Chapter Six: The Valley of His Majesty
The gate opened before anyone knocked.
It simply swung inward, with a long, grinding, sepulchral groan, the way a very old door opens when it has been expecting you for a very long time. Beyond it lay a courtyard paved in gold. Not gilded stone. Not gold-colored tiles. Gold, beaten flat into great sheets and laid edge to edge, so that every step rang out like a bell, and the whole space glittered so fiercely under the sun that Codette had to squint.
“Hood,” Smile murmured, without turning his head.
“I know.”
“Up. All the way. And don’t talk unless somebody asks you a direct question.”
“I know.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’ve said it four times.”
“It bears repeating.” He cast a quick glance at her. She had pulled the yellow hood down low over her forehead, tucked every curl away, and wrapped his red scarf twice around her neck. She had sprayed the last drops of her catnip vial across her collar that morning, and the smell of it, sweet and green, still clung to her sleeves. It wasn’t perfect. It was never going to be perfect. But for a cat with a poor sense of smell and a very large ego, it might do. “Tom. Phillip. Remember. She’s a Golden. From the grain country. Shy.”
“We remember,” said Tom, with the weary dignity of a cat who had been rehearsing the same story for a week.
“A regional adaptation,” said Phillip, quietly. “Wonderful hands.”
“Don’t mention the hands.”
“I won’t.”
“Don’t mention the hands.”
“I said I won’t.”
On either side of the courtyard stood rows of black cats.
They were guards, Codette realized. They were drawn up in two long ranks along the walls, each as sleek and silent and glossy as a piece of carved jet. They wore plumed helmets and breastplates of beaten gold, and carried halberds taller than themselves. Their eyes were green. They did not move as the four travelers walked between them. They did not blink. But as she passed the third pair, she felt, very distinctly, the weight of two long, flat, unfriendly stares sliding across her face like cold fingers.
She kept her head down. She kept walking.
At the far end of the courtyard rose the palace.
She would remember it for the rest of her life. It was an enormous, glittering, ridiculous thing: a vast heap of golden domes and towers and spires, piled one atop another, like a child’s idea of a wedding cake built from the contents of a jewelry box. Every surface was carved. Every window was gilded. Every door was twelve feet tall and studded with jewels. It was dazzling, and it was ugly, and as they climbed the broad golden steps to the main doors, Codette caught a smell drifting out from beneath it, over all that shining wealth: a faint, sour, clinging odor of damp and mildew, like a cellar nobody had opened in years.
The doors swung open.
“Welcome,” said a very small, very bored voice, “to the court of His Majesty.”
The Great Hall was the size of a football stadium.
It rose in a long, soaring nave of gilded pillars, hung with gold chandeliers and tattered banners and cobwebs as thick as lace. The walls were covered in sheets of gold leaf, and in places the gold leaf had begun to peel, curling off in long, brittle strips to reveal greenish, furred, water-stained plaster beneath. Rows upon rows of courtiers lined the aisle: cats in silk waistcoats, cats in powdered wigs, cats in rich brocade gowns, all talking and fanning themselves and glancing at one another with the glassy, restless smiles of people who have been told to look happy.
And at the very end of the hall, on a dais of twelve golden steps, stood the throne.
Codette’s first thought was that it was a mountain. It towered over the dais, a vast, gleaming, jagged heap, glinting with a thousand points of light. Only when they came closer did she see that it was built entirely of coins. Millions of coins. They had been pressed, stacked, welded, and fused together into a single seat, with arms and a back and a high, curving crest like a crown. And sprawled across it, in a deep, ponderous, dozing heap, lay the largest cat Codette had ever seen.
He was a British Shorthair, or something like it: round and plush and solid, with a thick golden coat, a broad flat face, and cheeks so wide they seemed to be pouring out sideways. He was wrapped in a robe of crimson velvet, edged with ermine. A tiny jeweled crown sat on top of his head at a precarious angle. His eyes were half-lidded, golden-green, heavy with sleep. He looked, at first glance, like a very large, very pampered house cat who had been left too long in front of a sunny window.
Then he opened one eye, and looked at Codette, and she felt every hair on her neck stand on end.
