Chapter Text
Lately, Mogget had taken to visiting with surprising frequency.
Sam wasn't sure how he was getting in. Last he checked, the walls outside his tower lacked footholds or lips, and the slit for a window hardly qualified as a cat-flap, enter-as-you-please. Not to mention the raging, bitter, biting sea in its winter months, and a fair few grumpy, stern patrolling guards on the nightwatch… even if the prior would be the only thing to serve as a deterrent to the once-servant of the Abhorsens.
He had long passed questioning how Mogget was entering, at least - little surprised him about the cat anymore. One moment the night was quiet and empty, with soft embers from the fire in the kiln, lazy moving Charter marks across the wall and ceiling: and the next, a soft purr as a cat white as the fresh snow outside stretched adjacent to the furnace, claws leaving score marks across the floor.
Perhaps it was just the lure of the fire after all.
Mogget rarely spoke on such visits, timing them for when his least favoured people would be asleep and less likely to pester him. Namely Ferin, Sam had noticed. Mogget might appear for his mother every so often, and then once to swipe a prize fish from Touchstone because old habits die hard, but with Sam… there was a friendship, an alliance. A tolerance.
And then there was Ferin, whom he avoided. The same could not be said for her. She had endless questions for everyone, but even Mogget's non-subtle refusal and steady rebuke washed over her like a stallion's charge that just kept coming. He seemed practiced, but her will upstaged his. That? That was frightening.
And Ferin got on famously well with Ellimere for it. Of course.
With his attention wandering away from his latest invention, the Charter marks began to dissipate and dance around the room, windborne seeds on the air. The supposedly sleeping cat reached out with a paw to grab at them as they skittered away into the stones, back to the Charter, avoiding his playful grasp. Sam paid it little mind – he knew how these nights were scripted - until Mogget opened one slit of an eye, greener than Sam remembered, and watched him in that relentless, thoughtful way of his.
"What?" asked Sam, the cat's look bordering on uncomfortable. He felt no need for customary greetings and acknowledgements as a Prince should - Mogget never gave them, anyway. He would either get an answer, or the cat would return to his fireside bed.
Tonight was an answer. "A thought," the cat replied, after some debate. His limbs had disappeared into white mass, and Sam was reminded of a slipper… if a slipper were capable of drawing blood from unwary toes. "A reminder. How many years ago, now? Twenty? Forty? Someplace inbetween? Memory fades, familiarity lingers."
Riddles. The cat was ever-fond of those, even now, and Sam thought about sighing. But he didn't. "Of what?" he pressed, hoping for focus.
Silence. The eye closed, signalling the end of the conversation.
Sam was just about to turn away to salvage what was left of his idea (it couldn't be really called a thing, not yet, it was still a jumble of interlocking, loosely woven marks at best, with nothing to pour the spell into) when the cat surprised him with two open eyes, and his undivided attention.
The loaf that was Mogget shuffled, but his legs didn't reappear. "Tell me, Prince Sameth, how much do you know of your grandparents? Maternal," he clarified. They both knew about the fate of his paternal line, and the night was too quiet, too peaceful, to disturb it with the chill such a discussion would bring.
Sam's brow creased. An odd question with little relation to his first inquiry, but if Mogget felt like talking, he wasn't going to spurn him. Besides, the subject matter was one that was not often breached. Sabriel rarely spoke of her parents: at least, not in Sam's company. Touchstone likely knew, and felt, more of it - and it was more right for him to know, and not her children. Sam knew that his grandfather, Terciel, had been led to the reservoir by his uncle, Kerrigor – much like his aunts, his father's mother – and had been slain there. Not slain, but held, spirit adrift from his body too long to return to life. It was a hurt that clouded Sabriel's eyes when she spoke of it. Dealt with, accepted, and not regretted… but a hurt. A private one, and Sam was wise enough to not intrude. He knew enough, and the hurt belonged to Sabriel alone. It was unkind to pry.
It was easy to see his parents as unflappable beings, steadfast and resolute, undamaged: and as a boy, he had. It had been something to see that look in her eye, however guarded and locked away, and to know his parents were not. Now he knew better, almost lost them too many times beyond counting, lost them truly once… and he knew that responsibilities meant bearing your decisions, for good or ill, and some things stayed, scarred over.
