What was real, and what was her heightened suspicion?
The three twisted and turned the many pieces of the puzzle, discussing the newest twist: Columbia’s discovery of a bitter current, a crossing of cold with warm unusual for this far north. It had brought a confluence of cetaceans into the feeding area. Rozo worried over the historical over-fishing by Felidae of whale habitats, the violent myths this had created, and what this meant for the negotiations with whales.
“Remind me what ye do again?” Muriel asked as Rozo led them up gentle ramp to the gallery of wispy curtains and ivy woven balustrades overlooking the main debating chamber.
The noise and motion made Cinrak’s hackles twitch. The talks had broken for afternoon tea. Mereg and Orvillia started shouldering towards them from different sides of the chamber.
“I’m a cat of all trades.” Rozo slipped easily through the crowd. The cat trusted his land sense as much as Cinrak trusted her ocean.
“He be a spy,” Cinrak said out the corner of her mouth just as Mereg slipped into the conversation.
“I’m a fixer on international relations,” Rozo insisted, grooming his whiskers with forepaws.
“Ye haven’t told yer council I not be who I say I be?” Mereg murmured, clapping a forepaw on his shoulder. They had to reach up to do so.
“Your secret is safe with me, your Sharpness.”
Mereg flicked their head at Muriel shuffling on Cinrak’s shoulder. “How yer feelin’? Any news from the other side o’ the veil?”
“Ack. Stupid hot flashes. Come without warning. Interruptin’ me flow. Just when I think I can see them varmints in me far-seein’, I go all—” she threw up her wings. “Whoof!”
A prickle caught the back of Cinrak’s neck and she swatted her hackles. Not an insect. She did a long, slow sweep of the chambers calmly lit with filtered sunlight. No one made strange moves. She didn’t want to bring the Aspects—the international magic security force made up of the Fairy Council, the Ferret Corp, and Felidae Theurgists—in on the problem. If magic was involved, there could be infiltrators there, too.
“Oh squiddies, she seen me.”
Queen Orvillia detached herself from a crowd eager to make her acquaintance. She glided in a froofy dress of white, black, and silver that made it difficult to tell where the material stopped and her fur started. She shone with a light of deep night and star’s intent.
Oh dear, thought Cinrak. She’d fallen fast and hard.
“A’int ye part o’ the next session?”
The queen brushed responsibility away like a fly. “Shipping rights with the ogres and whales. I’m not needed.”
Rozo glanced over the balustrade at the ogre contingent making themselves comfortable across the table from the Clowder. Cinrak noted how his eyes flicked around the room. “But I am. If you’ll excuse me?”
He bowed out of their presence.
“Shall we?” Orvillia gestured towards an exit.
“But—”
Orvillia cut Cinrak a look. “Shall we?”
The Queen scythed a swathe through milling cats, smile-and-nod practised and easy.
So many cats. Ginger, calico, white, black, black and white, silver, tabby, beige, brown, and blue. Green-gold and blue eyes watching them furtively, hundreds of star-turns of unrest, evolution, and learned self-control sitting awkwardly between rodent and feline.
“Who’s a pretty birdy, then?” asked a fluffy white matron in parrot-speak.
“I be, thank you for noticing,” Muriel preened.
The cat scurried away, ears twitching.
“Where’s Loqui?” Cinrak asked, fumbling for small talk.
She was surprised to see the queen’s blush. “Changing her wig, I presume. She seems to have one for every occasion.”
“Goes well with her opinions on all things art.”
Cinrak covered her grin by admiring a bright orange flower. Loquolchi’s hard shell, designed by trauma and hardened by court life, shielded a soft touch and an open heart. They shared good taste in women!
After having Mereg check the area, Orvillia guided them into a shady spot with an embracing palm frond.
“A’ight, what be buggin’ ye, yer majesty, Cinrak.” Mereg put a forepaw on their sword hip. “Yer both jumpy as piranha.”
“It be, err, me instincts.” Cinrak widened her eyes in Mereg’s direction. The queen didn’t know about her salty magic.
“Oh aye?” Mereg’s paw tightened on their rapier pommel. They’d been mentor and protégé so long, they immediately grasped her meaning. Cinrak hoped Mereg had done their due diligence with the Aspects and weather mages employed by some IRATE vessels.
