to their families about the massacre at Altas and the horror of Endura, nothing could keep them from supporting Leferge’s cause.
Leferge may not have any intention of helping Cat win his throne, but she fully intends to march her army against Gillage, and to that end, she is successful in earning the support of the people of Ines.
Madame Leonde takes in the information with a simmering impatience and quiet fury at Gillage’s actions.
Her daughter, a young dark-haired soldier who always seems to flush whenever she sees Elician, sits at her mother’s side through all of this.
‘But you didn’t execute these traitors for what they did to Altas? ’ Leonde asks Cat.
‘No. It wasn’t my place to offer that justice. Once this conflict is settled, the soldiers who attacked the city will be returned to Alelune, but…with the plague and the tensions between Soleb and Alelune still being what they are, we healed them, despite their protests, and came here first.’
‘Yes…I imagine they did not appreciate the fact you denied them their chance to die heroes of their nation.’
‘Dying isn’t heroic,’ Cat murmurs. ‘Death is an end that leads to a new beginning, but it is still only a point of transition. Actions are heroic, and actions require life. And their actions have been far from heroic despite those lives.’
‘Most would say action requires sacrifice.’
‘Sacrifice demanded of you by a force you cannot deny is no sacrifice, it’s enslavement.
’ Elician laughs at that. It bursts out of him, startling several nearby people who have been surreptitiously watching them from only a few paces away.
Cat smiles at him, though, delighted Elician understood his other meaning, and delighted even more to hear Elician laugh so loudly. He has missed it.
Being Exalted has done nothing but make both of their lives so much more complicated than they should have been.
Wouldn’t things have been easier for them both had they been simple humans?
They still would have been princes and they would have lived the lives their parents had envisioned for them.
Stello Alest and Prince Elician would have met on the battlefield, and they would have had their armies clashing against each other day in and day out until they went back home and were both named king.
Then they would have guided their heirs to do the same thing over and over again.
They would not have necessarily been better men, but perhaps they could have been happier men.
Cat reaches out for him, and Elician takes his hand in his.
It is improper to do more, but Elician rubs his thumb over the back of Cat’s knuckles.
A promise of a kiss. Cat lets himself smile wider.
‘I didn’t know Reapers could be happy,’ Madame Leonde murmurs. Cat looks at her.
‘What did you think?’ he asks.
‘They are soulless,’ she says. She does not mean to be cruel, but she says it without remorse.
She looks at Cat and Cat looks back, and it is nothing he has not heard before.
‘They have no feelings; they are still and empty and made of nothingness. They steal children from their beds. They kill and murder indiscriminately and without care. They are Death turned wrong.’
At each word, Cat thinks of the cells, of endless rows of people pushed into darkness yearning only for the chance to be with someone for just a few moments.
He remembers reaching out to Brielle, desperate to hold her hand.
How he’d cried from the want of it. How, sometimes, when Gillage sent Nured in to beat or burn him, furious at how, even in the dark, Cat had somehow captured their mother’s attention, Cat leaned into those touches simply for the chance to feel something.
‘Have you ever spoken to a Reaper before you met me?’ Cat asks her quietly.
‘No. I had never seen one before that group came through,’ she admits. ‘Only heard about what they are. What they can do.’
‘I heard everyone in Alelune is unfeeling, uncaring, and loathes any source of affection,’ Elician announces at Cat’s side.
Leonde looks at him in a kind of stunned stupor.
‘Beyond the battlefield, I never spoke more than a handful of words to anyone from Alelune, not even to your ambassador at court. And when I was captured? I saw nothing at all to convince me otherwise.’
‘Then why are you here?’ she asks, short and displeased.
‘Because your stello is one of the most loving, generous and caring people I have ever met in my life. Because, before Altas, I fought your soldiers for years and I remember them being honourable and good. Because the rumours and actions of a few people do not represent the rest of you, and I believe that your people are not the sum of your worst stereotypes.’
‘Solebens are loud, and they have no sense of public decency,’ Leonde informs him primly. ‘They speak far too much, and they lack propriety. You cling to your traditions and don’t bother trying to advance yourselves because your past is all you care about.’
He laughs. ‘Yes. For some, that is certainly true.’
‘But you are here.’
‘Here to help make a change.’
It makes her smile now, pleased, content.
Cat leans forward. ‘I can’t speak on if I have a soul—’
‘You do, love,’ Elician says. ‘Oh, you most certainly do. Every living thing has a soul, and yours is just as bright as hers, as mine. As anyone in Endura, Altas or beyond.’ Cat cannot react how he would like to.
Not here, not in public. But he has grown used to Soleb and its intimacy.
He yearns, in that moment, to lean against Elician’s side, to feel Elician’s lips touching the top of his head in gentle comfort and idle adoration.
Cat settles for sitting still and smiling down at his hands, drinking the drink Leonde has provided for him. ‘What kind of king will you be?’ she asks him. ‘If you had the throne?’
‘Exactly as you see me,’ Cat replies. ‘I would serve my people, do what I can to see them well. And change as I need to, to ensure all my people have the life they deserve.’
The next day, Cat hears parts of his own story echoed back to him as he walks through the village.
He sees men and women looking at their hands, soldiers and civilians mingling, contemplating, speaking together.
Hears them say, ‘To just kill accidentally…at a touch? Not even on purpose?’ He checks that his gloves are always on, that his sleeves are down and his skin covered.
Unless someone touches his face or head, he cannot hurt them. But he doesn’t want to take the risk.
Not now.