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Outside is the palace of slaughter. Under its gambrels of boiling sky, there is the cold unforgiving sea; there are mountains ready to cradle your bones. Along its corridors of singing grass, there are horseback warriors who will cut you to pieces. There are witches, and there are cats.
Outside is where I met Bozpo. In the broad yellow world, between sun-shadowed stalks, he appeared one day, a ragged, hissing, loam-covered thing. I thought he was one of my own come back to me at first, one of a litter I bore under a full moon, a mewling silver curl that opened its eyes early, and left early too, in a human hand. But under the mud I saw his true colors. He was black as night.
We introduced ourselves as cats do: standoffishly. When the puffing and posturing was at an end, we took our places in separate patches of sun.
“I am thirsty,” Bozpo said. “I am bored.”
I flicked my scarred white tail and drawled, “The horse trough never runs dry, and there are vermin aplenty.”
“I want to drink milk,” said Bozpo. “I want to drink the milk of a witch’s teat. I want to find a witch and drink of her teat until it runs dry and shrivels.”
“You will die of thirst before that happens,” I said.
“There are no witches here?”
“There are no witches here. Only horse-men and their horses.”
Bozpo yowled. His cry stretched and sang like the strings of a shangiz fiddle, promising retribution. I met his glass-green eyes and joined in.
• • • •
That night we made war in my dwelling! The setting moon found Bozpo and me lazing within a ring of corpses, a ring of our own making. Two bats, two swallows, one toad, one lizard, and at the last, a monstrous snake-tailed rat, still scuffling in its death throes.
As the sun rose, Bozpo declared his intent to journey over the mountains, and I went with him, for I wanted to see what else we could kill.
• • • •
Thus we climbed, Bozpo and I, over those bald white humps the sailors call Whale’s Folly and the horse-people call the Foal’s Farewell.
Bozpo had no interest in these names. “I call them boring,” he said.
“Well, Bozpo,” I said. “Suppose I told you these hills were called The Witch’s Tears?”
“I would find the witch who wept them into existence,” was his retort, “and give her more reason to cry.”
“Why this overwhelming hatred?”
“Do you not hate witches?” Bozpo asked me. “After all they have done?”
It was a story as old as the hills we prowled. In the palace of slaughter, witches form the walls and gates. At the edge of every overgrown human settlement, there is a witch snapping off lives like fingertips in her hinges. That is how one king of horse-men met his end, his head pinched from its stem by a witch’s fingernails; the wind batted his skull over the yellow plain until bone fell to dust.
But the quarrel of witches is with ambitious kings and generals, not cats.
“What is it,” I asked, “that witches have done to you?”
“Nothing,” Bozpo hissed. “Everything. If you do not think witches deserve death, then you are a witch yourself.”
“Careful,” I said. “You will stain the whole world scarlet with a brush that broad.”
“Wise old puss,” Bozpo said mockingly. “We will do that anyway. You and I, together.”
• • • •
He was right: If tree and stone could bleed, we would have bled them dry. All that spring we killed, destroying ducks, partridges, weasels, and foxes. We painted a path of blood over the mountain that faltered but once, when I stayed Bozpo’s claws against a sickly bear cub, which had emerged into the newly green world still wrapped in some of its mother’s winter sleepiness.
“Leave it be,” I said. “It has not even opened its eyes.”
“You have a tenderness for small blind things,” Bozpo accused me. “I have seen you turn your head from little birds.”
“What of it?” I said. “My haunches ache too much to go climbing trees.”
It’s true; I am tender about newborn creatures. About the way they writhe and whimper, sightless, craving warmth, craving the lick of a firm motherly tongue. When Bozpo scaled a towering spruce and emptied a nest of half-feathered finches, I did not join him in his feasting. But still I accompanied him, a sharp-eyed killer, a death-bringer covered in gore and down, who shied away from my attempts to clean him.
