Chapter 7 Trial by Catnip
Trial by Catnip
FARAJ
Catnip tisane tasted like a wilder, muskier version of mint, apparently. Faraj couldn’t say he felt particularly compelled to madness by it. Perhaps it was because Sahar was clearly uninterested as well, sniffing at a saucer and then yawning as she tucked a paw over her nose.
Najra took far too much gleefully scientific interest in her experiments.
She’d crushed catnip, brewed catnip, burned catnip like incense, powdered catnip and dusted books and pillows and his turban with it, until he was sneezing from the sheer concentration of it and Kamil backed away from the jali into the balcony garden to make sure he had un-drugged air to breathe.
When Najra was as convinced as she could be that Faraj was impervious to catnip, or at least that he was impervious while Sahar was so very roundly expecting and so very uninterested in any exertion herself, she changed her experimentation to more physical matters.
She’d set Sahar’s basket in the middle of the thousand-year-old pre-Imperial desk despite the Chamberlain’s horrified objections, stacked a pile of books along the edge for an improvised privacy screen for Sahar, and rearranged the sitting furniture so that Faraj had his back to Sahar and the desk but Ahmed could see whatever she was doing in order to pass signals back and forth.
As a result, Faraj was becoming excruciatingly self-conscious about his fidgeting.
He’d never been quite so aware of every itch of his ear or every seam in his clothing before he needed to wonder whether it was actually his own itch, whether Najra was tickling Sahar’s ear with a feather, or whether she’d floated a lock of his own hair to twirl about and tickle him.
Even the scratching of Najra’s silverpoint wasn’t enough to go by: she was as dedicated to noting non-responses as she was to noting responses.
Either he was becoming more attuned to his own ticklishness, or Sahar was becoming more explicit about sharing her vexations.
He’d been trying to hold a coherent conversation with Ahmed about the implications of the revisions he was considering to the taxes for the next season, and he honestly couldn’t tell which sensations were his, which were Sahar’s, and which were figments of a self-conscious and anxious imagination.
The one thing he was certain wasn’t his imagination?
He would need to be much, much better at masking in diplomatic situations, and very quickly.
Priests and their retinues from across the Empire were already arriving for the Greater Convocation, and he couldn’t afford indiscreet itches and squirming in public whenever someone tickled his cat in indelicate ways.
Ahmed’s faintly horrified expression was an excellent motivator to improve his blandly smiling diplomatic facade’s integrity as swiftly as he could.
Faraj wasn’t entirely sure whether the horror came from Najra’s shamelessly personal liberties with an heir to the Sun Throne or from the case he was trying to make for prophetically enhanced tax relief, with a side order of more equity for catfolk.
“But why do you want catfolk to pay even less in taxes?” Ahmed asked. “They scarcely pay their taxes now, unless some athletic young tax collector is fast enough to scruff them before they bolt out the window. That is unfair to the humans.”
“It’s not that I want only catfolk to pay less in taxes,” Faraj offered, with his hands firmly clasped on the table so that he couldn’t itch at unexpected ticklings.
“But I — I admit I am personally sensitive to the underestimated value of forewarned disasters that then do not happen, and expensive repairs that are then not necessary. If, for example, the value of the warehouses that were evacuated before a flood or a fire were credited to the one who warned—”
(The tickling had shifted to the most sensitive nook in the crook of his elbow. And Ahmed looked even more horrified.)
“Your Highness,” Ahmed said, “I understand you are a kind and generous soul, but the staggering potential for tax fraud inherent in ‘Behold the number of my rivals’ warehouses that I could have burned if I chose—’”
“Oh, yes, I know,” Faraj admitted. “That’s why captured vermin are far easier to calculate than some hypothetical lack of arsonists’ extortion.
If we reckon how much grain an uncaught mouse or rat might spoil in the course of a year, compounded by the breeding potential, and we credit a reasonable percentage of that to either cats or humans who bring us the tails… ”
“But, your Highness, why should we even bother? Cats catch mice whether or not we credit them for it.”
“In other circumstances, profiting from someone else’s uncompensated labor on your behalf is called by an assortment of names I do not wish to stain myself with,” Faraj said. “A historical oversight is still an oversight. And a historical injustice is still unjust.”
“But do catfolk even care whether we credit them for the taxes they don’t intend to pay anyway…?”