It was a clever eye. A cold one. It slid over the four travelers in a long, slow, lazy sweep, measuring each of them, weighing, pricing, discarding, and when it reached her, it paused. It lingered. It narrowed, very slightly, with an expression she couldn’t read.
Then it moved on.
“Visitors,” said the throne, in a voice like warm oil. “How delightful.”
“Your Majesty,” said Smile.
He had stepped forward. He swept off his invisible hat, if he’d had one, in an elaborate, extravagant, many-flourished bow that took about half a minute and ended with his nose very nearly touching the golden floor. When he rose, his whole face was transformed. His eyes shone. His whiskers quivered. His smile was wide and warm and utterly, shamelessly adoring.
“Your Radiant Majesty,” he said, in a voice she had never heard from him before: rich, round, honeyed, and perfectly sincere. “Sun of the Valley. Light of the Northern Marches. Most Gracious Lord of All the Coins. We have heard tales of your wisdom in every corner of the Kingdom, and I’m bound to say, with the greatest respect, that every one of them fell absurdly short.”
“Is that so,” said His Majesty.
“Without question. I came a hundred miles to see you. I walked through a swamp. And I find, standing here, that I am simply speechless.” He pressed a paw to his heart. “I don’t think I’ve ever beheld such magnificence. Such radiance. The tales don’t mention the crown. The tales don’t mention the cheekbones.”
Codette felt Tom tense beside her. Phillip made a small, strangled noise.
Smile just kept going.
“The tales don’t mention the throne,” he said, with a long, lingering, reverent sigh. “Majestic. A masterpiece. I confess I’m not a sentimental cat, Your Majesty, but I came near to tears. There’s a sense of — of history to it. Of gravitas. And the hall! The chandeliers! If I may say so, I’ve seen palaces, and this makes every one of them look like a shed.”
There was a long pause.
The golden-green eye had opened a little wider. His Majesty had lifted his enormous head, ever so slightly, from its nest of velvet. A thin, pleased, almost purring sound was rising in his chest.
“A shed,” he repeated.
“A shed. A stable. A pigsty.”
“Oh, you clever cat.”
“I merely speak the truth, Majesty.”
“Come closer.”
Smile came closer. He walked up the golden steps, one at a time, with his head bowed and his tail held in an elegant curve, until he stood just below the lip of the throne. His Majesty regarded him for a long moment. Then a very large, very soft paw came down and chucked him under the chin.
“What is your name?”
“Smile, Your Majesty.”
“Smile.” His Majesty rolled the word around in his mouth like a sweet. “How charming. How very apt. You’ve the most extraordinary gift, Smile. I haven’t had my whiskers tickled like that in years. Tell me. Are you a poet?”
“A humble one, sire.”
“A jester?”
“If it pleases the court.”
“A jester,” said His Majesty, dreamily. “Do you know, it’s been simply ages since I had a real one. The last one — poor creature — had no sense of timing. He tried a joke about a duck. It went on for forty minutes.” He shivered. “I had him exiled to the Marsh. I do hope he’s well.”
“A joke about a duck, Majesty?”
“It didn’t have a point.”
“They never do,” said Smile sadly. “That’s the tragedy of waterfowl humor.”
His Majesty let out a long, delighted, bubbling laugh, and the whole court tittered obediently behind their fans. Codette stood at the foot of the dais, hardly daring to breathe. She’d been watching Smile from the corner of her eye the whole time. She’d seen his shoulders, his careful posture, the way his eyes slid, once, quick as a flash, to the glittering heap beneath the throne, and then away.
She’d seen the way his paw twitched.
It’s an act, she told herself firmly. It’s all an act.
It was a very good act.
“Your Majesty,” she said.
It came out before she could stop it.
Her voice rang out across the hall, small and clear, and the tittering stopped. Every head in the court swung toward her. Smile, on the dais, went rigid, and shot her a look of pure horror over his shoulder. No, said every line of his body. No, no, no, don’t, don’t—
She took one step forward. She put back her shoulders. She did not know what in the world she was going to say.
“We came to ask for passage,” she said. “Through your Valley. To Mount Banana. We have no quarrel with you. We only need the gate on the north side opened. We’d like to go.”
Silence.
It stretched. It deepened. A single courtier somewhere in the back coughed, and then looked as though he wanted to dissolve into the floor.