He was bathed, after a fashion, as we forded streams fed by snow-melt and crouched miserably in the pouring spring rain. By the time the mountains were in flower, we had traversed the white chain and descended to the other side, following pale green slopes until they gave way to the lowlands and the sea.
• • • •
The sailors who named the Folly are drowned and lost, but their descendants remain. In the days of my youth, they cut the waves under the banner of the marigold, but as Bozpo and I approached their outpost I saw that their colors had changed. Their flags were ice-white now and bore the emblem of a snowy hawk crowned by a pale star.
We entered the harbor under the blanket of night. It was summer, or just about, but my old bones felt the chill of the sea.
Bozpo was nervy, his pupils huge. “I smell her,” he hissed.
“Calm yourself,” I said. “There are no witches here. Only ship-men and their ships. And . . . ”
“And what?” demanded Bozpo. “And what?”
From the mouth of a human dwelling came the plaintive sighing of a shangiz fiddle. It was a song of the men of the marigold banner, a song of death and battle. The door of the house was open and its hawk emblems were sparkling in the leaking firelight, which sparkled also in Bozpo’s star-blown eyes.
“She is here!” Bozpo cried. And in he ran, into that house of music and light.
• • • •
The music ground to a discordant halt. There was a great tumult. Shadows flickered in the windows, and I heard a roar.
“Ho, little prince!”
“A fighter!”
“The balls on him!”
Then came the voice of Bozpo, shrieking that he would never be taken alive.
“Grab him already, Marl, before he bites my fucking hand off.”
The door swung open. Two silhouettes peered down at me.
“Here’s his lady wife,” one shadow said. “Waiting patiently while her fool tom goes brawling. There you are, Marlabask, a wedded pair. They’ll honeymoon in the Blue Sea.”
“Some honeymoon,” said the shadow named Marlabask, and there was laughter. Then Bozpo and I were lifted by the scruff of our necks, conveyed across the paving stones, and carried aboard Marlabask’s ship.
The craft was small: one sail, one berth. Marlabask released us atop a coil of rope.
“I had a calico once,” he said, standing beyond the reach of Bozpo’s claws and teeth, “who would sit on my knee and eat the weevils off my biscuits. She was happy here, as I hope you will be. Good night.”
Bozpo waited until Marlabask had begun to snore before he spoke. “He reeks of witch. I cannot believe you let him lay his hands upon you.”
“He is harmless.”
“He has bewitched you,” Bozpo said.
I said nothing. It is a sort of bewitchment, living among men. Mice grow soft eating their refuse, and we grow soft eating the mice. I realized that I would gladly suffer a weevil or two, if only to get a closer look at Marlabask’s shining brown arms, which were gilded with tattoos: with marigolds.
• • • •
The Blue Sea is known as the Perfect Glass, for at times it is so calm the horizon disappears, and it seems as though you have left the sea to sail through the sky. For weeks we floated in this world of mirrors, and I grew fonder still of Marlabask, who, though neither young nor hairless nor blind, seemed to carry some newborn rawness in his zest for the sea. At night he would bounce me on his knee and sing: songs of the day’s discoveries and of his brothers and uncles, the marigold men. It was his voice we had heard that night in the harbor, rising and falling mournfully above its shangiz accompaniment, telling us of the terror and joy of horseback war.
One night, as Bozpo dozed, Marlabask showed me his true cargo, kept hidden beneath a tangle of skins: a lockbox of pearls that, when opened, glimmered like a bowl of stars.
“What do you think of these, my lady?” he asked.
I could not answer, of course. I thought of my silver kitten. I butted my head against Marlabask’s hand.
“They shine like the armor of our long-lost general,” Marlabask said. Sighing, he began a song of the last soldier under the marigold. A fearsome warrior, a deathless mercenary, the legendary general had disappeared decades ago but continued to haunt the halls of the palace of slaughter, memorialized in story and song. One glorious day, Marlabask sang, the general would return and defeat the witch who kept the marigold people imprisoned within a marshy cage.
“Soon,” murmured Bozpo, half-asleep.
