Rhiow blinked, astounded by the suddenness of what had just happened. Nonplussed, she glanced at Aufwi, who looked as bemused as she felt, and then over at Urruah. Far from intervening, he was presently smelling a large downhanging red rose on a nearby bush and acting as if his thoughts were entirely elsewhere. Is this some tom-style intervention you two cooked up? Rhiow said to him privately.
Not at all, Urruah said, taking a last breath of the rose’s fragrance. Kind of wish I’d thought of it. But we’ve been so busy with work here that disciplinary issues kind of got shoved to the back of my mind. Now, though –
He strolled over to where Arhu was crouching, and leaned down to peer at the ear by which Hwaith had briefly held Arhu still. Just a drop of blood marked the spot.“That could’ve been interesting,” he said to Hwaith.
Hwaith gave him a casual sidewise look.“No point in half measures,” he said. “If you’re thinking about pulling someone’s ear off, make sure you’re in the right place to pull it all off…”
Urruah merely flirted his tail in agreement. Seeing this, Arhu’s eyes went a bit less outraged and furious, a little more scared.
Urruah bent lower.“Just because you’re useful,” Urruah said, “don’t get the idea that you’re so indispensable that you can be rude to those of us who outweigh you – in seniority, or otherwise.” The way he was looming over Arhu, in a more massive manner than the slighter Hwaith could manage, suggestedthat the always-loaded issues of relative weight and size were now on Urruah’s mind… or at least that he wanted Arhu to think they were. “Because if you let your hormones start talking for you, believe me, we’re going to talk back.”
“And as for Hwaith having come to us for help,” Rhiow said, coming up beside Urruah, “you of all People have no business complaining about where errantry’s needs might lead a cousin in the Art! Or, for that matter, anyone’s ability to handle a problem with or without assistance from others. You had plenty from us, as I recall.”
The three of them stood looking down at Arhu for a few moments more. He kept still, but Rhiow could see that some of the tension was going out of him, if only to be displaced for the moment by embarrassment. Not entirely a bad alternative under the circumstances, Rhiow thought.
“All right,” she said at last. “For the time being, it might be smart if you busied yourself with something concrete while we start setting up our plans for this evening. Go on back to the Silent Man’s, tell Sif to take a break, and go over the structure she’s setting up for us. I’ll want a report on its strengths and weaknesses from you when we get back.”
Arhu stood up as they all backed off to give him transport space.“It’s just makework…” he said under his breath.
All three of them just looked at Arhu and didn’t say a word.
Arhu looked away, the ear Hwaith had put a claw into twitching a couple of times, and he vanished.
Rhiow and Hwaith and Urruah all looked at each other, and then practically in unison sat down to wash— as Aufwi was already doing off to one side, in the polite not-noticing mode of a Person not closely involved in a disagreement. All their whiskers were well forward in amusement, though– not just at Arhu’s discomfiture, but their own.
“Hwaith,” Rhiow said as she licked one paw, “…thank you for saving me the trouble.”
“Not a problem,” he said, scrubbing one of his ears vigorously: the same one in which he’d hooked Arhu, she noticed.
“I feel for our two kits, though,” Rhiow said. “They’ve been caught up in such serious events since we all came together… yet they’ve always produced the result. Which makes me wonder if we’ve come to depend on them too much while they’re still so young.” She glanced at Urruah.
He merely flicked his ears back and forth in a don’t-know gesture and kept on washing his face.
“In any case, it can’t be easy having the Eye so young,” Hwaith said. “Not that the Ear’s exactly a nap on a sunny rock either…”
“But what you said before…” Rhiow paused in mid-face scrub. “Is it hormones? Or just stress?”
“Stress has a hormone,” Urruah said as he finished his wash. “But Rhi, it occurs to me that there may be entirely different hormonal business on Arhu’s mind.” He exchanged a glance with Hwaith.
Rhiow blinked, as the thought genuinely hadn’t occurred to her. “Well, yes…” she said after a moment. There was no specific prohibition against sibling-Persons mating with one another when the blood or the heart moved them to it. There were even versions of the Sehau and Aifheh story in which the Lovers were occasionally born as littermates. Of course People were taught by their dams that there could be too much of a good thing in this regard if it continued over a number of generations, and this opinion was reinforced by the high mortality in the litters and dams of prides that inbred too closely or failed to insource enough new blood. Yes, this situation’s different, Rhiow thought. But there are other problems. When wizardly teammates also start thinking about becoming heatmates, a whole new level of complexity adds itself to every spell and every transaction. And if Sif should actually go into heat…
Suddenly it all seemed just too much for Rhiow to bear. She stood up, her tail wagging as uncontrollably as Arhu’s had, even while the words of the meditation went through her head. Today I shall meet the circumstance it seems impossible to manage, the events that seem willingly to conspire against me as I do my work. These, and my own fear that I cannot manage them, I must recognize as the claws in sa’Rraah’s paw, modeled on my own for the purpose of slashing me more deeply — But the sentiment seemed far less useful today than it normally did. And here I am doing nothing –
“I should get back,” Rhiow said. “I need to have a look and see what Sif’s set up for us – “
“In the state you’re in?” Urruah said, sparing her tail no more than a moment’s glance and going back to scrubbing his ear. “I wouldn’t advise it.”
Rhiow was instantly tempted to tell him what she thought of his advice… and then caught herself, somewhat in shock. I’ve been telling him he needs to start acting more like a team leader, she thought. And when he does, what’s my first impulse?…
Rhiow didn’t move until she succeeded in quieting her tail down: and as usual, doing so paradoxically made her feel calmer. “All right,” she said, “you may have a point. Do you want to go back and look in on her first? And Arhu, naturally.”
Urruah got up and stretched fore and aft.“I’ll do that,” he said. “Rhi, there’s no rush about anything until Ith gets back to us. Take a little self time.”
“I’ll go too,” Aufwi said, and stood up, shaking himself once. “The Silent Man can probably use a more detailed explanation of what’s been going on.” He flirted his tail, a resigned gesture. “And why he probably shouldn’t come along tonight to help us…”
Without more ado, they were gone. Rhiow stood there for a moment listening to the mutter of the traffic off beyond the edges of the Park, then glanced over at Hwaith. She sighed.“I begin to think,” she said, “that I’m the one who needs a dose of the treatment you just handed Arhu.”
He flicked an ear and headed down the path away from the museum: Rhiow fell in beside him.“I doubt that,” Hwaith said. “Just think of the pressure you’ve been under! I get a sense you’re harder on yourself than you’d ever be on your teammates.”
Rhiow laughed under her breath as they made their way along between the rose bushes.“I guess,” she said. “But it’s hard to strike a balance, you know? Even just in normal times…” And she had to laugh again. “I’m having trouble at the moment even remembering what that feels like. Some lovely faraway time when all I had to worry about was the Grand Central gates malfunctioning again… and always in some new and interesting way that I took oh so seriously, as if the Lone One Herself was designing every malfunction just for me.” Rhiow rolled her eyes at herself. “May Queen Iau start sending me lovely problems like that again, instead of the one we’ve got at the moment!”