Chapter Two: Smile’s Debt
The road down into Pate was not a road so much as a suggestion the hillside had made and then thought better of. It wound between hedges of purple thistle taller than Codette’s head, past stone gateposts with cat faces carved into them — each one grinning, each one slightly different, as if the mason had been told to make a hundred cats and had refused to repeat himself. The lanterns that lined the way were not lit by anyone she could see. They simply glowed, soft and amber, and brightened by a few degrees as she and Smile passed beneath each one, like the lamps were nodding hello.
“They do that for everybody,” Smile said, when he caught her staring. “Don’t read into it.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were. Your whole face does this thing.” He did an impression of it, eyes wide, mouth slightly open, and Codette felt her ears go warm. “It’s fine. Everyone does it their first night. Mostly the cats who fall out of delivery wagons, but still.”
The sky had not changed. That was what she kept coming back to. Her watch said it was almost six o’clock, which meant the evening in her own world would be sliding toward dinner, toward the smell of her mother’s cooking and the sound of her little brother arguing with the television — but here the same orange-purple sunset hung over everything, unmoving, as though somebody had pressed pause on the day and walked away. The only sign of time passing was a bell somewhere far off, tolling in slow, uneven strokes.
“It’s always like this?” she asked.
“Always. The sky just doesn’t bother. Don’t ask me why, nobody knows. Cats here tell time by the bells and by how hungry they are, which, to be fair, is more reliable than clocks.” He glanced up at her, and then at the swinging strap of her backpack, and then at her stomach, which chose that exact moment to growl loudly enough to startle a moth off a lamppost. “Right. Food. That’s the first thing, then.”
He did not take her through the center of town. Instead he led her along a crooked back lane that skirted the edge of the settlement, where the cottages thinned into sheds and woodpiles and one enormous, sagging windmill whose sails turned slowly in a wind Codette couldn’t feel. Smile stopped at its base and rapped three times on the door, then once, then twice.
Nothing happened.
“Nobody’s home,” he said. “Perfect. The miller left last winter. Moved to the coast. Said the quiet got to him.” He shouldered the door open, and a smell of old grain and dry straw rolled out into the evening. “It’s not much, but it’s got a loft, and the loft’s got hay, and nobody’s going to wander in and ask what kind of cat you are.”
Inside, the mill was a cathedral of dust. Shafts of orange light fell through high, grimy windows and lay across wooden gears as big as cartwheels, long idle, furred with cobwebs. A ladder led up to a platform piled with golden hay. Smile scaled it in two bounds. Codette followed, slower, her sneakers slipping on the rungs, and when she reached the top he was already rummaging in his leather satchel, which she realized for the first time was much larger on the inside than it had any right to be.
“Here.” He tossed something at her. She caught it against her chest. A round, flat bun, still faintly warm, with a pat of something yellow melting in its middle. “Cheese bun. Don’t ask where I got it. It’s a clean bun. I’m ninety percent sure it’s a clean bun.”
“Ninety percent?”
“I’m not going to lie to you, Codette. I’m many things. Honest isn’t always one of them, but I’m trying.”
It was the first time he had said her name. She had told it to him on the walk down, between the thistle hedges, and he had said “Weird name” and not repeated it since. Now it sat in the air between them, a small, odd thing, and neither of them mentioned it.
She ate the bun. It was, as it turned out, the best thing she had ever tasted — warm and salty and so much more than she’d been prepared for that she had to swallow hard around the sudden tightness in her throat. Smile busied himself with the satchel again, pointedly not looking at her, and she was grateful for that, grateful in a way she couldn’t have put into words.
She couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t the hay, which was warm and smelled of summer, or the old windmill’s slow creaking, which settled around her like a lullaby for something very large. It was the quiet underneath it all — the kind of quiet that gives your thoughts nowhere to hide. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the empty lot behind the Hendricks place, and her mother standing in it with a flashlight, and her little brother holding the dog’s leash and not understanding why everyone was shouting.
She curled on her side, pulled her hoodie around her knees, and watched the loft’s single window turn from orange to a deeper, dustier red as the town’s bells tolled out another hour she couldn’t measure.
Smile had not come up to sleep.
