Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

Arhu stood up as they all backed off to give him transport space. “It’s just makework…” he said under his breath.

All three of them just looked at Arhu and didn’t say a word.

Arhu looked away, the ear Hwaith had put a claw into twitching a couple of times, and he vanished.

Rhiow and Hwaith and Urruah all looked at each other, and then practically in unison sat down to wash — as Aufwi was already doing off to one side, in the polite not-noticing mode of a Person not closely involved in a disagreement. All their whiskers were well forward in amusement, though– not just at Arhu’s discomfiture, but their own.

“Hwaith,” Rhiow said as she licked one paw, “…thank you for saving me the trouble.”

“Not a problem,” he said, scrubbing one of his ears vigorously: the same one in which he’d hooked Arhu, she noticed.

“I feel for our two kits, though,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been caught up in such serious events since we all came together… yet they’ve always produced the result. Which makes me wonder if we’ve come to depend on them too much while they’re still so young.” She glanced at Urruah.

He merely flicked his ears back and forth in a don’t-know gesture and kept on washing his face.

“In any case, it can’t be easy having the Eye so young,” Hwaith said. “Not that the Ear’s exactly a nap on a sunny rock either…”

“But what you said before…” Rhiow paused in mid-face scrub. “Is it hormones? Or just stress?”

“Stress has a hormone,” Urruah said as he finished his wash. “But Rhi, it occurs to me that there may be entirely different hormonal business on Arhu’s mind.” He exchanged a glance with Hwaith.

Rhiow blinked, as the thought genuinely hadn’t occurred to her. “Well, yes…” she said after a moment. There was no specific prohibition against sibling-Persons mating with one another when the blood or the heart moved them to it. There were even versions of the Sehau and Aifheh story in which the Lovers were occasionally born as littermates. Of course People were taught by their dams that there could be too much of a good thing in this regard if it continued over a number of generations, and this opinion was reinforced by the high mortality in the litters and dams of prides that inbred too closely or failed to insource enough new blood. Yes, this situation’s different, Rhiow thought. But there are other problems. When wizardly teammates also start thinking about becoming heatmates, a whole new level of complexity adds itself to every spell and every transaction. And if Sif should actually go into heat…

Suddenly it all seemed just too much for Rhiow to bear. She stood up, her tail wagging as uncontrollably as Arhu’s had, even while the words of the meditation went through her head. Today I shall meet the circumstance it seems impossible to manage, the events that seem willingly to conspire against me as I do my work. These, and my own fear that I cannot manage them, I must recognize as the claws in sa’Rraah’s paw, modeled on my own for the purpose of slashing me more deeply — But the sentiment seemed far less useful today than it normally did. And here I am doing nothing –

“I should get back,” Rhiow said. “I need to have a look and see what Sif’s set up for us – “

“In the state you’re in?” Urruah said, sparing her tail no more than a moment’s glance and going back to scrubbing his ear. “I wouldn’t advise it.”

Rhiow was instantly tempted to tell him what she thought of his advice… and then caught herself, somewhat in shock. I’ve been telling him he needs to start acting more like a team leader, she thought. And when he does, what’s my first impulse?…

Rhiow didn’t move until she succeeded in quieting her tail down: and as usual, doing so paradoxically made her feel calmer. “All right,” she said, “you may have a point. Do you want to go back and look in on her first? And Arhu, naturally.”

Urruah got up and stretched fore and aft. “I’ll do that,” he said. “Rhi, there’s no rush about anything until Ith gets back to us. Take a little self time.”

“I’ll go too,” Aufwi said, and stood up, shaking himself once. “The Silent Man can probably use a more detailed explanation of what’s been going on.” He flirted his tail, a resigned gesture. “And why he probably shouldn’t come along tonight to help us…”

Without more ado, they were gone. Rhiow stood there for a moment listening to the mutter of the traffic off beyond the edges of the Park, then glanced over at Hwaith. She sighed. “I begin to think,” she said, “that I’m the one who needs a dose of the treatment you just handed Arhu.”

He flicked an ear and headed down the path away from the museum: Rhiow fell in beside him. “I doubt that,” Hwaith said. “Just think of the pressure you’ve been under! I get a sense you’re harder on yourself than you’d ever be on your teammates.”

Rhiow laughed under her breath as they made their way along between the rose bushes. “I guess,” she said. “But it’s hard to strike a balance, you know? Even just in normal times…” And she had to laugh again. “I’m having trouble at the moment even remembering what that feels like. Some lovely faraway time when all I had to worry about was the Grand Central gates malfunctioning again… and always in some new and interesting way that I took oh so seriously, as if the Lone One Herself was designing every malfunction just for me.” Rhiow rolled her eyes at herself. “May Queen Iau start sending me lovely problems like that again, instead of the one we’ve got at the moment!”

Hwaith chuckled, though the sound had a dark edge to it. “Tell me about it,” he said. “Everything in my practice was going so smoothly…”

“Until we turned up?” Rhiow said. “Well, don’t forget, it was you who came looking for us…”

The glance he gave her at first seemed a little strange to Rhiow: but then the bronzy eyes flickered away, and Rhiow was left wondering exactly what it was that had struck her as odd. “Yes,” Hwaith said in a tone that struck Rhiow as ironic, “I suppose I’ve no one but myself to blame…”

“For what?” Rhiow said, a touch amused. “The unfolding of causality?”

Hwaith didn’t answer immediately, looking across the great garden toward where the traffic could just be seen moving on the park’s south side. “Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s always annoying when one’s actions disrupt others’ personal schedules.”

That made Rhiow laugh. “It’d be novel to think that the Queen and Her daughters were overly concerned with the details of my schedule,” she said. “Mostly when you agree to wizardry, your schedule becomes something the Powers rewrite as needed.”

“But it’s hardly a one-way agreement,” Hwaith said. “They have a responsibility to us as well. There has to be some reciprocity, some service done in return for the service we do the world….”

“Well, of course, that’s understood,” Rhiow said, watching the spiderling land on a scrap of bark and pause there to get its bearings. It looked about it with eyes almost too small for even a sharp-eyed Person to see, then moved off under another bit of bark. “It’s not as if they ask you to go out on errantry when you’re in heat, for example, or rutting, or kittening.”

“It wasn’t the strictly physical situations I was thinking of,” Hwaith said. “More the personal ones.”

Rhiow flicked an ear at that as she paused in mid-stroll, having caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of one eye. From a bud-tipped stem of one of the nearby rose bushes, a minuscule grey fleck was dropping toward the rough bark-mulch covering the ground. Rhiow leaned close and saw a tiny baby spider, hardly out of the egg, busily spinning its first thread as it made its way out into the great world. “Well,” she said, “you know how it’s supposed to be. No wizardly mission is ever commissioned by Them in strict isolation, we’re told. Every intervention in the Queen’s world is meant to affect not just the problem it’s specifically devised to solve, but every ongoing situation, from the most central to the most peripheral. The ripples spread…”