Chapter 16 Proclamations and Yowling #4
“Oh dear,” Faraj said, and bent over to peer under the guards’ table.
The guards must have been gambling with dice before they had clearly attempted to prevent the cat his Highness wished to see from departing before his arrival.
The sounds of wrath were both unmistakable and very tiny.
Huge green-gold eyes blinked at him suspiciously from the shadows.
“I am so terribly sorry, I never meant for anyone to hold you here against your will,” Faraj said, and settled himself onto the ground in front of the upset kitten.
He pulled the little pouch of dried fish snacks out of the fold of his collar over his heart, shook a handful of them onto a guard’s discarded plate, and set it down in front of the rumbling shadows.
“You don’t have to come out if you don’t wish to, but may I ask your name? ”
“RrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrroooooooooooooooowww.”
“Ah.” He did wish that he’d paused long enough in his hurrying to ask Kamil’s company, but Kamil was still brushing the thick layer of dust out of his pelt.
“Well. I can’t say that I see, for you have found a wonderfully dark corner to lurk within.
But in any case: what piqued your curiosity, ya habibti?
You are the first to come, and I’m afraid we’re still ironing out the wrinkles in our hospitality. ”
“Hsssst.” After a moment’s pause, there were some small scratching sounds.
“Have you brought us mice to count…?”
“Hsssssst.” More scratching sounds, and then a scrape as the plate of dried fish was pulled under the table, and then a little square of slate was pushed out in its place.
In three different languages and approximately the right alphabets, the slate said:
book book.
book book book.
“Many books? Yes, we have very many books here. Would you like to read some of them?”
After a moment, the slate was dragged back into the shadows, followed by a few more scratchings.
This time when it returned it said
READ BOOK BOOK ALL BOOK BOOK BOOK READ ALL BOOK BOOK ALLLL
with several circles around the words.
“Oh, wonderful,” Faraj said, beaming. “Archivist Najra will be as delighted to meet you as I am! But the books are not exactly here. Would you permit me to assist you with a collar, so that we can go to where all the books are?”
“HRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr.”
“If you like, I will wear a collar with you,” Faraj offered, and he was not entirely certain whether the yelp he heard was a guardian.
He looked through the box of ribbons on the table and selected several of them, then knotted a couple of the ends together so that he wouldn’t entirely strangle himself with the results.
Today’s jewelry included a very sharp pin among the gems helping to fasten the hair-wrapping that had attempted to keep some of the dust out; he pricked his fingertip and touched a drop of blood to the charm as he had for Sahar.
Something about the enchantment tingled oddly; but then, he was not himself a catfolk, despite having just collared himself.
He activated another of the collar charms, and then spread an assortment of ribbons on the floor in front of the table’s edge. “Do you have a favorite color, ya habibti?”
After a moment’s silence, a little white mitten reached out and dropped a knotted piece of yarn on top of the slate. Part of it was a warm turmeric-gold, and part was cream, and part of it was the blue of Upaja’s priests’ hems.
“Priye?” Faraj murmured, feeling his heart soar. “Priye, is that you?”
She leaned a little further out of the shadows, and Faraj recognized her sweet little face.
He took a breath— and then remembered that he couldn’t name himself Rahat in front of Irfan and the guardians.
And she looked so fiercely suspicious, or at least as fierce as such a darling little kitten could look.
Rather than Master Asharan’s jasmine and bath-oils, he was certain that his night-clothes smelled of incense and the cedar of his wardrobe, and so he probably smelled as strange as he looked to her now.
But he’d kept Master Asharan’s rose-embroidered pouch nestled against his heart every day. He tucked his fingers inside the collar of his jama and pulled it out, and somehow her enormous eyes grew even wider.
“If you recognize me, habibti,” he said, “then I promise I am who you believe. Would you like a rose-sweet?”
One of the guardians yelped again at how swiftly she scrambled out from under the table and climbed into his lap, trembling with purrs as she rubbed her cheek against his chest and patted his belly. She crinkled her nose and sneezed at the cedar and incense, shook her head, and kept purring.
“There, little one,” Faraj murmured, pulling several little sweets from the pouch for her. “I’m glad you’re here too. Shall we go and visit Archivist Najra and all the books?”
Priye nodded vigorously, picking up her slate and circling BOOK BOOK ALL BOOK a few more times.
“It will take a great deal of time to read all the books.”
ALL BOOK BOOK ALLLL, she underlined firmly.
