I waved vaguely over my shoulder rather than looking back and kept walking.
My family is remarkably effective in the field. We have to be. Hesitate when there’s a Covenant operative or a hungry lindworm in front of you and there’s a good chance you’re going to wind up dead. Not cool. But this means that we’re also incredibly relaxed and disorganized when we don’t have to keep it together. When we relax, we relax, becoming as difficult to herd as a clowder of cats. If I’d stayed to finish saying goodbye, I would have found myself caught in an endless loop of just one more thing, until something important enough to break the cycle happened. Bedtime is an eternal trial.
At least James and Sam had their anti-telepathy charms now. Annie must have explained why they were necessary. Neither of them had seemed afraid of me, but with their minds sealed off, how could I tell?
Sometimes coming from a predatory species really sucks.
A constellation of smaller minds came into focus as I climbed the stairs. They were too small to project very far, although each of them was fully sapient, as complex as any human. Some of them were blurry: we’d never met before. Others were bright, crisp and clear, elders of the colony who knew exactly who I was and would be thrilled to see me home. I took a deep breath, steeling myself. Then I kept climbing.
“HAIL! HAIL THE RETURN OF THE HEARTLESS ONE!”
Aeslin mice are small, but when that many of them shout in tandem, they’re capable of making a hell of a lot of noise. There were at least a hundred mice spread out across the second-floor landing, perched on the bookshelves and clinging to the banister. I stopped, blinking at them. About a third of the gathering wore the colors of Verity’s clergy, bedecked with more feathers than any mouse had any business wearing. The rest were a mixture of the active family liturgies, including a few I didn’t recognize. That made a certain amount of sense. Dominic, Shelby, now Sam and James . . . we’d had a few new additions to the family since the last time I’d been home in Oregon.
“Hello,” I said.
The mice cheered.
Aeslin mice are evolutionary mimics. They look like ordinary field mice, save for slightly larger heads and slightly more developed hands—two attributes most people would never be in a position to notice. They nest like mice, breed like mice, and happily infest the walls of human habitations, again, like mice. It’s just that they do all this while practicing a complicated, functionally inborn religion. Aeslin need to believe in something. Anything. Our family colony believes in, well, the family. We are, and have always been, their objects of worship.
No pressure. I mean, “these adorable, cartoony creatures love and trust you, and believe that you have the power to keep them safe when their species is otherwise functionally extinct” is a perfectly normal situation, right?
“Long have we Awaited your Return,” intoned one of the older mice, stepping to the front of the group. He used a long kitten-bone staff to hold himself upright. From the twinges of pain that laced through his thoughts, I could tell that bipedal locomotion was no longer as easy for him as it had been when he’d been younger. “Hail to the Heartless One! Hail to the Savior of the Arboreal Priestess!”
“Of course I saved her,” I said. “Verity’s my family. I had to.”
“We understand,” said the priest gravely. I frowned. He wasn’t wearing nearly enough feathers. “We also understand that we have been Unfair to you.”
That didn’t make any sense, but he meant it. All the thoughts rising from him were sincere ones. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You helped me locate Verity when she needed me. Well. Not you, exactly, but the splinter colony she had with her in New York. You were totally fair to me.”
“Please.” The priest bowed until his whiskers brushed the floor, easing some of the crackles of pain from his spine. “Please. We seek Forgiveness and Absolution. Allow us to petition you for these things, for only then may we be Properly Made Clean.”
Sometimes the Aeslin ability to make any letter into a capital one was enough to make my head spin. “All right,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
The priest straightened and turned, looking at another, younger mouse. This one was wearing glasses, twists of wire around magnifying lenses that made its tiny oildrop eyes look absolutely enormous. The rest of its livery was nothing I recognized, beads and bits of bone counting out complicated patterns across its back. They almost looked like a Fibonacci sequence. I smiled at the thought.
The younger mouse cleared its—her—throat, forced her whiskers forward, and said, “I am come to petition you, O Heartless One, called Sarah Zellaby, called Cousin Sarah, to Forgive us our trespasses against you, to Forget our refusal to clearly see what was before us, and to Formally Allow us to sanctify the clergy which has been assembled in your Name.”
I blinked. “Um, what?”
“We understand now that we were unwilling to set aside our prejudices and our fears for your species of Birth, and to acknowledge that what matters is not Blood, but Belonging,” said the younger mouse. “You are a daughter of this line, as truly as any who have been Born to it. You carry in your motions the Grace of Beth, the Forgiveness of Caroline, the Canniness of Enid, the Viciousness of Frances, the Determination of Alice, and the Persistence of Evelyn. You are a Priestess, and have always been, and we are sorry not to have seen it before now.”
I gaped at her, unable to figure out how I was supposed to respond to that, or whether there was a good response.
The mouse sat back on her haunches, whiskers still pushed forward as she focused her full attention on me. “We have assembled as much as we can of your catechisms, for you have never been a stranger here. Will you allow me to lead your temple, to learn your mysteries, and to reveal them to the acolytes who come before us with time, ready to pledge themselves unto your divinity?”
I stood there in silence for a long moment—long enough that the mice began to mutter nervously amongst themselves, their thoughts radiating concern and fear of rejection. Me? They wanted me?
If I didn’t say something soon, this was going to get ugly. I swallowed my fear and confusion and asked, “Are you sure? I’m not—I mean, all the other priestesses are—”
“The Polychromatic Priestess is not human, nor ever aspires to be,” said the younger mouse, sounding relieved. “Her veins carry the blood of the Lilu, and still she stands beside her family, and still she cares for them as well as any other of her kin or kind. Nor was the Violent Priestess fully human, for all that none has ever Learned precisely what else she drew from, and that inhumanity has kept her bloodline safe from the crueler of the Heartless, for their claws find little purchase on family minds. You will not be the First. You will not be the Last. Will you permit us to worship you as well as you deserve, and to be held in the regard we have always owed to you?”