His Majesty turned his head.
“Pardon?” he said, in a very soft voice.
“The north gate,” said Codette. “We need to go through it. We’d be very grateful.”
“You will forgive me,” said His Majesty, “if I am slightly confused. Because I seem to recall that when a stranger stands before the throne of the Valley, it is customary, it is, indeed, traditional, it is a thing which has been done since the days of my great-great-grandfather—” he lifted one finger, “—to speak only when spoken to.”
“I understand.”
“And to kneel.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”
“And to bring a gift.”
“We don’t have a gift.”
“No,” said His Majesty. He stared down at her, and his expression was no longer sleepy at all. “Evidently you don’t.”
Nobody moved. In the corner of her eye, she saw Smile standing frozen on the dais, face gray, one paw still half-raised. She saw Tom reaching out as if to grab her sleeve. She heard Phillip’s thin breath.
“What is your name?” said His Majesty.
“Codette.”
“Codette. How very odd.” He tasted it. “You’ve a funny accent, Codette.”
“I’m from the south.”
“I see.” The golden eye moved to her hood, and the ears on top of it. “And what, pray tell, makes you think I am in the habit of opening my gates to anyone who asks?”
“I don’t think you are.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because it costs nothing,” said Codette, “and you might say yes.”
Somebody gasped. A fan fell with a clatter. Phillip, behind her, made a sound like a kettle being stepped on.
His Majesty stared.
And then, very slowly, he began to smile.
“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh, I like you.”
“Majesty—” said Smile, urgently.
“No, no, no, no. Quiet, darling. Let me enjoy this.” His Majesty heaved himself upright with a grunt, and his velvet robes slid off his shoulders in a long, sumptuous wave. He was even bigger than she’d thought. His shadow fell across the floor like a fallen tree. “Do you know, Codette, I have not been spoken to like that in — oh, decades. My court is a pack of toadies. My advisors are a flock of sheep. Everyone agrees with everything I say. It is quite, quite the most tedious thing in the world.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Are you really?”
“No,” said Codette honestly. “I’m a bit afraid of you.”
“Wonderful.” His Majesty clapped his paws together. “Wonderful, wonderful! Here is what we shall do. I am, as you may have noticed, a generous ruler. I shall give you an opportunity. A game. I’ll set you a riddle. If you can answer it, you and your friends shall walk out of my north gate, unhindered, and I’ll even send you on your way with a sack of coins. As a keepsake.”
“And if we can’t?” said Tom, hoarsely.
“Then you stay.”
“For how long?”
“For ever.”
The word fell like a stone in a well.
“You’ll become my servants,” said His Majesty cheerfully. “My lackeys. My handmaidens. You’ll sweep my halls and scrub my kennels and polish my coins, until the end of your days. It’s a perfectly respectable fate. Some of my best courtiers started as scullery maids.”
“That’s not a game,” said Phillip, in a thin, appalled voice. “That’s extortion.”
“It’s a wager.”
“It’s the same thing, with a better hat.”
“Phillip,” Codette whispered.
“Do I have your agreement?” said His Majesty sweetly.
She looked at Smile. His face was strange. His eyes were fixed on her, wide and dark, with a plea in them, and a warning, and something else, a deep, helpless flicker of fear.
Say yes, his eyes seemed to say. Say yes, you fool. Don’t make him angry.
“We agree,” said Codette.
“Splendid!” His Majesty sank back onto his throne. He folded his paws across his stomach. His eyes glinted. “Here is the riddle. Listen very carefully. I shall say it only once.”
The whole court held its breath.
“What can build an entire kingdom without brick or stone,” said His Majesty, in a slow, delicate, singsong voice, “destroy a friendship with a single word, and is the one thing its owner can never see with the naked eye?”
He folded his hands.
“You have three days,” he said. “Three days to find the answer. If you present it to me correctly on the morning of the fourth, you may go. If you do not—” He smiled, very sweetly. “Well. You’ll have had such a lovely rest.”
They were separated that afternoon.
It was done with great efficiency, and very little ceremony. Within a quarter of an hour of the riddle being set, three footmen in plumed helmets had come to escort the party out of the hall. Two went to one side. One went to the other. It was only when the golden doors boomed shut behind them that Codette realized that the one on the other side had taken Smile.
