[Ealasaide]

After telling his tale of the talking cat and the spy who wasn't there to Mithadan, Airefalas waited miserably for his captain's reaction, fully expecting to be relieved of his duties and confined to his quarters for the remainder of the voyage, provided they made their way back to the Lonely Star at all. He could scarcely believe his ears when Mithadan began to laugh. When his captain went on to talk to the cat in the cupboard, carrying on a little conversation with the mewing creature within, it occurred to Airefalas that his captain might be making fun of him. He felt a sharp spike of humiliation at the notion, but the emotion was short-lived, evaporating instantly as a small voice growled from within the armoire:

"Let me out!"

Airefalas startled and spun away from the cupboard door, watching as Mithadan opened it and let the cat out. He suddenly remembered the story his mother used to tell him as a very small boy about the Boggart Trapped in the Butter Churn, and a new thought occurred to him. Let me out. Hadn't the boggart in the story said the exact same thing? Maybe the entire scene was a dream. Maybe he was still asleep in bed and none of it had happened. He would wake up in a few minutes and begin his day as usual. Umbarian slave boys would remain slave boys. Cats wouldn't talk. The world would still be the same world it had been the night before. And the boggart would still be in the butter churn, so to speak.

Furrowing his brow, Airefalas watched as Mithadan stroked the cat's back and talked to it in a pleasant and soothing tone of voice. Without thinking, Airefalas reached up and rubbed his chest where it had begun to sting and itch. He pulled his hand away bloody and remembered the slash the cat had given him that had torn both his skin and his shirt. Airefalas' confusion deepened. The blood was certainly a strong argument against the idea that he was dreaming. Wasn't one supposed to wake up at a pinch? Why not at the slash of five cat's claws? Looking down, he smeared his own blood pensively between his thumb and forefinger. Then, he looked again, more carefully, at Mithadan and the white cat.

Suddenly the cat wavered beside Mithadan and seemed to melt into the air, reforming itself before Airefalas' eyes as the slave boy he had first seen standing over Mithadan's satchel. Muttering a curse, Airefalas fell back a step. This was a little too much. Boys that changed into cats and back into boys again. He had heard of shapechangers in fairy tales all his life but never imagined that they really existed. He raised his hand to his temple where an acute throbbing had set in. But, why not? Stranger things existed in Middle Earth. Why not shapechangers? He had seen his share of oddities at sea over the years, so why not shapechangers, too? He took a deep breath and forced himself to pay attention to the ongoing conversation between Mithadan and the boy-cat. If he wasn't going mad, it might benefit him to know what was going on. On the other hand, if he was going mad, he might as well play along with the hallucination. It obviously wasn't going away.

“Ráma?” said Mithadan, looking closely into the boy‘s face.

Ráma, echoed Airefalas mentally. Where had he heard that name? The world seemed only that much more surreal when he realized why the name seemed so familiar. It belonged to the lovely desert girl he had seen speaking to Mithadan at the reception the evening before. Her beautiful hair had been cropped off close to the scalp, but it was indeed she who stood before them now. He groaned inwardly. Not only had he harassed an ally who had come to offer them assistance, he had also been quite intent on roughing up a girl. He shook his head. Airefalas, my lad, he said to himself. You have had a busy morning.

Aloud, he murmured, “I’m so sorry, my lady.” She did not seem to hear him, confining her attention instead to Mithadan.

She peeled back the rags on the top of a wagon full of cleaning supplies that he had not noticed earlier in all the confusion, revealing two sets of swords and daggers. Still talking, she also revealed a set of bed sheets that had been knotted into ropes. She began to feed them out the window toward the courtyard below.

“Come on, then,” she snapped impatiently. “We can talk once we get away. I didn’t come to get us killed.”

Still rooted into place, Airefalas shot a sharp glance at Mithadan. If they fled now, they surely would be killed, probably before they reached the harbor, definitely before the Lonely Star could slip from her berth between the two black-sailed warships. His immediate temptation was to take the makeshift ropes out of Ráma’s hands and haul them back in the window before they were seen by the exterior guards, but considering the mess he had made of things already, he did nothing. Grimly, he waited for Mithadan to act.