• • • •
Kinghawk! I shout it now because that is what Marlabask did then: a cry of homecoming.
In those early days of autumn, the former seat of the marigold banner overlooked the sea from a hillside nest of red foliage. The deep red of the hills was reflected in the water like floating blood, and bristling through the crimson like fingerbones were the masts of the ships that had skimmed to shelter ahead of the white wall of winter.
“She will be waiting for me,” Marlabask said. “My black-eyed mistress.”
So Marlabask had a lover, and I gathered from his song as we stitched our way into the harbor that she had a powerful hold on his heart.
“Well?” said Bozpo. “What will it be, old puss? Witch or weevils?”
The weevils had lost their appeal. My own heart had cracked like a stale biscuit. As soon as the gangplank was laid, we bolted, and Marlabask’s beautiful voice, crying out after us, was lost to hearing.
• • • •
We tore through Kinghawk swift as horses and pounded uphill under the shadow of circling hawks.
I could not sense the witch as Bozpo could, but I knew she was here. Memories sang in my pricked ears like the lines of song. I remembered that I had been born on this hillside, beneath the marigold banner. I remembered that I had watched the witch trample the king’s headless body as it lay in the mud. I remembered that she had built her home below the hill five hundred years ago, and for five hundred years she had waged war against the horse-men who had dared try to plow her marshes into fields.
Against five hundred years the life of a cat is as the life of a flea, so I cannot fault the disdain with which she looked at us, when at moonrise we burst into her parlor and stood panting on the sea-damp carpet.
Then came recognition as she dipped her lamp, and with some astonishment she said, “You again, my wicked warrior: I did not think to see you among the living.”
“Death,” cried Bozpo, and we sprang at her.
“Tch!” said the witch. She seized us and held us fast.
The ground rippled, as though we were still upon the open sea. Our yowls were choked as if by icy water.
“Bloodthirsty as ever,” the witch remarked into the gurgling silence. “Let’s see how you fare without your weapons.”
Depositing us carelessly outside, she closed the door in our stupefied faces, warning us to be wary of salt, herons, and the cold.
• • • •
The hawk-shadows loomed large, overhead and in my mind. “Into the reeds!” I told Bozpo. Clumsily hopping and shuffling, we made our way to the bracken and looked at our muddy reflections.
There were frogs in the water, one black, one white, and Bozpo struck at them, shouting at them to be gone. But they did not heed him, and as the ripples faded, Bozpo raised his paw in the moonlight and saw what it had become: a frogpaw, black as muck.
“What has she done?” he demanded, in a trill that pierced the marsh.
“Quiet,” I said. “Recall the hawks and herons.”
The black frog fell into a crouch, and Bozpo gurgled, “I will kill her for this.”
“An undertaking, already foolhardy, that has increased significantly in difficulty,” I muttered, and I watched the white frog crouch down beside her companion.
I was like a berry in thin skin, ripe to bursting. I thought of the puncturing sharpness of the heron’s beak. I thought of the impending winter that would put us to sleep in the mire and make us easy morsels for hungry springtime hunters, for the weasels and minks, the eagles, the owls, the cats that we had once been.
I thought of the salted sea and my salted sailor, and I blinked at myself with wet yellow eyes.
• • • •
We kept ourselves safe that night by burrowing in the mud. The morning brought a sweet pink light and a mist of vapor and midges, which we spooled into our bellies with tentative licks.
But Bozpo was not content to spend his shortened days stalking gnats. Rolling his froggy eyes balefully toward the witch’s hut, he said, “She does not know her day of reckoning is upon her.”
“She will squash us beneath her shoe,” I said. But it was odd to me to see the witch thus shod, for now I remembered that in days gone by she had walked barefoot, conjuring up cattails in her wake.
“Have you accompanied me through the mountains and over the sea,” Bozpo said, “to wallow and warble and be bred by toads?”
“My breeding days are behind me,” I said, “but your point is made.”
