Arc II: The Very Wrong England
Chapter II: The Feline Conspiracy Incident
Three weeks at sea.
Three weeks of salt water and hardtack and Milos asking every single morning "are we there yet" with the genuine curiosity of someone who had never once considered that this question might be annoying. Three weeks of Sven cooking whatever they had with the focused optimism of a man determined to make dried fish emotionally nourishing. Three weeks of Sam reviewing his financial projections for the England raid in a wax tablet he kept updating even though the projections had not changed because there was no new information, but the act of updating them made him feel productive. Three weeks of Tijjani sharpening weapons that were already sharp and thinking thoughts that he shared with nobody. Three weeks of Yuki sitting at the prow in the mornings looking east and then turning around and being useful.
Three weeks of Jens and Jesper existing in the specific armed truce of two people who had accidentally shown each other something real by a dying fire and had since been extremely careful not to do it again.
Bjarni had gotten into Sam's food supply twice. Sam had threatened, on both occasions, to throw the dog overboard. Sven had, on both occasions, positioned himself between Sam and Bjarni with the immovable calm of a very large man who was not going to let that happen. The dog remained on the ship. Sam remained unhappy. This was the equilibrium.
On the twenty-second morning Jens stood at the stern and looked at the horizon and said: "England should be close."
Jesper was at the rudder. He had taken it the previous night when the wind shifted and had not technically given it back yet, partly because he was good at it and partly because holding the rudder gave him something to look at that wasn't Jens.
"Probably," Jesper said.
Sam looked up from his wax tablet. "That doesn't sound reassuring."
"I'm reassuring myself," Jesper said.
Everyone looked at him.
"I've been navigating by stars," Jesper said. "The stars have been... cooperative. Mostly."
"Mostly," Jens said.
"There were three nights of cloud cover."
"Three nights."
"I estimated."
A long silence broken only by the sound of the sea and Bjarni eating something he'd found.
"Estimated," Jens said.
"Confidently."
"How confidently."
Jesper looked at the horizon. "...fairly confidently."
Tijjani set down the sword he was cleaning. "Define fairly."
Jesper did not define it.
This was, in retrospect, the warning.
I. Land
It was Milos who saw it first, because Milos was always at the top of the mast for reasons that had never been satisfactorily explained, hanging off the spar with the comfort of someone who did not process heights as a concept.
"LAND!"
The word hit the crew like a wave.
Sam was on his feet instantly. Tijjani stood. Sven shielded his eyes and looked. Jens surged to the prow. Even Yuki rose from where he'd been sitting and looked toward the horizon with an expression that was, for Yuki, almost animated.
There it was.
Green hills. Low coastline. Morning mist. The smell of land, actual land, grass and earth and wood smoke, after three weeks of nothing but salt.
"ENGLAND!" Milos screamed from the top of the mast.
"ENGLAND!" Jens confirmed, because it looked like land and land was England, that was the plan.
"England," Sam breathed, already doing sums.
"England," Sven said warmly, like greeting an old friend.
"England," Tijjani said, eyes already narrowing into planning mode.
Yuki said nothing. He was looking at the coastline with an expression that was doing something complicated.
Jesper, at the rudder, also looked at the coastline.
He looked at the angle of the sun.
He looked at the stars, visible just barely in the fading dawn, the ones he'd been navigating by, the ones that had been through three nights of cloud cover during which he had been fairly confident.
He looked at the coastline again.
"...hm," said Jesper.
Nobody heard him. Everyone was celebrating.
He held the rudder and sailed them in and said nothing else.
Later, when people asked why he hadn't told them, he would say: "I wasn't sure."
This was true. He wasn't sure.
He was just slightly worried.
II. The First Signs
The harbor was small. Wooden docks, fishing boats, nets drying in the early sun. A village of perhaps forty or fifty structures climbing a gentle hill. Smoke from cookfires. The smell of fish and woodsmoke and bread, which made everyone on the Bubbly almost weep with relief because three weeks of hardtack had consequences for morale.
Normal. Completely normal.
Except.
"Jens," Sven said slowly, from the prow as they came in.
"What."
"...do you see—"
"Yes." Jens said. Because he did. He did see it.
