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It took a moment for Nyreem to understand the cat’s words, spoken in the hedgerow vernacular with a particular hissing lisp. Then, too, there was her startlement that that cat had addressed her at all. Her first instinct was to scurry further under the barn, and she took several small, awkward hops backward before she mastered himself.
Tindra had dragged herself to deeper shelter as well. Dandelion stopped licking her, pressing as close to Nyreem as he could, and whispered, “Can you get her out the back way?”
“Yes,” Nyreem said. “But she won’t move fast. The cat—”
“You just leave the cat to me,” Dandelion said. He sounded more sure of himself. Sandwort would have bristled, Nyreem thought, but she only felt relieved. “Your story gave me a notion. Stalling, that’s the trick. Wait until he’s good and distracted, then go.” He edged forward until he was barely out of range of a sweeping cat’s paw, and said, as politely as he could, “I see. Why don’t you tell me more about unicorns?”
Nyreem could hardly believe the ploy would work. Cats hate to appear foolish, she knew, and love to make fools of others, but the urge to tease and taunt prey is a mystery to rabbits, who do not play with their food. For a moment, there was silence. She couldn’t see the cat, but she could imagine him washing his whiskers, daintily cleaning off Tindra’s blood—
The cat spoke, and Nyreem shuddered out of her half-tharn state. “Unicorns can never age or die.”
“Did they meet the Third Cow too, then? Like El-ahrairah?” Dandelion said. With a flick of his ear, he gestured to Nyreem, and she hastily nudged Tindra to her feet.
The cat’s tail swished across the dirt. “Who’s telling this story? You or I?”
“You, of course,” said Dandelion meekly. Behind him, Nyreem and Tindra begin to move, agonizingly slowly, toward the far side of the barn.
“As I said,” the cat said, ignoring all mention of cows and heroic rabbits, “unicorns can never age or die. But they can be captured, and unlike a cat, who always knows exactly who he is, they can be made to forget who they are. I know this, because in the first of my nine lives I knew a unicorn.
“That unicorn,” the cat said, his tail growing still as he settled into the telling, “was a very foolish unicorn. She did not want to be alone, and so like a dog who needs a pack she left the safety of her territory and went out into the world. She fell in with humans—”
“You live with humans,” Dandelion pointed out. His interruption covered the sound of Tindra’s lame leg scraping as she maneuvered around a tight gap in foundation pillars.
“I,” the cat hissed, “take tribute from humans. She let them cage her, like rabbits in a hutch. Worse than that—she let them cage her in a human form.”
Nyreem was barely listening. She and Tindra had nearly reached the far side of the barn. “How did she escape?” she heard Dandelion ask. “Did you save her?’
“Certainly not,” said the cat. “Why would I do a thing like that? What is it to a cat whether or not there are unicorns in the world? No, she was saved by nothing more than luck. Like a rabbit. Only yours has run out, hasn’t it?”
Nyreem crouched, nose sniffing the evening air, and wondered whether their luck had run out.
No, the thought came to her, from very far away. That’s not the order of things.
She slipped out as quietly as she could and let Tindra set a limping pace out of the farmyard. A moment later, she heard Dandelion’s pounding legs as he leapt past the cat and sprinted down the lane on the other side of the barn.
“Do you think that there really are unicorns?” Nyreem asked. They were all three of them back in the warm safety of the warren. Tindra would have a bad scar across her face and might even yet lose her eye, but she had barely whimpered when Hyzenthlay herself licked her haunch clean, and Sandwort was gazing at her with a certain awe. Hyzenthlay had pronounced the muscle not too torn to heal. Tindra would run again, and that was all a rabbit could ask for from Frith.
“Cats are all liars,” Holly said. “But a good job you lot did, playing that one for a fool. ‘Dandelion and the Cat’—that’s a story you can tell again some time.”
“I don’t know,” Bigwig put in unexpectedly. “Unicorns, you say? I think I’ve heard the word from Kehaar. Some sort of creatures that once lived in the Big Water.”
“If they lived in the water, I don’t see how a cat could have met one,” Sandwort objected, then twitched and fell silent, flustered by his own reflexive belligerence.
“You’ll have to ask Kehaar, I suppose,” Bigwig said. “He’s more to be trusted than any cat, I’ll tell you that much. Even if he sometimes doesn’t make much more sense.”
“Collecting tales from cats and from birds?” Bluebell asked. “Brilliant notion. I’ve always said our stories could use some shaking up around here. Let’s ask the slugs, next.”
“If you’re tired of my stories,” Dandelion said, “you only needed to say so. Try asking Nyreem for a tale or two. My voice could use a rest anyhow, you know, and she has a knack for it.”
Nyreem felt her whiskers tremble with the praise, and gave Tindra’s wound a fresh lick to cover her reaction.
“You never did tell us how the story of Aythisthyera and the Unicorn ends,” Tindra said.
“Oh,” Nyreem said, and then surprised herself by yawning.
“Tell it properly to us some other time,” Dandelion advised her, “from the beginning. I’m half asleep now myself. We’ve been in a story tonight, after all, and that’s harder work than telling one.”
