Read Online The Book of Night With Moon by Diane Duane - Free Book Online Page B

firmly over his midsection and held him down.
    "Lemme go!"
    "You've had a bad morning, kit," Rhiow said mildly. "I'd lie still awhile."
    "Don't call me kit," he said in a yowl meant to be threatening. "I'm a tom!"
    Urruah gave him an amused glance. "Oh. Then we can fight now, can we?"
    "Uhh…" The kit looked up at Urruah— taking in the size of him, the brawny shoulders and huge paws, and, where the tips of the forefangs stuck out so undemurely, the massive teeth. "Uh, maybe I don't feel well enough."
    "Well, then," Urruah said, "at your convenience." He sat down and began to wash. Rhiow ducked her head briefly to hide a smile. It was, of course, an excuse that the rituals of tom-combat permitted: most of those rituals were about allowing the other party to escape a fight and still save face.
    "You have reason not to feel well," Saash said, pausing in her washing. "About fifty rats took bites out of you. You lie still, and we'll work on that."
    "Why should you care?" the kit said bitterly.
    "We have our reasons," Rhiow said. "What's your name, youngster?"
    His eyes narrowed, a suspicious look, but after a moment he said, "Arhu."
    "Where's your dam?" Saash said.
    "I don't know." This by itself was nothing unusual. City-living cats might routinely live in-pride, even toms sometimes staying with their mother and littermates; or they might go their own way at adolescence to run with different prides, or stay completely unaligned.
    "Are you in hhau'fih? " Saash used the word that meant any group relationship in general, rather than rrai'fih, a pride-relationship implying possible blood ties.
    "No. I walk alone."
    Rhiow and Saash exchanged glances. He was very young to be nonaligned, but that happened in the city, too, by accident or design.
    "There'll be time for those details later," Rhiow said. "Arhu, how did you come to be down there where we found you, in the tunnel?"
    "Someone said I should go there. They laughed at me. They said, I dare you… " Arhu yawned, both weariness and bravado. "You have to take dares…."
    "What was the dare?"
    "She said, Walk down here, and take the adventure that comes to you—"
    Rhiow's eyes went wide. " 'She.' What did she say to you first?"
    "When?"
    "Before that."
    A sudden coolness in Arhu's voice, in his eyes. "Nothing."
    " Fwau, " Rhiow said; a bit roughly, for her, but she thought it necessary. "Something else has to have been said first." She thought she knew what, but she didn't dare lead him….
    Arhu stared at her. Rhiow thought she had never seen such a cold and suspicious look from a kit so young. Pity rose up in her; she wanted to cry, Who hurt you so badly that you've lost your kittenhood entire? What's been done to you? But Rhiow held her peace. She thought Arhu was going to give her no answer at all: he laid his head down sideways on the concrete again. But he did not close his eyes, staring out instead into the dimness of the garage.
    Come on, Rhiow thought. Tell me.
    "I was in the alley," Arhu said. "The food's good there: they throw stuff out of that grocery store on the other side of it, the Gristede's. But the pride there, Hrau and Eiff and Ihwin and them, they caught me and beat me again. They said they'd kill me, next time; and I couldn't move afterward, so I just lay where they left me. No one else came for a good while…. Then she must have come along while I was hurting. I couldn't see her: I didn't look, it hurt to move. She said, You could be powerful. The day could come when you could do all kinds of good things, when you could do anything, almost, with the strength I can give you… if you lived through the… test, the… hard time…" Arhu made an uncertain face, as if not sure how to render what had been said to him. "She said, If you take what I give you, and live through the trouble that follows— and it will follow— then you'll be strong forever. Strong for all your lives. " His voice was going matter-of-fact now, like someone repeating a milk-story