He had arranged a nest of hay for her in the far corner, snorted when she tried to thank him, and then gone back down the ladder with the air of someone who has remembered an errand. She had assumed he’d curled up somewhere below. But when she crept to the edge of the loft and peered down through the slats, she found him sitting on the mill floor with his back to the ladder, facing the front door, perfectly upright, tail wrapped around his feet. Not asleep. Not even pretending to be.
A gust of wind rattled the door in its frame.
Smile was on his feet before the sound had finished. He didn’t hiss or arch or make any show of it; he simply stood, very still, ears swiveled toward the entrance, and placed himself directly between the door and the foot of the ladder. He held that pose for a long moment. The wind died. Slowly, slowly, he sat again — and caught her looking.
“Go to sleep,” he said, without turning around.
“You’re awake.”
“Cats are nocturnal. That’s a thing. It’s called being a cat.” He flicked an ear. “I’m stretching. This is just my stretching position.”
“You’ve been sitting like that for two hours.”
“Long stretch.”
Codette bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “Who are you waiting for?”
“Nobody.”
“Smile.”
He was silent for a while. Down in the mill the great wooden gears ticked faintly as the temperature changed. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter and had lost most of its edge. “The wild hounds come over the town wall sometimes, at night, when the bells slow down. Most of the time they just steal bread. Sometimes they follow a scent.” His tail twitched once. “You smell very new. That’s all. It’s not— it’s not a big deal. I just don’t want anyone walking in here and finding a surprise.”
“A surprise.”
“A human-shaped one. In a yellow coat. Very difficult to explain.”
She lay back in the hay and stared up at the old rafters, where a family of moths was holding what looked like a very small, very serious meeting. Somewhere in her chest, something that had been clenched all day eased a notch.
“Thank you,” she said again, and this time he didn’t snort.
A minute passed. Then two.
“Don’t mention it,” he said at last, so softly she almost missed it. “Seriously. Don’t. If any of the others hear I’m going soft I’ll never get another card game.”
A branch scraped against the mill wall outside, and he was up again, a pale shape against the dark, standing in front of the ladder as if he’d never sat down at all.
Codette watched him until her eyes grew heavy. The last thing she remembered before sleep finally took her was the line of his back against the dim light of the doorway, steady as a post, and the thought — warm and strange and impossible to examine too closely — that for the first time since the forest swallowed her, she was not alone.
She woke to the smell of fish.
Not a bad smell, exactly, but a persistent one, and it took her a groggy moment to locate its source: Smile, crouched at the end of her hay nest with a small tin in his paws, picking out slivers of something silver and glistening and eating them with a precision that looked almost ceremonial.
“Morning,” he said, with his mouth full. “Or what passes for it. The sky’s still the same, but the bell’s rung six times, which means the bakers are up, which means the day has officially started and I’m legally allowed to be grumpy.”
Codette sat up, pulling bits of hay from her hair. Her neck ached. Her stomach, to her surprise, did not. “Did you sleep?”
“Like a kitten.”
“Smile.”
“A very small amount. Like a kitten who has seen things.” He put the lid back on the tin, wiped his whiskers with the back of one paw, and then did something she hadn’t expected: he went quiet, and the brisk morning edge slid out of his voice all at once. “Okay. I need to tell you something, and I need you to not do the thing with your face.”
“What thing?”
“The thing where you look like I just kicked a puppy.” He sat up straighter. “I’m not going to take you to Mount Banana.”
The words hung there. Codette felt them land, one at a time, and did her best to keep her expression exactly where it was.
“I know what I said last night,” Smile continued, quickly, the way people talk when they’re afraid of being interrupted. “I walked you down here. I got you a bun. I’m not— look, I’m not abandoning you, I’m telling you the truth, which is different. I don’t believe the Cat Witch is real. Nobody’s ever seen her. The ones who go up that mountain don’t come back, and I mean none of them, not the brave ones, not the clever ones, not the ones who packed extra socks. I’m not leading you up there to die for a fairy tale. I can’t.”
“You don’t have to believe in her,” Codette said evenly. “I just need to find out.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Then I guess I’ll be one more.” She tucked her hair behind her ears, and was a little surprised to discover her hands weren’t shaking. Somewhere between last night’s bun and this morning’s tin of fish, the panic had burned down into something steadier and colder. “Smile. I’m not asking you to come. I asked you where I’d find directions, and you’ve been — you’ve been really good to me. More than you had to be. I’m not going to forget that.”