On the dock: three cats.
On the roof of the nearest building: four cats.
On a fence running along the waterfront: seven cats in a row, evenly spaced, sitting upright, watching the Bubbly approach with the unified attention of people who had been expecting them.
On a boat moored at the far dock: two cats.
In a window: one cat.
In another window: two cats.
In the window above that: five cats.
"That's..." Sam trailed off.
"A lot of cats," Tijjani said, in the voice of someone making an observation, filing it, and waiting to see what it meant.
"OH MY GOD," Milos said from the mast, looking around at the village with wide eyes. "THEY'RE EVERYWHERE."
Sven said, quietly, with profound feeling: "Oh my goodness."
Yuki said, also quietly, in Japanese: "...neko-chan. Takusan no neko-chan." Which nobody understood, but his tone was that of a man arriving at a place he recognized from a description.
Jesper, at the rudder, looked at the cats. Looked at the village. Looked at the hills beyond, which were not shaped like Northumbrian hills. Looked at the trees, which were not entirely like English trees. Looked at the cats again, who were looking back with the coordinated, unblinking attention of an audience at a very important performance.
"Something's wrong," Jesper said.
"We made it!" Jens said.
"Something is—"
"England!"
"Jens, listen to me—"
"ENGLAND!" Milos screamed, and then fell off the mast, and then caught himself two feet down and climbed back up.
Nobody listened to Jesper.
This would later be identified as the mistake.
III. The Welcome
The villagers came to meet them.
Forty, fifty people. Weathered faces, fishing-village clothes, warm expressions of the particular kind that said visitors, we don't get many visitors, this is exciting. They spoke a dialect that was almost recognizable and then wasn't, a thing Jens filed away as English probably sounds different here in this part which was a reasonable thing to believe if you'd never been to England and had no baseline.
Tijjani, who had studied language the way he studied everything — with focused, comprehensive attention — listened for thirty seconds and then looked sideways at Jesper.
Jesper was already looking at him.
They had the same expression.
They did not say anything. Not yet.
The villagers offered: food, shelter, warmth, and an enthusiastic welcome that seemed slightly disproportionate for a crew of heavily armed strangers who had arrived unannounced. The village elder, a broad-faced man with a magnificent beard and eyes that were very warm and also, just occasionally, flicked sideways in a way that was hard to place, shook Jens's hand and spoke at some length.
"What's he saying?" Jens asked Jesper, who had the most languages.
Jesper listened. "He's welcoming us."
"What else?"
"He says we must be tired from our journey."
"True."
"He says they have food prepared."
"Wonderful."
"He says—" Jesper paused. "He says the island welcomes all who arrive in peace."
"Island," Sam said.
Everyone stopped.
Jesper smiled tightly. "I'm sure it's a translation issue."
"Is it."
"Probably."
"Jesper."
"Let's eat first."
They ate first. The food was excellent — smoked fish, fresh bread, something roasted that nobody identified but everyone agreed was delicious. The village hall was warm and bright and there were, Sven counted quietly while eating, seventeen cats inside the building. Just inside this one building.
Sitting on beams. On windowsills. In the corners. On the table, frankly, right on the table, and the villagers moved dishes around them without comment like this was normal because for them it was normal.
One cat sat directly across from Sam and watched him eat with an expression Sam did not like at all.
"It's looking at me," Sam said.
"Cats look at things," Sven said.
"It's looking at my money pouch."
"Cats don't know what money is."
Sam looked at the cat. The cat looked at Sam's money pouch.
"This one does," Sam said.
IV. The Population Assessment
After dinner, Sam took out his wax tablet and conducted what he described as "a preliminary survey."
The village: forty-three structures. Population: somewhere between three hundred fifty and four hundred humans, based on what he could observe at the welcome meal and a rough extrapolation.
The cats.
Sam stopped writing.
He counted the cats he could see from where he stood in the village square.
He counted again.
He extrapolated.
He was a merchant. He was good at numbers. Numbers were his foundation, his language, his native territory.
"Tijjani," he said.
"Yes."
"How many cats do you see from here."
Tijjani looked around the square. "...many."
"On the rooftops, in the windows, on the fences, in the boats, on the—"
"Many, Sam."
