As a cat, of course, he had a certain amount of experience sitting before the mouse hole, every sense keen even as his eyes seemed to glaze over with disinterest. But though a cat at a mouse hole might look as lazy as a tub of lard, he was no less alert, no less purposeful.
This was different. This was waiting without apparent purpose. This waiting required patience. Eanrin was rarely game for patience.
He sat in cat form on the edge of the gorge, his outer eyelids mostly closed, but his third eyelids still open so that he might observe the world without the world being quite aware of his observation. He particularly observed Alistair. The poor young lord had paced himself to the point of exhaustion and now lay on his back, staring up at the sky. It was a fixed stare, not the vague gazing into nowhere one might expect. Curious despite himself, Eanrin glanced up to see what so fascinated the young lord of Gaheris.
Above them gleamed the blue star.
“Starlight, star bright, guide her footsteps through the night,” Eanrin chanted, but his voice was acidic. “Don’t put too much hope in those old nursery rhymes, mortal man. They mean little in the end.”
“Maybe.” Alistair shrugged without looking around. “Or maybe they have meaning beyond your knowledge.” Perhaps he didn’t intend to be heard, but Eanrin’s pricked ears picked up every word.
Irked, the cat stood and trotted a little along the gorge, looking out across the long plain to where the fire of the temple burned. He had seen the second gathering of the Midnight in the distance and wondered what poor soul now had the Black Dogs on his trail. Could it be Etanun himself, fleeing along his chosen Path?
Could it be Imraldera?
Eanrin, as merry a man as ever sprang from the gardens of Rudiobus, growled bitterly. “This dragon-blasted waiting is more than I can stand,” he muttered. But he must stand it. Until some guidance or grace was given him, he must sit here on the edge of the Dragonwitch’s poisoned realm and do nothing, and it was the hardest task he had ever been given.
The evening passed. Alistair slept at last, the cat noticed and was glad of it. Who knew what the following day would bring? Possibly danger, possibly death. So let the lad sleep while he may. The blue star had danced its measure and descended below the horizon with its brethren, and the sun was beginning to rise. Otherwise, the world was still and hot, only to get hotter. And they must wait.
Then suddenly, there was Mouse.
The cat, dulled by the labor of doing nothing, didn’t see her at first. Then he realized that the little figure on the edge of his vision, moving with the mind-numbing plod of mortality, was familiar. He leapt to his feet, meowling, “Get up, Alistair! It’s the girl!” Away he streaked across the dust toward that distant image.
Disguised once more in her slave boy’s rags, Mouse hastened along, head down, her mind full of the things she had seen and learned. Her ears were ever strained for the sound of pursuit, and though it never came, she expected it nevertheless.
The high priestess may have allowed herself to be deceived once. But she surely would not blind herself to Mouse’s treachery a second time.
So Mouse fled, her one thought to reach the gorge and, if the cat-man and Alistair waited there, to tell them all she knew. Perhaps in this small way she might undo some of the evil she had worked.
When she at last saw the cat swiftly approaching, she stopped and her face went slack, almost dead. Eanrin saw enough in that expression to confirm his worst suspicions. Even so, as he halted at her feet, his ears back and his tail lashing, he asked, “How did you escape the Black Dogs?”
“I didn’t,” said Mouse.
The cat growled. Then he was a man towering over her, his hands clenched into fists. “You were sent by the high priestess, weren’t you, to find Etanun’s heir. Not by my lady Imraldera.”
Still she did not avert her eyes, though her face was pale beneath the layer of gray dust. “I betrayed you all,” she said. “I was sent to retrieve the heir to Fireword for the Flame at Night, and that is what I have done.”
By this time Alistair was approaching. “Mouse!” he cried, but the girl did not shift her gaze from Eanrin’s furious face.
“I betrayed you for the sake of my goddess,” she said. “But my goddess does not exist. There is nothing but a dragon.”
“Learned that a bit late, didn’t you?” said Eanrin.
Her breath came in a shudder. “I freed the heir. He has fled into the Diggings. Lost. She cannot use him to retrieve the sword.”
Alistair reached them and stood panting, his face, unlike the cat-man’s, full of a surprised smile. “Mouse, you’re alive! You’re alive and whole, and I thought for sure you’d had it! How’d you get here? How did you—”
Mouse, who could not understand him anyway, interrupted. “Tell him,” she said to Eanrin. “Tell him what I did. Tell him what I am.”