Power & Majesty by Tansy Rayner Roberts

between us, there’s only one courteso left to guard her, and her lyin’ there with a broken leg.’
    ‘Dhynar and his boys are the most dangerous,’ Kelpie said helpfully. ‘But I wouldn’t underestimate Priest’s ambition.’
    ‘Poet is a dark horse, I’ve always thought that,’ said Macready. ‘And as for that Warlord—sure, it wasn’t tea and biscuits that earned him his name. It will be a grand old bloodbath, will it not?’
    Anger and frustration crossed Janvier’s face. ‘I’ll get you,’ he promised Macready.
    Macready smiled sweetly. ‘Invisible circle of protection?’
    Janvier moved so fast he was a blur, shaping himself into a cloud of ravens as he threw himself into the sky. Once they were three streets away, the dark birds dropped down out of sight.
    Macready breathed out. ‘That can be our good deed for the day, can it not? Warning the lad about his lady’s safety.’
    ‘Two good deeds for you,’ said Kelpie. ‘You broke Livilla’s leg.’
    ‘Only in the interests of her ongoing health and happiness,’ Macready said in a lordly tone.
    They broke then, hanging on to each other as they howled. Livilla’s broken leg was the funniest thing either of them had heard in months. The fact that Mac hadn’t meant to do it made it even funnier. ‘Invisible circle of protection!’ he wailed in between bouts of mad laughter.
    Something furry brushed against their legs and both sentinels flinched back and away from each other. A cat stood between them, a patient little greymoon with short slick fur and green eyes. It opened its mouth and spoke a simple message in Crane’s voice. ‘I need you both now. The Crucible, Via Alysaundre.’ Message discharged, the cat walked on dainty paws to the sunniest spot on the roof and licked itself.
    Kelpie moved fast, crossing to the edge of the roof and checking the safest way to get from there to street level. When she realised Macready wasn’t joining her, she looked back impatiently. ‘You coming or what? Crane’s the proudest of all of us—he never asks for help unless he’s up to his eyeballs.’
    Macready had not moved. He was still staring at the placid greymoon. ‘I’m all for running to the rescue, lass. I just have one small question to ask about this situation of ours.’
    ‘ What ?’ she demanded.
    ‘Since fecking when has Crane used cats to carry his messages?’
    The Crucible in Via Alysaundre, on the less respectable side of the Alexandrine hill, was actually The Crest and Crucible, a shabby-looking inn with a closed bar at the front and guest rooms on the upper floor. It was obviousthat this was the place Crane had meant them to come, because there were cats everywhere. Tabbies, greys, tortoiseshells, blacks and whites, short and long hairs, moggies, strays and elegantly preened house cats—every kind of feline imaginable swarmed around the inn, some clambering on the roof while others rubbed themselves up against the windows as if they could will themselves inside.
    The innkeeper, his bald head decorated with a wilting Floralia garland, stood in the street and swatted the cats with a broom, trying to keep them away from his door. ‘The damned weather, so it is,’ he grunted as Kelpie and Macready approached him, his Islandser accent as thick as Macready’s. ‘As soon as Aphrodal rears its head and we get a day or two of sun, all the animals in this city go crazy, do they not?’
    ‘Sure, there’s crazier still to come,’ said Macready.
    ‘Eh, but you’re a countryman,’ the innkeeper said, a cordial smile breaking across his face even as he belted several cats across the nose with the flat of his broom. ‘How long since you set foot on the Green Isles, son?’
    ‘Far too long,’ Macready said with a sigh. ‘My mammy will be sore at me when I do make it home, right enough. I told her I was only going out for a jug of milk.’
    They laughed together.
    ‘We’re looking for a youth,’ Kelpie broke in, glaring at