Koksun was acclimating quite nicely to life in the Pitkins-Donive home. Meals were regular, milk was plentiful, and back rubs were frequent. His usual schedule involved waking up around 7 a.m., when Donive awoke, and then getting a generous breakfast. After that, he usually traipsed around the grassy acres of their luxurious estate, chased a mouse or two (he had not yet acquired a taste for them in spite of his love of pursuing them), and then found a shady tree where he would nap for several hours.
After a hardy lunch, he would often play with Mervin, the bulky, nearly lion-sized Great Dane that patrolled the estate with all the rigor and enthusiasm of a handsomely paid guard. Koksun had been quite uneasy with his towering companion at first, given that he felt the size of a mouse compared to this animal. But, fear for corporal safety aside, he felt quite fortunate to have ended up with such a companion. Koksun had been an avid dog owner and trainer in the Varco and had personally owned a Great Dane very similar in appearance to Mervin, and thus, he had felt a fondness for him immediately.
It had taken him a full three weeks to work up the nerve to approach Mervin and play with him, during which time he had observed the giant animal with utmost attention. He had found that Mervin was not aggressive to anything he considered family, and both Koksun’s eyes and nose told him—when he was being pampered by Donive in Mervin’s presence—that Mervin was not only beginning to see him as a friend, but as part of the family and thus entitled to his full protection.
One day, realizing that the slightest miscalculation would result in him being wolfed down like an afternoon snack, he decided it was now or never and approached Mervin. Mervin was sitting in front of the house like an upright statue surveying the premises unblinking. He didn’t even seem to notice Koksun as he came and lay next to him. Then, Koksun took a lengthy nap. When he awoke, Mervin was off patrolling the grounds, but Koksun was still in one piece and not inside Mervin’s stomach, and he had stopped fearing him after that.
In fact, they had become quite playful, and occasionally Koksun would chase Mervin around the house or lawn, or vice versa. On other occasions, Koksun would test Mervin’s alertness by scaling a tree, waiting patiently for Mervin to come by on one of his many patrols, and then jump down towards his back. He found that his Metinvurian skills were still sharp because he succeeded in landing directly onto Mervin’s back around eighty percent of the time. Mervin would often let out a loud “WOOF!” and then buck him off. Koksun could have dug his claws in deeply to Mervin’s side and held on, but he didn’t want to hurt his buddy. In fact, he was becoming quite chummy with The Beast, as he often thought of him.
But he missed Tristan too. It wasn’t necessarily that he savored Tristan’s passion for large-scale wars designed to expand Dachwald’s section of the map, but rather he liked the intellectual challenge that conversations with the old man had afforded. Koksun had rather taken it for granted, at the time but now sorely missed it as he had been unable to speak to anyone for quite some time. The last person—or rather the last anything—that he had spoken to was Chip, and he now found himself feeling quite curious as to whether that tiny bird had succeeded in finding Tristan and, if so, whether he survived the encounter.
He knew that Tristan had almost perpetually distrusted the konulans and that he was probably going to kill all of them, especially after the revolt of the pholungs, whom he had trusted twenty times more than their miniature counterparts. He suspected that if Chip made it to Tristan and was not killed for his troubles Tristan would likely send him a message someday via Chip. But as for now, here Koksun was not only imbued with the gift of speech but also with a lifetime of having used it and not having any stretch before now in his memory where he could not.
It was beginning to eat at him. He was starting to contemplate talking to Donive, maybe even Pitkins, although he knew Pitkins would likely chop him in two without a second’s hesitation if he thought that he was in any way an ally of Tristan’s. And since Koksun felt it to be a pretty safe guess that Pitkins had never seen a talking animal in his life with the exception of the pholungs, he would be very prone to suspect the involvement of Tristan if Koksun suddenly started talking. He had seen Pitkins come riding into Tristan’s lair on the back of Istus and had seen the fire in his eyes.
However, if Pitkins was able to be convinced that the pholungs were really just victims of Tristan’s, why couldn’t he be convinced that Koksun was another of Tristan’s many victims, rather than a willing collaborator? Even if Pitkins had seen Istus fling him from the cliff, that wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Istus himself had made a mistake. Furthermore, Koksun was pretty sure Pitkins had not seen this because as soon as Istus entered the lair Pitkins had hopped off his back and gone to work dousing everything in sight with naphtha. Also, Pitkins had now seen him countless times in his own home, and he had never behaved with the slightest aggression towards him, and in fact he had occasionally given him a pat on the back.
It was starting to seem worth a try, and Koksun was growing a bit weary by the day of pretending to be a mute animal.
While he was in the kitchen, getting ready to slurp dry a saucer of milk, he heard someone opening the door to the house, and his nose immediately told him it was Donive.
“Hi, Bandit,” Donive said to Koksun as she entered the kitchen, having no idea of the full appropriateness of the name she had chosen for her cat.
She began removing some items from the basket she was carrying, and then, without any warning, a unique smell hit Koksun with the force of a hurricane wind, transporting him almost instantly across the erstwhile untraversable abyss of several centuries of time to when he was a strapping, twenty-year-old man about to graduate from Stage One of Varco training and embark upon his first mission.