“Wait!” she cried. “Where are you — wait! We’re supposed to stay together!”
“Servants are assigned by function, madam,” said the footman, in a flat, bored voice. “Quarters for kitchen, quarters for kennel, quarters for the royal presence. The jester sleeps in the royal wing.”
“But—”
“His Majesty has taken a particular liking to him.”
“Codette,” said Smile.
He had turned, halfway down the corridor, with the footman’s hand on his shoulder. He didn’t look frightened. He looked pale, and tired, and very, very calm. He held her eyes for a long moment. Then he gave her a small, crooked half-smile, and tilted his head toward the ceiling, the way you might to a person standing on the other side of a window.
“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Three days. We’ll work out the riddle. It’s a puzzle. I’m very good at puzzles. Phillip’s very good at puzzles. I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Smile—”
“Dinner,” he said, with a wink, and was gone.
She stood in the corridor, looking after him, with a hollow, sinking feeling in her stomach.
I’ll see you at dinner, she thought. He didn’t say where.
The kennels stank.
That was the first and last and only thing Codette could say about them. They were housed in a long, low, windowless building behind the east wing: forty stone cells, in a row, each with a rusty iron gate and a heap of filthy straw. The hounds inside were huge and ill-tempered and wore leather muzzles. They watched her with bloodshot eyes as she walked past. They growled. One of them lunged, and Tom, behind her, yelped.
“Mops,” said the head kennel-cat, a thin, cross-eyed gray with a limp. “Buckets. Brushes. You’ll muck out every stall by sundown. Throw the dirty straw in the cart, fill the troughs, wash the floors. Don’t let ’em bite you. Don’t let ’em out. And don’t feed ’em the scraps from the royal table, or they’ll take your fingers off.”
“What if they bite?” said Phillip, in a very small voice.
“Then you bleed.”
“Oh,” said Phillip.
“It’s good for you,” said the kennel-cat, with grim satisfaction, and stalked away.
The first day nearly broke them.
Codette had scrubbed floors before. She’d cleaned out the cat boxes at her aunt’s house, one summer. She’d mopped, and dusted, and dragged a vacuum cleaner up three flights of stairs. But none of it prepared her for the sheer, grinding, soul-deadening labor of a royal kennel, where the dirt was as old as the dynasty. By noon her hands were blistered. By two her back screamed with every step. By four she’d stopped speaking, and was simply mopping, mechanically, one slow stroke after another, while somewhere above her a very long way up, a bell tolled and tolled and tolled.
Tom fared no better. He tried, with a kind of blind, heroic determination, to carry two buckets at once, and went down in a heap, drenched to the whiskers. He got up. He tried again. He got bitten by a hound the size of a pony, and swore, and then very sheepishly apologized to it. Phillip had his glasses fogged from the steam of the wash-water, and spent the whole afternoon stumbling about with a bucket on his head. He had not complained once.
“I’ve been thinking about the riddle,” he said, at last, around five o’clock, in a thick, exhausted voice.
“Mm?” said Tom.
“It’s obviously a riddle about intangibles. Qualities. Things you can’t touch. ‘The thing its owner can never see.’ Honor. Charm. Reputation. Wit.”
“Reputation?”
“It can build a kingdom, I suppose. It certainly destroys friendships. But I don’t think it fits the last line.”
“What’s the last line?”
“That its owner can never see it. With the naked eye.”
“Oh.”
“A reputation is something you can see very clearly. In a mirror. In a — in a — oh, I don’t know!” Phillip dropped the bucket from his head with a clang. “I’ve been up all night thinking, and I’m so tired, and I keep thinking I’m close, and then I look at it and it’s gone.”
“Take your time,” said Codette.
“We have no time.”
“We’ve got three days.”
“We’ve got two and a half.”
She stopped mopping.
A sudden thought had occurred to her, an odd, cold, sinking one. She looked around the dim, dripping, torchlit kennel, at the hounds in their muzzles and the gray cat limping up and down the row, and a small voice in the back of her head whispered, very clearly: He didn’t say where.
“Phillip,” she said. “Where do they eat?”
“Hm?”
“Dinner. Smile said he’d see us at dinner.”