He made a small, strained noise that might have been a laugh. “You’re going to make this hard.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“That’s what makes it worse.” He reached into the satchel and pulled out two glass bottles. The first was a fat, heavy flask that sloshed when he moved; he looked at it, patted it once like an old friend, and tucked it back out of sight. The second was a small vial no bigger than her thumb, stoppered with cork and wax, filled with a faintly shimmering green liquid. “Catnip essence. The big flask stays with me — I’ve got plans for it. But this one’s yours. Spray it on your sleeves, your collar, the back of your neck, twice a day if you can. It’ll cover your scent. To any cat who doesn’t look too hard, you’ll smell like one of us.”
She turned the vial in her fingers. It was warm from being inside the satchel, and it smelled astonishing — grassy and bright and almost dizzyingly sweet, like the first day of spring distilled into a drop. “Won’t it make me—”
“No. You’re not a cat. It’ll just make you smell like one. Probably. I’ve never tested it on a human.” At her expression: “Kidding. Mostly.”
He made her practice the story three times. “You’re a Golden — a shorthair from down south, from the grain country. Shy. Doesn’t talk much, because the southern accent is very embarrassing, and anyone who asks gets nothing but a nod. Keep your hood up. If somebody asks about the ears, they’re a family heirloom.”
The ears. She had nearly forgotten them: the two small triangles of yellow felt her aunt had stitched onto the hood of this hoodie two Christmases ago as a joke, after the fifth time Codette had come home covered in cat hair from one of her kittens. She had threatened to rip them off a dozen times. Now, tugging the hood down over her curls, she found herself grateful to a woman she hadn’t called in months.
“One more thing,” Smile said. “And this is the important one.” He looked at her very directly, and for the first time since she’d met him, there was no joke anywhere in his face. “Don’t go into the town center by yourself. There are guards at every crossing who sniff for strangers, and the market’s full of cats who’ll sell a rumor for a fish. If you have to get across, you go through fast, you keep your head down, you don’t stop to talk to anyone. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Good.” He stood. He hesitated, tail drooping for a second, then straightening again as though he’d caught himself at something. “Good luck, then. With the— with all of it. Try not to die.”
“Try not to get into trouble,” she said.
He laughed at that, a real laugh this time, short and surprised. “I’m very bad at that,” he said, and went down the ladder without looking back.
Codette sat for a long time with the vial in her hand, listening to his footsteps recede across the mill floor and out into the strange, unchanging light. Then she shouldered her backpack, sprayed her collar twice, and followed him out the door — not after him, she told herself firmly, just in the same general direction.
The Rusty Whisker had been Smile’s favorite tavern in Pate for exactly as long as it had been willing to extend him credit, which was to say, until about three weeks ago.
It sat at the bottom of Gutter Lane, a low, crooked building with a hand-painted sign of a cat’s face missing one whisker, and it smelled the way every good tavern smelled — of warm spiced milk, old wood, and the slightly desperate sweat of people betting more than they owned. Smile slid through the door at what the bells called mid-morning and was greeted by the familiar roar: dice rattling in cups, mugs thumping on tables, somebody at the back doing a truly terrible fiddle impression of a tune that had been popular a decade ago.
He felt better the moment he crossed the threshold. That was the problem with taverns. They were designed to.
“Smile!” the barkeep called, a heavyset tuxedo cat with a spotless apron and a face like a closed door. “Thought you’d left town.”
“Never. Pate would collapse without me.” He slid onto a stool and laid out three tarnished coins. “Silvermilk, please. Small. And I’d like a seat at the dice table.”
The barkeep looked at the coins. Then at Smile. Then, with the weariness of someone who has watched a lot of cats do exactly this, he poured the drink.
It was a very small drink. Smile wasn’t here for the drink.
The dice table sat at the back, in a smoky corner where the lamplight pooled yellow and the games ran longer than they should. Smile took a seat between a one-eared ginger who smelled of mackerel and an enormous gray with a very small hat, pulled out his last six coins, and told himself what he always told himself, which was that tonight would be the night his luck turned.
