Chapter 15 The High Priest’s Judgment #7
“But isn’t it adorable watching him fluff up in indignation protecting your dignity and your kittens?”
“Najra, please, I’m trying not to break him entirely.”
“Psssht. He’s tougher than the silks make you think. As we’ve just demonstrated.”
With an explosive sigh, Irfan said, “I must endeavor to lose some of your esteem, ya ustadha, so that next time you will not calculate a need to crack the foundations of our God-Emperor’s faith in order to be certain of your victory.”
“If you didn’t have that steel rod up your backside, you wouldn’t deserve your place. His Adorableness deserves people he can rely on through flood or famine, because he’s already had to.” Najra glanced at Kamil and said, “Thanks for the tips, by the way.”
“What tips?” Shai Vishal said, a touch sourly.
“His Eminence’s cypher-key was much easier to untangle than a gap in your frankly ludicrous schedule,” Najra said.
“How did you know when to—” Shai Vishal stopped, looked at Kamil again, and said, “The cat at the window.”
“You are not reassuring me that my fears of feline espionage are overblown,” Irfan said, with a pained crinkle at the corners of his eyes.
“I never said they were,” Najra pointed out. “But if everyone else has already got curious eyes and curious whiskers pouncing on the secret-mice, then we might as well recruit more secret-mousers ourselves. Kamil can’t be everywhere.”
“And how much of today’s private deliberations will be much less private than I had believed?” Irfan asked wearily.
“Oh, that’s what the wards are for. A little extra insurance for us both.
For you? Privacy in the conversation. For me?
” Najra grinned. “Want to bet on how many cats are sitting in the hall because there’s been something going on in Bastet’s Temple behind a closed and warded door, they don’t know what, and the curiosity is itching at them like fleas? ”
“I’m sure I don’t wish to imagine.”
“Between fifteen and twenty, depending on who brought kittens,” Shai Vishal guessed.
Faraj blinked. “But you do not use coin, your Reverence? What would you wager with?”
“You’ve ‘misplaced’ a ring again, your Highness.” Shai Vishal nodded toward the hand holding his kulhad of chai.
Ten or fifteen years ago, if Shai Vishal had ever said that he paid such careful attention to Faraj’s hands, Faraj would have flushed and stammered and made truly terrible excuses and fled to the haveli.
Then he would have buried himself in his bed-silks and mashed a pillow over his face and tried not to make such breathless noises of embarrassment that a concerned khadim would have tapped at his door.
Even now, he still felt his face warm. But he said with what he hoped was reasonable dignity, “If you have found it when you have particular need of it…”
“At the present moment, I have particular need of you wearing it, your Highness. Because if the Priests of the Assessors of Maat pounce on even the rumor of a misplaced ring, I confess I am too old and too tired for the drama that will ensue should they find me wearing your misplaced ring.”
Faraj wondered if any shreds of his dignity could survive burying his face in one of the nearby throw pillows and trying not to squeak so much the Temple cats took him for an overlarge mouse.
(He had not permitted himself to imagine Shai Vishal wearing any of the rings he had so carefully misplaced, not for many years, but the image that presented itself…
those hands illuminating a work of holy art, or serving those in need, or even in repose, wearing a particular ring…
And it was even easier to imagine Master Asharan’s hands gently tending to the jasmines in his window or stroking Nehal’s fur with a delicate gleam of gold upon a graceful finger, easier to imagine Master Asharan’s smile—)
Najra took a breath.
Faraj didn’t even need to be a prophet to know he absolutely could not survive whatever was going to come out of her mouth, regardless of whether it had to do with his youthful wistings or with a charming companion of night-blooming jasmines whose hand might lack rings.
“No!” he yelped. “I mean yes, I mean of course not, I mean— all of the ways they could read that are— um.”
“When collusion and bribery are the best of the options,” Shai Vishal agreed wearily, “and from there it likely descends into some sort of hidden revolutionary scheme between the God-Emperor’s youngest brother and a minor nobleman who disavowed his blood-claim but who has lain in wait as the High Priest of a rival religion, and that’s only if they don’t bring star-charts and convergences and the upcoming Greater Convocation into it…
” He held out the ring, which he had clearly discovered despite what Faraj had thought a reasonable hiding-place beneath the curve of the chai pot.
Faraj took it back, and slipped it onto his finger.
Grinning, Najra took another breath. Faraj kicked her under the table.