Phillip blinked. “The servants’ hall, I suppose. Through the scullery. I believe there’s a long table.”
They went. They stood in the servants’ hall at half past six, amid the clatter of tin plates and the steam of boiled cabbage, among two hundred cats in drab gray smocks, and looked up and down every bench and every table.
Smile wasn’t there.
“He’s with the king,” said Tom, at last, in a low voice. “He must be. He’s — dining with him. It’s — that’s good, isn’t it? That’s what he wanted. Isn’t it?”
Codette said nothing.
She sat on the bench. She ate her cabbage. It was the worst cabbage she’d ever eaten. She could feel her face going hot and tight and strange, and she stared down at the tin plate until the shape of the rim blurred.
It’s fine, she thought. He’s safe. He’s fed. He’s not scrubbing floors. It’s good. It’s what he wanted.
It was, of course. A week ago, on a hay-bed in a windmill, a small white cat had told her about the great, ugly, terrifying fear of being poor. He’d said it so lightly, so carelessly, over a tin of sardines, that she’d barely noticed the weight of it. You can’t be abandoned, he’d said, if you’ve always already gone.
And now he was in a golden palace, with a golden plate and a golden fork, and nobody was ever going to make him leave.
She wasn’t angry. That was the strange thing. She wasn’t angry at all. She was just so, so tired, and her hands hurt, and the cabbage tasted of mildew, and somewhere, very far away, a bell tolled, and tolled, and tolled.
“Codette,” said Phillip softly.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not eating.”
“I’m fine,” she said, and pushed back her plate, and went out.
She found the bun at midnight.
She didn’t find it at first. She was lying on a straw mattress in the kennel-maids’ dormitory, a long, drafty, low-beamed attic over the scullery, with sixty other cats snoring on sixty other pallets, staring at the cobwebbed rafters. She’d tried to sleep. She’d tried to count sheep. She’d tried, in a moment of desperation, to count crocodiles. She’d given up, and rolled over, and put her hand in the pocket of her hoodie to find her handkerchief.
And her fingers closed on something warm.
She drew it out.
It was a cheese bun. It was round and flat and slightly squashed, wrapped in a clean linen napkin, and it was still faintly warm. Folded around it, tucked into the napkin’s hem, was a small scrap of paper, torn from a menu. On it, in a looping, hurried, familiar hand, someone had scrawled:
Ninety percent sure it’s a clean bun. —S.
She sat up.
She held it in her lap for a long time. She turned the paper over and over. Under the line, in smaller writing, as if added at the last moment, were three words:
Don’t tell Tom.
A strange hot tightness filled her chest. She pressed her hand over her mouth. Her shoulders shook, once, silently. And then — in the dark, in the cold, in the smell of straw and mildew and sixty sleeping cats — she ate the bun, in small, careful, grateful bites, and cried.
It was the best bun she’d ever had.
He did it every night.
It was never the same thing. On the second night it was a clean towel, folded into a small, damp-smelling square, with a note that said For the hands. On the third it was a little tin of salve, smelling of lavender and beeswax. Once, it was a boiled egg. Once, a tiny, battered, hand-sewn pouch of dried berries. Always the pocket of her hoodie. Always the left one. Always while she was asleep, or in the washroom, or in the long, windy line for the evening wash. She never saw him do it. She never once caught a glimpse of a white tail disappearing around a corner.
But she began to look for him anyway.
She looked for him in the great hall, when the servants were called to carry the platters. She caught sight of him once, across a sea of silk and powdered wigs, on a velvet cushion at the foot of the throne. He was wearing a little scarlet jerkin with gold buttons, and a cap with a bell. His Majesty was feeding him a bonbon. He was laughing, and his face was lit with that bright, bubbling, beautiful, practiced laugh she’d come to know, and she could not tell, at that distance, whether it was real.
She looked for him in the long upper gallery, on her way to scrub the staircase. And there, on the last afternoon of the second day, she saw him: crossing the end of the corridor with his arms full of folded linen. He glanced up. For one long, frozen second, across forty feet of polished floor, their eyes met.
Neither of them moved.
Then a courtier swept between them, in a rustle of silk, and when he had passed, the corridor was empty.
“We have to leave,” said Tom, that night.
