Faraj sighed deeply. “I would like to believe that cruelty should never be necessary.”
“That is your privilege,shahzada.”
“And I have too many privileges that others cannot share,” Faraj said, staring up into the silken canopy above his bed. “I must do more for the world with the privileges that I have been given.”
“More than the lives you save with forewarnings of floods and fires and calamity?” Kamil’s tail thumped hard against a well-clawed pillow. “The last I checked, you are still human. Tell your brother who claims himself a god to step up.”
“If cruelty is still necessary for those without my privilege, then my power has not sufficiently served my people’s needs.”
Kamil heaved a vast sigh as well. “Shahzada, I am catfolk. Weenjoyhunting small prey. And we play with our food. If you ask me which of your humane upsets are not necessary, I would name your heart-rending guilt over the world’s assorted cruelties high on the list.”
With a rueful smile, Faraj asked, “How would you order your list of our human unnecessaries, then?”
“Either war or breeding tops the list,” Kamil said. “Then your guilt.”
Faraj tried not to laugh, and ended up coughing. “I’m sorry, war orbreeding…?”
“May I be entirely blunt,shahzada?”
“More so than usual?” Faraj asked lightly. “Speak as you will.”
“If you’d told me how desperate you were to mate with someone of your own desire, rather than to be bred like a dog with a pedigree, I would have listened.”
“I know you would have, Kamil.” Faraj folded his hands behind his head and looked up into the drifting blue shadows of his silken bed-canopy, gently shifting in the night breeze. “Just as I know that you would have stopped me.”
“You’re not hearing me,” Kamil rumbled. “Forget the harlot for a minute. The problem isn’t the mating, the problem is thebreeding. That human fixation on bloodlines and pedigrees and trait-inheritance.”
“I understand catfolk think differently about such matters. But as you say, I am, alas, merely human myself.”
“But if you didn’t have to suffer through all that courtly dog-breeding, if you were a catfolk who wanted to mate with someone, you could justdo that,” Kamil said, tail lashing. “And if you didn’t want to mate with someone, then don’t. You wouldn’t have spent half your life fretting over all the political mess around breeding fancy humans like they’re fancy dogs, or whether or not you could force yourself to sire prophet-pups on a dam with an approved pedigree. If your courtiers didn’t put such a steep price on defying their planned-out stud books, you could have mated with whoever you wanted years ago. I wish you’d told me you wanted to.” In a rumble so deep it was barely audible, he added, “I’m so used to you pushing your ‘animalinstincts’aside for so long, I hadn’t realized you truly wanted someone to mate with.”
It was easier to say this to the blue-tinged shadows, to not look at Kamil, to not see what he thought when Faraj asked, “And if I wanted to mate with someone who was terribly inappropriate…?”
“My objection was that he was a two-daniqgutter-witch in a back-alley bath-house who could have taken anyone’s coin to enchant you and ransom you,” Kamil said irritably. “It was never your desire to mate that I objected to. Just your taste. Did you even check to see whether he had a pox?”
“Kamil!”Faraj protested, wheezing with his effort not to laugh too loudly and draw Kala’s attention from her night-prowling. “My glorious companion of the evening did not have a pox.”
“You deserve better, is all I’m saying!” His tail thumped hard against the pillows. “Not because of some fancy breed-humans-like-dogs pedigree thing. Because you’remy human.And I haveimpeccabletaste.”
“Of course you do; you are the very pinnacle of catfolk,” Faraj said fondly. “I suppose you also believe I should have accepted Irfan’s too-generous offer. He is as close as any human comes to such exacting feline taste.”
“No,” Kamil said. “Yourhajibknows how to be unkind. That is a necessary skill in a guardian, but not in your lover. Your heart is very soft and easily bruised, and if he made your heart bleed, I would claw his face off. And that would be a waste.”
“So that we are entirely clear,” Faraj said, “Kamil, you shouldneverclaw the face off anyone who injures my heart. It is, as you say, quite easily bruised, and that is not a cause for bloodshed.”
“And for Sahar’s sake?”
“I would much rather protect her than avenge her,” Faraj said.
“Of course you would,” Kamil said. “You are made for protecting.”
“I believe I recall a popular saying about the crow and the raven’s wing?”
“You are made for protecting. I am made to protect.”
With a tremulous sigh, Faraj said, “My soft human heart would very much like to pet you, just a bit, if you wouldn’t mind too much.”
“Hrrmph.” Kamil would never deign to be found in Faraj’s human bed, which was full of silken sheets that could trap claws and snarl a lunge, and which had too many temptingly lurkable and pounceable shadows underneath it. But he made an elaborate show of yawning and stretching and shifting around in his pillow-pile, and he oh-so-casually ended up with his chin propped in the crook of his elbow on the edge of Faraj’s bed, so that his velvet-soft and lynx-sharp ears were just a few inches from Faraj’s fingertips.