"Hundreds," Sam said.
"At least."
"In this square alone."
"Yes."
"And this is one square of one village."
"Yes."
"And there are farms beyond the village. And hills. And presumably the whole island."
Tijjani looked at him. "What are you calculating."
Sam wrote a number on his tablet. He showed it to Tijjani.
Tijjani looked at the number.
"That can't be right," Tijjani said.
"The numbers suggest—"
"That number is insane."
"The numbers suggest," Sam said carefully, "that this island has approximately thirteen million cats."
A cat walked across Sam's foot. Sam looked down at it. It looked up at him. It continued walking.
"Approximately," Sam said.
V. The First Night
They were given rooms. Real rooms, real beds, the first horizontal sleeping surfaces the crew had experienced in three weeks, and the effect on most of them was immediate and total. Milos was asleep before his head hit the straw. Sven arranged Bjarni on the floor and was unconscious in four minutes. Jens took off his sword belt, lay down, and was gone.
Tijjani did not sleep immediately. He lay with his eyes open thinking about the dialect, which was not English and was also not anything he recognized from his considerable exposure to coastal languages. He thought about the village elder's sideways glances. He thought about the cats.
Then he decided these were tomorrow's problems and went to sleep.
Sam slept badly. He kept waking up with the feeling of being watched. He was being watched. Every time he opened his eyes there were two small luminous cat-eyes in the corner of the room. Different pair each time. He didn't know if it was the same cat repositioning or multiple cats in rotation.
He didn't know which option was worse.
Yuki did not sleep at all, which was normal for him. He sat by the window of his room and watched the village at night and noted several things which he stored carefully and said nothing about, because Yuki was building a complete picture, and incomplete pictures announced themselves too early.
Jesper got into bed, pulled the blanket up, closed his eyes.
Heard a sound.
Opened his eyes.
A cat was sitting on the foot of his bed.
Large cat. Orange-ish. Not enormous, not spectacular, just a cat, sitting with the perfect posture of a cat that has decided this is its seat now.
Jesper looked at it.
The cat looked at Jesper.
"No," Jesper said.
The cat did not leave.
"Off," Jesper said.
The cat blinked. Once. Slowly. And then resumed looking at him with the complete attention of something that had an opinion and was waiting for him to work out what it was.
Jesper sat up. The cat did not react.
"What," Jesper said.
The cat looked at him with both eyes fully open, the specific look of a cat that is not merely watching but assessing, categorizing, reaching conclusions.
"What do you want," Jesper said.
The cat's tail moved. Once. Slowly.
"I'm not giving you food."
Tail.
"I don't have food."
The cat glanced very briefly and deliberately at the corner of the room where Jesper had put his travel pack, which did in fact have a small amount of dried meat in it for emergencies.
Jesper stared at the cat.
"...you can't know that," Jesper said.
The cat looked at the pack. Looked at Jesper.
Jesper did not sleep well.
VI. The Morning of Losses
Jens woke up in the best mood he'd been in in weeks because he had slept in a real bed and was therefore prepared to feel warmly toward England and all its inhabitants.
He went to find his shield.
His shield was not where he had put it.
He checked again. Under the bed. Behind the door. In the corridor. He checked the room twice with increasing thoroughness and decreasing good mood.
The shield was gone. Not stolen — the room showed no signs of entry. The door had been shut. The window was small and latched. Nothing else had been moved. Just the shield. His favorite shield, the one with the iron boss and the old chip in the rim from a Saxon axe that he'd kept because it was character.
Gone.
Down the corridor, Sam emerged from his room with an expression that had moved past upset and into the cold white space beyond upset, where a person simply becomes very quiet and very precise.
"My silver," Sam said.
"My shield," Jens said.
They looked at each other.
"How much?" Jens asked.
"Half the pouch. The other half is still there. They took exactly half."
"Who takes exactly half."
"Someone making a point," Tijjani said, appearing from his own room with his boots in his hand. He looked at both of them. "My short blade is gone. Just the short one. The sword is still there."
Milos erupted from his room. "MY AXE."
"Gone?"