They were sitting in the dark of the kennels, on a pile of straw that didn’t smell very much worse than anything else, with a single guttering candle between them. It was past two in the morning. The hounds had fallen silent. In the stall at their backs, a great brindled beast snored thunderously.
“I’m not saying it to be dramatic,” said Tom. “I’m saying it because it’s true. We’ve been here two days. We’ve got one left. And Phillip hasn’t —”
“I’m close,” said Phillip miserably.
“You’ve been close for forty-eight hours.”
“It’s very hard, Tom! It’s a very hard riddle! It’s — it’s designed to — I mean, it’s by definition meant to be—”
“I know. I know, buddy. I’m not blaming you.” Tom put a heavy paw on his shoulder. “I’m just saying. If we don’t get it by tomorrow night, we’re in trouble. And the way I see it, we’ve got two choices. We solve it, or we run.”
“We can’t run,” said Phillip, aghast.
“Why not?”
“Because — because it’s a wager! Because His Majesty is a — we shook on it! It’s dishonorable!”
“It’s a scam.”
“It’s also a scam,” Phillip admitted. “But it’s a scam with a contract.”
“Wait,” said Codette.
She’d been very quiet. She sat with her back against a post, knees drawn up, her bandaged hands wrapped around her ankles. She was thinking about a cheese bun, and a boiled egg, and a smear of lavender salve.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that we should go. Tomorrow night. Before the deadline.”
Tom and Phillip stared at her.
“I’m not saying it’s right,” she said. “I know it’s — I know what it looks like. But the more I think about it, the more I think we’re not going to get that riddle by tomorrow. It’s not a clue kind of riddle. It’s — it’s an answer kind. It’ll come when it comes. And I don’t think we’ve got that long.” She took a breath. “I don’t think Smile’s got that long.”
“What do you mean?”
“His Majesty likes him.” She said it flatly. “He likes him a lot. And he’s not — he’s not a creature who gives things up. He’s the kind who keeps. If we lose the riddle, he’ll keep us. But if we win it—”
“He’ll keep Smile anyway,” said Phillip, very quietly.
Nobody spoke.
“We can’t leave him,” said Tom, at last.
“We’re not going to leave him.” Codette lifted her head. “We’re going to ask him.”
She found him at midnight on the third day.
It had taken some doing. She had bribed a scullery-maid with her last hair elastic. She had listened outside a hundred keyholes. She had crept, hoodie up, through the back stairs of the east wing, past the sleeping footmen, to a small, narrow, windowless landing at the foot of a spiral staircase, and she had waited there, on a stone step, with her heart in her throat.
He came down at the stroke of twelve.
He was alone. He wore his little red jerkin and his cap, and the bell on it chimed faintly as he descended. He looked as he had that first day, in the hall: groomed, glossy, plump. There was a new gold chain around his neck. His fur had been washed and brushed to a pure, dazzling white. He walked with a light, easy, graceful step, a cat with a full belly and a clear conscience.
Then he saw her.
He stopped dead on the third stair.
“Hello,” said Codette.
“You shouldn’t be here,” said Smile, in a low voice.
“I know.”
“If anyone sees you—”
“I know. I’ll be quick.” She stood up. Her knees were stiff. She looked at him, standing there in his silly little jerkin, with the candle behind him throwing a halo around his ears, and her throat went tight. “I just — I wanted to say thank you. For the buns.”
A long, strange silence.
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Smile.
“Ninety percent sure.”
“I’ve never—”
“Smile.”
His shoulders sagged. He sat down, very slowly, on the stair, and put his chin in his paws. “Don’t tell Tom,” he said weakly.
“I won’t.”
“He’d never let me live it down.”
“I know.”
He didn’t look at her. He was staring at the wall, at a crack in the plaster, and the little bell on his cap trembled with every breath.
“You came to say goodbye,” he said, at last.
It wasn’t a question.
She didn’t answer.
“I thought you would,” said Smile. He gave a short, brittle laugh. “I’ve been waiting for it. I’ve been waiting for three days. I thought, any hour now, she’ll come, she’ll say, ‘We’ve figured it out, Smile. We’re off. Thanks very much for the buns.’ And then I’ll say, ‘Good luck, then,’ and you’ll go, and I’ll—” He stopped.
“We haven’t figured it out,” said Codette.
