Chapter Five: The Marsh of Claws
Nobody slept.
They had stayed on the ledge through what the desert called night, though there was no night in the Dust Desert, only a long, white, unblinking noon that pressed against Codette’s closed eyelids like a thumb. She lay on her side with Smile’s red scarf bunched under her cheek, listening. Tom and Phillip had withdrawn to the far end of the stone shelf. They were not speaking. Every so often one of them shifted, and the small scrape of a paw on rock would carry across the ledge, and Codette would feel her whole body go tight.
Smile lay beside her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him, with his bandaged leg stretched out and his eyes shut. He wasn’t asleep either. She could tell by the way his ear kept turning toward the others every time they moved. Once, around what might have been the middle of the night, his tail slid slowly across the stone and settled over her wrist, light as a thread, and stayed there until morning.
Neither of them mentioned it.
It was Phillip who spoke first, when the long noon finally tipped into something that might be called dawn. He stood at the edge of the ledge with his satchel clutched to his chest and his spectacles slightly crooked and said, in a voice rubbed raw with lack of sleep, “We’ve decided.”
Codette sat up. Smile opened his eyes.
“We’re going on to the Marsh,” said Tom. He didn’t look at her. He was standing with his back turned, staring out over the endless gold, and his broad shoulders were so stiff they might have been carved. “That’s where the manual is. It’s why I came. I’m not turning back now. But we’re — we’re going to go separately.”
“Tom,” said Smile.
“It’s not a — we’re not leaving you. I mean, we are, but it’s not—” Tom made an angry, helpless gesture. “I need some room. To think. We’ll go in by the west reeds. You take the east. We’ll — we’ll see each other. Probably. It’s the same marsh.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Smile. He had gotten to his feet, swaying a little. His voice was very quiet. “After yesterday? After what she did? You’re going to—”
“I’m not saying she’s bad!” Tom whirled. His eyes were red-rimmed and fierce. “I’m not saying that! I know she isn’t! I know she’s not what the books say! I just — I need time to understand it, Smile! A whole lifetime of hearing one thing and then in one day it’s — it’s all backwards, and I don’t — I don’t know how to—” He broke off. His jaw worked. “Give me time.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Smile,” said Codette.
She’d stood up too. She laid a hand on his shoulder, very lightly. He stopped.
“Let them go,” she said.
“They’re going to walk straight into the most dangerous place in the Kingdom—”
“They’re going because they have to. And so are we.” She looked at Tom’s rigid back, and at the small, miserable figure beside him, who was watching her with an expression she couldn’t read. “It’s okay, Tom. I understand. I’m not angry. I was never angry. You have every right to — to need time.”
Tom’s shoulders jerked, once.
“Phillip,” she said. “Thank you. For the yarrow.”
Phillip looked at his own paws, where he held a small, crushed bundle of green leaves. He seemed to be about to say something. Then, with a visible effort, he stepped forward, set the bundle on the stone at Smile’s feet, and said, in a rush, “For the wound. Mash it with a little water and bind it over the cut. It’ll keep the infection down. I’m — it’s good. It’s good yarrow.”
“Thank you,” said Smile, stiffly.
“I’m very sorry,” said Phillip, and he looked, for one moment, as though he might burst into tears. “I’m so very sorry. I just — I need to—” He swallowed. “Good luck. Both of you. Please be careful. The Marsh is full of — it’s called the Marsh of Claws for a reason.”
And the two of them went down off the ledge and into the dunes, and did not look back.
Codette stood watching until they were small gold specks, and then smaller, and then gone. Her throat ached. A hot, thin wind blew grit across the stone.
“They’ll come back,” said Smile.
“You don’t know that.”
“No.” He leaned a little against her, not quite deliberately, the way a person leans on a wall. “But I know Tom. He’ll sulk for about two days, and then he’ll start missing us, and he’ll pretend it’s the food.”
She laughed. It cracked in the middle, and turned into something wet. Smile said nothing, only shifted a little closer, so that his shoulder was against her arm.
“Come on,” he said at last. “Let’s get that bandage done properly, and go find a marsh.”
The Marsh of Claws began without any warning at all.
One moment the sand under Codette’s sneakers was loose and pale and gritty. The next it was black, damp, and sticky, squelching with every step, and the stinging white glare had given way to a low, brooding, bruise-colored twilight, as though somebody had drawn a lid over the sky. A sour wet smell rolled up off the ground. A fog crept in around her ankles. Ahead, rising out of the mist in long, whispering walls, stood the reeds.