"WHICH CAT." He looked down the corridor. Three cats at the far end looked back at him. "WHICH ONE OF YOU."
"Milos—"
"I KNOW IT WAS CATS."
He wasn't wrong.
Sven appeared last, Bjarni at his heels. The dog had an expression Sven had never seen on him before — ears back, tail very still, the posture of an animal that had encountered something last night that had recalibrated his understanding of the world.
"Bjarni seems nervous," Sven said.
They all looked at the dog.
The dog looked at the three cats at the end of the corridor.
The three cats looked at the dog.
The dog took a step backward.
"Something," Jesper said, coming out of his room with dark eyes and no evidence of having slept, "is wrong with this island."
"You said that yesterday," Jens said.
"Yes. I did." Jesper looked at him. "And then we all ate their food and went to sleep and now your shield is gone."
A silence.
"So when I say something's wrong," Jesper said pleasantly, "perhaps consider listening."
Jens had nothing for this. He said nothing.
"Investigation," Tijjani said, putting his boots on. "Now."
VII. The Investigation
It was, as investigations went, deeply unusual.
The evidence: missing items. Jens's shield. Sam's silver. Tijjani's short blade. Milos's axe. A belt buckle of Sam's that he hadn't even noticed yet until Tijjani pointed out it was gone. Yuki had lost nothing, which everyone noted and nobody commented on because Yuki losing nothing seemed like exactly what would happen.
The witnesses: cats. Uniformly distributed throughout the village in numbers that should have been impossible. On every surface that could hold a cat, which turned out to be every surface. Watching. Always watching. With the alert, organized attention of watchers who were not merely being cats but were doing something else that happened to look like being cats.
The suspects: also cats.
"Okay," Tijjani said, sitting in the village square with a piece of charcoal and a flat board he was using as a surface, mapping what they knew. "Let's be rational."
"They're cats," Sam said.
"Let's be rational."
"Tijjani. Cats took our things."
"We don't know that—"
"A cat sat on my bed for an hour last night and looked at my supply pack," Jesper said. "Then in the morning the supply pack had been opened and the dried meat was gone. Neatly. Like someone had untied the knot."
"Cats don't untie knots."
"I know that," Jesper said. "And yet."
Milos was conducting his own investigation, which consisted of walking up to individual cats, looking them directly in the eyes, and saying "give it back" in Magyar. The cats received this with dignity.
Sven was also conducting an investigation, which consisted of sitting on the ground and attempting to befriend as many cats as possible on the theory that friendship produced information. He had, currently, four cats in his lap and two on his shoulders and one on his head, and none of them had given him anything useful, but Sven seemed to be having a nice time.
Yuki wandered the village in his quiet way, looking at things. The arrangement of buildings. The placement of cats. The patterns — and there were patterns, once you looked. The cats were not randomly distributed. They sat in formations that could be described as, if you were willing to think about it seriously, positions. Lookout positions. Entry and exit control. Communication lines.
He went to the fish market at the edge of the village. Watched the fish sellers. Watched the cats surrounding the fish market, approximately thirty of them, who were not eating the fish. Who were watching the fish. Who were, Yuki noted, watching the silver that changed hands for the fish.
He went back to Tijjani.
He sat down.
He drew, with his finger in the dirt, a circle. Then smaller circles around it. Then lines connecting the smaller circles to the center.
Tijjani looked at it.
"A hierarchy," Tijjani said.
Yuki pointed at the center circle.
He then looked up and across the square, toward the largest building in the village, the elder's hall, from the upper window of which a single figure was, at this moment, observing the square.
A cat.
An orange cat.
Very large. Very still.
Looking at the square with the comprehensive awareness of something that was seeing not details but the whole picture, the way that commanders looked at battlefields.
Everyone slowly looked at the orange cat.
The orange cat looked back.
"Oh," Sam said.
"Oh," said Tijjani.
"Oh no," said Jesper.
VIII. King Whiskers
The thing was, they had all thought the village elder was in charge.
The elder was a perfectly nice man. Friendly. Hospitable. Magnificent beard. He ran the welcome dinner well, he had organized their rooms, he had answered questions with a warmth and an openness that had seemed, at the time, straightforwardly genuine.
