Aldera (Cat, years before the Causeway)

Aldera had misjudged a leap two nights before and still favoured the paw for it, which suited her. A limp was a good excuse to refuse being lifted, stroked, or carried indoors before she was finished with a room.

She kept three paces behind Elvira on the terrace walk, then six ahead, matching nothing. Matching nothing was the only reliable way to test whether anyone was paying attention. No one was, except the household guards in the high windows, and they were paid to watch Elvira, not the cat.

At the sundial, Elvira did the thing she always did: stopped mid-stride, tilted her head, exhaled slowly through pursed lips, as if bracing for a blow that hadn't landed yet. Aldera had catalogued the gesture for months. It happened at the sundial. It happened at the east wall. It had happened twice at the old well and nowhere else on the grounds. She had no name for what triggered it. She only knew it was real, and that Elvira treated it as nothing.

Today Aldera closed the distance and said so, the only way available to her — three quick strides, claws out, a flat warning yowl.

Elvira knelt, caught her by the scruff, and held her face up close enough to smell the sugar on her breath. "There's nothing here. Nothing coming. Go and amuse yourself." A swipe, not hard enough to draw blood — a correction, not an attack — earned her a sharp exhale and a wave toward the footman.

He carried her to the garden gate the way he carried everything: efficiently, without opinion. He set her down outside the latch and went back in. Aldera stood at the bars for one breath, maybe two, watching Elvira's skirts recede up the terrace path.

Then she turned the other way.

The city below smelled like nothing on the terrace ever did — tanneries, spice stalls, wet rope. She kept low, avoided the scarlet-coated household guards who hated stray cats on principle, and let instinct rather than memory carry her down toward the harbour. By the time she reached the wall her hop had a limp built into it that would not heal for weeks. She did not slow down.

She found the first ship that smelled of stale bread instead of cargo, and went in low, under a slop bucket in the galley. The cook found her once, aimed a kick that missed on purpose, and announced to no one in particular that they kept rats, not cats. She left the door ajar afterward. Tolerated, not wanted. It was enough.

When the ship groaned off its moorings, Aldera felt Dún Rí come loose from her the way a knot comes loose — slowly, then all at once. She crouched at the prow as the shore lights blurred to a gold smear and then to nothing. No wall. No hedge. No hand to claim her.

She licked the split pad of her paw. The pain was clean in a way none of the terrace's comforts had ever been.