Sam's fingers absently traced his wrists.
Sabriel's mother, his maternal grandmother, he knew… nothing. Stories of Terciel's visits in Ancelstierre sometimes crossed Sabriel's lips, stories of travellers, an idle wish here and there of longing for the sort of bond as Abhorsen and in-Waiting as she had with her half-sister, happier memories… but there was never a word of her mother. Hazily, all Sam could recall was that she had died when Sabriel was born, so she never knew her.
"Not much," was the answer he settled with. It was a good answer for all grandparents, regardless of which side of the family they came from.
"Odd you should remind me of them."
"Who? Terciel?"
"No," the cat said, with barely a shake of his head. "Nerysiel." It had been a long time since that name had crossed his tongue, and with it came a whole host of faded, washed-out memories, none of which he could relate to Sam.
Sam, for his part, had not had a name until now, and he grappled with it, trying to match it up to an unknown woman who had long since departed from the shores of the Ninth Gate. Someone without defined Bloodline traits was harder to picture. "I'm like my grandmother?"
He sounded doubtful. He wasn't sure whether to be offended when Mogget let out what he thought was a sneeze, but was actually a snort, a mockery of such an idea. "Oh, no. You're nothing alike." He muttered something that sounded a lot like 'she' and 'spine'. "Other fires, other truant marks on nights such as this. That's all."
"That's all? You can't just leave it like that!"
"And a fish," Mogget interrupted with a yawn, nonsensical. He could, would, leave it at that. "For the morning."
Sam felt exasperation cut him deep. Keeping Mogget on a single thread of conversation for long enough to get anything out of it was like trying to get his sister to abate before calling out the latest perceived faults in character. Or not, because one of those things had relented after Orannis, and it wasn't the cat.
Sam stood, abandoning his work bench – it was late enough, he was tired, the cat had him thinking about long gone relatives and untold, never told stories – and the cat's yawn caught as he stretched. At least he knew the cat planned to stay until morning. Maybe he would tell his father, so that he could follow through on the numerous skinning threats that might still apply, even if Mogget had saved the world since…
No, he wouldn't do that. His promise to Mogget had been fish, and fish he would procure, even now. The built trust gave way to more than just tolerance, despite Mogget's carefully guarded quips. Sam wasn't stupid. Mogget wouldn't keep coming back, otherwise.
He gave him one last glance as he left the tower, even though he knew Mogget wouldn't follow him down and away from the fire. Sam's bed called to him at last, warm and clean, and with certain individuals away from the capital on business, he wouldn't be woken again anytime soon.
The same could not be said for the little white cat, as the feigned sleep vanished as the door shut and his eyes snapped open. He stood with feline grace, not pausing to stretch, moving away from his valued fire that Sam had left alight for his private use (how considerate of him, and foolish), and jumped up to the workbench, taking care to disturb nothing. There he skirted the circular rotunda, weaving between odds and ends, clambering from one shelf to the next, until he could see the night beyond the fingers-breadth window.
The chill air, the fire, dancing Charter marks and the same moon in the sky? A ripple went through his body, ears to tail; to any onlooker, the belated stretch, but a stretch it was not.
It was true. Nerysiel and Sam were nothing alike, but the night itself was, and now that… woman… was in his head, she wouldn't leave again as easily.
He thought of her, of days long passed into the Dead's memory. Some of the darkest days in the Kingdom, stretching on for years… it was a simpler time when the Dead wrecked havoc and nothing held them in check. What could one Abhorsen and the ice-witches do? Bloodlines were lost, and it had been a time when he was still bound to a cause he cared nothing for, each master falling to give rise to another, and nothing changed. And then it had plummeted, that history, one last dive of a phoenix bird before it rose again from the ashes, with Sabriel and the restored prince Touchstone at the head.
But it was in Terciel's time when the Kingdom had fallen and crumbled, its regency lost – a time when all hope next to vanished. A time that had also been hers. Theirs. Them.
The fire beckoned, toasty and inviting.
Mogget shook his head. When would he learn to not reminisce over such unwanted, troublesome things?