She had seen reeds before. Reeds, in her experience, were soft, green, bendy things that rustled gently and belonged to ponds in public parks, with ducks.
These were not those.
They were taller than a house. They were the dull gray-green of old bronze, and every stalk was edged with a double row of fine, curved, glittering hooks, like the teeth of a saw. They swayed together in the breeze with a sound like a thousand knives being sharpened. One, brushing her sleeve, caught the cloth and tore a clean, neat slit from elbow to cuff.
“Don’t touch them,” said Smile, a beat too late.
“I noticed.”
“That’s why it’s called the Marsh of Claws. Everything in it bites, scratches, stings, or takes a chunk out of you.” He glanced at the slit in her hoodie. “That was just a warning. It’s being polite. Stay on the path.”
“What path?”
“The one I’m about to find.”
He crouched, unwrapped the little tin plate from his belt, and floated the dried reed on a few drops of water. It trembled, wavered, and swung toward the far end of the mist. “North-north-west. Not far. The cave sits on an island in the heart of the Marsh, about a mile in. If Tom’s information is right.” His mouth twisted. “Which, knowing Tom, means it’s seventy percent right and thirty percent something he overheard in a tavern.”
“We could wait for them.”
“We could.” He stood, swaying slightly. “But I don’t think they’re coming, Codette. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.” He glanced down at her. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It’s a little my fault.”
“It’s a very little your fault.”
“I’ll take it.” He gave her a wry, tired half-smile, and she realized, for the first time, that his face had gone slightly gray under the white fur. His right foreleg, bound in a fresh yarrow poultice, was held awkwardly against his side. He walked with a hitch in his step he’d stopped pretending didn’t exist.
“You should rest,” she said.
“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
“That’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“It’s a very little funny.”
“I’ll take that too.”
They went in.
The first hour was misery of a slow, sticky, endlessly wet variety. The path, such as it was, followed a winding ridge of firmer ground between black pools, but it kept vanishing under the water, and every few yards they had to wade. The mud sucked at her sneakers. Things in the water moved, long, pale, silent things that left V-shaped ripples. Bubbles rose and burst with a sound like a muffled laugh. The sky turned slowly darker. Once something huge and green slid out of the reeds beside the path, regarded them with one flat golden eye, and slid back again.
“What was that?” Codette whispered.
“Probably a croc.”
“Probably?”
“There’s a croc, or there’s a cousin of a croc. It doesn’t matter. They’re not interested in us. They’re waiting for the thing that’s worth the effort.” He paused. “I’m not totally sure what that is. I hope it isn’t us.”
She laughed, or tried to. It came out as a squeak.
It was the third hour when it happened.
She never saw the root. It was an old black tangle, half-hidden under the surface of a pool, slick with algae, lying exactly where a person walking carefully, head down, watching the water for crocodiles, would step. Her left foot hit it, shot out sideways, and her whole weight went over on her ankle with a sickening, crunching wrench.
She screamed. She couldn’t help it. White light exploded behind her eyes. She went down hard on one knee in the freezing water and sat there, gasping, clutching her ankle with both hands.
“Codette!” Smile was beside her in an instant. “What? Where?”
“My — my ankle—”
“Let me see.”
“It’s fine, I just — I just twisted it—”
“Stop lying and let me look.”
He knelt in the water, careless of his own bandages, and took her foot in both paws, and touched the ankle with a delicacy that made her bite her lip. His whiskers were drawn forward, his eyes narrowed in concentration. When he pressed on the joint, she hissed.
“Swollen,” said Smile. “Not broken. I don’t think. Can you move your toes?”
She wiggled them.
“Good. That’s good.” He sat back on his heels. “You can’t walk on it.”
“I can—”
“You can’t.”
“Smile, I can’t just sit here—”
“No,” he agreed. He looked at her for a long moment, and then, with the air of someone doing arithmetic he would rather not do, he turned around, and crouched, and presented his back. “Get on.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Get on. I’m going to carry you.”
“You can’t carry me! You’re — you’re about the size of a — you’ve got a hurt arm!”
“I’ve got three other legs. Possibly four. I’ll figure it out.” He glanced over his shoulder. “You’re a very light person. Compared to an anvil.”
