Faraj really had meant to soothe Kamil to sleep, and then to sneak over to Sahar’s kitten-nursery to make sure all was well with her through the night. But stroking Kamil’s soft ears and feeling the deep rumble of his purr lulled his own eyes into drifting closed, too.
The feeling of cat paws walking on his face an hour before dawn was bothalmostentirely novel and just familiar enough that for a brief moment Faraj thought he was still dreaming, until a cat stuck a cold wet nose in his ear and sneezed.
“Gaaaaah,”Faraj said, coming wide awake with a lurch that nearly toppled him off his bed and onto Kamil.
….Kamil was stillbesidethe bed.
Faraj was still reeling from the abrupt and unexpected awakening, so he thought perhaps he could be forgiven for taking a moment to realize thatSaharwas the cat who had sneezed in his ear to wake him up to demand her breakfast.
…Sahar, whose kitten-nursery had been safely latched the night before, and — as he untangled his feet from the bedsheets and padded barefoot into his study to examine the wooden lattice-door enclosing thejharokha— yes, it was still safely latched this morning.
Sahar was supposed to have been on theotherside of that door.
Sitting primly in the middle of his pillows and grooming her paw, Sahar gave him the clear mental image of a porcelain bowl with neatly sliced cubes of fish in it.
“Oh,dear,” Faraj said.
“Mrrt,” Sahar said, and nibbled delicately between her claws.
In hindsight, Faraj had to wonder how many of the years of trouble-foresights tangled around the vision of Master Asharan’s hand tending that beautiful jasmine plant in the window had been due not to Master Asharan himself, but to Sahar.
And even Master Asharan, who’d presumably known his Nehal for some time, had struggled to persuade Sahar to choose an acceptable basket.
She was very fond of gentle scritching of her chin and behind her ears. She seemed attentive to the sound of his voice as he quietly but urgently explained to her the importance of staying safe within thejharokha. She permitted him to lift her into hisarms and carry her into thejharokha,she sniffed at the bowl of Esha’s dried and flaked fish that he refilled for her, and she purred when he petted her until she closed her sleepy, slow-blinking eyes.
He eased themashrabiyalattice closed as quietly as he could and tied it with three silk ribbons well above even a cat’s stretch-height.
Five minutes later, while he was sitting at his desk trying to compose a casual-and-not-too-demanding-but-still-princely-sounding note to the kitchens, she shoved her damp nose into the crook of his knee and thought very firmly,Fish.
“O most plush-velveted and opinionated of queens,” Faraj said a bit helplessly, “I fear my Chamberlain will not be persuaded by the argument that no sorcerer can use you against me simply becauseno onecan convince you to doanything.”
Fish.
(The fish in her vision were fresh and gleaming and set in a white porcelain bowl edged with playful, sparkling waves. Faraj had no idea whether the kitchens even had such a pattern.)
“You were never this difficult,” Faraj said to Kamil, whose whiskers were twitching vigorously in his attempt not to laugh.
“Have youentirelyforgotten how we met?”
“I knew you didn’t actually want to kill me, or at least you wouldn’t by the time I’d explained enough,” Faraj told him. “But more to the point,explaining helped.”
“From her point of view,sheis explaining,” Kamil said, nose crinkled.
“…Yes, I suppose she has explained that fresh fish are required immediately.”
Fish,Sahar agreed, purring.
“If you would deign to settle into your basket, my dear, I could carry you to the kitchens to fetch the fish of your choice?”
The basket suddenly appeared on his desktop, and Sahar mewed her imperative from within the basket, thumping the pillow with her tail.
“Yourhajibis going to be even more displeased to find you taking orders from your cat, you realize,” Kamil said.
“But I have no idea whether the particular porcelain bowl is part of the necessity,” Faraj replied. “If I am there in the kitchen, looking through the dishware with my cat is a royal whim, but if I send the dish back with akhadimfive times because my cat will not accept a different dish than the dish of her visions, then I am either mad or a tyrant. If not both.”
Shahin was the young flight-mage on duty overnight, fidgeting with a pale quill balanced on his fingertip in the night-blue shadows. Faraj suspected that his restlessness had seen him put on the overnight watch because it was by far the slowest, in some exasperated elder’s effort to rebalance his impetuous young humors. He brightened immediately when Faraj approached the platform facing the inner courtyard.
“Off to work already, your Highness? Where to?”
