Alma Alexander - The Secrets of Jin-Shei

Xaforn was a head shorter and much lighter than her opponent, and all the boy saw was a thin girl who had challenged his authority. One good blow, and it would be over – she’d be across the courtyard, in a heap in the corner, and there would be good blue bruises all over her face the next morning – or at least that was the plan. He swung, and he never knew what hit him. Xaforn ducked under his arm, pivoted on the ball of her foot, came up behind him and landed a blow on the small of his back and across the kidneys which felled him to his knees, and then drove the edge of her hand into his solar plexus as he tried to rise. He swayed for a moment, his eyes crossed and focused on the tip of his nose, and then fell face first into the cobbles.

The rest, throwing down the kitten, fled.

It had taken a fraction of a second. Xaforn was left in possession of the field, triumphant, a little guilty.

‘You aren’t supposed to beat up the general population,’ a voice said, apparently giving tongue to her guilt.

Xaforn looked down. On her knees on the dusty courtyard cobbles, heedless of a pretty silk robe, Qiaan was extracting the kitten from its torture apparatus.

The mother cat had retreated a few steps and now stood growling softly deep in its throat, but making no sudden movements.

‘What are you doing here?’ Xaforn said waspishly.

‘Just passing through, same as you,’ Qiaan said. The kitten fell into her hands, freed at last, barely breathing. Its eyes were still closed. ‘I don’t even know if it’s old enough to be weaned yet.’

‘Will she take it back?’ Xaforn said, coming down on one knee beside Qiaan to have a closer look at their prize. Both girls were completely ignoring the erstwhile bully, who was still on the ground, groaning.

‘Even if she did,’ Qiaan said, ‘it might die. It’s so tiny. I wonder where those bullies found it.’

‘They probably killed the rest.’

The mother cat snarled, but when they looked up at the sound she was gone, melted away into the shimmer of heat. Xaforn sighed.

‘Well, that’s that.’

‘Do you want it?’

‘What would I do with it?’ Xaforn snapped. She’d been caught in a moment of softness and it rankled – especially because it had been Qiaan, of all people, who had been the one to see her succumb to it.

‘Then why did you save it?’

‘Because they were Guard,’ said Xaforn. As though that made all the necessary sense in the world. In her world, it did.

Qiaan could even understand it. But her understanding didn’t change matters. ‘It’s dead anyway, then,’ she shrugged. But she tied her sleeve into a makeshift sling and cradled the weakly mewling kitten into it. It quested with its tiny nose until it found her finger, and then it started sucking on the fingertip, hard, making tiny complaining noises when it refused to yield any sustenance.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’ll take it home,’ Qiaan said. ‘See if I can’t find something. Milk going to waste. Something.’

‘Sappy.’

‘Mad,’ countered Qiaan.

They got to their feet, spun apart. Behind them, the poleaxed young bully was only just beginning to sit up and shake his head in confusion. The girls stalked off in opposite directions, and then Qiaan turned to look at Xaforn’s stiff, retreating back.

‘You can come see her if you like,’ she called softly.

Xaforn paused, half turned her head. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

Qiaan shrugged. ‘To see if she survives the Guard.’

Xaforn’s braid snapped like a whip as she turned. ‘It wasn’t Guard did that to it!’

‘To her ,’ Qiaan said. ‘And if they hadn’t you would never have interfered. I’ll be seeing you.’

‘Witch,’ muttered Xaforn.

‘Bruiser,’ came floating back, just as Qiaan passed out of sight.

Xaforn turned away. She tried to scowl, but however hard she schooled her features her mouth kept on coming up into a twisted little grin instead. Of all the people …;

But she had an awful feeling that she could not resist going to see the cat. She. That pathetic little bundle of ragged fur, bloodied and weak and barely flickering with life. How did Qiaan know it was a female?

Xaforn shared a dormitory room with three other Guard foundlings. She had a utilitarian relationship with her room-mates – she did not have anything much in common with any of them. She had both given and received bruises from sparring sessions with all of them, but they shared the space amicably even if Xaforn didn’t join in with the giggles and the compound gossip the other three girls were prone to. The single Guard members were given to transient and shifting flings with others in their cadre, and Xaforn’s room-mates always seemed to know who was attached to whom any given week. Xaforn did not particularly care to know, and had developed a habit of generally tuning out specific conversations, those spiced with heavy doses of titters and whispers. But gossip was also a mine of information about the general day-to-day lives in the compound and Xaforn did not dismiss everything that found its way into her room through her chatty bunkmates.

She was sitting on her bed fixing a broken sandal barely a week after the incident with the kitten when a comment involving ‘cats’ found its way past her defences, and she lifted her head fractionally, starting to listen without giving the least impression that her attention was suddenly on things other than the half-completed repair job in her lap.

‘ …; adorable ,’ one of the girls was saying. ‘It must be only a few weeks old, and it must have suffered something terrible, there are still marks on it where it had been tortured.’

‘Where did Qiaan get hold of it?’ asked another.

‘She won’t say, she says nothing of where she found it or how she got it,’ the first one said. ‘But I think it’s going to make it. She still feeds it four, five times a day; it suckles on her finger like a baby, An told me.’

So. The kitten lived. Xaforn bent over her sandal, obscurely pleased at the news. She made a mental note to keep an ear open for news of it – of her – her lips quirked again, remembering Qiaan’s quiet insistence on that point. She toyed briefly, as she had done a number of times already in the past week, with the idea of visiting the cat – the cat , not Qiaan – and then dismissed it, as she always did, staunchly resisting the impulse. There was nothing for her in the inner compound, with its teeming children, its squabbling women, its families , its cats.

She muttered a soft curse under her breath. The kitten’s tiny, vulnerable face, the delicate suckling on Qiaan’s finger, the scrabbling little wounded paws …; Xaforn jabbed a repair hook too deeply into the rope sole of her broken sandal, annoyed at the kitten’s insistent hold on her mind’s eye. She had interfered because two of the torturers had been Guard , damn it all, not because she was a bleeding heart for waifs and strays. She didn’t care what happened to it, after. She didn’t. She could swear she didn’t. She was glad the little thing had clung to life, but she’d tried to dismiss the creature from her orbit and she had every intention of forgetting about it. Especially now that she knew it had survived.

But the cat incident seemed intent on coming back to haunt her. The day after she had overheard the conversation about the kitten’s well-being, Xaforn was summoned into her cadre leader’s presence.

‘Is it true?’ JeuJeu, the scarred veteran in charge of training for Xaforn’s group, demanded without preamble as soon as Xaforn came into her cubicle.

Somehow Xaforn didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. She clenched her teeth. Qiaan – Qiaan probably told them everything.