Kamil coughed an incredulous noise just short of a hairball, and even Esha looked politely skeptical.
“Your Highness,” she said, “even in the Catsprowl markets I have heard the tale of the deadly young Basteti hunter who once sought your blood upon his claws.”
“And that was all a dreadful misunderstanding!” Faraj insisted. At least, from his own perspective, with his insights through time, it had been. And he’d been right… eventually.
Silently, Kamil flexed his claws, to make several very sharp points.
Ahmed began edging further from Kamil and closer to the guards, with eyes as white around the edges as a high-strung horse.
Faraj sighed. “Can kittens truly makethatmuch trouble?”
“You have not spent much time around toddlers, have you, your Highness?” the guard asked, struggling with a straight-enough face. “Start there. Then add gnawing, clawing, climbing, shredding, pushing of breakables off ledges, reckless endangerment, and multi-hour hide-and-seek adventureswithout diapersto the possibilities.”
“Ah. Er. Well. I do begin to imagine, yes.”
On the whole, kitten misadventures weren’t the sort of thing that were both imminent enough and dire enough to crowd out the other greater calamities clamoring to cast their shadows across his foresight. But Faraj suspected he was about to need to learn how to spare some attention from disaster-level foreseeing in order to pick up on the adorable-nuisance variety.
“You could still reconsider, your Highness,” the guard said.
“I have spent my entire life being cautious and careful and prudent and guarded,” Faraj said, stroking Sahar’s side gently. “As far as challenging activities go, I should think that bringing home one very round and sedentary cat-familiar, here in the city of cats, is far from the greatest calamity I might create.”
“Tell that to Deputy Minister al-Faruq after one of the kittens has toppled an inkwell onto a five hundred page long and centuries old tax ledger,” Ahmed muttered. “Or to your guardians after someone has sent a cat-shaped assassin to smother you in your bed.”
“My dear Ahmed, you are as dedicated a foreseer of trouble as I am,” Faraj said. “I may regret this after a great deal of scolding, but I would like to learn how much kitten mischief aprophet’s foresights might avert. These kittens are mine, and I shall answer for their mischief however I must. But if we learn that their mischief can be reasonably managed, then perhaps young Hikmat’s — ah, I mean hiscousin’sfamiliar could join him in the Archives on occasion as well.”
Hikmat took a hasty step backwards when Ahmed and the guard both glared at him.
“I, er, I think Archivist Najra is calling, I should go…”
Faraj glanced toward the Archives, studying the looming of the shadow-flares. “Oh, she isn’t yet, but in about two minutes she will be,” he said. “Pardon me a moment, good gentlefolk. I’m certain the rest of you don’t deserve to be in the shouting range for this.”
“I bless your mercy, your Highness,” Ahmed sighed. “Is there any aid we might offer from, er, a more judicious distance?”
“Well. Um.” Blinking fiercely as he tried to foresee his way through the shadows and the shouting with the least collateral damage, Faraj said to Mistress Salimat, “I don’t suppose you could summon up three more kulhad…?”
The Deputy Minister of Finance Bashir bir Idris al-Faruq and the Chamberlain Irfan bir Enayat al-Sadiq were distantly Faraj’s kinsmen, in the way that many of the Imperial nobles were kin if one looked closely enough at a few generations of marriages. Much of the time they bristled at each other over which of them had the greater claim upon Faraj’s schedule, person, and duties.
Faraj was more fond of the Chamberlain, because they had worked together in the diplomatic service of the court for nearly all their lives. Irfan went to great lengths to see to it that the Imperial residences and the servants of thehaveliweresmoothly managed and never caused disastrous trouble to his foresights, not even with the Greater Convocation in mere weeks.
But Faraj’s sense of duty also called him to the Ministry of Finance. It was an incontrovertible fact that none of the rest of the secretaries could know that a record had been falsified simply by turning a certain page of the ledger and feeling the page’s lies sting his fingertips.
The Deputy Minister of Finance was rarely kind. But he was ferociously incorruptible, because falsified records outraged his sense of the proper ordering of the world. Faraj needed someone with that fierce sense of truth in that position. And usually Bashir treated Faraj’s insights as evidence even more clear than ink, even when his insights were politically inconvenient.
Faraj really had hoped to be back before the two of them found common cause in raising the alarm over his unexplained, unauthorized absence. He’d tried to walk quietly, hoping against hope that he might be able to sneak into his study, and Kamil always walked quietly unless he was yowling with outrage.
Unfortunately, both the Deputy Minister and the Chamberlain were glaring directly at his closed study door, and at the tiny but fierce woman barring their way. It was unworthy to feel a moment’s relief that their glaring at the study door meant that they hadn’t yet noticed him walking up behind them.
He’d never before offended both of them at the same time.
…Though, to be scrupulously fair, right now Archivist Najra was doing a great deal of the offending on his behalf.
“No I willnotadmit either of you to his Highness’s private study,” she declared, arms folded over her chest. She’d freshened the henna reddening the silver streaks in her hair, and in the sunbeam that shone in through the glazed stonework, it looked as though her hair had caught fire with the heat ofher indignation. “That is why it is his Highness’sprivatestudy. None of us call this ‘his Highness’s occasionally-private-but-easily-invaded, busybody-entertaining receiving room.’”
“Listen, you jumped-up little witch,” the Deputy Minister snapped. “His Highness is missing.You were the last person to see him. And if you don’t get out of my way, I will have the guards take you to the magistrate and charge you with obstruction?—”
Faraj took a breath to try to head off the stormclouds roiling in the corners of his eyes, but Najra held up a warning finger, even as she held the Deputy Minister’s furious gaze without even a flicker of a glance beyond his shoulder.
“You think we won’t?” the Deputy Minister demanded. “You think your power is inviolable because we stand in the Archives rather than his Highness’s chambers?”