“Why did you come?” asked the frog that was Bozpo. “Why did you come, if not to kill her? I smelled her on you when I followed her stench over the plain. I smell her now, with my heart if not my senses, which are duller than ever . . . ”
“I came to see what had changed,” I said, interrupting his ribbiting lamentation. “I came to see the place of my birth on the eve of my death. Is that not what cats do? For I scented my death, Bozpo, as you scented the witch. Yours is the banner of the Reaper, and I marched beneath it.”
“I do not know what cats do or do not do,” Bozpo said. “I am not like the others. And neither are you, for you will have long years ahead of you, once we accomplish this thing.”
“I do not intend to drink of anyone’s teat,” I said, teasing, and then we fell silent, for there were footsteps on the path.
• • • •
The man in the marsh was no stranger to us: it was Marlabask, tawny as marigolds, who plodded through the mud and beat his fist upon the witch’s door. And she answered, coyly, his black-eyed mistress, in a robe of lace like metal filigree.
“You have taken your time,” she said.
“I dared not come to you at midnight,” said Marlabask, shuddering. “That is the witching hour, is it not?”
“Every hour is the witching hour,” she said, “when you are the witch. Come in, my darling,” and he did, but he left the door ajar.
We bounced after him, splashing in our haste. There on the carpet we watched him kneel before her, and we watched the parting of her fine robes, as she took her soap-white breast in hand and offered it to him in the manner of a lover, but he did not suckle; he merely bowed his head.
“There is a winter voyage,” he murmured. “An ice-breaking vessel has been commissioned to take the Kinghawk’s fleet north, and I would like to be on it. It would be a journey of three years, maybe four.”
“My pet,” said the witch, “I begin to suspect you of divided loyalties. Remember who it was that made you.”
“Yes,” said Marlabask, but still he would not drink.
“Was she happy with her present?” said the witch suddenly. She tucked her breast away behind the filigree, and Marlabask sagged in relief. “The Kinghawk.”
I knew she meant the lockbox, those moonwashed pearls. Marlabask said, “Yes, but you will have to find some other way to ensorcel her, for she would not wear them.”
“Tch,” said the witch. “And I suppose you did not exert yourself to persuade her. Do not tell me, ‘I am a sailor, not a seducer.’”
“I will tell you that you would do better to go yourself,” Marlabask said. “In this skimpy costume of yours, if you so desire. Old though you are, it would have wondrous effect. She would eat you with her eyes and let you put upon her whatever pearls, whatever chains, you pleased.” And softly he muttered, “I do not understand why you do not curse her from afar, but send me continually to do your bidding.”
“I might do better to send you,” said the witch with equal softness, “in these robes, as the little maid you were when you first came to me. You are bound to me, Marlabask, and will remain so unto death.”
A flash, a sparkle. Between her breasts sprouted the hilt of a sailor’s rigging knife. Marlabask held it in his two trembling hands.
“My enchantments may be fading,” said the witch, unflinching, “but they have life in them still. Kill me now and you will end everything prematurely: you will end yourself.”
Marlabask wept as he pushed. His blade sank into her, as if into a soft white cheese.
“She sends him because she is weak,” Bozpo rasped to me. His eyes were wide beneath the cobwebs. “She is like you, she is old and dying, she will not leave the confines of her home.”
But we could not wait for time to kill the witch. We saw the white lash of her magic around the neck of my sailor. We saw her force him to the ground; we saw her sit upon him. We saw his strong brown hands scrabbling in the dirt.
“I see,” said the witch, “that you wish to be unmade.”
“You may have made me,” gasped Marlabask, “but I named myself.”
As the witch opened her mouth to laugh at him, I threw myself down her throat.
• • • •
It is a strange country, the belly of a witch. There is no time, no season. All is dripping dread. But I was not alone in my wandering, for Bozpo came with me, came after me, outpaced me, bellowing, “Death!”