“That is the worst compliment I’ve ever—”
“Codette. Get. On.”
She got on.
He staggered, once, as she settled her weight onto his shoulders, and she heard him exhale through his teeth. But then he straightened, adjusted his grip on her knees, and began to walk.
“Heavy?” she said, in a small voice.
“Extremely.”
“I can get down.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s character-building.” A pause. “You’re much heavier than you look, by the way.”
“Smile.”
“I’m just reporting facts. It’s all those bones. And the, ah, the hoodie. It’s the sodden hoodie. It weighs about forty pounds.”
“It does not!”
“It’s the density of your principles, then.”
She leaned her forehead against the back of his head and bit down on a laugh that sounded halfway to a sob. His fur was warm and smelled of dust and catnip. She could feel his heartbeat, fast and steady, under her chin.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
“I know.”
“You could leave me. Go find the others. You’d get there faster.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why—”
“Because I said I wouldn’t.” He kept walking. His voice was low and even. “I don’t make a lot of promises. I’m not a promise-keeping sort of cat. Ask anyone. Ask Nack. But when I make one — and this is true, I’m not just saying it, it’s an odd quirk — I find I can’t stop. Like a splinter.” He sighed. “It’s a problem. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for years.”
She was quiet for a while. The reeds rustled. Water dripped from somewhere very far away, plink, plink, plink.
“Why did you never stay anywhere?” she asked.
“Hm?”
“You told me you were a nomad. That you’d never had a home. I always wondered—”
“Ah.”
He didn’t say anything for a long minute. She thought he wasn’t going to. Then, in a voice so quiet it was almost lost in the reeds, he said:
“My mother died when I was small. We lived in a little town in the hills. I don’t remember much. A kitchen. A smell of bread. After that I went from house to house, and everyone was kind, and nobody kept me, because there wasn’t room, and then I got bigger and stopped being cute.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “So I thought: well. If I’m going to be left anyway, I may as well be the one who does the leaving.”
“Smile—”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. It’s a good system. It works. You can’t be abandoned if you’ve always already gone.” His grip on her knees tightened, just slightly. “I’m only telling you because you asked. And because — hm. Because I think I’m a bit tired of it.”
Codette’s chest felt strangely full. She reached forward, awkwardly, and laid her hand flat between his shoulder blades.
“I’m not going to leave you,” she said.
“You can’t promise that.”
“I just did.”
A pause. His shoulders moved, very slightly. When he spoke again, his voice was rough.
“That’s my line.”
“I know,” said Codette. “I borrowed it.”
He said nothing. But she felt it, when his stride, which had been halting and uneven for the past hour, steadied, as though something in him had finally set down a weight.
The cave stood on an island in the heart of the Marsh.
They came on it slowly, through a last, thick curtain of fog that peeled back all at once to reveal a hump of dark, rounded rock rising out of a ring of black water. A narrow causeway of flat stepping-stones led out to it. At the far end, black against the dim sky, a great stone archway had been carved into the cliff, taller than a cathedral door and carved all over with spiraling, clawed designs: swirls of paw prints, rows of curved talons, the long sinuous shapes of cats mid-leap. It was ancient. It was beautiful. And in front of it, on a smooth flat dais of stone, something had been left lying in the middle of the path.
“Bones,” said Smile quietly.
Codette peered down from his back. A scatter of small, pale, brittle shapes. A rib cage. A skull, no bigger than her fist, with long, curved canine teeth.
“Cat,” she said.
“Not all of them.” He nudged one with his foot. It was larger, and blunt, and flat-faced. “And not all of them died of old age.”
He set her down, very gently, on a patch of dry stone, and propped her against a boulder. Then he walked a few paces forward and stood still, ears swiveling, nose lifting. He looked, she thought, like a cat who had just smelled something.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“Dog.”
The word fell between them like a stone.
“There are — dogs?”
“There’s always dogs,” said Smile. His voice was very calm. “That’s what the old stories say. Whoever put that manual there, they didn’t leave it lying around. It’s guarded.” He drew a long breath. “I can smell two. One big, one—” His nose twitched. “Smaller. Flatter. Angrier. Don’t make any sudden—”
A growl rolled out of the cave.
