The Unkindest Tide

by Seanan McGuire

  And then there was Helen. She spoke to me kindly but without reverence, like I was anyone, like I was no one, like everyone deserved to be spoken to that way. I wasn’t sure she knew what the Court of Cats was, much less that she ought to be respectful of my place in it. I knew almost nothing about her, but I knew that she was clever and kind and deserved to survive this. I wanted to survive this.

  I wanted us both to survive.

  We ran, and the rocks bit at our feet and the thorns whipped at our heels, and behind us I could hear the pounding of hooves and the sounding of horns, and then it wasn’t Helen holding my hand at all, it was Quentin, and I had lost her, and I was going to lose him as well, sacrificing them both to this dark and terrible place, and all for the sake of getting away, alone again, Prince of Cats, Prince of Nothing—

  I sat up with a yowl, eyes open, and had never been so relieved to find myself inside a cage. And then I fell over, the drugs in my system robbing me of balance and stability. I meowed petulantly, tail lashing, and forced myself to sit up. It was a slow, difficult process. My legs were clumsy as a kitten’s, and my paws felt like they were five times too big for my body. I looked down, suddenly afraid that I had regressed in age while I was drugged into slumber. My body was as I expected it to be, save for the bandage wrapped around my paw and the tube that slithered beneath it.

  Once again, I considered the virtues of biting at the tube until it came free. This time, my head, while still fuzzy, was clear enough for me to reason against it. If I bit at the tube, they would replace it, possibly with something sturdier or fastened to a part of my body I couldn’t reach. This place would have to close eventually. The humans would have to go home to eat, and sleep, and do whatever else humans did behind closed doors. I could wait until they were gone before I freed myself.

  The drugs that kept the pain at bay were in the tube—the same drugs that kept my head too fuzzy for me to reach the Shadow Roads. Once I removed the tube, my head would clear and I would be able to escape.

  I hoped. There were several flaws in my plan, including the fact that I had no idea how much pain I would actually be in once I stopped my medication. If I was too badly hurt, the shadows might not come at my command, or worse, might come and then refuse to carry me all the way home, dropping me into some limitless void from which I would never be freed.

  Cait Sidhe have been lost on the Shadow Roads before. Not Princes, not usually, but the weaker ones who can’t control their magic well enough to control their destinations. Their bodies litter the hidden tunnels and dead ends of the darkness, and it can be centuries before they’re found and brought back into the light, exactly as they were before they fell. No: the risk was too great. If I couldn’t be sure of controlling my passage through the shadows, I couldn’t take the chance of being lost. Quentin, Chelsea . . . Helen. None of them would ever know what had become of me.

  That wasn’t entirely true. Uncle Tybalt would know, would smell my magic and my fear hanging in the frozen air the next time he stepped onto the Shadow Roads. Even if he couldn’t find my body, he’d carry word of my loss home to the ones who loved me—and then what? Without an heir, he couldn’t step aside. He’d be forced to remain King until a challenger appeared, and Princes and Princesses of Cats are rare. So rare. He could be King for years yet, delaying his marriage to October, stranding them both in lives they no longer wanted.

  I could ruin everything by allowing myself to be lost. For the first time, I let myself reflect on how foolish it had been of me to intercede when Cal was endangered . . . and how little choice I’d had. Yes, I needed to take care of myself, needed to remain a viable heir for my uncle and a viable protector for the Court—but if I’d been willing to stand by and watch Cal die because I was too concerned with myself to move, I would have been no fit King.

  I made a small, aggravated sound. There was no winning at this game, no perfect answer that made everything easy and gave everyone exactly what they wanted. There were only different sets of complications. There were only different ways to fail.

  I’d never been in feline form for this long before. I thought uneasily of the trouble Uncle Tybalt had had with shapeshifting after the Liar—I wouldn’t even dignify that woman, or her place among the Firstborn, with her name—had been forced to release him. His imprisonment had lasted days. Mine had been hours. Surely the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. Surely I wouldn’t lose myself. Would I?

  Mother never stood on two legs, not once. She was born in feline form and had died the same way. Her magic had simply refused to turn inward the way it needed to in order to accomplish transformation. But she had never lost herself. She had known her name and her place, always. She had known me. She had loved me. She had cared for my father, enough not to leave him when it became apparent how much he privileged power, but she had loved me.

  I loved Helen. I loved Helen, and Quentin, and even my uncle and October. Surely that would be enough to keep me from slipping away or forgetting who I was supposed to be.

  But my uncle loved October, loved her more than I thought I would ever be capable of loving anyone. I couldn’t imagine giving that much of my heart to someone else to hold. Even if I tried, I couldn’t imagine giving it to someone like October, who seemed bound and determined to make some unnamed date with death. Loving her would be like loving a natural disaster. Pleasant enough from a distance; all but guaranteed to break your heart.

  I made another aggravated sound and tried to stand. My hind legs refused to obey me. That would be alarming, had I not been able to feel them; they were being stubborn due to bruising and drugs, not because of any permanent damage. I lashed my tail just to be sure. My stomach rumbled. That was new. If I was feeling well enough to be hungry, I must be recovering.

