Free Destiny: A Story of the Fey by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 
     
     
    Destiny
    Kristine Kathryn Rusch
     
    Solanda walked the cobblestone streets of Nir, the capitol city of Nye, her tail up. She had a meeting with Rugar, the son of the Black King. He had sent a Wisp to find her, and it had taken the little creature nearly a day to do so.
    Solanda was in her cat form, as she had been since the Fey captured this repressed country — and thus very difficult to find. The Nyeians had many faults — they were prissy, overdressed, and pasty faced, not to mention abominably poor soldiers — but they did treat their animals well. She had found a family who fed her to excess, allowed her to roam outside, and pampered her as no cat should be pampered.
    How appalled they would be if they ever discovered the golden cat their daughter had adopted was really a Fey Shapeshifter.
    Solanda’s tail twitched once in amusement. Every day she imagined eating her lovely tuna dinner in the glass plate that the family gave her, and then Shifting into her Fey form just to say thank you.
    She didn’t know what would appall the Nyeians the most: the fact that she was Fey, or the fact that she would be naked. She doubted any of them had seen a naked woman before: the wife managed to change her clothing one piece at a time, without ever taking it all off at once, and the husband didn’t seem to think this unusual. He would probably be more shocked than his wife at the appearance of a naked Fey woman in his house. He would probably fall over in a dead faint.
    Only the daughter, a girl of five, was redeemable. Esmerelda was a good child. She had to be. She was raised Nyeian. Her mother trussed her in layers upon frothy layers of clothing, making movement nearly impossible, and then yelled at the poor child whenever she did something natural, like running.
    Sometimes Solanda thought she went back to that household at night because she felt sorry for the child. But in truth, she stayed there because they gave her fish properly deboned and they brushed her, and they put a warm cedar bed in Esmerelda’s room. Esmerelda, good child that she was, never confessed to her parents that she often picked up the cat and carried her to bed, cuddling with her long into the night.
    And Solanda would never tell anyone — Fey or Nyeian — that sometimes she purred when she slept, pressed against the little girl’s back.
    Shifters were supposed to be the coldest of the Fey, the most fickle members of a warrior people, incapable of real emotion, flighty, restless and completely self-absorbed. They also were supposed to take on the characteristics of the animal they had chosen to Shift into, so Solanda’s fickleness — theoretically — was doubly compounded by the fact that she had chosen the cat as her alternate Shape.
    Of course, it didn’t matter how many times she had proven herself trustworthy. In the war against Nye, such as it was, she had done intelligence for the Black King. She had worn her cat form and slinked into Nyeian villages, soldiers’ camps, and mess halls, keeping her ears open, and learning more than she should have.
    Most countries that the Fey had fought had banned strange animals from military compounds. Solanda had heard that the Co had gone so far as to slaughter any strays, thinking they might be Fey reconnaissance. But the Nyeians had a fondness for cats, and while they kept stray dogs out of their camps, they fed cats on the side.
    Solanda had spent most of the war the pampered resident of a Nyeian general’s tent. He used to feed her bits of meat off his own plate while telling his staff his battle plans for the next day.
    And then when he fell into his snoring sleep, she would go to the nearest Shadowlands and inform the Fey general of all she had heard. Toward the end of the war, she reported directly to the Black King, who shook his head at the stupidity of the Nyeians.
    Conquering Nye was the first step toward world dominion. The Black King didn’t say that, but Solanda knew that was