It was a deep, wet, rumbling sound, so low that it seemed to come up through the soles of Codette’s feet. Then another answered it, higher, nastier, with a snuffling, choking rasp, like a pair of bellows with a fault.
Two shapes stepped out of the darkness of the archway.
The first was huge. It was the size of a small pony, with a barrel chest and a blunt, square, scarred head, and a coat of short, thick, brindled fur the color of wet slate. It wore a leather collar studded with iron spikes. Its eyes were small and yellow and totally without mercy.
The second was black. It was low, and stocky, and wrinkled, with a flat pushed-in face and bulging eyes, and drool hung in long ropes from its jowls. It was almost comical. It was a pug. She’d have laughed if she’d seen it on a leash in a park.
But it was growling, and its eyes were bright red, and as it came out into the light, it curled its upper lip back to reveal a double row of teeth like a row of nails.
“Okay,” Smile breathed. “Don’t run.”
“Smile,” said Codette, very quietly. “I don’t think I can.”
“Good. That’s the right instinct.” He stepped in front of her. His tail was fluffed to twice its normal size. His good paw was out before him, claws unsheathed. “Whatever happens — stay behind me.”
“Smile—”
The big dog charged.
It came across the causeway like a freight train. The stones shook. Smile went sideways in a blur, and the dog’s jaws snapped closed on the air where his throat had been. He bounced off the cliff wall, spun, dodged a second lunge, and landed in a crouch on top of a low boulder, hissing.
“Come on, then!” he yelled. “Come on, you great ugly lump! I’ve seen bigger rats!”
The black pug lunged.
It was fast. Faster than a pug had any right to be. It hit Smile like a cannonball, and he went down in a tumble of fur, rolled, kicked, and sprang free with a long red slash across his flank. He dodged the big dog’s snapping jaws, and then the pug’s, and then both at once. He leapt, twisted, ducked under a swipe of one enormous paw. But he was wounded, and exhausted, and bleeding, and there were two of them, and he was one small cat with a gashed leg and a bad shoulder.
Slowly, steadily, they drove him back.
Codette watched it happen. She watched him get pushed from the boulder to the causeway. She watched him get pinned against the cliff wall with the big dog on one side and the pug on the other. She watched his chest heave. She saw the way his good paw trembled.
No, she thought. No, no, no—
She tried to stand.
It was a mistake. Her ankle gave out the second she put weight on it. She cried out, went down on her hands and knees, scrabbling, and her palm slid across a patch of green slime and she skidded forward into the open, in full view, with nothing between her and the dogs but twenty feet of flat wet stone.
Both heads turned.
The big dog’s yellow eyes locked on her. It huffed, once, a long, hot, rumbling breath, and turned from Smile as though he were no more than a gnat. Its lip lifted. A string of drool swung from its jaws.
“No,” said Smile, in a thin, shocked voice. “No — hey — hey! Over here! I’m right here, you—”
It didn’t even glance at him.
The pug was moving too. Circling. Eyes burning. Codette crawled backward, one hand at a time, sliding on the wet rock, until her spine hit the boulder. There was nowhere left to go.
She couldn’t see Smile. Something had moved between her and him. She heard him yell her name, hoarse and frantic, and heard the scrape of claws, and the thud of a body hitting stone, and then the world narrowed down to a pair of small yellow eyes, and a yawning wet red mouth, rushing toward her face.
She threw up both arms.
“GET AWAY FROM HER!”
The voice was enormous.
It rolled across the Marsh like thunder, and with it came a rushing crash of snapped reeds, and a striped, furious, flying shape that came barreling out of the fog and hit the big dog full in the side with a thump that shook the whole causeway.
Codette lowered her arms.
Tom was on top of the dog.
He had gotten both forearms around its thick neck, and was hanging on with all his weight, his hind claws raking furrows down its flank, his teeth bared in a snarl of pure, fearless rage. The dog thrashed. It bucked. It roared, and whipped around in a tight circle, trying to throw him off, and Tom hung on like a limpet, roaring right back.
“You touch her again and I’ll bite your ears off!” he bellowed. “I’ll bite them both! You hear me?! Both!”
“Tom?!” Codette gasped.
“I’m busy!”
And then, from somewhere to her left, a smaller, higher, shakier voice: “Codette! Codette, are you hurt? Don’t move! Don’t — oh, goodness, don’t move!”
