Come Home, Little One
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Her heart was racing, and she could not tell whether the sound was her own or Shirca's, pounding where he held her crushed against him.
"Shirca, your heart's going like mad."
Bariya chattered on, the very picture of innocence, as if the frantic beat had nothing to do with her.
"I swear I can feel my lifespan shrinking. If you were going to run away from home, you ought to have stayed somewhere safe. What are you doing in a place like this?"
Shirca sighed without loosening his hold. The strength in his arms said he had no intention of ever letting her go again.
"It's all right. I did a good thing."
Bariya held up the tiger cradled against her chest for him to see.
Shirca's eyes went wide.
"I heard you meant to rescue a tiger, but why is this one's coat so mottled?"
"I don't know either."
Even Shirca, a tiger beastkin himself, seemed to be seeing fur like that for the first time.
"……Shirca."
At the voice, they turned.
Lioric Leotel stood glaring at him, one wounded hand clenched tight. From the gash, dark crimson blood threaded with poison fell in a steady drip.
"I never thought I'd find the acting clan head of the Leotels in an auction house illegally selling tigers."
Fury filled Shirca's voice.
"And you tried to kidnap this child knowing full well she is a guest cherished by the Caliph Clan. The Caliphs will not let this pass."
"Ha. And if you don't? You're already hard-pressed just fighting the Mariners, and now you mean to make enemies of us as well?"
Lioric twisted his mouth into a sneer.
"I see no reason why we couldn't."
At that unabashed answer, Lioric's smile died.
"The Leotels would do well to start considering how they might escape the wrath of Baden Caliph and Sabrina Caliph. Those two treasure our little one far more than you imagine."
Shirca gathered Bariya up into his arms. Lioric's face creased at the sight of him fussing over a girl of ten as though her legs might snap if he set her down.
The two of them still... me...
But Bariya understood. The words were a warning aimed at Lioric, and at the same time a message meant for her. Their hearts had not changed, so she needn't worry. They were still worried about her. So come home.
This is what I wanted to hear.
The moment she stood before Shirca, she recognized the feelings she had spent so long turning away from, and in the same breath she saw how foolish her choice had been. To let Darius Mariner's words frighten her into running. She should have trusted the Caliphs a little more. Not once had they disappointed her.
Bariya regretted it. And she wanted to go back.
Which means I have to be of more help.
For the Caliphs, who still meant to protect her even after she had driven a blade into their hearts. From now on, she would protect them too.
"Hey, mister."
Bariya tipped her chin as high as it would go and pointed at Lioric's wound.
"That wound won't heal so easily, you know."
She had opened it with her nails, and the tiger had worked poison into the cut. She did not understand why the tiger carried the same Poison Pheromone the Mariners had used, but she knew it well enough. She had purged it once before.
"If you don't want to die, you'd better find a cure before it festers any worse."
Once that poison took hold, no ordinary method could neutralize it. It was not a simple toxin. It was a poison made of pheromone.
The Mariners claimed they had an antidote, but he doesn't know that.
Hyenas were not venomous creatures. He would never draw the connection.
"You heard her. See to your own treatment."
Shirca turned so Bariya could say nothing more to Lioric.
"Jake!"
"Yes, Young Master. Oh—young lady! Just as Miss Glosa said, you really were here!"
Jake, waiting outside the building, caught sight of Bariya and broke into a brilliant smile.
"Aigoo, do you have any idea how worried we've been? Thank goodness you're safe."
"It's good to see you again, mister."
"Jake, the auction house is to be shut down. Arrest everyone involved and have them escorted to the Caliph domain. Miss Obli Glosa should be somewhere nearby. Find her, and see that she is protected."
"Yes, understood."
Before long Jake was leading the Caliph knights through the auction house, sweeping it clean.
"……I'll see that I'm paid in full for this wound."
Lioric ground his teeth.
Shirca answered without so much as a glance.
"It is the Caliphs who will be paid in full for the hand you laid on our guest."
