The Secrets of Jin-Shei Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t even know if it’s old enough to be weaned yet.”
    “Will she take it back?” Xaforn said, coming down on one knee beside Qiaan to have a closer look at their prize. Both girls were completely ignoring the erstwhile bully, who was still on the ground, groaning.
    “Even if she did,” Qiaan said, “it might die. It’s so tiny. I wonder where those bullies found it.”
    “They probably killed the rest.”
    The mother cat snarled, but when they looked up at the sound she was gone, melted away into the shimmer of heat. Xaforn sighed.
    “Well, that’s that.”
    “Do you want it?”
    “What would I do with it?” Xaforn snapped. She’d been caught in a moment of softness and it rankled—especially because it had been Qiaan, of all people, who had been the one to see her succumb to it.
    “Then why did you save it?”
    “Because they were Guard,” said Xaforn. As though that made all the necessary sense in the world. In her world, it did.
    Qiaan could even understand it. But her understanding didn’t change matters. “It’s dead anyway, then,” she shrugged. But she tied her sleeve into a makeshift sling and cradled the weakly mewling kitten into it. It quested with its tiny nose until it found her finger, and then it started sucking on the fingertip, hard, making tiny complaining noises when it refused to yield any sustenance.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’ll take it home,” Qiaan said. “See if I can’t find something. Milk going to waste. Something.”
    “Sappy.”
    “Mad,” countered Qiaan.
    They got to their feet, spun apart. Behind them, the poleaxed young bully was only just beginning to sit up and shake his head in confusion. The girls stalked off in opposite directions, and then Qiaan turned to look at Xaforn’s stiff, retreating back.
    “You can come see her if you like,” she called softly.
    Xaforn paused, half turned her head. “Why would I want to do that?”
    Qiaan shrugged. “To see if she survives the Guard.”
    Xaforn’s braid snapped like a whip as she turned. “It wasn’t Guard did that to it!”
    “To
her
,” Qiaan said. “And if they hadn’t you would never have interfered. I’ll be seeing you.”
    “Witch,” muttered Xaforn.
    “Bruiser,” came floating back, just as Qiaan passed out of sight.
    Xaforn turned away. She tried to scowl, but however hard she schooled her features her mouth kept on coming up into a twisted little grin instead. Of all the people …
    But she had an awful feeling that she could not resist going to see the cat.
She.
That pathetic little bundle of ragged fur, bloodied and weak and barely flickering with life. How did Qiaan know it was a female?

Four
     
    X aforn shared a dormitory room with three other Guard foundlings. She had a utilitarian relationship with her roommates—she did not have anything much in common with any of them. She had both given and received bruises from sparring sessions with all of them, but they shared the space amicably even if Xaforn didn’t join in with the giggles and the compound gossip the other three girls were prone to. The single Guard members were given to transient and shifting flings with others in their cadre, and Xaforn’s roommates always seemed to know who was attached to whom any given week. Xaforn did not particularly care to know, and had developed a habit of generally tuning out specific conversations, those spiced with heavy doses of titters and whispers. But gossip was also a mine of information about the general day-to-day lives in the compound and Xaforn did not dismiss everything that found its way into her room through her chatty bunkmates.
    She was sitting on her bed fixing a broken sandal barely a week after the incident with the kitten when a comment involving ‘cats’ found its way past her defenses, and she lifted her head fractionally, starting to listen without giving the least impression that her attention was suddenly on things other than the half-completed repair job