He was also, they now understood, looking back at every interaction with this new information, very careful about where he looked. Never directly at the orange cat unless he thought nobody was watching. And when he did look at the orange cat, his expression was not the expression of a man looking at his pet.
It was the expression of a man looking at his employer.
The orange cat's name, when Jesper asked a village woman with the careful linguistic strategy of someone communicating across a language gap through tone and expression, was—
She made a sound that was something like Hvískarar, which Jesper processed through several linguistic layers and emerged with Whiskers, and he filed this as: the name of the king of this island who happened to be a cat.
"His name," Jesper told the crew in the village square, "is approximately King Whiskers."
A beat.
"King," Jens said.
"King."
"He's a cat."
"He's a very large orange cat."
"He's a—"
"He is the reason your shield is missing, yes."
Milos looked at the window where King Whiskers was sitting. King Whiskers looked back at Milos.
"I want to fight him," Milos said.
"No," Jens said.
"Just a small—"
"MILOS."
"He's right there—"
"We are NOT fighting the cat king."
"He took my axe—"
"Then we get the axe back diplomatically."
Everyone looked at Jens.
"...diplomatically," Jens repeated, because he felt it needed standing behind.
"You want to negotiate with a cat," Sam said.
"I want to get my shield back."
"By negotiating."
"Yes."
"With a cat."
"SOMEONE negotiate something."
IX. The Generals
They found out about the Generals the hard way.
Tijjani had proposed a practical approach: retrieve their items directly. The items were presumably in the elder's hall. The elder's hall was a building. Buildings could be entered. They would enter it, collect their belongings, and leave.
This was a reasonable plan.
The hall had twelve cats outside it.
Not village cats. Not random cats lounging in the sun. Twelve cats positioned in a very specific pattern around the entrance and the perimeter, sitting with the upright, deliberate posture of soldiers at a post.
"Those are guards," Tijjani said.
"They're cats," Jens said.
"They're guards that are cats."
Jens stepped toward the door.
The twelve cats looked at him.
He stopped.
It wasn't that they moved. It wasn't a threat, no hissing, no arching, nothing dramatic. They simply looked at him with the complete coordinated attention of twelve things that were not afraid of him at all, which was unusual, because most things in Jens's experience were at least a little afraid of him.
He stepped back.
"That's," he said, "unsettling."
"Yes," said Tijjani.
They regrouped in the square.
"Alright," Tijjani said. "New approach. We split. Each person engages one sector. Overwhelm their—"
Milos was already moving.
"MILOS—"
He charged the door.
The twelve cats, in unified motion, scattered and reformed around him in a pattern that left him standing inside a circle of cats with no clear exit. None of them touched him. None of them attacked him. They just... reorganized around him, and now he was in the middle of it, and every way he stepped there was a cat, and it was deeply confusing.
"I," Milos said, from inside the cat circle, "don't know what's happening."
A kitten approached from the left.
Very small. Very fluffy. Grey.
It sat in front of Milos and looked up at him.
"...hi," Milos said.
The kitten blinked.
Milos sat down on the ground in front of it.
The kitten climbed into his lap.
Milos's entire face changed. "Oh," he said softly. "Oh, you're very small."
He was out of the battle for twenty minutes. When they eventually retrieved him he was sitting crosslegged in the dirt with four kittens and an expression of pure and helpless contentment.
"Milos," Jens said.
"Look at them," Milos said.
"We're trying to—"
"They're very small, Jens."
"I KNOW—"
"This one has extra toes."
Jens physically picked Milos up under one arm, kittens scattering, and carried him back to the group.
Meanwhile Sam had attempted a different approach, which was going to the village market and trying to buy their items back from whatever economic structure the cats had built. He was a merchant. He could out-negotiate anything with a price.
He sat across from a large tabby cat that appeared to be in charge of the market area, placed several coins on the ground between them, and said: "Shield. Axe. Blade. Silver. I buy them back."
The tabby looked at the coins.
Sam added more coins.
The tabby looked at Sam.
Sam added more coins.
The tabby looked at Sam in a way that communicated, without any possible ambiguity, that Sam had fundamentally misunderstood the transaction. That Sam was not the one with leverage here. That the tabby was aware of something about Sam that Sam would not enjoy being revealed.