Furious as he was, Lioric took one look at the knights closing the distance and, in the end, withdrew.
Once outside, Shirca climbed into the carriage waiting nearby.
"Ha... little one."
Only now, with Bariya truly safe, did he let the breath go.
"How in the world did you end up all the way out here? Did the kidnappers drag you with them?"
"No. As if I'd let people like that get the better of me."
"Ah. Right. Of course not."
There was no world in which Bariya let some ragtag lot kidnap her.
"I just climbed onto whatever carriage happened to be passing, and that's how I got here."
"You rode in a carriage?"
"Yep. The driver didn't know, though."
At her perfectly unashamed confession of fare-dodging, a helpless laugh broke from Shirca. Come to think of it, Bariya was a prodigy of escape, three years spent evading the hyenas. And he had imagined a child like that would still be wandering somewhere near the Caliph lands. He had underestimated her badly.
"Then how did you get here so fast, Shirca? I didn't think you'd make it today."
"Mother was searching mainly to the north, and I to the south. The moment word came from Miss Glosa, I shifted into my true form and ran."
Beastkin were already twice as fast as ordinary animals, and in animal form they could run faster still. To hear he had come at his utmost speed left her grateful, and sorry besides.
"I apologize for leaving home of my own accord."
"……Little one. Are you thinking of leaving again?"
Shirca asked it carefully, watching her face.
"Of course, if you don't want to go back, you don't have to come with us. But little one, if you're doing this because you're worried about us, please, change your mind."
He caught her hand and held it tight, the plea close to begging. At that raw earnestness, tears threatened to rise in Bariya all over again.
"……Can I go back?"
Color flooded Shirca's anxious face.
"What kind of question is that? Of course you can!"
He pulled her into his arms at once.
"……Okay."
Bariya leaned into Shirca's embrace, familiar as breathing. What had the Mariners said, that she had given up people this good in a single moment? A bond most never find in a lifetime had come to her of its own accord, and instead of closing her hand around it, she had let it slip through her fingers. She would never do that again.
"But, little one."
"Mm?"
"What is this tiger, carrying poison around?"
Shirca regarded the tiger in her arms with open distaste. He must have seen it spray poison into Lioric's wound.
"I don't really know either. I thought it was just an animal, but up close it turned out to be a beastkin with a Poison Pheromone."
"A beastkin?"
"Yeah."
Bariya caught one of the tiger's big front paws and gave it a shake. Irritated, the tiger grumbled, but it neither yanked the paw free nor bit her.
"You're taking it to the Caliphs?"
"I have to."
She needed to learn why the poison the Mariners had used and this tiger's pheromone were one and the same.
"And thanks to my Authority, its poison doesn't affect me at all, so you don't have to worry."
"Grrrr."
Looking thoroughly put out, the tiger planted a hind paw against the Shirca sitting so close and shoved him away.
"What, you don't like Shirca? You'll have to put up with him. The place we're going is Shirca's house."
The tiger went still.
"If you want meat, you have to get on the house owner's good side. And if you mean to grow bigger once you're grown, you need to eat properly."
Perhaps because the two of them had squabbled in the prison over which was smaller, the tiger folded the leg it had been using to push Shirca back. So it wanted to get big, too.
Shirca, however, was thinking something else entirely.
I don't think it stopped because of the meat. It stopped when she said Bariya was coming along too.
He did not like this creature. Not one bit. It felt as though someone were trying to steal his precious little sister, and so, all the long way back to the Caliph lands, he never once took his eyes off the tiger curled in Bariya's arms.
"Hmph."
The tiger, of course, did not spare him a glance.
"Ah."
The urgent word had come by the messenger bird Shirca sent, and the breath broke from Baden in a rush. At the news that Bariya had been found safe, tears very nearly surged.
No. I mustn't. I still have work of my own.
He steadied himself, folded the dispatch, and slipped it inside his robes.
"It would seem you have received the news you were awaiting."
Seated across from him was the head of House Aldros, the leading family of the crested ibis beastkin.