Phillip skidded to a stop beside her, panting, covered in mud from head to foot, one lens of his spectacles cracked. His satchel hung half-open at his side. He dropped to his knees, grabbed her by the shoulders, and stared at her with enormous, wet, terrified eyes.
“You came back,” Codette whispered.
“Of course we came back,” said Phillip. He said it with fierce, indignant disbelief, as though she’d suggested he might have gone to the moon instead. “We never — we never — we were going the other way and then we heard the — and Tom just stopped, and he said ‘she’s my friend,’ and I said, ‘Yes, I know,’ and we ran!”
“Phillip—”
“I’m so sorry! I’ve been a complete idiot! The books were wrong! The books were completely wrong! I should have known! I did know! I knew the moment—” He caught himself. “Never mind. Later. We’re going to — we need a plan. Do you have a plan?”
“No.”
“Excellent. Neither do I.” He swiveled. His eyes landed on the black pug, which had abandoned Smile and was now circling toward the two of them, low and slow, its bulging red eyes burning. “Oh dear. Oh, dear. Oh—”
He stopped.
The pug flinched.
It was a tiny motion. A tiny twitch of its flat face. As it came out from under the dim shadow of the archway and into the thin gray light of the marsh, it narrowed its eyes, ducked its head, and blinked, hard. It shook itself.
Phillip’s eyes went very bright.
“The eyes,” he said, in a whisper. “Look at the eyes. They’re — they’re weak. It’s been living in the dark. It’s bred for cave-guarding. It can’t — it hates the light!” He whirled, scrabbling in his satchel. “Codette — Codette, I need — there! There! By the water! Do you see them?!”
Along the margin of the island, half-hidden in the black reeds, grew a scatter of pale, drooping flowers. They were small and white and shaped like bells. As she watched, one of them, brushed by the wind, gave off a faint, silvery, ghostly shimmer.
“Moon-bells,” Phillip breathed. “Night-glow flowers! They store light all day and release it in the dark! If I can — if I can crush them — they flare like a lantern! Codette, could you—”
“Yes!” She was already crawling.
They tore handfuls of the flowers from the mud. They didn’t glow much when they were whole. But when Phillip tore one in two, with his teeth, it burst, with a soft, pale pop, into a brilliant white flash that lit the whole island like a lightning bolt.
The pug yelped.
“Again!” shouted Phillip, and flung a fistful. “Throw them! Throw them all!”
They threw them.
The flowers burst in the air, one after another, a barrage of cold white flares that turned the whole marsh as bright as noon. The pug yowled. It staggered, blinded, shaking its head, scrabbling at its face with both paws. It spun in a tight circle, bumped into the cliff wall, and bounced off. Phillip kept throwing. Codette tore and pitched and tore and pitched, with the stinging gleam of the flowers burning blue ghost images on the backs of her eyelids, until the pug, in a panic, turned and bolted away across the causeway and plunged, howling, into the black reeds.
And on the other side of the island, with a roar and a splash, the big dog went down.
It went over on its side like a felled tree. Tom rolled off it, panting, covered in scratches and spit and mud, and stood over it, trembling all over, with his fists clenched. The dog lay stunned for a second. Then it lurched to its feet, shook its great head, looked at Tom, looked at Smile, who had dragged himself up against the cliff and was glaring at it with one eye open and one eye swelling shut, looked at the glowing, blazing, smoking marsh, and made the very sensible decision to leave.
It lumbered into the dark. A long, dwindling, grumbling sound, like a train going through a tunnel, faded into the mist.
Silence.
“Is everyone—” said Phillip, faintly.
“Alive,” Smile croaked. “I think. Hello, Tom.”
“Hello,” said Tom.
“You’re late.”
“I was sulking.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m done now,” said Tom, and burst into a ragged, helpless laugh that shook his whole big body. He sat down heavily on the stones. “I’m done. I’m — I can’t — I thought it was going to eat you. I thought — oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t,” said Codette, hobbling toward him. “Don’t apologize. You came back.”
“I should never have left!”
“But you came back.” She laid a hand on his massive, trembling shoulder. “That’s what matters.”
Tom looked up at her. His eyes were glittering. He looked at her hand on his shoulder, small and pale and five-fingered, and for a long moment, he didn’t say anything at all. Then, very slowly, he reached up and put one huge paw over it.
“I don’t care,” he said hoarsely. “What you are. I don’t care. You’re Sergeant Sensible. You pulled me out of a bush.”