“Well, you are very young, so you will have a great deal of time to read,” Faraj said, ruffling her little ears. He tucked the end of her yarn through the charm and fastened it carefully about her throat. “There, you see, now we match.”
Priye sneezed again, and shook her head vigorously.
“We do not match?”
Underneath ALL BOOK BOOK ALLLL, she drew a picture of a very tall, very round man and a very small kitten.
“You may be one of only two souls who have ever called me tall, I believe,” Faraj admitted ruefully. “If you tell Archivist Najra that she is also tall, she will be in raptures for the rest of the day.”
Priye blinked up at him, nose crinkled.
“Ah. Raptures? Overcome with delight. Just as she is also overcome with delight by many books.”
BOOK BOOK ALLLL received the addition of !!!
“Yes, habibti, very much so,” Faraj agreed, smiling.
With some effort, he pried himself off the ground, rather hampered by having only one arm available since the other had been thoroughly claimed for Priye’s cuddling-nook.
But he dusted off his knees before realizing how much of the rest of him was likely dust-splotched as well, and he turned toward the door through which four fascinated guardians and the utterly resigned Irfan watched them.
Priye stared at Irfan, ears beginning to flatten.
Irfan stared back. His ears would likely have flattened if they could have.
“It’s all right, habibti, these are my friends,” Faraj assured her hastily.
“These are your servants, your Highness, as am I,” Irfan said.
“She is only a kitten, Irfan.”
“Cats do understand who is in charge, your Highness, even if they believe it to be the cat.” Then Irfan placed his hand to his heart, bowed slightly, and said to Priye, “The man who carries you is the most powerful man in this quadrant of the Empire. He is also protected by everyone you see here, and by hundreds of others. He is in charge. Are we clear?”
Priye yawned, scratched behind her ear, and snuggled against Faraj’s chest, purring.
“That is ‘I suppose so’ in cat, I believe,” Faraj said.
“That is ‘pfft, whatever’ in cat, your Highness,” a young mage-guardian said, lips twitching.
“Ah, yes, my mistake,” Faraj said. “A matter of nuance, clearly.” Making sure she was balanced in his arms, he began walking carefully toward the inner arch of the gateway, but the charm held fast as he carried her through into the sunny courtyard.
Three of the marching guards were so busy staring at their shahzada, in dust-splotched night-clothes, wearing his bed-slippers through the courtyard while he had collared himself like the young catfolk kitten in his arms, that they forgot to turn when the others marching in their row did.
Three fully-armored guardians tripping into each other’s marching paths made quite an astounding crash and clatter.
Faraj hoped that serenely ignoring the chaos might be less embarrassing all round.
“So tell me, habibti, who has told you of our proclamation?” he asked.
Priye turned her piece of slate over and wrote, pot sister toy toy yarn yarn girl. Then she drew a market tent over the words.
“Ah, both Elder Sister and the lady Esha of the marketplace?”
Priye nodded.
“I shall have to thank them for encouraging your love of literature.”
Priye’s ears flattened immediately.
“No…?”
word word bite, she wrote. word word bite peck flap flap
pounce book book ALLLL book
“Oh dear,” Faraj said. It wasn’t just that Priye had opted out of needing to memorize the Imperial plurals, because when a given noun might take upwards of eighty declensions even when it followed the rules and broken symptotes could be even more complex, he could scarcely blame her.
The far more concerning matter was that he had no idea how figuratively or literally she meant her pouncing, because pages flapped quite literally in a stiff breeze and— “Priye, sweetest, books are not made for pouncing and clawing even if they do sometimes flutter like birds.”
Priye gave him the most longsuffering look he had ever seen on a kitten’s face, although admittedly Kamil’s looks took top prize among adult catfolk.
book book trap word word, she wrote.
read fight pounce word word
pounce gnaw gnaw word word breakfast WIN
“Breakfast…?” he asked helplessly.
Priye huffed a little sigh of frustration, rubbed everything out, and tried again.
brEAKFAST, she wrote.
word word stop flap flap peck bite
read book head mouth gnaw gnaw
all word word eat in mouth in head
all word word MINE
“Ya habibti, that is possibly the most ferocious approach to educational achievement I have ever read,” Faraj said, stroking her ears gently.
“But even when your fierce and clever thoughts have pounced upon and gnawed all the words in all the books, if you still don’t enjoy the taste of words in your mouth, I will still adore you just as much as I do today. ”