"What," Sam said.
The tabby glanced toward Sam's boat. The Bubbly. Which was visible from the market.
Sam thought about this.
"...what do you know about my boat," Sam said slowly.
The tabby continued to look at him.
Sam thought about the records he kept in the Bubbly. His business records. His letters. His documentation of several transactions in Frisia that were, technically, entirely legal, and also several that were more in the category of legally creative.
"You can't read," Sam said. "You're a cat."
The tabby blinked.
Sam looked at his coins, then at the cat.
"...how much do you want," Sam said.
He came back with nothing and an expression like a man who has been robbed by someone better at his own profession.
Tijjani attempted the strategic approach, which was to identify the weakest point in the cat formation and apply targeted pressure.
Twenty minutes later he came back looking thoughtful and slightly lost.
"What happened," Jens said.
"I don't want to discuss it."
"Tijjani—"
"I said I don't." He sat down. "Suffice to say that I had a conversation with a large grey cat and I am no longer certain about several things I was previously certain about."
"...the grey cat convinced you of something."
"I'm not sure it was a conversation exactly."
"What was it."
"I said I don't want to discuss it."
Sven, for his part, had been trying to help and had succeeded perfectly at a completely different version of helping than anyone needed. He had, through his cat-befriending activities of the morning, established warm relationships with approximately forty cats, none of whom were the relevant cats, and he was refusing on moral grounds to ask them for information about King Whiskers on the basis that this felt like a betrayal of the friendships.
"They trust me," Sven said.
"Sven—"
"I gave them my word. Implicitly."
"You didn't say anything—"
"I implied it through consistent gentle behavior."
Jens looked at his crew.
Milos was recovering from the kitten incident and looked guilty about how much he'd enjoyed it.
Sam was calculating losses.
Tijjani was quietly restructuring his worldview.
Sven was surrounded by cats who were not helping.
Bjarni was hiding under the Bubbly.
Yuki was standing near the elder's hall looking at King Whiskers's window.
King Whiskers was looking back.
They seemed to be having a conversation. Without words. Just looking.
"Jesper," Jens said.
"Yes."
"Can you negotiate with the cat."
Jesper looked at him. "Can I negotiate with the cat king of an island we accidentally sailed to because I navigated us wrong."
"Yes."
"...this is a very strange life I've built for myself."
"Jesper."
"Fine."
X. The Negotiation
Jesper went alone.
He walked to the elder's hall, through the twelve Generals, who parted for him — just slightly, just enough — with the unhurried coordination of things that had decided he could pass. He went up the stairs. He found the room with the window.
King Whiskers was sitting on the windowsill.
Jesper pulled a stool from the corner and sat on it, which put him at approximately eye level with King Whiskers. He folded his hands. He looked at the cat.
The cat looked at him.
They stayed like this for a while.
"I know you're in charge," Jesper said. "And I know you know I know. So we can skip that part."
King Whiskers's tail moved. Once.
"We came here by mistake. We meant to go to England. We're sorry about the error." He paused. "Some of us are sorry. The large one is sorry. The one who eats everything is probably not sorry."
Tail.
"We want our things back. I'd like to propose an exchange."
King Whiskers looked at him with both amber eyes, fully open, unblinking.
Jesper thought about what a cat king would want. Not food — the village fed them, clearly. Not silver — they'd taken Sam's silver and it wasn't about the silver. Information? Information was what intelligent things with power always wanted.
"We've been," Jesper said carefully, "to a lot of places. We know things about the sea. About what's beyond it. About ports and islands and countries and people."
King Whiskers looked at him.
"I think you've been managing this island for a long time without knowing what's around it. What's coming. What might arrive on those docks that isn't seven idiots in the wrong location."
The tail stopped moving.
"I'll tell you," Jesper said, "everything I know about the sea routes within two days' sail of here. Every harbor, every settlement, every crew that operates in these waters. I'll draw you maps. I'll tell you what to watch for."
He held the cat's gaze.
"In exchange: our things back. Safe passage out. And—" he added, because he had a feeling, "—you tell your people to stop following our ship."