In her gullet we began to change. She changed us: into mice, into fleas. I floundered, but Bozpo bit and scratched. No matter his form, he fought like a wolf. Like a cat.
Her stomach spasmed around us, sought to heave us out, but we dug into her, as bats, as beetles. Her body became a cavern, her long white fingers stretched after us like snakes, and we chewed them to stumps.
Then I lost Bozpo in the turmoil, in the tumbling of blood and bile. Her blundering hand closed around me and dragged me into daylight.
And dropped me. She lay dying. She died in Marlabask’s lap, dribbling blood through white lips.
With the rigging knife we cut her open. We found Bozpo in a cage of her bones. Her heart was between his teeth. It seized once and stopped, and a sob went through the marsh, left now without the witch’s protection.
I lifted him. I cradled him like a child. I whispered his name as, awestruck, Marlabask whispered mine.
• • • •
The witch’s enchantments had died with her, and we were our true selves again. Marlabask remained unchanged, a sun-dark sailor, and Bozpo was Bozpo, a fearsome black cat, and I—
“How is it that you know me?” I asked Marlabask. “It has been some thirty years since I set foot in this country.”
“I have seen your portrait,” he answered. “It hangs in the room where your brother’s daughter signs her decrees. And you look like her: you, the last warrior under the marigold. We are hawks now, of course; we fly over the sea. I was a child when you disappeared. But I never thought you dead, only wandering.”
“There is truth in that.” I looked at the body by my feet, the pooling robe of filigree. I could remember myself now, a woman in pearly armor howling for the witch’s head. A head for a head: my father’s head, which she had sent spinning across the yellow plain. In those days the witch had no home but roamed wild in the marsh.
If you wish to be a warrior, I will make you one, she had cried. With a snap of her fingers, armor and general had vanished, and a scarred white cat had slunk through the reeds, the witch’s raucous laughter ringing in its tattered ears. A perfect warrior with weapons of bone!
The perfect warrior stirred against my chest. Bozpo’s eyes blinked open, then shut again.
“I thought you were a princess,” he said. “You are neither young nor beautiful.”
“Life’s full of disappointments,” I said. “I’d offer you my teat, but there’s nothing in it. Nor am I a witch, Bozpo Witch-Bane, so just you keep your claws to yourself.”
Very formally, Marlabask said, “General, may I escort you home?”
• • • •
With Marlabask before me and Bozpo in my arms, I walked through the forest, slicing my naked flesh on stones and thorns. There were jeers in the streets from those who did not recognize me. But soon the cries fell away, and on the steps of the house that had belonged to my father, Ygrit Solenar, the Kinghawk, unadorned, bowed before me until her black hair swept the stones.
I had never met her before. When I galloped into the marsh, my brother was a boy of fifteen, his wife a girl playing with toy dragons in a foreign port.
“We have changed tactics since your time,” the Kinghawk said, ushering us inside. “We seek to explore the frozen realms, spilling no blood upon their pristine shores. Marlabask may have mentioned the fleet. If you have thoughts, I welcome them.”
Her stare was unwavering but wary. I suspected any thoughts of mine about Ygrit Solenar’s ice-bound fleet, however anodyne, would be unwelcome indeed.
“But perhaps,” the Kinghawk said, “you would like to get dressed first. Your old quarters . . . ”
“I remember the way.”
She bowed again. Marlabask bowed too and receded.
• • • •
Carrying Bozpo, I climbed the stairs to my dusty bedchamber, where I dressed myself in the soft white robes of a courtier. Bozpo leapt to the ground and gazed at me with his glass-green eyes.
“I am hungry,” he said. “I am bored.”
“In the cellars there are many creatures ripe for massacre,” I told him. “There are rats as big as cats and spiders as big as dogs. In the eyrie there are falcons with talons like knives. Kill one and it will not be missed. Kill two and notice will be taken. Kill three and my brother’s daughter will have you trussed up like a turkey and thrown into the sea.
“In the great hall, there is a fire and a sailor who sings stories, and I am going to sit beside him.”