“Think a storm be comin’.”
“Hmph. That’ll put a damper on tonight’s festivities,” Orvillia said. “Will need to reassess my outfit.”
“An’ you, yer worshipyness?”
“Me?” Orvillia sat primly twitched the upper layers of her dress to let some air onto her fur. “Cinrak was the one who sent me that messenger squirrel.”
“Nay. I been doin’ the rounds with Muriel all this time.”
“Can confirm.” Muriel clutched Cinrak’s padded shoulder so tight her claws cut in. “She doin’ a great job o’ lookin’ after me. There with a nice place for me to relax whenever I need an ash nap.”
“Not doin’ it entirely for altruistic reasons,” Cinrak said, touching a waxy leaf, trying to taste the water in the air. It gave her nothing.
“Ye wouldn’t be a pirate if ye were.” Muriel tilted her head.
Orvillia gave an annoyed grunt. “Enough of the mutual appreciation society. The message. It was in your paw writing, Captain! You said you needed to talk, urgently. About—” Orvillia flicked her head at the phoenix. “—you know what.”
Cinrak looked at Mereg. Mereg looked at Orvillia. Orvillia looked at Cinrak. Muriel looked at them all, feathers all fluffed out, pacing up and down Cinrak’s outstretched arm in agitation.
“This is not good. Not good. Farting Westerly Winds, is it hot or is it...murrrrderrrr. Oh bugg—”
Whoompf.
Cinrak got the bucket up just in time to catch Muriel collapsing into ashes.
Rapier drawn, Mereg turned a slow circle. Even Orvillia had a knife.
Cinrak’s head felt fit to burst, salt scraping wildly at the inside of her skull and bones.
Heat like a dozen tiny knives slid into Cinrak’s back, creeping perilously close to the main artery in her neck.
Mereg and Orvillia froze at the same time, whiskers twitching.
“Don’t move, friends,” a voice whispered. “Or you will bleed out in moments. Put the phoenix down and surrender your blades. Slowly.”
A shimmer like heat on water slid all around them, muffling the jungle, cutting off distant voices.
“That’s it. Good girl.”
Their blades floated away from their paws and disappeared into the shimmer. Orvillia’s coal-chip eyes widened. Cinrak tried to communicate her chill across the space between them, but her salt overrode everything, burrowing the marrow out of her bones.
Mereg twitched, going for one of their hidden blades.
“Don’t even think of doing anything stupid,” hissed the voice. “We won’t hesitate to start something in the chamber. Would be awful. Lots of dead. Blood on your paws.”
Cinrak took a breath to speak, but the knife-shriek heat in her flesh rose to a scream. Sunshine exploded into slivers of sliver-black sparkles, and a door opened onto night.
Moonfire cascading along her spine brought Cinrak to some semblance of consciousness. The dark remained total.
“Well, I not be dead.” Cinrak pulled against her bonds. Heat clamped sharp on her wrist, ankles, and waist. “Yer highnessing?”
“How undignified,” grumbled Orvillia. “And I told you to call me Orvy.”
“Mereg?”
A grunt.
“Muriel?”
A waft of roast chicken scent.
“Where. Are. We?”
/>
“Don’t try to get out of yer ropes, yer...Orvy. They be magicked,” Cinrak said. As soon as she stopped struggling, the prickly pain ceased. “An’ we be on board a ship.”
“I can feel that.”
Sarcasm. Good. Something to focus on other than being afraid.
“Doesn’t smell like the Impolite Fortune. Or the Havoc’s Revenge.”
A thunk and another grunt. “Chair bolted to floor. Can’t get over there t’ gnaw ya free.”
“Mereg! I told ye not to move! How ye be?”
“Head hurts. Like a kraken bin playin’ whip ball with it.”
A lie, but not a lie. Now was not the time to call Mereg on it.
Silence. No pawsteps and voices. A damp shroud like heavy wool held their senses in place.
“Can ye feel anything, Cinrak?” Mereg asked.
Orvillia made a confused noise.
“I be tryin’. But me head hurt like blathery when I push against. Whoever it be, their magic hard ‘n fast.”
Another confused noise from the queen.
Cinrak sighed. Not the best way to reveal her secret.