King Whiskers looked at him for a very long time.
Then the cat stood up, stretched, stepped off the windowsill, walked to a corner of the room, and sat down facing the wall.
The audience was over.
When Jesper came back downstairs, the twelve Generals had already returned the items.
Shield. Axe. Blade. Silver — all of it, including the half that had already been taken. Sam's belt buckle. Everything, lined up neatly outside the hall door.
The crew looked at the items. Looked at Jesper.
"What did you do," Jens said.
"Negotiated," Jesper said.
"With the cat."
"With the cat king, yes."
"What did you give him."
"Maps and sea intelligence."
"He's a cat."
"He's a very intelligent cat."
"Jesper—"
"Pick up your shield, Jens."
Jens picked up his shield. He held it and felt the familiar weight of it and had several thoughts he couldn't put in order.
"He also agreed," Jesper said, "not to follow us."
"Why would he follow us."
"I don't know. But he agreed not to."
"...good."
They looked at the hall. At the twelve Generals, now dispersed back to their posts. At the cats on the rooftops, the cats in the windows, the cats on the fences.
"Can we leave now," Sam said.
"Yes," said Jesper. "Let's leave now."
XI. Departure
They pushed off at low tide, the crew at the oars, the sail catching the offshore breeze, the Bubbly backing away from the wooden dock with the relieved energy of seven people leaving somewhere that had been strange in ways that were difficult to fully explain.
Jens rowed.
Milos rowed, and was quieter than usual, and was thinking about the grey kitten with a fondness he did not fully understand and would never admit.
Sven looked back at the village and waved at several cats on the dock, who watched the departure with the composed attention they brought to everything.
Sam was calculating his net position, which was roughly neutral since the silver had been returned, though he felt that something about the tabby cat encounter had shifted a balance somewhere in his professional confidence that would require time to recover.
Tijjani was thinking about the grey cat. He would be thinking about the grey cat for a while.
The island shrank behind them. The mist settled. The sea opened up.
"Where are we going," Jens asked.
"England," Jesper said. "Actually England, this time."
"Are you sure."
"I'm more sure than last time."
"That's a low bar."
"I know. But I've recalibrated."
Jens looked at him. Jesper met his gaze, briefly, and looked back at the horizon, and Jens thought — not for the first time, but for the clearest time so far — that there was something in this person that was genuinely, specifically interesting, in a way that had nothing to do with the impossible hair or the infuriating composure or any of the surface things.
He thought about the negotiation. Jesper, walking into a room alone with something that had organized an entire island into a feline conspiracy, and coming out with everything.
Jens looked at his shield. His recovered shield.
He thought: you didn't have to get mine back too.
He thought: you did though.
He said nothing. He rowed.
At the stern, Yuki sat watching the water.
He watched the cat island disappear into the mist. He thought about King Whiskers, with whom he had also had a conversation, though a different kind, in the window-watching hour before dawn when Yuki had gone to the hall alone and sat outside it and King Whiskers had descended to sit on the step and they had regarded each other across the species divide with mutual recognition.
Yuki had understood, he thought, what King Whiskers was.
Not a cat that thought it was a king. A king who happened to be a cat.
He had bowed to King Whiskers before he left.
King Whiskers had inclined his head.
There had been respect there, of a kind Yuki took seriously.
Yuki sat and watched the water and said nothing.
Below deck, where nobody was currently paying attention to the storage area, three shadows moved.
Very small shadows.
Very quiet.
The tiny sound of something settling into a dark corner among the rope coils and the supply sacks.
Three small pairs of eyes in the dark, watching the bilge water shift with the movement of the ship, entirely invisible, entirely silent.
Yuki heard it.
He heard the tiny sound of small bodies finding comfortable positions.
He looked down at the hatch.
He looked up at the horizon.
He did not say anything.
He was not going to say anything.
Some disasters, Yuki had learned over considerable time and distance, were better experienced directly.
These idiots were going to need cats, eventually.
He just didn't know which occasion yet.
The Bubbly sailed on. The wind filled the red sail. The mist closed behind them.
England, actual England, waited somewhere to the southeast.
And in the dark below the decks, three stowaways curled together in a pile and went to sleep.