It wasn’t tonight. It was morning, technically. But the principle held.
He lost the first round, won the second, lost the third and fourth in a way that made the ginger snicker and the gray hat-wearer shake his enormous head with something very close to pity. By the fifth round he was down to two coins and a bad feeling.
A chair scraped beside him.
“You’ve got the look,” said a voice like gravel in a velvet bag. “The look of a cat who’s one roll from either glory or ruin.”
The cat who’d taken the seat was ancient — truly ancient, with a coat that had gone from tabby to a kind of pewter gray, one eye clouded over to a milky blue, and a tail that seemed to have lost a fight with a door sometime during the last century. He held a tiny saucer in both paws and sipped from it delicately.
“Everyone in this place has the look,” Smile said. “It’s the lighting.”
“Ha.” The old cat’s one good eye glittered. “You owe Nack, don’t you.”
Smile’s whiskers went flat. “Does it show?”
“Everything shows, son. That’s the thing about debt. It gets into the walk.” The old cat set the saucer down. “I’ve been watching you stumble in here every day for a month. Forty Cat Coins, I hear. A big number for a cat who can’t keep six in his pocket.”
“Thanks for the support.”
“I’m not here to support you. I’m here to sell you a story.” He leaned closer, and his voice dropped to a murmur. “You ever hear of the Valley of His Majesty?”
“The mad king. Everyone’s heard of the mad king.”
“Do you know what he sleeps on?”
Smile didn’t answer. Something in his chest had gone very still.
“A mountain,” the old cat whispered. “A mountain of Cat Coins, piled so high it scrapes the ceiling of his hall. Every coin the Kingdom’s ever minted, they say, and a few that were never minted at all. Forty coins wouldn’t be a drop of it. You could pay off Nack a hundred times over. A thousand.”
“If you can get past the mad king.”
“If.” The old cat smiled, and it was a terrible, knowing smile. “There’s always an if.”
Smile’s mind was already racing. A mountain of coins. It was the kind of story every cat in Pate had heard a hundred times and half-believed, like the Cat Witch, like the rumor that the stream turned to cream on the first night of spring. But it wasn’t the story that pulled at him. It was the place. The Valley of His Majesty lay on the road to Mount Banana — which was exactly the road a certain stubborn girl in a yellow hoodie was about to walk, alone, with a vial of catnip and no map.
He pushed the thought away. He had made a decision. He had made it for good reasons, sound reasons, reasons he’d rehearsed on the walk here. He did not go to Mount Banana. Nobody did. A cat who wanted to keep his fur learned that early.
He was still telling himself this when the tavern door banged open.
It did not slam, exactly. It opened with the kind of deliberate force that said the person doing it was in no hurry and wanted everyone to know. The fiddle at the back stopped mid-note. A mug rolled off a table somewhere and no one picked it up.
Five cats stood in the doorway, and the one at the front was a Bengal — sleek and heavy-shouldered, his golden coat marked with dark rosettes like coins, a gold chain looped around his neck and a vest of dark red leather buttoned over his chest. His eyes were the color of old brass. He did not look angry. That was the worst part. He looked patient.
“Smile,” said Nack.
The old cat beside Smile was already gone. The one-eared ginger studied his dice with immense concentration. The gray with the hat discovered a pressing engagement at the bar.
Smile stood up slowly. “Nack. What a surprise. I was just about to come find you.”
“No, you weren’t.” Nack strolled forward, his boots — he wore boots, tiny, immaculate ones — clicking on the floorboards. Two of his lieutenants peeled off to flank the table. “Forty Cat Coins, Smile. Due three weeks ago. I’ve been generous. I’ve been patient. And I’ve been hearing, from a number of people, that you’ve been seen out in the open, laughing, gambling, living your life. As though you didn’t owe a thing.”
“I can explain.”
“I’m sure you can.” Nack smiled, which was somehow worse. “Come outside and explain it properly.”
A paw closed on Smile’s shoulder, and then another. He was being walked toward the door, not roughly, but with the calm inevitability of a tide. In the middle of it all, while his heart hammered and his tail bristled and every instinct he owned screamed run, one thought rose above the noise, sharp and clear and utterly inconvenient.
