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She never did like cats.
They did not make her nose stream or her face itch as they had her sister’s back in Umbar long ago, but still she misliked them. They were unpredictable things, switching between violence and affection for no reason she could ever see.
Her sister had loved them anyway, scratches, snot and all. Her gowns were forever fluffed with their hair, snagged by their claws, glittering with the scales of the fish she stole from the kitchens for them. But for all that her sister cajoled, they still liked the Princess best even when she ignored them. Likely because she ignored them.
At that age the Princess had made a habit of ignoring that which displeased her. She ignored the strange, pale men from the coast who came to see her father, speaking of an end to hostilities, of trade routes and taxation. She ignored her mother’s talk of womanly duties and speculation on how pleasant the sea must be in summer. She stayed in her chambers and read while her sister and her cats played at her feet. She ignored the trap until after it had closed.
When all was arranged and the litter stood waiting, slaves sweating in their traces, after the priests had said their prayers and her parents given their blessings, her sister stepped forwards and tried to press a ball of grey fluff into her hands. The kitten’s eyes were barely open, slits of pale jade set in a pointed face.
“She’s not yet weaned,” she told her sister. “Let her stay with her mother until then. You look after her for me.”
Her sister embraced her with a force that would have crushed the kitten had the Princess not snatched it out of the way. They were scions of an ancient line and knew better than to weep; if their eyes were red and puffy, it was only from the cat’s fur.
When she saw her promised husband for the first time, there were still grey hairs clinging to the dark silk of her gown.
***
Her husband’s house was chill and ever filled with the sound of waves, lapping at the foundations like the tongues of thirsty cats. The Queen hated it. She hated the mould that ate away at those few books that had come out of Umbar as her dowry. She hated the slimy fish and mollusks that were all anyone seemed to eat and the bright silks and brighter gold that was all anyone seemed to wear. The people spoke too loudly and too forcefully, laughed when they thought she could not hear at her accent, her coarse hair that would not hold Gondorian styles, her love of books and quiet.
Her husband did not mock her; he did not see much of her at all. He had wed her in body but his spirit belonged to the sea that she so hated. They were well matched, she thought; he gobbled up his neighbours’ lands as insatiably as the waves ate away at the support beams of their house. He would return every few months with a wind-burnt face and rope-roughened hands, hungry for conquest of a different sort and she would surrender. She knew her duties well or so she thought.
But, after their third child slipped from her stillborn in a tide of blood and bitter shame, her husband made her a gift of a white kitten.
“You should have something to love,” he told her. Was it misplaced kindness or deliberate cruelty? She never had learnt to read him but she thanked him graciously all the same and waited until he had left the room to weep.
The kitten licked the salt from her cheeks and she considered drowning it. In the end the only thing that stopped her was the knowledge that its death would have made her little sister cry.
The white kitten grew into a slim, graceful cat with eyes the blue-green of seaglass. She never named it and she certainly did not love it for all that she would let it eat from her plate - at least the cat enjoyed oysters.
***
Ruling began almost as a hobby - her husband had wars to fight and little patience for the finer points of administration, while she had a tidy mind and a love of well-kept ledgers and pedantic laws. She had already moved from Pelargir to Osgiliath in hopes of saving the last of her books from the damp and her husband no longer troubled to visit her anyway. They had given up hope of a child long ago and she needed something to do with herself. Her husband’s ministers indulged her curiosity as though she were a child herself and invited her to sit upon their councils where she smiled and flattered and remembered. Upon her lap, the white cat sat and stared, as pretty and complacent as her mistress.
But how to make them listen! In truth that came near as easy. She was foreign and a woman and they did not guard their tongues around her as well as they might have. She teased secrets from her ladies in waiting as they teased her uncooperative hair into the styles of the court. The scullery maids sold her gossip and merchants, priests and lords could be bought with as much ease, if a little more dearly. A bastard here, a debt there, it all added up to power.
Soon they were all hers, or enough of them that it did not matter. Oh they chafed against it but, the first time she spoke up at a meeting of her husband’s council, none of them dared challenge her and none would meet her eyes. It was a small matter, correcting them all on some trifling matter of inheritance law, but even lions grew from cubs. There were ruinous taxes upon goods from her father’s city, a palace library that had not been added to since her husband’s father’s day, no provision for the education of noble girls.
