Recoup: Khia got caught up in the storm and was later found by Miss and Arrah. She gave some VERY bad news to Arrah, who has been sadly fucked over by me without my realizing, and is now all set to bounce and avoid all the fallout.
Khia leaves while the dawn is very young and soft. There is no need to sneak - Arrah and Miss (or Memory now, if Khia feels any desire to obey the warmonger's wishes, and she really doesn't) are curled a comfortable distance from the den's entrance. Right by each other, and close enough to touch, if only by a hair's breadth each time they breathe out. They look sated and dreamless, the pair of them. There really is no need to creep, to look furtive, but Khia does so anyway. It's a force of habit, and hers had been beaten into her very, very early.
She pauses and says goodbye, or thinks the words anyway, the ones she could very easily speak to Arrah's face when she wakes. But Khia has delivered too much sadness to Arrah, and the prospect of one more burden, one last and final farewell, just seems cruel. She knows the alternative: Arrah will wake, will be alone, will miss the loss of her last daughter. But keeping the words unspoken might be kinder to them both.
So Khia leaves in the way that is now customary to her: suddenly, silently, the easiest way she knows. But she wonders, just for a second, if she might someday find a place she won't have to leave.
She shakes that thought. She knows her place is with her brother. Wherever, however, she finds him… whatever it might take to follow him…
Khia just walks. It's different now. Almost the last thing she remembers is that awful cross-country hike with Ru, the way her ears seemed to ache almost more than her feet. She's missing time, after the storm: days, in fact, washed away with the last of the flood. It's better she doesn't remember, but the thought of Ru still hangs in her mind, unshakeable. His memory is harder to escape than he had been, in the end.
He had told her, very pointedly, in a way meant to cow her, that she would never survive on her own. Yet here she is. Early days, yet, she thinks, but she's full of strange confidence mostly unknown to her. The prospect of Cariad - the closeness to him she has not felt in a long while - is buoying her.
Khia has that confidence as she walks up to the threshold of the forest. Not a subtle thing; taller and colder than the city, a dark curtain hung from trembling, outflung branches. Khia crosses and feels just as assured. Mostly.
Not so different from the city, she tells herself. Where the moors had been plain and empty, there's a familiarity here she earnestly tries to place; the wind stirs the branches and heavy leaves, almost like the constant noise of traffic or habitation she knows from the streets; the shades touches her cooly, as though she stands in the shadow of a tall building; everywhere there is some new smell. And she feels the danger. Perhaps that part is just her, convinced of hidden threats and unexpected foes. But that city taught her that, and whatever wisdom it imparts, it's usually something worth learning.
She knows, roughly, where to go. Khia will follow the forest and find the river, though she won't trust it not to breach its banks again. The river will lead her to Cariad and the Clan. Ru quizzed her almost ruthlessly on geography, though he did so with a smile and note of teasing in his voice. He hadn't trusted her not to get lost. And he hadn't really been wrong.
The thought of Ru doesn't hurt, but it's a little nostalgic. She has every confidence he survived - but where did the flood leave him? It's not her concern, but she wonders anyway, whiling away the minutes as she picks her way through the strange forest.
Khia is unsure of the shadows, wary of the intermittent sounds and silence, and her own thoughts are welcome.
One scent comes to her, more compelling than the rest. A chain of them, one link after another, like breadcrumbs on a dark woodland path. Khia opens her mouth, tastes the air, tries to dissect it, though she has no idea what she's smelling. It must be feline. She decides as much - Khia should know, with her Tillman heritage and army affiliation.
Cautious now, Khia creeps further into the shade, camouflages herself amongst the fallen, fallow leaves. She is far from PureClan, but that doesn't mean the cats she almost stumbled into are friendly.
She moves forward, twitching in the undergrowth, trying very hard to muffle the sounds of her passage that only seem to amplify with her efforts. Khia finally stops, leaving a pale wake behind her of stirred detritus. Her eyes are unused to picking apart the tableau before of - of trees and shade, of the many muted colours of the wild - and it takes her time.
Besides, he blends so perfectly into the forest it's almost unfair, a subterfuge.
The tom seems to wink in and out of view as she stares and after a moment finally squints, trying to untangle the sight of him from trunks and branches and the damp brown colours of them all. Is he really there at all?
Khia is sure he is. As she watches, he scruffs his foreleg against the ground and seems to spook at the noise it makes. A slender tabby, painted the colour of clay slip, with a nervous air about him Khia likes immediately. She should approach - she knows Ru would, or Gideon, and probably even Arrah - but she is comfortably screened in her secrecy. She hid from everyone in Tillman's, and it became a point of pride. But it was a tactic that almost always worked. ]
The tom is not doing much: if he's hunting, something Khia doesn't know much about, he's surely going about it the wrong way. He sits and waits, in the midst of that strange pool of scents. He glances off into the forest, every which way, but always passes over Khia's head without seeming to spot her at all. That's fine by her. Socialising is always such a test, anyway. She just looks at him, evaluates him. Lightly muscled, spry enough, barely scarred at all. Has he scrapped with the Clan before, or, like her, just feared them from a distance? He looks the fearful type. Khia is inclined to think the intricacies of battle are faraway prospects for him.
Her gaze goes beyond him. There is a patch of darkness just framing him, a deepness in which Khia can almost discern eyes.
She shakes her head. Nothing is there - it's only a den, a little harmless hollow in the roots of a tree.
Khia waits for an hour. She isn't sure what keeps her hidden - just a wordless insistence, an instinct telling her not yet.
The little tom is almost as still as Khia is. But they both start when the second cat walks into view.