“I don’t know yet,” Faraj said, feeling an itch between his shoulder blades that he was almost certain was guilt over never having thought to ask Kamil about his opinion on human-imposed social restrictions on where he was permitted to use his small shape.
Kamil had chosen Faraj for his human so many years ago that sometimes Faraj didn’t remember to think about which matters were complicated because Kamil had firmly added himself to the Imperial household, with its associated courtly protocols and restraints, and which matters were complicated for any catfolk.
“I don’t know how many of them care at present,” he admitted, “but I intend to learn, if—”
Suddenly, the tickling was just too overwhelming. He swatted at his own ear.
His hand came away from his ear with Najra’s tickle-feather in his fingers.
As she snickered and scratched away in her notes, Faraj thought that at least he hadn’t entirely lost his sense of his own body between Sahar’s soft round echo and the fiercely embarrassing self-consciousness.
None of it had been dangerous, of course. Najra knew the limits of his foresight nearly as well as he did. She was a consummate scholar, and she wasn’t about to contaminate her research into familiar-bonds with the overspill of a nadhir’s danger-warnings.
Then the Chamberlain pulled a long, wickedly sharp silver pin from the tapestry mending kit—
Faraj had thrown himself out of his chair and had the Chamberlain by the wrist before he realized that had been foresight, because the Chamberlain had been sitting behind him, and he’d only begun to reach for the mending kit.
“I’m sorry,” Faraj managed, letting him go. “I hope I didn’t hurt you?”
“Not as much as whatever he was planning would have hurt you, apparently,” Najra said, glaring at the Chamberlain.
The Chamberlain ignored her entirely. Instead, to Faraj, he said wearily, “Now we face twice the challenge in ensuring your safety, and twice the vulnerability to hostage-taking. And if we must banish the creature for your sake and the sake of the Empire, your prophecies will complicate it, and you will need to choose to suffer with the creature’s banishment.
Truly, your Highness, I would have expected your foresights to warn you away from such a rash course of action, if you were not enchanted by whatever gutter-witch bound this creature to your tender heart. ”
Faraj bit his lip hard against Master Asharan did enchant me for a moment, but it was nothing at all like that, because the far more desperate realization clawing at his heart was Master Asharan must have felt it when his familiar — when Kamil— because I hadn’t told him—
Najra said, “No one shouts at the other noblemen when they sire hostages to fate. No one scolds a noblewoman for bearing a beloved child her family would do rash things to protect.”
“A summoned bit of necromancy is not a child! You know that! You’re a self-proclaimed witch and a heretic who sent him into the grasp of an enchanter, and now you run experiments on his ensorcelled heart. How dare you speak as though such ensorcellment were love?” the Chamberlain snapped.
Najra froze utterly motionless.
“That is enough,” Faraj said. “That is far beyond enough. Irfan, go and see to the household schedules.”
“Your Highness, someone with your best interests at heart must speak truth to you—”
“Go,” Kamil snarled, from directly behind Faraj’s ear.
Faraj flinched despite himself. His conscious mind knew Kamil would never, ever harm him, but that much sheer rage so close hooked into body-instincts far below rationality.
And his heart was still pounding with the knowledge that Kamil had struck down Master Asharan’s familiar, and they both must have felt it.
The Chamberlain was not a coward. “Your Highness—”
The noise Kamil made was nothing at all like a human. It sounded like distilled molten wrath half a breath from bloodshed.
Stiffly, hands clenched at his sides to prevent them from trembling, the Chamberlain bowed to Faraj with excruciating formality. Then he turned his back on Kamil as he left, every step precisely measured.
The Chamberlain was not at all a coward, Faraj thought again. But that did not mean that he was particularly sensible either.
Blinking ferociously at the tears welling in her eyes, Najra scrubbed a hand across her face with shaking impatience.
“Thank you, hunt-brother,” she said to Kamil, whose pupils were blown huge and black from the overpowering amount of catnip in the air.
“Let’s get you back outside where the air is clear,” Faraj told Kamil, concerned. “Esha, if you and Ahmed would see to cat-proofing a nursery space in here…?”
“Yes, of course, your Highness,” Esha said softly. And when she took a tape measure from the mending basket, Faraj didn’t foresee even the slightest flare of silver-tipped threat to Sahar’s well-being.