Brin had been up top, the front of her body hidden in an open compartment beneath the immense light, lying on her back like she were a mechanic. She’d been around machinery her whole life — there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed with brute force and persistence, and she was going to fix the lamp. The first step had been cleaning away all the grit and salt crystals that had caked on over half a century; now she had to figure out the wiring. When Foxstar’s voice drifted up to her, echoing through the twisting stairwell, she growled to herself but didn’t stop her work, listening to him in silence. She had come out here because she preferred to be alone, because she liked silence when she worked, and still he hadn’t gotten the memo. Finally, at his come on down, please and thanks, she pushed herself out and stood, wiping her blackened paws together. They were dark up to the elbows. Brin didn’t refuse a direct order. She was miraculously honourable about that — it would have been easy to be resentful, to take her years of experience and leadership and scars and hold it up to this kit’s, but she didn’t; from one Captain to another, she would serve him. There was no competition, no rivalry; her power was in the past, his was in the present — that was all there was. A deposed Captain obeyed the current, all swords away.

“Foxstar,” Brin replied as she descended the winding staircase with heavy steps, her paws first appearing, then her legs, then her body — but rather than sounding like a greeting, it sounded like she was already launching into a sentence, “do you know what happens when a Captain shows weakness to a crew?” She stopped in front of him on the wiry seaside grass, looking down at him and leaning in. “They get their throat cut.” Holding his gaze for a long moment, she finally turned away again and padded back into the lighthouse stairwell, dragging a tattered bit of cloth from the railing and using it to clean her paws. “Think you can’t breathe now? Wait till then. Captains should spend more time listening to themselves and less time listening to the cute nurse with a crush on them.” She was turned away from him as she spoke, so deadpan and monotone, the cloth wringing over her oily paws. There was no insult in her comment, no condemnation; she had been recruited to help protect this boy king, and that was what she would do. She had no interest in his love life, in the families and politics of his Clan — if Sunveins was a liability, she should stop being one, and if Foxstar wasn’t going to listen to her, to Brin, then she wouldn’t cry when his head was snapped off. She’d serve the next Captain.

Tossing the cloth back over the railing, she turned back and padded back down to him, dropping down from the step with such a lazy, heavy thud of one paw that her shoulder jolted. Her eyes were still dead as she stopped, looming over him. “I’m here. What do you need?”