“You pulled yourself out of a bush,” said Codette, laughing and crying at once. “I just threw the yarn.”
“It’s a team effort.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Phillip had been hovering at the edge of the little circle, wringing his hands. He cleared his throat. “I, ah,” he said. “I would also like to say. If it’s not too much trouble. That I’m sorry. And that I was wrong. About the books. And that—” He stopped, flustered. “That I’d very much like to keep traveling with you. If you’ll have me.”
“We’ll have you,” said Smile.
“Oh, good.” Phillip sagged with relief. “Because I’ve thought about it a great deal, and the rational conclusion is that I’m a complete fool without you. I’d rather be a fool with you.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” said Smile.
“I’m not trying to be nice. It’s a statement of fact.”
“That’s what makes it nice.”
The manual lay on an altar of black stone at the very back of the cave.
They found it after Phillip lit a dozen glowing flowers in a pile on the floor and the whole interior came alive with pale silver light. It was a long, narrow hall carved with the same clawed spirals as the arch, ringed with the faded shapes of a hundred fighting cats, their paws raised in strange and graceful poses. At the far end of it, on a low, round pedestal, in a pool of blue shadow, a single book rested on a stone cushion.
It was very old. Its cover was cracked red leather, tooled with a pattern of golden claws. A thin film of dust lay over it, as soft as snow. And beside it, set into the wall, was a plaque of tarnished bronze, bearing an inscription in angular, ancient letters that Codette could somehow read:
TO THE ONE WHO COMES, WHO IS WORTHY.
“Oh,” said Tom, in a very small voice.
He stood in the doorway for a long time. His whole big body was trembling. He had come all this way, across fields and woods, into a forest and a desert and a swamp. He had been stuck in a stile and dragged through a hole and almost eaten by a dog. He had cried in front of three strangers. And now here it was, right before him, just a short walk away.
“Go on,” said Smile gently.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“What if it’s not—” He swallowed. “What if I’m not—”
“Tom.”
“What if I’m not good enough?”
Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything clever. Phillip, beside him, laid one small, steady paw on his arm.
“You fought a dog the size of a pony with your bare hands,” said Codette.
“That doesn’t—”
“You bit a dog the size of a pony.”
“That was an accident.”
“It was magnificent.”
Tom’s mouth twitched. It was not quite a smile.
He drew a long, shuddering breath. Then he straightened his shoulders, and lifted his chin, and walked the whole way down the aisle to the altar, with the light of the glowing flowers burning silver on his fur. He stopped before the pedestal. He reached out with both paws, as though approaching a sleeping animal, and lifted the cover.
It opened with a faint, dry creak.
The first page was blank.
Tom frowned. He turned it. The second page was blank too. So was the third. He flipped faster, and faster, through ten, twenty, fifty pages, all creamy, all thick, all utterly empty, until he reached the very last leaf in the book, where, in the exact center of the page, in a single line of small black ink, were written the words:
Those who succeed in obtaining this manual are all Great Masters of the Cat Martial Arts.
That was all.
Tom stood very still.
It was Phillip who moved first. He came up beside him and read the line over his shoulder. His brow furrowed. He turned back a page, then another, then riffled the whole book from front to back, holding it up to the light, tilting it, sniffing it, looking for hidden ink.
“There’s nothing,” he said, finally, in a baffled voice. “It’s — it’s empty. There’s no technique. There’s no — Tom, I’m so sorry, I — I don’t understand—”
“It’s a trick,” said Smile.
“It’s a what?”
“It’s a — hm.” He had limped up to join them, and was frowning at the page. “It’s not a trick. It’s a — it’s a riddle. Of a sort.”
“What kind of riddle?”
“The kind where the answer is the thing you did to get here.”
Nobody spoke.
Tom lowered the book slowly. He stood with it in his paws, staring at the wall.
He was thinking of a stile, perhaps. A hot afternoon in a field. He was thinking of a rope pulled tight around his waist, and a hand on the other end of it, and a voice saying left foot, right foot. A girl with a cracked, hoarse voice and sand in her hair, running through a storm to find a boy who was drowning in the dunes. A tiny black-and-white cat with a cracked lens, hurling flowers at a monster. A skinny, bleeding, battered white one, hauling a girl through the mud on his back and complaining the whole way.