“Wait,” Smile said. “One question. Just one. Did any of you see a girl on the way in? A small cat, goldish, in a yellow coat, heading for the north road?”
The lieutenants exchanged looks. Nack stopped walking.
“You are about to be shaved bald and thrown over the wall to the hounds,” he said slowly, “and you want to know about a girl.”
“I need to know she got out.” The words were out before Smile could stop them, and then there was nothing to do but stand there with them hanging in the air, absurd and bare. “That’s all. If she’s out of town, I’ll come quietly. I won’t even bite anyone.”
Nack studied him for a long, flat moment. Then something shifted in his brass eyes, a small, cold gleam of interest.
“A girl,” he repeated. “Interesting. I think we’ll ask around.”
Smile’s stomach dropped to the floor. Behind them, unseen, the tavern door stood open to the dim gold light of the lane, and a small figure in a yellow hood paused in the doorway, one hand still gripping the frame.
Codette had followed her instructions, and she wanted that on the record.
She had avoided the town center for nearly an hour. She had gone around the Old Mill, down a lane lined with woodpiles, and along a shallow canal where a family of otter-cats was doing laundry on the stones. She had kept her head down and her hood up. She had sprayed her collar twice and felt, in a distinctly unflattering way, like a bottle of air freshener walking upright. And at the end of that hour, the lane she’d been following had ended at a canal too wide to jump, with a single narrow bridge crossing it — a bridge that fed straight into a bustling square crowded with market stalls, and a sign that read, in curling script she somehow understood: PATE MARKET — ALL ROADS NORTH.
So she had gone in.
Fast. Keeping her head down. Not stopping to talk to anyone. Exactly like he said.
It was working, too, right up until she heard the name.
“— said the white one was in the Whisker again. Smile. The one who owes Nack.”
“Forty coins, I heard. He’s done for.”
“Shame. He was good with a rope.”
Codette stopped walking.
The two cats talking — a pair of fishmongers in oilskin aprons, leaning on a stall heaped with silver-scaled things she didn’t want to identify — had already moved on to the price of eels. She stood in the middle of the street while the market swirled around her, and a small, sensible voice in the back of her head said: You promised. You promised you wouldn’t. He told you not to. He told you he wasn’t coming. You have a mountain to find.
Another voice, smaller and much less sensible, said: He sat up all night in front of a door.
She was running before she’d decided to.
Gutter Lane was easy to find; everyone she passed seemed to be drifting toward it, sniffing the air, the way people do when a fight is coming. By the time she reached the Rusty Whisker, a crowd had gathered, and the door stood wide open. She slid between a pair of gossiping cats in matching waistcoats and reached the threshold just in time to hear a voice she didn’t know say, smooth and chilly, “A girl. Interesting. I think we’ll ask around.”
Then she saw Smile.
He was standing in the middle of the tavern with a cat’s paw on each shoulder, his white fur dull in the lamplight, his tail hanging low. And in front of him, tall and sleek and golden, with a vest the color of dried blood and a look in his eyes like a cat who has already decided how the evening ends, stood the cat who had to be Nack.
Her stomach turned over. She hadn’t planned this far. She hadn’t planned at all. She had four things on her person: a half-empty vial of catnip, a French textbook, a pencil case, and a phone with sixty-one percent battery and no signal.
And the one thing she’d always been told she had too much of: nerve.
Codette took a breath, squared her shoulders under the yellow hood, and walked into the tavern.
“Excuse me,” she said.
The room did a strange thing. It turned, all at once, like a field of flowers toward the sun. Smile’s head came up and she saw his eyes widen, saw the word run form silently on his mouth and then die when she gave him the smallest, firmest shake of her head.
“I’m looking for the cat who runs the debts around here,” she said. Her voice came out higher than she’d wanted, and she pitched it lower, deliberately, in the half-mumble of a very shy, very southern cat. “The Bengal. Is that you?”
Nack’s brass eyes traveled over her slowly: hood, ears, jeans, backpack. “And who might you be?”
“A courier.” She’d had approximately four seconds to invent this and was proud of how plausible it sounded. “From the Valley. His Majesty sent me. He’s heard this cat owes you money, and he’d like to — to settle the matter personally. Free of charge.”