If the other possible interpretation from that wistful, long-faded fantasy behind an offering of misplaced rings had never once occurred to Shai Vishal over the quarter century they had known each other, between the court and the temple and the clash of their vows to different gods…
then this was absolutely not the day he would let Najra tease him about it, or provoke Shai Vishal into any shocked reconsideration of his years of gifted tokens.
Not when Shai Vishal had just sat in judgment upon Faraj’s heart, soul, and faith.
Everything still felt too raw and delicate and precariously balanced to kick any more foundation-stones out of their mutual understandings.
Rubbing her ankle ostentatiously, Najra declared, “And this is why I’m agnostic. The godly portentous woo-woo and the priestly dominance pissing matches are far too much nuisance to bother propitiating. Give me a cat, I know where I stand with a cat.”
“As tempting as it is to imagine handing you a cat, locking you into a study with the Priests of the Assessors of Maat, and ignoring the ensuing screams of outrage until either the room becomes silent or some gelatinous purple cursed ooze starts trickling out from under the door,” Irfan began.
“Can we?” Shai Vishal muttered into a sip of his chai.
“Oh, let’s,” Najra said. “Can I borrow you, Kamil?”
“—As tempting as it is,” Irfan repeated, “I would find the aftermath of the panicked screams of sacrilege, blasphemy, and demon-summoning in woman-shape even more tedious than the cleanup of the room itself. With or without the cursed ooze.”
“You say that like it’s not even more tempting now.”
“Najra, please be gentle,” Faraj said. “Wouldn’t you rather look through the Temple library for cat-averting suggestions?”
“Isn’t that a sacrilegious notion here in Bastet’s Temple?
” Najra asked, grinning. “But if I head to the market-witches’ stalls I’m sure I can find someone who’s fiddled up some movable cat-repulsion charms with naranj oils and citron peel and hair of the dog.
” She leaned an elbow on the table and said, “Are you sure you don’t want me to break some troublesome order-priests for you? ”
“If Shai Nanda hasn’t already broken them,” Shai Vishal said, “it will be a miracle worthy of their gods, and we should accept the hand of divinity when it shelters its people.”
“You handed order-priests to Shai Nanda?” Najra laughed. “You’re terrifying, your Reverence. Remind me to leave Upaja’s people alone.” She reached over and smudged three chalk lines on the stone floor, and Faraj’s ears popped again as her wards collapsed.
Within two seconds, a tabby cat’s paw had poked under the bottom of the door and started patting about for anything it might catch.
“Right,” Shai Vishal said, and eased the door open with cautious care for whatever might be too close to the other side.
At least two dozen cats and kittens of all shapes, sizes, and colors were sitting in the hall, variously napping in a sunbeam, ostentatiously ignoring the closed door, or avidly awaiting the moment it opened.
A pounce of them streamed into the room to sniff and climb and poke and investigate everything.
For some reason, Faraj seemed to be especially fascinating to them.
He found three of them in his lap before he quite realized what was happening.
All of them were purring vigorously, and a small sleek black tom who looked very much like Nehal kneaded at his knee, then climbed up his chest to perch on his shoulder and groom his hair and snuffle at his ear.
Somehow, Kamil permitted all this without even a grumble.
…Ah. That — that was another kitten on the way.
His foresight in the aftermath of Shai Vishal’s judgment had suggested Sahar would expect about half a dozen of them, but he’d neglected to count, given the distractions of the day.
He shut his eyes and clung to the now-familiar edge of the table, because he didn’t wish to hurt any of the cats if a pang tightened his grip.
A human hand touched his back, and another touched his hand; struggling to keep his breath even, he took the offered hand and held on.
He heard Kamil’s deep purring even over the cats’, and the familiar rustle of Najra sorting through papers, and then that scritch-scritch-scritch of her silverpoint was interrupted suddenly.
“No, that is not a cat toy,” she said. “Watch me start rubbing my scribes’ tools with naranj peels.”
“I do the same,” Shai Vishal said, from quite a bit closer than Faraj had expected. And suddenly he realized Shai Vishal was holding his hand, and rubbing his back with a breathtakingly unexpected tenderness.
He couldn’t possibly hide among the pillows under the table. He wouldn’t have fit even if his lap hadn’t been full of purring cats.
He must have flinched somehow, or perhaps his breath had caught.
Shai Vishal said, “I’m sorry, your Highness, I shouldn’t have— here.”