Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [40]
Or had he?
… Visit the Broken Mast, get the box, push the leaves apart …
Cauvin snatched the box and brought it closer to the lamp. In addition to the broken scrollwork there were clusters of leaves on what he’d taken for the box’s bottom. He prodded them gingerly, in various combinations. On the fourth try the box sprang apart. There were pieces of wood falling to the floor, coins bouncing everywhere, and a sharp pain at the root of Cauvin’s right forefinger. He stood transfixed, watching a bead of blood well up from his flesh.
“Ki-thus, I must return home—to the land of my mothers. My people need me; and I need you.”
The woman who spoke in Cauvin’s mind was a soft, tiny creature—no taller than Bec—wearing a snug gown that widened her hips threefold and bared a woman’s ample breasts. For a moment, there was nothing in Cauvin’s mind save those breasts, then he managed to look at her face. Fortunately, he’d seen a fish before, else he might have dropped to his knees when the glistening membrane flicked across her eyes.
“And that is precisely the reason I cannot sail with you, Shu-sea. We could be together while we dwelt in Sanctuary, but nowhere else. We were each born with obligations we cannot avoid—and now those obligations are calling us, both of us and at the same time. You must return to your Empire and I to mine.”
The man who held the woman’s hands between his own had bright gold hair and guileless eyes.
Cauvin blinked. He looked past the embracing couple and recognized—barely—the angles of the palace roofs. The man, his memory told him—though Cauvin couldn’t understand how it could be his memory—was Prince Kadakithis, last of Sanctuary’s Imperial governors, who’d left Sanctuary for Ranke seven years after its sack in the faint, futile hope of saving the Empire from anarchy—
Seven years! In his own life Cauvin had listened to old Bilibot and the charlatan-hazard Eprazian tell the tales of the Rankan Empire’s collapse and how the Kitty-Kat prince had vanished one day, never to be seen again, but the details—where the prince had gone or when or why—None of that was part of Cauvin’s memory.
And what, exactly, was “anarchy”?
Suddenly—as if the pair had heard Cauvin asking his sheep-shite questions—they unwound and looked his way. The woman—her name was Shupansea and she was the ruler-in-exile of the fish people—ran toward him, rouged breasts bouncing. She embraced him. Cauvin felt the surprising strength in her arms and smelled her perfume, familiar in memory though he’d never smelled its like before.
“Lord Molin—Thank you for coming so quickly. Can you speak sense to him?”
Cauvin gasped. He wasn’t himself; he’d become Lord Molin Torchholder, or a few of his memories.
“What’s wrong?” the prince asked.
“It’s too late,” Molin replied.
Or Cauvin replied; or it didn’t matter because the words all flowed out of memories that had been old and meaningless long before Cauvin had gotten his froggin’ self born.
“What’s too late?” the woman asked.
Cauvin felt a sense of relief as strong as his anxiety had been a moment earlier. Molin had always gotten along well with the Beysa. She understood expediency better than her naive husband ever would or could. If she’d been a man, not a fish, he—Molin, not Cauvin—would have backed her all the way to the Imperial throne in Ranke.
“A messenger just arrived from the capital. Your cousin was deposed five days after he was made emperor. He did not survive.”
There was more in the scroll the golden prince took from his hands. Molin had already read it through. Cauvin recalled the details: a battle in the streets around the Imperial Palace, a new emperor proclaimed—the third since the year began, a ten-year-old boy hacked apart for the crime of being his father’s last surviving son.
Cauvin had his froggin’ answer. He’d learned the meaning of anarchy—it was just a sparker word for his own childhood and adolescence.
“Go with your wife, my prince, or