“I am very sorry,” Faraj said, feeling tears clog his throat again. “If I had just remained dutiful, if I had kept the Empire’s needs above my own desires…”
“You’ve done that your entire life,” Najra said. “You’re allowed one night of hedonism in an entire lifetime of duty. Your brothers do it all the time.”
“But no one holds them responsible for the troubling outcomes that they were expected to foresee and avert.”
“Are you listening to yourself? That wasmypoint, your Royal Snuggliness.” Najra cuddled up against him and petted his silks with an almost indignant touch. “If people are so aghast that you chose your own night of pleasure and your own soft little cat because you’ve never done it before? Then clearly you need to do itmoreoften, so they get used to it.”
“Please don’t break Kamil,” Faraj said, smoothing a henna-fiery lock of her hair back behind her ear. “Or my Chamberlain. Or Ahmed, or thekhadimuna…”
“How do all of them have more say in your life than you do? You’re theshahzadahere, aren’t you?”
“I’ve abused that badly enough already today.”
He thought guiltily of how unsurprised Ahmed had been that, when propriety and rules had failed to force a nobleman to behave in the expected ways, there had been no consequences for him; instead, the traditional defenses of the entirehavelihad been compromised for the sake of his royal whim.
No wonder Master Asharan had tried so desperately not to hear his name spoken aloud. A bath-house companion wouldn’t have even a royal cat-familiar’s protection from courtiers who would give ashahzadaanything he wished, and then aim their power at removing the defenseless cat or the defenseless lover instead.
“Because you made them let your cat in?” Najra said. “Honey-plum, she’s acat.Which means she’s entirely perfect as the other half of your sweet, curious, cuddly soul who foresees all the trouble… and then she swats a paw on the edge of the saucer. Because ifyouwon’t knock the saucer off the ledge, obviouslysheneeds to, to make sure that no one has sorcerously broken the world and universal laws have not developed any cat-exploitable loopholes!”
Faraj blinked. “How is that obvious at all?”
“Your divine brother leaves holy water welling up from his bare footprints on marble and fire-flowers blossoming out of a dead stick he touched on the way up some hermit’s mountain. I don’t think I want to trustyoursense of normal object interactions.” She scritched Sahar’s ears, smiling at the vigorous purr. “Cats knocking things over for mischief and a check for any exploitable loopholes in local gravity? That is so entirely normal that it’s reassuring. I hope I can rely on your sweetie to help me recognize whether any of the Archives’ containment systems for the cursed spellbooks have sprung a leak. And the imp infestation is particularly irritating this year; I hope her kittens grow into good little imp-mousers, because the swarms are getting too clever for the warding.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t follow…?”
“She’s diverting you from your self-blame,” Kamil said. His pupils were almost narrowed enough to pass for normal again. “If she chatters distractingly enough, you sometimes get caught up in the religious and philosophical significance of cats’ mischief, or the Eldest Archivist’s taste in reading material, or the Archives’ imp infestation.”
“You weren’t supposed totellhim that,” Najra said, glowering.
“Oh, dear,” Faraj sighed. “And if you are diverting me from my blame, then I should not permit myself to be diverted from the blame I deserve.”
“Of course you should. You’re not going to wallow in misplaced guilt for the rest of forever, are you? —No, don’t answer that. Ihavemet you.”
Kamil coughed, so that he wouldn’t laugh.
“Right. So there’s four paths I can see out of this tangle,” Najra told him, “but one of them won’t happen, and I don’t need to be a prophet to foresee that. You’re not going to stop caring what’s best for the people around you and go power-mad now that you’ve tasted the nectar of irresponsibility, so let’s write that off. Another is squeezing yourself back into a miserably rigid and inflexible snare, which I admitisentirely too plausible. But fortunatelyI’mnot going to let you get away with that one. That leaves changing the system either subtly or spectacularly.” With a sharp grin, she said, “I’d do it spectacularly, but I’m not you. Therefore, assumingyoudon’t think leading the women and the catfolk on a yowling revolution is as good an idea as it sounds tome?—”
“Oh, mercy,no,”Faraj said, both hands over his eyes, but he couldn’t block the smoldering ember-flares of the fires in his foresight. “The people who suffer the most when cities burn are never the rich. The marketplace burns first — they’d burn theCatsprowl before the Archmage and the High Priestess couldactually herdcatsto try to stop it, and then — the Archives?—”
“All right, you’re the prophet here,” Najra said. “If we want to change the system more gently than the torches’ revolution, you tell me where we start. To makejust enoughtrouble for the people who deserve the troubling.”
“I can’t see how,” Faraj breathed, struggling for a glimmer of light amid the seething, leering shadows. He took a careful grip on the arm of the bench before he lost all sense of his body, and then he dove into the shadows. Long-trodden paths that had been as bleak and narrow as black rivers had surged over their banks in a wildly frothing flood of potential, swirling eddies of gossip and power-plays and extortionate smiling insinuations and the riotous color and chatter of the marketplace with all its thousand dramas.
A third of them dragged him back to the capital, to his brother’s priesthood’s sternly disapproving supervision. Too many ended in fire. Some of them ended in floods when he was too far away to send the warnings in time.
Sahar mewed, and turned around and walked away through his visions. Heart-stricken, he reached out towards her, and his fingers passed through her.
…wait.
If his fingers passedthroughwhat he saw, then —
Then she was walking into his visions. Or her spirit was. Somehow.
No one else had ever seen the things that danced at the edges between his sight and his foresight. But if Saharsharedhis soul, if she shared his vision?—
Sahar mewed at him again, clearly impatient. If he’d had to put human words around it, he wasn’t sure whether it would beWell, are you coming?orHurry up, the food bowl has not been refilled yet.
“Your pardon, O softest of queens,” he said to whichever of her might hear. “But I’m not accustomed to having a guide, and if I walk after you too literally this balcony is not as spacious as our vision.”