He was thinking of a dog the size of a pony.
I’ll bite your ears off, he’d said. Both.
“I didn’t need it,” said Tom, very slowly.
“Tom?” said Codette.
“I didn’t need the book.” He looked up. His face was wet. He was smiling, an odd, crooked, astonished smile, like a person who has just found out that the lock he’s been trying to pick for his whole life was never locked at all. “I was already — I was already—” He laughed, a short, startled burst. “It was us. It was never the book. It was never any trick. It was just — this. Being brave when you’re scared. Going back when you want to run. Not letting go of somebody’s hand.” He shook his head. “That’s the technique. That’s the whole martial art.”
“That’s very good,” said Phillip, wiping his eyes with a sleeve. “I’m going to write that down.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“I’m writing it down.”
“I’ll bite you.”
“You’ll do no such thing. You’re a Great Master of the Cat Martial Arts.” Phillip patted his arm. “It says so in the book.”
Tom laughed so hard he had to sit down on the floor.
Night fell on the Marsh at some point, though they only knew it by the sudden deepening of the dark outside the arch. They made camp in the cave. It was dry, and warm, and a great deal safer than anywhere else for fifty miles. Phillip crushed a handful of moon-bells into a bowl and set it on a ledge to act as a lamp. Tom produced a dented kettle and, from some pocket Codette had yet to identify, a single crumpled bag of tea.
“Medicinal,” he said defensively.
Codette sat in the pool of silver light with her bad ankle propped on a rolled blanket. Phillip had examined it and pronounced it “only moderately sprained” and wrapped it in a strip of cloth with a degree of care she suspected he’d read about in a book. Now he and Tom were arguing amiably in the corner over whether tea brewed in a dented kettle with no lid counted as a legitimate technique. She sat and watched them with a warm, strange, aching feeling in the middle of her chest.
“Hold still,” she said.
“I am holding still,” said Smile.
“You are not. You’re twitching.”
“It’s an involuntary twitch. It’s a — hm. Ow.”
“Because you’re twitching.”
He sat on a flat rock facing her, with his red scarf hung over a nearby boulder and the wound on his shoulder laid bare. It was a long, ugly, curved gash, where the pug had raked him. The fur was matted with dried blood. The skin around it was angry and red. Phillip’s yarrow lay in a little paste in a dish at her side.
She dipped her fingers into it. It was cold, and green, and smelled sharp and clean.
“This is going to sting,” she warned.
“I’m a veteran. I’ve been stung by things you wouldn’t believe.”
“Is that so?”
“A wasp once. A very large one.”
“Wow.”
“I took it on the chin.”
“I’m sure you did.”
She laid the paste on the wound. He hissed. His whole body jerked, and then went rigid, every muscle locked, as though bracing against a blow. She stopped.
“Sorry. Did that hurt?”
“No.”
“Smile.”
“A little.”
“Do you want me to—”
“No.” He took a breath. “Keep going.”
She did. She smoothed the paste carefully across the gash, from one end to the other, her fingertips light, and then she took a clean strip of linen and began to wind it round his shoulder and chest. It took a long time. He sat very still, and she became aware, slowly, that he’d stopped twitching entirely. His breathing had slowed. His eyes were half-closed. He was watching her hands with an odd, absorbed, helpless expression, like a creature who had never before been allowed to hold still.
“You don’t like being touched,” she said, softly.
“Mm.”
“I noticed. At the tavern. When Nack’s lieutenants grabbed you. And the first night, when I tried to give you a—”
“It’s not that.” He frowned. “It’s — I don’t know what it is. I’m just not used to it.” He paused. “I can’t think of the last time anyone did this. Sat with me. Just to — I don’t know. To make sure I was all right.”
Her hands stilled for a moment.
“You carried me through a swamp,” she said.
“That was different.”
“How?”
“That was me carrying you. This is you carrying—” He stopped. His ears flattened. “Never mind. It’s a bad metaphor. It’s late. I’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“You’re stalling.”
“I’m recovering.”
“You’re being a coward.”
“I’m being a — hm.” He pressed his lips together. “Yes. Fine. A little.”
She tied off the bandage and sat back. The fire crackled. Across the cave, Tom was holding forth about the proper technique for biting a dog’s ear, with illustrations, while Phillip pretended to take notes.
“You owe me, you know,” said Smile abruptly.