“Oh.”
“Phillip’s still working on it. But we think it’s — we think we’ve got to go. Tonight. Before the deadline. We can’t wait around and risk losing.” She kept her voice steady. “We’re going to try to get out through the back. And we want you to come with us.”
He lifted his head.
For one moment, something burned in his eyes. It was so bright and so raw that she almost took a step back. It was hope, she realized. It was pure, naked, desperate hope, and he was staring at her as if she’d just opened a door in a wall he’d spent his whole life walking along.
Then it went out.
She watched it go. She watched it die, slowly, the way a candle dies when somebody pinches the wick. Smile looked down at his paws. He swallowed. When he lifted his head again, his face was perfectly calm.
“No,” he said.
“Smile—”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I—” He stopped. He drew a breath and let it go. He tugged at his little red jerkin, smoothing the gold buttons. “Because it’s a good life, Codette. It’s — look at me. Look at me. I’m clean. I’m fed. I have a bed that smells like roses. I’ve had three meals a day for three days, and not one of them was a fish bone I had to fight a seagull for.” His voice shook, just a little. “I’ve never had that. Not once. Not in my whole life.”
“I know.”
“He’s kind to me. He’s — he’s strange. He’s a bit of a lunatic. But he laughs at my jokes. He’s given me a gold chain.” He touched it. “He’s offered to pay off Nack. Forty coins. Forty. A hundred, if I like. All I have to do is stay.”
“And you want to.”
“I want to want to,” said Smile softly.
She sat down, very slowly, on the step beside him.
“I can like a soft bed,” he said, to the wall. “I’m not ashamed of that. I like it very much. I’m — it’s — a cat is a cat. We like warmth. We like a full dish. We like a cushion by the fire. But that doesn’t mean—” He stopped. “It doesn’t mean I like sleeping alone.”
Her heart gave a slow, hard thump.
“I lie there every night,” said Smile. “In my lovely bed. With my lovely roses. And I think, this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And then I think, there’s a girl scrubbing dog-hair out of a drain, three floors down, with blistered hands, and she doesn’t even have a pillow.” His voice cracked. “And it doesn’t taste as good.”
“Smile.”
“So I save my bun.”
“I know.”
“It’s a terrible system. I get hungrier every night.”
She laughed. It came out wet. She reached over and took his paw. He let her. It was warm and small and slightly rough, and it was shaking.
“I’m not going to ask you to come,” she said. “I’m not going to make you choose.”
“You are asking.”
“I’m wanting,” said Codette. “It’s different.”
His paw tightened on hers.
“I’m not going to hate you if you stay,” she said. “I could never hate you. You’ve given me — you’ve given me so much. The windmill. The scarf. The tree. The swamp. You’ve carried me through a swamp, Smile. I can’t ask you to give up a — a home. Not when it’s the first one you’ve ever—”
“It’s not a home,” said Smile, in a small voice.
“What?”
“It’s a cage.” He said it very softly, as if it had been trapped in his chest for three days and was only now being let out. “A beautiful one. With a golden lock. But it’s a cage. I’ve known it since the first night. I keep telling myself it’s a palace, and I keep looking at the walls, and they’re so close.” He drew a shaky breath. “I just can’t — I don’t know how to — I’ve never known how to leave a place that was good. I’ve only ever left the bad ones.”
“You don’t have to decide tonight.”
“I think I do.”
“Then decide,” said Codette. “And I’ll respect it. Whichever way.”
He looked at her for a long, long moment. His eyes were wet. A single tear tracked down his cheek and caught in his whisker, and he wiped it away with the back of his wrist, quick and angry, like a kitten who didn’t want to be seen.
“I’m staying,” he said.
She nodded.
She’d known he would. She had known since the bun. She’d been braced for it, in her deepest, bravest, least-hopeful place, and still it went through her like a sword.
“Okay,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I said don’t be.” She got to her feet, and wiped her face on her sleeve, and tried to smile. It wobbled. “You deserve this. You deserve it more than anyone I know. Be — be happy. Eat lots of cake. Send Nack his forty coins. Tell His Majesty the one about the duck.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
She turned to go.
“Wait,” said Smile.