The tavern held its breath. Nack’s whiskers flickered.
“His Majesty,” he said, “doesn’t concern himself with the affairs of Gutter Lane.”
“He’s very fond of Smile,” Codette said, with all the calm she could dredge from some deep reserve she hadn’t known she possessed. “He’d hate to see anything happen to his favorite jester.”
“His favorite jester,” Nack repeated flatly, and glanced at Smile.
“I am very funny,” Smile said weakly.
It was almost working. She could see it — see the doubt creeping behind Nack’s eyes, the hesitation in the lieutenants’ grip. And then Nack took one step toward her, two, and his nostrils flared, and Codette realized with a plunge that he was smelling her, really smelling her, past the catnip, past the fabric, past the story.
“You,” Nack said softly, “don’t smell like the Valley.”
He reached out and caught the edge of her hood.
She didn’t think. She had a half second, maybe less, and her hand was already in her backpack, closing around the cool glass rectangle in the front pocket. She pulled it out, thumbed the screen awake, and pressed the flashlight icon with her left hand while her right slammed the volume all the way up and tapped the alarm she’d set for 6:45 every morning for two years, the one with the cheerful, hideous, impossible-to-ignore jingle.
Light exploded out of her palm — a hard, white, blinding star, five times brighter than anything in the lamplit tavern. And beneath it, rising shrill and manic and unholy in the small enclosed room, came the sound.
It was the loudest, shrillest, most nonsensical noise any cat in the Kingdom of Pate had ever heard. It chirped. It whooped. It repeated itself at twice the speed of sound.
“A SCREAMING STAR!” someone howled.
Nack let go of her hood as if it had burned him. His lieutenants dropped Smile and shot straight up toward the rafters, claws scrabbling for the beams. A table went over. Then another. The gray cat with the tiny hat was under the bar. The ginger was on top of the chandelier. A barrage of dice and mugs and a flung bowl of something orange rained across the floor.
“Run!” Codette shouted, though she couldn’t hear herself over the jingle.
Smile was already moving. He hit her at a sprint, seized her wrist in a grip that was impossibly strong for a creature his size, and the two of them tore out of the tavern, through the astonished crowd on Gutter Lane, with the shrieking light still blazing in her hand and Nack’s furious voice following them down the street.
“The moon, Smile! You have until the moon is round again! And then I send the hounds!”
They did not stop until the bells had rung twice and the noise of the market had shrunk to a faint murmur behind them. Smile dragged her through a gap in a garden wall, across a lane of potted ferns, and into a narrow brick alley so crowded with stacked barrels and hanging laundry that no one passing the end of it would see more than a flicker of gold light and a drift of dust.
He let go of her wrist. She slid down the wall until she was sitting among the barrels, lungs burning, her phone still clutched against her chest, its jingle finally, mercifully, cut off by the sudden stillness.
The screen flickered. The flashlight sputtered out. A small, sad battery icon blinked red in the corner — one percent — and then, with a faint electronic sigh, the whole thing went dark.
Codette stared at it.
It was only a phone. It was the same cracked-corner, slightly sticky phone she’d had for two years. But the lock screen had held a photo of her mother laughing at the kitchen table, her brother hanging off her shoulders, a snapshot from last summer that Codette had snapped without warning. She had been carrying that picture around all day like a pocket-sized hearth. Now it was gone, and she hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to it.
“Hey.” Smile’s voice had lost every ounce of its usual swagger. “Hey. It’s— that thing. Is it broken?”
“It’s out of power.” Her voice cracked in the middle, and she hated it. “It’s fine. It’s just a phone.”
“It looked like a lot more than a phone.”
She laughed, a wet, ragged sound. “It saved your life.”
“I’m aware.” He sat down across from her, slowly, as if the movement hurt. For the first time she noticed a long scrape along his left shoulder where one of Nack’s lieutenants must have caught him, and a bruise coming up purple beneath the white fur. “I’m very, very aware. And I’m also very, very angry at you.”
“At me?”
“I told you not to go into town.”
“You told me not to go into town alone.”