“I owe you?”
“You owe me for the shoulder. I’m going to put it on your account.”
“What account?”
“The one I just opened. It’s for services rendered.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One tavern rescue. One pugs-and-dogs mitigation. One, ah, one extremely heroic back-carrying. I’m running quite a tab.”
“I thought I was the one who rescued you.”
“That’s one ledger. I keep several.” He tipped his head thoughtfully. “In fact, now that I think of it, I’m fairly sure you’re responsible for my debt to Nack.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Forty Cat Coins. It’s all your fault. You showed up. You flashed your screaming star. You cost me my — my reputation. It’s going to be a very long time before I can walk into the Rusty Whisker again.” He sniffed. “So as far as I’m concerned, that makes it your debt, and I’m just the collection agent.”
Codette stared at him. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m being businesslike.”
“You can’t just — it doesn’t work like that—”
“Doesn’t it?” His whiskers twitched. “Hm. Then I suppose we’d better find that mountain of coins, so you can pay it off.”
“Smile.”
“It’ll be a long road. A very long road. Possibly it’ll take years.” He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at a point on the wall about two feet to the left of her head, and the tips of his ears had gone a very deep, very unmistakable shade of pink. “You’ll have to stay with me the whole time. To make sure I don’t forget. It’s a very — I’m told it’s a very serious financial arrangement.”
She’d stopped breathing.
“A very long time,” she heard herself say. “Years.”
“Hm.”
“That’s a lot of years.”
“I’m aware.”
“I’m not sure I—” She stopped. Her face was hot. She could hear her own pulse, loud as a drum in her ears. “I mean. I think. That I might be—” She started again. “That I wouldn’t mind.”
Smile went completely still.
It was only a second. Only a heartbeat. Then, with a visible effort, he turned his head and met her eyes, and for the first time that night, he didn’t look away.
“Neither would I,” he said quietly.
They sat there for a long moment, in the silver light, saying nothing at all.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Tom, from the other side of the cave.
“What?” said Smile.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Phillip, are you seeing this?”
“I’m very busy,” said Phillip loudly. “I’m taking notes.”
“On what?”
“Marsh ecology.”
Codette buried her face in her hands. Smile examined the roof of the cave with great interest.
It was, she thought, the first time since the day she’d followed a white cat into the woods that she could imagine — really imagine — a day when she wasn’t afraid.
They left the Marsh at dawn.
The mist had begun to thin by then, and the great bronze reeds had parted before them as though they’d been waiting. Tom led the way with the manual tucked into his satchel, walking with a peculiar, springy, rolling gait, like a cat who had just discovered his own legs. Phillip bounced along at his heels, scribbling in his notebook. Smile limped at Codette’s side with his wounded arm bound up in a sling, and she walked with a stick and a bandaged ankle, and between them, quite by accident, their hands brushed once and then twice and then stayed.
Beyond the last of the reeds, the land rose.
It rose in a long, gentle, golden slope, a green and grassy ridge, as bright and fresh as a morning in spring. And on top of it, in the soft light, stood a gateway.
It was enormous. It stretched across the whole width of the valley, a huge arch of white stone inlaid with gold, carved with lions and crowns and roaring faces. Beyond it, in the great green cup of the hollow, a river of light seemed to be pouring: shimmering, glittering, flashing and winking in the dawn like a spill of sunlit water. It was a hillside, Codette realized, slowly. A whole mountainside, so thickly heaped and piled and strewn with something round and bright and flat that it blazed like a second sun.
Coins.
“The Valley of His Majesty,” said Phillip, in an awed whisper.
“It’s real,” said Tom.
“It’s really real,” said Smile.
His voice was strange. Codette glanced at him. He was staring at the glittering hillside with an expression she hadn’t seen before: raw, wide-eyed, almost frightened, like someone looking at a dream he’d been told for years was a lie. His good paw twitched at his side, as if he were about to reach for something.
Then he glanced down at her, and at the hand still wrapped around his, and his expression shifted. Something warm crossed it. Something very quiet.
“Well,” he said. “That’s a lot of money.”
“It’s a lot of money,” Codette agreed.
“Think of the debts I could pay.”
“Think of the tab you could settle.”
“Hm,” said Smile. He squeezed her hand. “I’m thinking about it very carefully.”
And they walked on together, up the long green slope toward the gate.