And so she dictated policy to her husband’s men - her men now - with her cat draped about her shoulders like a shawl, purring her victory.
***
“Those tomes she’s always hunched over - book of spells brought with her from Umbar!” hissed a librarian sorting a new shipment of scrolls.
“We all know what southern women are like,” said a drunken sailor to his mate, who nodded sagely.
“I heard she sends her cat to spy for her. How else could she know the things she knows?” said a servant, one who had sold her information many times before.
“I heard she turns into a cat herself and prowls the streets at night!” said an excitable lordling who ought to have know better.
“I heard she has no children because she eats them for her magic, soon as the cord is cut,” said a carter. Him she had beheaded.
That only made it worse. “Sorceress,” the people whispered. “Witch.” Berúthiel they named her and other, fouler things.
She could not quash the rumours; too many wanted to believe. They hated her already for the darkness of her skin and the strangeness of her manners, for her failure to give their king an heir. “Well then!” she told the daughter of her white cat who was sunning herself upon the windowsill. “Let them hate me. There is power in that too.”
She let the stories spread and, when one of the kitchen cats had a litter, took the kittens for her own. In the courtyard of the King’s House she had them place sculptures in the style of Umbar, lithe and graceful. The Gondorians misliked their smooth stone faces but the cats adored them, leaping up to roost upon a head or doze in the crook of an arm, following the sun across the space.
And if there was no little sister to chase after them, still it almost felt like home.
The men of her court feared her, would not meet her eyes, would not argue with her commands. She held her own head high and stopped bothering with gaudy silks and ugly jewellery. She wore gowns in the style of Umbar, in black and silver, and let her hair curl tight against her head.
A steady flow of plunder came trickling back from her husband’s conquests south of the Ethir Anduin and she saw that it was spent according to her will, on improving trade routes, on establishing an academy stocked with brilliant young scholars that owed their every last success to her.
Gondor, despite itself, prospered and she prospered with it.
***
And then her husband came back from the sea for good. He was too old now for conquest of any sort for they had wed when he was past his prime and she was yet a girl. Somehow it was worse, when he stepped from his boat onto the docks, than when she had been helped down from her litter fifty years ago and looked for the first time upon the face of the man that owned her. At least then she had known what was expected of them both.
A quiet retirement, she hoped. Let him fish or stroll along the shore as it pleased him and, as long as he stayed out of her way, they might both be happy.
“Why all these cats?” he asked her the first night.
“Something for me to love,” she told him blandly.
He grunted in response and she hoped the matter closed. They slept in separate beds as they had for years and took their meals separately and she let herself believe that nothing had changed. In some ways she was still the girl she had once been, too happy to ignore that which displeased her.
But a week later he came to council - his council in name if hers in truth - and took the seat of honour, the throne that was usually left empty. Graceful aging was the mark of his line and his silver hair and graven face made him look wise and noble, even though he did little more than nod in the appropriate places.
These councillors had been hers for many years though and it was to her they looked before they spoke. He must have noticed that but he said nothing until after the meeting. “I have been a neglectful husband indeed,” he said drawing her aside. “I should not have let so much of this fall to you. In the future I will be more attentive.”
“My husband is kind,” she said. “If he will inform me when he next intends to attend council, I will report to him beforehand on all he must needs know.”
“That will not be necessary. I named these men my councillors for a reason and I should hope they know their duties well.”
Of those her husband had first appointed, few remained and those that did were the most ineffectual, the least likely to question her decisions. Still, she smiled and nodded and curtsied deep, the full obeisance due a king. “My husband is wise,” she lied. It was a passing fancy, she was sure. He would grow bored of this as he always did and go back, if not to war then to something that would hold his interest better than dusty tomes and legal technicalities.
He did not grow bored. He came to every last council and asked questions - some foolish, some not - that derailed the meeting with the need for explanations. He gave judgements - some foolish, some wise - and the councillors nodded their heads in agreement. The entire city nodded in agreement. Not one ruling she had made had been greeted with such enthusiasm. She had not made herself loved, as he had, but she had been wise and just and it galled her that they did not see it.
Her enemies whispered and chittered and her spies told her those factions that opposed her spread like vermin through the court. Her cats couldn’t catch them all and they wooed her husband, flattered him and courted him as she had never been flattered or courted before her marriage.