“That is the same— that is exactly the same—” He threw up both paws. “You promised. I made you promise. I specifically, in so many words, told you to keep your head down and not stop for anyone, and you walked into a tavern full of every cat in Pate who’d happily sell you out for a fish, and you told Nack to his face that you worked for the mad king!”
“It was a good lie.”
“It was a magnificent lie! It was the best lie I’ve ever heard! It was going to get you killed!” His voice cracked on the last word, and he stopped, breathing hard. For a moment neither of them said anything.
“You asked about me,” Codette said quietly. “When they took you. I heard. You were about to get shaved and thrown to the dogs, and the first thing you asked was whether I’d gotten out.”
Smile looked away. The tips of his ears had gone faintly pink beneath the fur. “That’s — it’s not — I just wanted to know if my investment had paid off.”
“Your investment.”
“A bun. And some catnip. Not nothing.”
“Smile.”
He went quiet. Somewhere above them, a sheet snapped in the wind, and a drop of water fell from a clothesline and rolled down a barrel in a slow, glittering line.
“I had a head start,” Codette said, “and I could’ve kept going. I know that. I had the whole north road in front of me.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “But I don’t know where the north road goes. I don’t know what’s in the Yarnwood, or how to find a mountain, or what a Valley of His Majesty is supposed to look like. And I’d rather go back and try to help someone who sat up all night guarding a door for me than walk out of here with a clean conscience and no idea where I’m going.”
“That’s the stupidest reason I’ve ever heard.”
“I know.”
“It’s also—” He stopped. Rubbed a paw over his face. Exhaled, long and slow, until all the fight went out of his shoulders. “It’s also the reason I’m still alive. Fine. Fine. You win. I’ll say it. I owe you.”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“I owe you everything, which is a lot worse, because I can’t afford it.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Forty coins to Nack. One round of rescue to you. At this rate I’m going to owe the entire kingdom by the weekend.”
He pulled something from his satchel — a tattered scrap of parchment, much folded, covered in smudged pencil — and smoothed it flat on his knee. “There’s an old cat at the Whisker,” he said, “who told me something this morning. Right before everything went wrong. He says the Valley of His Majesty has a mountain of Cat Coins. A mountain. Enough to pay Nack off a hundred times and still buy the bakery.”
“And you believe him?”
“I believe in a lot of things I shouldn’t. It’s my worst quality.” He tapped the parchment. It was a map, Codette realized — crudely drawn, half of it blotted out with old stains, but unmistakably a map, with a jagged peak in one corner labeled MT. BANANA (????) in a looping, unhappy hand. “The Valley sits right on the road to your mountain. So here’s what I’m thinking. I take you as far as the Valley. We get past the mad king, if he’s real, if he can be reasoned with. I get my coins. You get closer to your witch. And then—” He swallowed. “Then we see.”
“You said you weren’t going to take me to Mount Banana.”
“I’m not taking you to Mount Banana,” Smile said firmly. “I’m taking you to the Valley of His Majesty. For the money. As repayment. That’s a completely different destination.”
“It’s on the same road.”
“It’s a very long road.”
Codette looked at him for a long moment: at the scrape on his shoulder, at the ears that hadn’t quite stopped being pink, at the tail curled so carefully around his feet it looked like it was holding itself together. She thought of a figure standing between a door and a ladder in the dark. She thought of the word run, shaped silently on his mouth, in a tavern full of enemies, for her.
She held out her hand.
“A debt for a debt,” she said.
He stared at her palm as if it might bite. Then, very slowly, he put his paw into it, pad against palm, small and warm and slightly rough. Neither of them let go right away.
“Terrible idea,” Smile murmured.
“Absolutely,” Codette agreed.
They left Pate by the north gate an hour later, slipping through a gap in the wall that Smile swore was used only by the cats who wanted to make a very quiet exit. Beyond it the land opened up in long, golden folds, rolling toward a horizon where a single peak rose, blue and impossibly far, from the haze of the unchanging sunset.
Smile walked a step ahead of her, as he always did. But Codette noticed that every few paces, without ever quite turning his head, he checked to be sure she was still there.
And Smile, who had spent his whole life learning exactly how much a creature could carry before it broke, understood something he would not say aloud for a very long time: he was no longer walking toward a mountain of coins. He was walking beside the only thing he had ever been afraid to lose.