The Secrets of Jin-Shei. Alma Alexander

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       Four

      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.

      ‘It was Guards who were torturing it,’ Xaforn said, with a touch of defiance.

      ‘Guards,’ JeuJeu repeated blankly.

      ‘There were four of them, and two were Guard trainees,’ Xaforn said. ‘This was not …; honourable.’

      JeuJeu was betrayed into a grim smile. ‘You took on four older boys on behalf of a half-dead street cat because what they were doing was not honourable? For the love of Cahan, Xaforn. Did you know who the boys were?’

      ‘Just the Guards,’ Xaforn said.

      ‘The others were far more important,’ JeuJeu said. ‘The one you landed in the House of Healing for five days was the son of a City Councillor. His father was not pleased.’

      ‘The City Councillor’s son is a bully and a fool,’ Xaforn said trenchantly. ‘He was told by the others –’

      ‘Yes?’ JeuJeu prompted when Xaforn came to a grinding halt. When Xaforn remained stubbornly silent, JeuJeu heaved a deep sigh and sat back in her chair, stretching her legs out before her and crossing them at the ankles. ‘I’ll tell you, then,’ she said. ‘The others told your target that he shouldn’t mess with you. He didn’t listen. He paid for it.’

      ‘Am I in trouble?’ Xaforn asked warily.

      JeuJeu laughed, a sharp bark of a laugh, betraying amusement but not mirth. ‘Oh, a great deal of it,’ she said. ‘You broke so many rules that it would probably take me less time to enumerate those you did not break. There are people out there exceedingly angry with you, who won’t forget your name in a hurry. But you took on an adversary against the odds – they were bigger and there were more of them – and you did it on a matter of principle.’ JeuJeu shook her head. ‘Yes, I’d say you’re in trouble. But I also dislike interference with Guard matters, and they were in the compound. So technically they were in our jurisdiction. And it was our cat.’

      Xaforn, who had kept her eyes down, stole a look at JeuJeu’s face at those words. The damn cat had become a symbol, somehow.

      And it hadn’t been Qiaan who had squealed. It had been that malicious bully with his flabby muscles and soft СКАЧАТЬ