"Father!" says the small one, sounding startled. Khia sighs in relief. A family group. They should be harmless. Reasonable, at the very least.
The other one scoffs. It is another tom - a very gruff tabby, with a stump for a tail and a messily scarred throat. She thinks of Miss, who may yet be sleeping serenely with her own coronet of scars. She is proof, most decidedly, that cats with many scars can still have even temperaments and pleasant civility.
"I could have been a fox, or a badger," the gruff one points out. His voice is rough but still mellow. She wonders if the scars force him to speak quietly. "Or something worse. And you'd be dead right where you sit."
His son looks down at his paws. The attention of his father seems unmerited, like he's unused to its touch.
"Sorry," he coughs. He doesn't look up.
The other one sighs and sits too, peering into the dark little space behind his son. He seems content and turns away.
Khia is even less inclined to approach. She doesn't need anything from this pair, and once she can ascertain their numbers and the kind of threat they pose her, she can sneak on her merry way. There are more than two singular scents here; Khia decides, for once, to be thorough.
"Catch anything?" the younger tom asks, after an indecently awkward pause.
Khia's stomach makes a humble little noise.
The big tom shakes his head. "I didn't expect to. We've scourged this forest twice over already. Pickings are slim. I don't know what your mother expected of us, but I'm sure she'll subject us well enough to her rage when we return."
She feels a prickling of empathy. Food is hard to come by if you don't know how best to catch it. And with the colder months coming on quickly, any mother would be upset by her family going hungry.
"Lucky we found something," he continues, turning to peer into the den. "Such as it is. We'll have enough for the next month."
The son looks uncomfortable. He's hardly done anything, by sitting and guarding what little they have. His mother's temper might explain that perpetually nervous look fixed on his face.
"I miss the city," he admits. "It was easier there. At least she could have her fun with them and not us."
And he jumps again, as another pair emerges from the forest.
It's a tom and a she-cat, this time; a bulky black tom, hidden mostly behind a tall, stately she-cat. She catches Khia's eye and holds it. Khia has seen herself often enough - her pale, pretty fur reflected back at her by grimy alley puddles or the mirrors of Andraste's house. But, in all her time spent crowded in with kits and soldiers both, she has never seen anyone who looks just like her.
That may be an overstatement. The newcomer is tall, wiry, clearly muscled, wearing the scars on her skin like hard-won prizes. Khia never grew very tall, to her chagrin, and she is still trimmed with infantile roundness her brief army education never quite trimmed away. But their fawn colouring, their pelts stippled as though by the same brush… Their strange, coveted dapples, exactly alike. The she-cat turns her head; she has green eyes, brightly lit in the shaded forest, but the resemblance to hers ends there. Khia's eyes, Arrah's eyes, their twin maternal heirlooms, aren't shared by this strange new she-cat.
Nevertheless, Khia is perplexed.
Nudged along before them, so plain and pedestrian Khia had not before noticed him, is a skinny brown tom. Bright wounds weep along his sides, and he favours a leg as he limps along, muzzle very close to the ground. The first beat of panic stirs in her chest.
The older tabby looks cheered. "So you did find one."
The she-cat meets his gaze, even and blank, as she spills the brown tom at his feet. "Easily enough. If your heart were in it, old man, you might have got him instead of me and my young friend here."
He grunts. "I got one earlier. That might quell our dear leader's murderous compulsions."
"We should go," the first tabby says. "I don't want to be walking through a forest that's not ours when night falls."
The she-cat sneers. "Afraid of some ragtag Tainted dogging your tail, Littlefrost?"
He doesn't say anything - just snaps his eyes back to the ground.
"Of course he is," his father snaps shortly. "How he won his fight when Volepaw-" his eyes slip to the black tom, and something like contrition passes over his face. "Sorry. Round up my catch, Littlefrost, and we'll move on. I want to reach home."
Khia squeezes her eyes shut and tries not to breathe. It's them - the indomitable them, the feared and faceless beasts of legend incarnate. PureClan. And she lies only metres away, ripe for the harvest like the poor brown tom on the ground. She cracks open her eyes again, deciding it's more dangerous to shut off her senses while a veritable mob lies before her. Even Etch, she thinks, wouldn't try to save me from this.
They have all moved, taken up guard; the brown tom is on his feet, even as tremors rack his body, and behind is someone new. Someone new and old.
Khia can't make a noise, can't even breathe and feel safe, and bites down on her paw to keep silent. The shock is a sound inside her throat, and she must keep it in. The pain brings a little clarity, but not nearly enough.
To death, then. How stupid her bravado. What a prophecy, spoken in her voice. Only, and she hadn't known it, she didn't mean her own.
Ru, always the jailor, outside the bars, beyond the cages… that Ru, now a prisoner. He has no purpose for them, only the one drilled into her by everyone she has ever asked, when she asked about Cariad: dying for their cause, being killed for their sanguine crusade. Even Ru had spoken the words. They take us and we die.
Tradition, by now.
Her brother, her not-quite, never-will-be father… who else would they dare take?
And without Oakpaw, Khia knows, her chances of rescuing two captives grow slimmer by the second.
Failure tastes like copper and blood on her tongue.
The Clanners pack themselves into formation: The she-cat at the head, her lackeys close at her heels, the unlucky prisoners borne along in the middle. Khia tries to glimpse Ru's face - is he hurt, is there a chance he might spot her, and find comfort in seeing her alive? But he is too thoroughly shrouded by the warriors. She watches the hefty black tom block him from view.
And Khia's fur begins to crawl, and the shock in her throat turns to horror.
Cariad is, after everything, quite alive. He is one of them.
