Nessa (Cat, wild, unaugmented)

Nessa smelled the wrongness before she saw the kitten — faint, foreign, the particular unevenness she had not caught wind of since her own travelling years. She came down off the ridge already deciding what to do about it, which was, mostly, nothing. Watch first. Newly arrived things on Carraig Bán rarely lasted the week regardless of what anyone did for them.

This one lasted longer than expected. It missed the shrimp, missed the eggs, missed the whole first morning's worth of easy food a hungrier animal would have found by instinct alone — and kept trying anyway, in a manner Nessa recognised from exactly one place before: a stubbornness that outran the body's own sense, the kind that either got an animal killed early or got it somewhere worth arriving at.

She pushed the crab across the sand mostly to see what the kitten would do with being given something outright. It ate it without pretending not to need it, which told Nessa more than a season of careful observation would have. No performance in the taking. Whatever this small, over-scented stranger was, it hadn't yet learned to be ashamed of hunger, and Nessa found, somewhat against her own long habit, that she preferred it that way.

The teaching that followed was not generosity, whatever it looked like from the outside. Nessa had learned this stretch of coastline the slow way, over more winters than she cared to count exactly, and passing pieces of that on cost her nothing she wasn't already carrying. She watched the kitten fail at the sand-eggs four times before finding the trick of it, and thought, not for the first time this island, that failure repeated with attention was the only teaching method that had ever actually worked on her either.

The wrongness settled the question by the rain-hollow. Up close, lapping alongside it, the unevenness in the kitten's scent resolved into something Nessa had a name for only because she had gone looking for one, decades back, in a place south of here where the ground itself had disagreed about what it was. She had not managed that place. She had gone, found a single exhausted woman trying to hold something too large for one set of hands, done what a young and overconfident cat could do about it, and left within the season knowing the limit of what she was built for. She was older now. Whatever was still needed at that causeway, it was not going to be met by a cat whose hunting range had shrunk to this one stretch of rock.

But the kitten in front of her carried the same wrongness she remembered, undiluted and untrained, and carried it the way a young thing carries a gift it hasn't yet been told is heavy. Nessa was not sentimental about what she said next. She had learned, at that causeway, exactly what one insufficient pair of hands costs a boundary held alone, and she was not going to watch a second one go to waste on a rock nobody needed defending.

"You're carrying a wrongness with you," she said, and meant it as diagnosis, not accusation. She told the kitten what she could — south and west, past the river mouth, one person managing badly what should never have been managed alone — and left out the rest, the season she'd spent there herself and the reasons she'd left, because the kitten had not yet asked and Nessa had learned not to hand over more than a listener was ready to carry.

When it asked her name, she gave it plainly, and did not correct the kitten's evident assumption that a name was all there was to give. Some debts were better paid forward than explained.

She watched the small shape work its way off the rock the next morning, uncertain-footed and entirely certain of direction, and thought that whatever was waiting at that causeway had just been sent considerably more than it had any reason to expect from a bare tidal island that owed it nothing.