“I got that pirate salt, yer...Orvy. Of that special kind. Taste the weather, people’s movements, shadows, an’ such like.”
“Oh. Oh. That’s...good to know.”
Whoops, there’s that sarcasm, Cinrak thought.
Orvillia muttered to herself for a moment. “Does that mean...?”
“I felt somethin’ comin’. Like Muriel. But whoever they be, they good at it. Apologizin’, yer majesty.”
“Cinrak.” Orvillia’s voice softened to something Cinrak could very much learn to love. “Cinny. Stop it. They’ve broken the rules of engagement. Played sinister tricks. Used outlawed magic, I suspect, if you or the Aspects or Muriel couldn’t pick up on it.”
The thought she was too young, too inexperienced, for this captain’s gig ruffled Cinrak’s fur. Was she to blame for their predicament? Had she inadvertently allowed Muriel’s vision to come true?
“Muriel?” Mereg grunted.
“In a bucket,” Cinrak said.
“Aye? Me ears ringing. Speak up.”
“She be snoozin’.” Cinrak chewed her thoughts for a moment. “They came for us. Specifi-kicka-lally.”
“You mean me.” Orvillia sounded like she could cut something into small strips, nice and neat. “Treating with the Felidae was my idea.”
“Yer part right, Orvy. I s’pect they wanted Muriel and Mereg. I be a lucky catch.”
“Union busters.” Mereg sounded terribly pained.
“But why didn’t they take Sterickus?”
“Apologizin’, yer majesty. I needed to find out if I could trust ye. Uhh—” Cinrak was thoroughly concerned for her mentor. “I be the true head of IRATE. Don’t like all them eyes on me. Can’t think straight at the table. Sterickus be hard-headed as a porcupine can come, which makes her a better face fer IRATE. I be there just to shuffle papers.”
Orvillia made a noise like she was sucking air through her front teeth. “Anyone else have something they should share with me? You know, your queen.”
Cinrak didn’t think it appropriate to share Rozo’s job description, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that job was.
“You really are quite tenacious,” came a voice out of everywhere and nowhere, part of the night-claws itself. “I would advise against fighting your bonds. That saltiness, as you so eloquently describe it, may just crystallize under too much pressure.”
A squeeze upon Cinrak’s brain, like barometric pressure had just jumped. She yelped.
The voice continued, “No use trying to figure out who we are. I’m not one of those idiots who spills my plan only to have you escape by dissecting it, or turning us against each other. Just know that there are many of us working to stop this sham of a treaty, and you will die once you stop being useful.”
Silence like a bell toll.
“Wonder what they mean by us bein’ useful,” Cinrak muttered.
No reply.
“Cap’n?”
No reply.
“Blatherin’ Beasties of the Deep.”
Pwap!
In the flash of the phoenix’s feathers reforming, Cinrak caught a glimpse of her mentor slumped against their bonds, and a very annoyed rat queen.
“—er! They be comin’, they usin’ the waters! Ooh cripes...this ain’t good. No no no! Barnacles, who put the sun in here. Cinny, halp!”
Fwoof.
“Now I’m hungry,” Orvillia grumbled.
Cinrak came to loathe the sound of her heartbeat. She had no sentiment for the squishy organ, having seen how they worked. And stopped working.
Orvillia passed the time by talking through her memories of disaffected mages and fairies. Hearing her voice laced with sarcasm and silly plans helped Cinrak stay focused on something, anything, even if it was a plan to take the queen and Loqui on a night’s sail on her captain’s sculler.
When they got out of this.
If.
Mereg came and went in decreasing degrees of sensemaking. Cinrak and Orvillia spoke and sang, but nothing kept them awake long.
Muriel popped up twice, but whatever magic bonds held the three from the real world held Muriel back from full encorporeality.
Cinrak tested the edges of their prison with gentle prods of her salt. Magic was magic, and could be undone with magic, she reckoned. After much pain and narrowing her focus, she found a small worn patch in the dark weave beneath her paws. Their captors were not expecting any approach from under water, and the weather seam was clumsily tied off at the base of the oval Cinrak discerned encased the prison.
Despite the flaw, the threads of night were tougher than ship ropes. Gnawing at them with her salt was like unpicking skeins with a single pin. She could manage to snip a pawful before she had to stop and swallow against the bile. Snip, breath, swallow, repeat.