He had risen too. He stood on the stair with his paws clasped in front of him and his cap askew and his jerkin crooked, in the flickering candlelight, looking, she thought, rather like a very small kitten at the end of a very long day. His eyes were red-rimmed.
“The back gate,” he said.
“What?”
“You said you were going out the back. It’s not — you can’t. It’s guarded. There’s a whole regiment. And the lake, the — there’s a moat. There’s crocodiles.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“You’ll die.” He came down the last step. He was talking very fast now, his words tripping over each other. “Listen. Listen to me. There’s a service door behind the east kitchens. It’s small. It’s behind a stack of barrels. It opens onto a terrace. The terrace goes down to the lake, and there’s a stone footbridge across the narrow part, and it’s got a gate at the end. It’s the one the gardeners use. It’s locked at midnight but there’s a key — hang on—” He fumbled at his belt, and pulled out a tiny, rusty iron key on a loop of twine. “Take it. It’s the gardener’s. I — I stole it. Last night. In case.”
Codette stared.
“In case of what?”
“In case you asked.” He pressed it into her palm. He closed her fingers over it with both paws, hard, warm, trembling. “Go left at the lake. Not right. Right’s the guardhouse. There’s a patrol every quarter-hour. The black cats are fast, so you have to be faster. I’ll—” He swallowed. “I’ll leave the east lamps burning. It’ll draw them off. A bit.”
“Smile—”
“Go,” he said. “Before sunrise. Before the next bell. Before I change my mind.”
She looked down at the key. Then at him. Then, with a sudden, helpless impulse, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his neck and held him as tight as she could.
He stiffened.
For a moment he stood like a plank, his arms pinned at his sides, his chin dug into her shoulder, absolutely rigid with shock. Then, slowly, with a long, shuddering breath, something in him gave way. His arms came up. His paws closed on her back. He hugged her back, hard, with his face pressed into the scarf at her neck, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.
“Thank you,” Codette whispered.
“You’re welcome,” said Smile, thickly.
“Look after yourself.”
“I always do.”
“Really look after yourself.”
“I’ll try.” He pulled back, wiped his nose, and lifted his chin. He gave her a bright, brittle, perfectly false grin. “Go on. Shoo. I’ve got a king to entertain.”
She went.
It was past one in the morning when the three of them crept down the back stairs.
The east kitchens were dark and silent, smelling of cold grease and old bread. They slid between the long, shuttered ranges, past rows of copper pots hung from hooks like the skins of strange animals, and found the little service door exactly where he’d said, behind a stack of oak barrels, with a rusty iron latch. Tom pressed his shoulder to the wood. It opened with a long, low squeal.
Cool night air poured in.
They stood on a narrow stone terrace, high above a vast, black, still lake. The sky was a deep, drowned violet. Behind them the palace rose in a great gold cliff of towers and domes, its windows blazing with light, and below them the water lay motionless, flat and dark as a sheet of glass. It smelled of weeds and silt and something old.
A long, narrow bridge of pale stone stretched out across the narrowest part of the lake. At the far end, small and dim, stood a gate.
“There,” whispered Phillip.
“Slow,” said Tom. “Stay low.”
They went down the steps. They crept out onto the bridge. The stone was cold and slick under Codette’s feet, and on either side, only a hand’s breadth from the edge, the lake lay in perfect, mirrored silence. She did not look down. She was almost sure she saw something shift, deep under the surface: a long, pale, ridged shape, sliding along the bottom.
“Crocs,” breathed Tom.
“Don’t look.”
“I’m not looking.”
“You’re looking.”
“I’m not—” He swallowed. “Right. Not looking.”
They crossed the bridge on tiptoe, in single file, with Tom at the front, Phillip in the middle, Codette at the back. Halfway across, she turned her head, just once, and looked back at the palace.
A single window blazed on the topmost floor. A tiny white shape stood in it, framed in gold. It was too far away to see his face. But he was there, a small, still figure with a bell on his cap, watching, and as she watched, one paw lifted and pressed, very softly, flat against the glass.
She lifted her own.
Then she turned, and followed the others, and they reached the far end of the bridge, and Codette took the little rusty key from her pocket, and slid it into the lock of the gate.
It turned with a click.
And somewhere, far behind them, high up in the golden towers of the Valley of His Majesty, a single great bell began to toll.