Cat goes back
No one knew where the elves dwelled. Catan supposed that they lived in caves, for her cousin Malcolm had met several elves in one and she had met an elf in another.
And yet there was something so airy and graceful about them that she found it difficult to imagine them living underground. In her country, the descendents of the mystical people of Dana still lived in their caverns beneath the hills, but they were supposed to be a dark, twisted, ugly race.
The elves of Lothere, she thought, ought to live in the air. If not in the sky, then at least in the trees. As she walked, she tried to imagine an entire elf city over her head, invisible, perched on the massive branches of these ancient trees. Her gaze was so lost in the treetops that her feet tangled themselves in a creeping vine, and down she went with a startled cry.
She had learned by now not to use her left hand for everyday tasks – and never before had she realized how useful a left hand could be – but her reflexes were quicker than her education. She rolled over onto her side, cradling the injured hand in the other, and alternately moaning and cursing herself through gritted teeth.
“Cat?” It was an anxious cry coming as a late echo to her own.
“Friend!” She pushed herself up with her right hand and her left elbow, and her laugh was muddled joy and embarrassment and pain. “Don’t tell me you saw me fall!”
She could hear his hesitant feet padding over the leaves behind her. She thought he must want to help her up, but he could not see her to take her hand. And then she realized she had just said a rather foolish thing.
“I heard you,” he said. “You’re hurt.” His hands were waving between them, seeking hers.
“Not a bit!” she laughed and jerked her injured hand away. “Only surprised.”
Cat hid her bandaged hand in her skirts. She did not want him to know what Egelric had done that night – she thought they were already enemies enough. But she had not forgotten that the elf had called her his friend.
“I was looking for you!” she cried gaily, hoping he would forget her injury.
“I wondered.”
“You weren’t following me, were you?” she scolded, shaking her good finger at him.
“I wasn’t certain it was you until you cried out. Don’t you ever talk to yourself?”
“Do you think me mad?” she grinned.
“That must make me mad.”
“If you’re talking to yourself, that’s a sign you need a friend, Friend.”
He sighed and turned his face away, and she thought she had again said the wrong thing.
“I never heard you!” she said. “You must walk on cat feet.”
“You don’t,” he smiled.
“Because I fell? That’s only because I was looking for you instead of looking where I was going.”
“I would have come out earlier if I had known you were looking for me.”
“What else would I be doing here?”
“I don’t know. What were you doing the first time you came here?”
“Oh! That was because my sister was swimming, but I couldn’t swim with my hurting finger. So I went prowling.”
“Where do you swim?”
“Oh, no!” she cried. “Innocent as a babe, he looks, with the devil’s own intentions! I shan’t tell!”
“I’m blind!”
“Oh…”
“Do you sound different when you’re naked, too?”
“Probably,” she giggled.
He looked as if he would have liked to laugh, but he determinedly frowned and asked, “How is the Mouse’s friend? Did he live?”
“Ach! I suppose you saved his life, Friend. But it was the sleep of the dead he slept for four days after. And when he woke, he remembered almost nothing of his life – not even his own name. He remembered his mother’s name and family, and so he went home to his brother’s, hoping to remember more. But he did not remember Mouse at all. A sad thing.”
“Do you think so?”
“Forgetting my whole life, even unto my love?” she gasped. “I certainly think so. If I had a love, that is.”
He felt out a stick on the ground with his toes and kicked it up into his hand. “Then you are – and have always been – happy.” He walked away from her to slash blindly at a nearby stand of ferns.
“Like most folk, I suppose,” she murmured and followed after him. “Did you manage to find your way home that night, Friend?”
“I don’t know – am I getting close?”
“Are you – !” She leaned over to peer beneath his hair and saw the corner of a smile. She laughed.
“You needn’t worry about that. I go down to the lakeside often. I know the way well enough to run it.”
“That didn’t stop you from holding my hand all the way down…”
“I didn’t want you to fall in the dark.”
“Oh! For sure and for certain!” she laughed.
“Why are you laughing? You even fall in the sunlight. Some Cat!”
“I only fell because I was looking up in trees as I walked. I was trying to find where elves make their homes.”
“This elf lives in a cave. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“That’s enough for me, but I’m wondering for the sake of a friend.”
“Another friend! What is it this time? A goat?”
“No. Only a man.”
“And what sort of animal loves this man?”
“An elf does. Or, at least, he loves an elf.”
He dropped his stick into the ferns. “What?” His eyebrows had come down in menacing points over his pale eyes.
“It’s my own cousin Aengus, who was trapped for two weeks in a pit with an elf lady, named Lena, before some other elves rescued him. And he loves her. And Egelric’s friend Vash – he’s an elf – says that she will have a… a child…”
Cat stumbled backwards a few steps, away from the elf, who seemed on the point of going off in an explosion of fury such as she had recently endured at the hands of her cousin.
He shook and he trembled, but in the end he only pressed his fists against his temples and howled, “Nai!”
“What’s the matter with you?” she breathed.
“No! No! What’s the matter with you? Your men? Can you not be satisfied with your own kind? If they aren’t debasing themselves with these – these–creatures, they are – are debasing our fairest ladies!”
“What?” she gasped.
“And these abominations! These half-breed babies of yours!”
“Now, never! I’ll never let you say so! Wulf and Gils and Duncan! If they aren’t the sweetest babies – ”
“Monsters!”
“No!” She shook her skirts in anger, and when that didn’t make enough noise to satisfy her, she stomped her boot on the spongy ground.
“Yes! What would you think, if your sister came to you and said, ‘Here is my sweet baby! Its father is a pig!’”
“A pig!” she huffed. “The only pig I know is the one before me! There’s no difference between men and elves, besides the ears – ”
“The ears? The ears?” He yanked back his hair to show off his ears. “You could cut off the points of my ears, but it wouldn’t make me any less an elf! Otherwise they would have done it! Can a man do this?”
He bent to pull up a fistful of dead leaves and litter, and the entire wad was ablaze before he had lifted it to the level of her face. Cat leapt away, and he tossed down the smoking ashes and followed her.
“Can a man heal your finger? Can a man heal the fear-of-water sickness? No! They are little more than animals!”
“And I?” she sobbed. “What am I?”
“Little more than a cat.”
“I thought I was your friend!”
“I like cats,” he said with a smug little smile.
“You – ” She could not think of a name vile enough to call him in English.
Reflexively, as if she were a cat indeed, her lips curled back from her sharp teeth, and her fingers curled into claws. But her reflexes had again forgotten that two of the fingers of her left hand were broken, and she yowled in pain.
“You’re hurt,” he said, his voice suddenly, startlingly gentle.
His hands went out again in search of hers, but she knew now that she was no better than a pet to him – a stray cat who stubbornly came back to him until he had developed a grudging affection for her. The pain in her fingers was nothing to that.
Cat turned and began walking back the way she had come, her eyes resolute on the path and unblinking.
“Cat?” she heard him call behind her. “Are you going? Cat?”
But she did not hear him follow.