Cinrak muttered dirty shanties to keep the queen chuckling and herself focused.
She may have fallen asleep. The dark made it hard to tell.
Finally. Her salt whittled down to only a few grains, head spinning, she tore a tiny hole in the magic weave.
Cinrak wriggled her senses through, tasting the warmth of the water, listening for its light. They were on the north side of the island and the sun was already despondently descending. With the rest of the Felidae Isles stretched east towards the ogre peninsula, a vessel could scarper west and be quickly lost in the wide expanse of the Unknown.
Ah, but here: a push against what little remained of Cinrak’s salty energy. The bitter currents Columbia spoke of. A side effect of the weather manipulation to hide the ship. What had Columbia said? Dolphins and whales were feeding well.
She tried a click-whistle to attract a dolphin, but the prison’s bonds snapped the sound to pieces. Cinrak pulled back, spat bile. She was so close to something, some new understanding.
The tide was turning. The ocean, too big to influence, every part of it connected to every other part, known and unknown. But she didn’t have to reach to the other side of the Unknown. Just the other side of the reef.
Pushing through the tear, Cinrak birthed ripples in the viscosity. The effort almost drowned her senses, whipping away what little remained of her salt, but dammit...more lives were at stake than her own. She could not condone the mistrust and war that could brew up from this one misconstrued moment. One of Orvillia’s election planks had been an insistence on overseeing the end to war. She did not want to let her new friend down.
“Mereg,” Cinrak barked. “Time to turn tha Havoc into tha wind, ye old salty rat!”
Mereg mumbled something that may have been a curse.
“Orvillia, I be needin’ yer help. Sing at me so I don’t be faintin’.”
Mereg mumbled some semblance of notes that sounded like the Shanty of the Kraken and the Whale. Orvillia picked up the response to the call. The surprise at the queen knowing the bawdy tale gave Cinrak the final impetus to p
ush hard, sending a warning ripple out into the ether.
Cinrak’s salt gave out at the same time as Mereg’s voice and she descended into darkness.
Icy fire, whispering.
Scale and teeth. From the depths. Gnawing her bones.
Pop and sizzle of joints. Fireworks attacking the stars for their disinterest, bringing them down to rest against empty eyes.
Iron, creating iron, metal to fluid.
Shouts, harmonizing with the dirty skies of dawn.
Voices wove around Cinrak’s head, like the Three Capybara Sisters couldn’t decide whether to knit or cut her ties.
“I don’t believe in fate,” Cinrak murmured, trying to push away insistent paws.
“Cinny, hush, it’s alright.” Loquolchi’s voice emerged from the babble. “You have cuts on your head. No, don’t take that off, you woolly headed mammoth!”
Shadows lurked at a sensible distance between Cinrak and her knife paw.
“Ya make a terrible nursemaid,” Cinrak grumbled. “Ya think ya dyin’ if ye have a cold.”
Loquolchi sniffed. “You’re welcome. You gave me such a fright. I thought you were dead.”
Another face floated into her vision. Orvillia. Even monumentally annoyed she looked strong and handsome to Cinrak.
“You saved us, Cinny. You saved the whole treaty, possibly the world from war.”
Cinrak made a rude noise at what she thought about ‘saving’ the world. “Mereg?”
“Alive, and safe.”
Loquolchi answered too quickly.
She didn’t like it one bit. Not the being lied to, and definitely not the being seen by her queen wearing some silly nightgown!
“Well done, scamp.” Rozo, with Muriel on his shoulder.
Muriel hopped on to the blankets and nuzzled Cinrak’s cheek. “I’ll be a pterodactyl’s uncle if you didn’t help divert a prophecy.”
“Pterodactyl nothing.” Cinrak made another rude noise, enjoying the caress.
“Don’t make fun, Cinrak,” Muriel scolded. “It’s no small thing to fight the strings of time and space and win. The stars are looking down on you, I’m sure.”
“None of that murder stuff?”
“A few nasty rats and their fairy mages got a little roughed up, but no one suffered anything near a deathly wound,” Orvillia explained, laying a soft forepaw on her arm. Near Loquolchi’s paw. Two warm, lovely paws on her fur.
The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper Page 4