Elder Grendish Read online

Elder Grendish

  By Melinda Bardon

  https://www.melindabardon.com

  A small grey tabby watched from beneath a shrub as the champion of the Brackwater Alliance emerged from a rental car into the hot Florida sun. The champion’s name was Kir Ballard, and she had come to the seashore with her parents for two weeks of June quite unaware of the Alliance or what role they expected her to play. The beaches of the Florida coast were full for the season. Every last hotel and resort worth mentioning had been booked up for months, so the Ballard family had rented a flamingo pink two bedroom cottage, three blocks from the sea, sandwiched between a sun-faded burrito shack and a bleached white house guarded by a pitbull and a chain link fence. Kir had only ever known one dog—the neighbors’ labradoodle back home—and thought it might be nice to make friends with this new one. She had got only three of her fingers through the chain, however, before her mother ran screaming towards her and yanked Kir back into their humid vacation home.

  For all the previous summers she could remember of her eight years alive, Kir and her parents had spent the hot days close to home in their Westbury Heights cul-de-sac, safe in a sea of sprinklers, rolled lawns, and double car garages. Kir had never before seen the real ocean, or real seagulls, but her parents seemed thrilled at the prospect of showing them to her, so Kir was excited, too.

  The three of them spent two sunny, blissful days at the beach collecting seashells and looking for turtle tracks. Then before she knew it, Kir was watching her mom run out the door in her blue blazer and lucky earrings, off to unending days of conferences and bad coffee. Kir’s dad was too absorbed in the novel he’d picked up at the airport to notice the tell-tale signs of a bored child in a strange place. The third time her father ignored her invitation to play Space Ponies on Mars, Kir packed the pockets of her overalls with cracker sandwiches and a juice pouch and pushed open the heavy sliding glass door to wander the cottage’s unexplored back yard.

  As far as back yards went, Kir was solidly unimpressed. It had little grass to speak of—professionally rolled or otherwise—and was devoid of any play structure, kiddie pool, or even a set of patio furniture. Instead, the small slab of weed-cracked concrete was bordered on three sides by chain link made an opaque green by the hibiscus hedge that covered it, its sole point of interest being an orange tree that grew in the northeast corner. Spindly palms peered in over the hedge, bobbing their spiked heads curiously.

  Kir scrunched her face up at the palms, as if this interminable prison of boredom and lame groundskeeping were somehow their fault. With a heavy sigh, she pulled a plastic toy cheetah out of her front pocket and together they went to investigate the flora. The cheetah had been Kir’s favorite toy for the past six months, ever since she had won it in a raffle in school, and was her near constant-companion, mostly due to how nicely it fit into her pockets.

  “Come, Pepper Lord,” Kir ordered the cheetah, “let us go forth and claim this land for ourselves. These magical flowers will make excellent crowns.”

  Without further ceremony, Kir plopped herself and Pepper Lord down on the warm patio in the shade of the orange tree and began pulling hibiscus stems and the hot pink flowers attached to them from the fence, clumsily weaving them into crowns. The first three that she made fell to pieces when she tried to place them on her head, but by the fourth she’d gotten the knack of weaving the pieces together in her small hands. Pepper Lord, of course, was no help at all, but she had set him out to guard her while she worked, not for his weaving skills.

  The sun was setting below the fence and amber streetlights were starting to shine by the time she had finally finished a workable crown to her satisfaction. Kir looked up from her pile of half-wilted greenery to search the fence for some nice blossoms for her mother, and to her surprise, met a pair of yellow feline eyes that stared back at her intently, wide and wary. The eyes belonged to a little grey short-hair tabby that stood just across the fence from her. Its tail swished twice, but otherwise the animal remained still and silent.

  “Pepper Lord,” Kir whispered, not daring to take her eyes off the cat. “Is this one of your minions? Well, we’ll have to see what he wants then.”

  Slowly, she stood, not bothering to brush the dirt from her knees, and took a cautious step closer towards the fence. The cat bolted, but paused a few feet back and turned to regard the little girl once more. Kir took this as a sure sign that the cat wanted her to follow him. She turned and scooped up Pepper Lord, careful not to knock her new crown off her head, and searched the fence closest to the cat for signs of a weak spot. She was surprised to discover a girl-sized hole at the bottom of the fence, not far from where she had been weaving her crowns. Being a pragmatist, Kir did not pause to wonder how a hole just her size had got to be there without her noticing. Instead, she pocketed Pepper Lord and crawled through in pursuit of the tabby.

  On the other side of the fence from the cement yard, Kir felt cool, slightly damp, earth beneath her palms. On all sides save for the way she came in, she could see nothing but dense Floridian vegetation. Even the huge streetlights could barely get room to shine, so thick were the plants, but instead freckled the green gloom here and there, highlighting piles of dead leaves and palm tree debris with orange light. Kir crawled forward--there was no room for her to stand. The only path was that the cat had taken, and at times it got so narrow and low that she was forced to flatten herself out and scoot along on her belly.

  The cat always stayed in plain view, but never let her get very near. If she sped up, it would dart further away. If she got snagged on a branch and had to stop, the cat paused, one paw raised curiously above the ground, haunches ready to flee in a blink. Kir had a vague notion that there were other cats following behind her. From time to time she thought she heard the sound of padded footsteps in the leaves, but the tunnel had become so constricting that she could not see over her shoulders to find out if they were really there.

  When the last rays of the sun had set in the far-off west and Kir could barely see the shadowy silhouette of the tabby, the hedge tunnel turned sharply and deposited her into an empty parking lot. The cat sat calmly beside a fossil of a shopping cart and licked its tail clean of any dirt it had accumulated during the chase, but otherwise made no attempt to move. Still, he stared watchfully at Kir with one yellow eye as he worked. Kir stood and decided the cat had the right idea. She began brushing the dirt and bits of dead leaves from her knees and hair, then pulled Pepper Lord out to make sure he’d made the trip unscathed.

  “Alright!” She called out to the tabby after several minutes of grooming. “What’s all this about, kitty?”

  The tabby raised its head from out between its legs and stared at her for a good while, tongue sticking out between its teeth in a ridiculous pose. As the silence continued, Kir began to feel just a bit silly that she had followed a stray cat all this way, and perhaps it wasn’t the magical talking kind after all, but just a normal dumb cat who had come looking for food scraps. She looked up at the sky and noticed for the first time just how dark it had gotten outside. Her mother was almost definitely back at the rental now, probably with dinner. She got that fluttery feeling in her stomach that warned her she would be in a Lot of Trouble upon her return. She conferred with Pepper Lord about what to do next.

  “We should probably go home soon, I agree,” she said. “There’s nothing here, anyway, except a stupid cat.”

  “Warlord Tibbs is not stupid,” a woman’s voice behind Kir said with icy inflection.

  “Uh-oh....” Kir whispered to Pepper Lord.

  Hesitantly, she turned around and found another cat behind her, blocking the entrance to the tunnel. This cat was larger than the tabby, all black except for a freckling of white around her face and tail.
/>   “Warlord Tibbs,” Kir repeated, not knowing what else to say in this situation.

  “That’s right,” the black cat said, and Kir detected a bit of a snarl in the response. “You should apologize to our Dear Leader this instant and be grateful he does not lick your eyeballs out of their sockets.”

  Kir glanced over her shoulder at Tibbs, who now stood on all four paws and gazed back at her blankly. There didn’t seem to be anything special about him that she could see, but she bowed her head briefly just the same and apologized.

  “I’m sorry, Warlord Tibbs,” she said. “It was wrong of me to call you stupid without getting to know you first.”

  “Don’t be a smart