Fleeing might have be wisest but where to? It had been half a hundred years since Umbar and, for all she still dreamt the smell of cardamom and the scalding heat of sand beneath bare feet, she feared it would be just as foreign now as Gondor had once been.
The cats felt her tension and wailed and paced and clawed the antique furniture. She let them.
Even mice will bite when cornered, she told herself, standing in her high tower looking out over the city, pale buildings piled up like a child’s blocks. She rubbed absently at the ears of a plump black tom that had leapt up onto the windowsill beside her. She had only playing at politics for the game of it but that had been long years ago and she had grown to like the taste of power. She would not give over the reigns. Or the tiller as he, Ship-King as they named him, would no doubt put it. She had her books and her spies and her knowledge of the petty failings of half the nobles in the city.
And, yes, her cats.
***
Her husband fell ill. Some disease of the bowels she heard and fastidiously avoided his sickroom. She took it as an opportunity to get more work done, to claw back as much of the power he had stolen as she could. That showed a lack of foresight on her part.
In the early days of her reign how many of her opponents had suffered fatal misfortunes? A fall down a flight of stairs, a wasting sickness, a riding accident. Had there been a cat upon the steps? Black fur found upon the coverlet? A flash of white darting between the horse’s feet?
Of course not. But if people thought so it had done no harm to let them go on thinking it.
She did not see the trap until after it had closed.
The throne room was crowded with lords and courtiers, a shimmering rainbow of silk and jewels bright enough to dazzle her. He sat above them all like a statue of Elros Tar-Minyatur, founder of his line.
“Berúthiel of Umbar,” he said. His voice was heavy with command and rough with salt. “As my Queen you have conspired against me and bound my realm to your will with dark sorceries. As my wife you have strangled my children in the womb-”
She spat at his feet. Later she would not be proud of that. The loss of control was unforgivable.
He was a warrior with a warrior’s temper and reared from his seat to strike her. She could not tell if he held back or not but the blow knocked her to the tiles, mouth full of the saltwater taste of blood. A different woman might have played that off for sympathy, but she was too proud and too misliked to think that anyone would take her side against a king.
“Scheming hellcat,” he snarled. “Witch. I should have trimmed your claws long ago. Here is your sentence and it is a mercy you do not deserve - I will send you back to Pelargir. You will live out your days there, far from court and far from your spies and sorceries.”
A slow decay. She would not stand for that. “You accuse me of treason, my King. Mercy is not yours to grant. By your own laws the penalty is death or exile.” It was freedom either way.
Whatever flaws she might lay at his feet, her husband was a decisive man. He whispered to his steward, who nodded to the guards. Even then they did not lay hands upon her but prodded her at spearpoint to the docks.
Her husband raised his hand and gestured, noble and imperious, to a skiff. “Death or exile you said, Wife? I leave that decision to the sea.”
She could have laughed. Did he think that was a mercy? Even now she could not tell. Well. She would not die meekly.
“A curse on you, Ship-King,” she said, voice rasping like a cat’s tongue. “A curse on you and all your line. A hunger shall live within you, vast and unrelenting as your sea, a hunger for new lands and fresh conquest. You will never be satisfied. You will never be at peace.” She thought he might be fool enough to believe that. Certainly his nephew, standing at his right hand, paled as though slapped.
She let herself cackle, just a little, to see the boy flinch more and then turned at the guards’ urging and climbed into the boat. She did it unaided, careful of her dignity for she had little else left.
She laughed again when she saw the cages. What brave man had dared to catch her cats? And to what end? She supposed she could eat them but she had no idea how to prepare them and thirst would kill her long before she needed to know how.
The Queen settled herself in the middle of the ship, as far from the water as she could get. The sails swallowed up the wind and swelled out taut, dragging her far away from land, while above her the cat’s claw curve of the moon tore up the darkness of the sky.
The white cat curled in her lap was not the one that her husband had given her years ago - cats did not live so long. It didn’t make any difference. A cat was a cat and, though she could not hear it over the hiss of waves against the hull, she felt its purr rumbling through her and was comforted.
She remembered a little girl with a snotty nose and silver fish scales on her hands, playing with a kitten in a sunlit city long ago and set her hand upon the tiller that she only half knew how to use.
“Cats always find their way home,” she told her pet, stroking its pointed ears.