  Not that there was anything in this cage worth eating. There was a small bowl of brown, crispy things, the likes of which I had seen in the shelters and occasionally on back porches in the mortal city. They smelled like they had once been part of some sort of animal, although what kind was less than clear; they had been ground and dried and processed until they became an unimpressively uniform color. I sniffed again. There were things in there that I was nowhere near hungry enough to eat.

  I would be eventually. I knew that. Hunger is more than an annoyance; it’s a reminder to keep one’s strength up, to be prepared to run. But until I removed the tube, I wasn’t going to be running anywhere, and I’d already decided the tube could stay where it was until night fell.

  I tucked my paws under myself and wrapped my tail around my body, intending to take another nap. They’re restorative, and it wasn’t as if I had anything else to do with my time, since no one had seen fit to provide me with an Internet connection.

  “—please, I know it’s irregular, but I really think you have my cat.”

  I cracked one eye open. The voice was familiar, even through the haze of pain, drugs, and ongoing exhaustion. But who in the world did I know who might be here?

  “All right.” This voice belonged to the man from before. “He’s right through here.”

  A door opened in the distance, and then she came around the corner, resplendent in her beauty: Helen, my Helen, her hair pulled into a bushy ponytail, her body swallowed by one of her father’s sweaters. Her father was right behind her—and behind him, back in human form, wearing overalls and a white shirt with mud stains on the sleeves, was Cal.

  I jumped to my feet, or tried to. Once again, my legs refused to obey me, and I collapsed to the bottom of my cage. I didn’t let that stop me from meowing frantically, my eyes fixed on Helen.

  “There you are,” she said, clasping her hands against her chest. There were tears standing in her eyes. “I was so scared.”

  I meowed again, louder. I had never in my life wished so dearly that she were Cait Sidhe. She would have been able to understand me, if she had been.

  Helen unclasped her hands so she
could press her fingertips to the bars, then looked pleadingly at the man who’d been at least partially responsible for my care. “He wants out,” she said. “You have to let him out.”

  “Is that how he wound up on the street, throwing himself in front of a car?”

  “That was me,” blurted Cal, then flushed, cheeks going red as they realized what they were saying. “I mean, I’m the one who let him out. It was an accident, honest. I thought my sister was going to kill me.”

  Cal and Helen look nothing alike, but two kittens from the same litter won’t always resemble one another. The man looked at Cal, somewhat dubious, before glancing to Willis, who nodded.

  “Well, young lady, it was very irresponsible of you to let the cat out,” began the man. “He could have been killed, and—”

  “I’m not a young lady,” said Cal.

  The man blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, I’m not a young lady. I’m not a young man, either. I’m a young me, and I don’t like it when people use the wrong pronouns.” Cal’s cheeks flared an even deeper red. “That’s all.”

  The man blinked a second time before nodding and saying, with what sounded like genuine apology, “I’m sorry. That was rude of me, and I should have known better. But so should you. It’s not safe to let cats run around outside. There are cars, and coyotes, and people with dogs that haven’t been trained properly. Something very bad could have happened. Something worse than being hit by a car.”

  “I understand,” said Cal, voice small.

  “If you don’t mind, we’d like to pay his bill and take him home,” said Willis.

  “While we settle up, I want to talk to you about having him neutered,” said the man. “You need to consider how much easier it would be to keep him inside, and how much better it would be for his mental health. If he’s not going to breed, he doesn’t need to be intact.”

  “Oh,” said Willis, shooting me an amused, faintly pointed glance, “I’m very concerned with his ability to breed.”

  Wisely, I was silent.

  I didn’t want to give him any ideas.

  SEVEN

  It wasn’t safe for me to transform anywhere I might be seen, and with the painkillers still lingering in my system, I couldn’t reach for the shadows. Helen removed me from the carrier as soon as we were in the car, and I curled in her lap, tail tip over my nose, for the short drive to her place.

  Cal sat with us in the backseat, bubbling over with nervous energy. “You’re not mad at me, are you?” they asked, hands fluttering like they wanted to reach for me but didn’t quite dare. “I didn’t mean for you to get hit by that car, I swear by Oberon’s eyes, I didn’t even know it was there, it was so early in the morning the sun hadn’t even come up yet, but then there it was, and I thought I was going to die, and you pushed me out of the way. You’re a hero. You’re the reason I’m still here.”

  I made a small grumbling sound rather than answering them directly. It seemed rude to carry on an actual conversation when Helen wouldn’t be able to understand my side of it.

  “I didn’t know humans would get out of their cars and take cats who’d been injured, I swear I didn’t,” said Cal hurriedly. “If I’d known, I would have jumped out of the bushes and bit and scratched them until they left you there.”

  That painted a picture of the incident that made a dismaying amount of sense. The driver, upon hitting me, must have gotten out to see whether I was still alive—and upon finding I was, had loaded me into their car and driven to the nearest twenty-four-hour veterinary hospital. Cal wouldn’t have been able to keep up. I wouldn’t have been able to keep up, and my magic made me both faster and more durable than they were.

  My magic was probably the only reason I had survived the impact. That was a daunting thought.

  “How did you find me?” I asked, breaking my own determination to stay quiet until Helen could understand me.

  Cal looked infinitely relieved. They must have been afraid I was intending never to speak to them again. That was silly. They were going to be one of my subjects. I had to be willing to speak to them, even if it was only so I could give them orders.

  “He wants to know how we found him,” said Cal, translating for Helen before looking back to me. “I know you didn’t want me to talk to your girlfriend, but it was an emergency. I knocked until her father let me in, and then I told him what had happened, and he started making calls. It took a while for anyone to recognize his description of you.”

  I must have been a mess when they brought me in, and intake and initial treatment would have taken time. Still, I didn’t care for the delay. I nestled deeper into Helen’s lap, grumbling at the pain beginning to radiate through my body. The medication was passing through my system. I’d listened as the vet explained the realities of my situation to Willis—how could I have done anything else, when I was in a cardboard carrier right next to their conversation? The second woman turned out to have been my doctor. That was fine. She had good hands.

  According to her, I was likely to ache for several days, and would need to be checked again in a week or so. I was sorry for the regret she’d probably feel when Willis and Helen failed to reappear with me, but the people in that building were far too interested in the state of my testicles, and I didn’t want to give them any opportunities to threaten them. I liked my testicles. I liked them exactly where they were, either between my legs or beneath my tail, depending on the form I was in, and a part of me I had no interest in losing either way.

  Willis pulled up in the driveway of the small house he shared with Helen. “All right. Helen, you need to hold onto your boyfriend like you’re concerned about losing him; Raj, please don’t run away. I know you’re a smart boy who generally makes good decisions, or I wouldn’t trust you in my house, but you’re probably still a little stoned, and I have no interest in going through the last twenty-four hours again.”

  My heart sank. I knew I’d been gone longer than I’d promised Ginevra, but I hadn’t realized it had been a full day. She was going to kill me when I finally made it back to the Court of Cats. I meowed plaintively.

  Cal shot me a sympathetic look. “It’s worse than that,” they said. “Don’t worry, though, it’ll all be over soon.”

  “Be nice,” scolded Helen.

  “I am being nice! You would never have found him if not for me!”

  Helen huffed as she got out of the car. I didn’t make a sound, wrapped as I was in contemplation of Cal’s words. They were right. If they hadn’t been there—if they had run a little faster when I’d knocked them out of the way, or if they hadn’t woken up when I slipped by them, or if they’d gotten tired of waiting for me and decided to go home—I could have been lost forever, or at least for a very long time. And yes, there was every chance I wouldn’t have been hit if I hadn’t been trying to rescue Cal, but that wasn’t the only time I’d had a close call with a car, was it? Cars were everywhere, and while most humans tried to avoid hitting supposedly stray cats, not all of them were that kind. Some might even steer toward a stray, seeing it as an opportunity to avenge a fallen songbird.

  I could have died. I could have died, and no one would ever have known for sure what had happened to me, only that I was gone.

  Maybe Ginevra was right for wanting me to have someone with me when I went out into the city. Not when I took the Shadow Roads to October’s—anything that wanted to attack me there could enjoy contending with the occupants of her house—but otherwise, an escort, and some additional care, couldn’t go amiss. I was a Prince of Cats. I had responsibilities. One of those responsibilities was to not disappear without a trace.

  Willis unlocked the door and Helen carried me into the cool, dim confines of the living room. The fire in the hearth roared back to life as soon as Willis followed her in, reacting to his pureblood presence as it would never react to hers. I’d never considered her in any way less
er because of her human blood, but I saw the way the skin around her eyes tensed at the reminder that the fire loved her father more than it loved her. She was outside parts of her own world, removed from them by blood and the circumstances of her birth. It had to be hard.

  I meowed for Helen to put me down. She walked over to the couch, bending to set me gently on a cushion. I rubbed my cheek against her hand as a gesture of thanks, then closed my eyes and reached deep into myself, into the simmering wellspring of my magic, looking for the switch that would allow me to change forms.

  It had never been this difficult before, not even when I was on the cusp of leaving kittenhood. Kittens often lack control over their transformations, instinctively choosing the form that was best suited for the situation. With control comes the risk of getting stuck. I’d been feline for almost a week when I was nine, unable to convince my magic that I’d be better off having thumbs and attending my lessons. Father had been furious. Mother had been amused, and washed me so thoroughly that I kept expecting to find myself entirely without fur.

  I reached deeper, fighting through the pain and the lingering effects of the human painkillers until abruptly, I was naked and standing on the couch. I immediately fell over, reverting to feline form on the impact. Willis roared with laughter. Helen blushed. Cal sighed.

  “I wish I’d had a camera ready,” they said. “Can you do that again?”

  I looked at them imperiously. This time when I transformed, my clothing came with me, and I found myself seated, not standing. I sniffed, nose in the air. Unfortunately, that meant I missed it when Helen flung herself at me, knocking us both into the couch cushions and awakening a whole new degree of pain in my injured side.