"Mercè, you will take dictation, please."

L'Ausa Majaur tapped a yellowed scroll lightly against the tussock of down between her beak and maw. One of the Cucs sidled up beside me, reached for a pocked chalcedony bench with her two forelegs, and slowly pulled herself erect. She beamed at me, a simple little girl's grin, appropriately shy, her saffron comb unfurling and tacking into the moist dawn like a heliotrope. I nodded at the child and startled to grin in return. Within a few seconds, a small, disjointed congregation of her sisters began to trickle from the shadow of the archway and scurried singlefile across the peristyle, over weeds and chunks of limestone and sprigs of vermillion feldspar, towards the looming, flowering lhedouner where L'Ausa waited. We all exchanged wide grins, as would only befit a summons from the old mendicant.

La Majaur drew an appreciative smile for the crowd, dropped to one knee, and handed me the scroll. I plucked it from the underside of her paw, between my thumb and forefinger, quickly, daintily, as she had once taught me. Her hand vanished immediately beneath an ebony fold in her robe, specks of dander wafting across my nose and mouth, as she stood up and receded into the hulking shadow of the nettle tree. She smiled again, sagacious and capriciously maternal, and began with a recitation of the events of the past eighteen years; how her people brought us here as a misunderstood act of peace, how the Chathalans greeted the Cucs, that endearing, almost infantile proto-species under Ausana tutelage, with cannon and flashing turret, and taught their kind that word, guerha, although they never once, in their entire existence, fashioned such a concept. It did not matter, I thought as I wrote, that my fathers and grandfathers were mere frontiersmen, utterly unarmed save the odd hunting rifle. La Majaur then recited the old story of the Roman conquest of Gaul; how Julius Caesar had all communiques to and from Italy encoded in Greek because barbaric, Celtic Gaulish and Latin were in most regards nearly the same tongue. She insisted that lhengua des Auses and Chathalà must have been mutually intelligible due to the same incomprehensible serendipity of cosmic benevolence, even though by the time I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday I had deciphered much if not most of the written form of the Auses' primeval language and found it to be a leviathan with myriad unwieldy declensions, completely devoid of syntax, as well as probably their only system of mathematics.

It was at that point, I suppose, that I stopped listening for the import of L'Ausa's words and contented myself simply to transcribe them, glancing up at her, with restrained incredulity, periodically. For her part, the old bear grinned approvingly down on me from time to time, favoring me with a slight nod as she did. I should not have balked when she finally delivered the summation of her sermon.

"As we have decided to return our beloved Mercè to Fideus, and conclude, after what will be many decades of silence, this grand ritual."

I narrowed my eyes at L'Ausa. She flared her beak nostrils, parted her lips slightly, and nodded. I put down my pen and gazed up at her.

"Yes, my dear girl, we received their reply last week. They asked about you, all of you, of course." She licked at her beak with her upper lip for a moment and addressed the Cucs again. "We will meet again next week, as usual, for further instructions. Our departure will not be for long, however. I assure you. Well, then ... Fins la sedmaena proucaena."

With those words the Cucs ambled over to me, one after the other, in the order of their ages, as per custom. Each girl latched her forelegs onto my shoulders and hoisted herself eye-level. They took turns blowing on me, softly, on my head, my face, shoulders and neck; all the places where I should have had down, or at least barbules, had I been one of their kind. In turn, I ceremoniously buried my face in each child's chest and inhaled deeply. I began to cry, absent-mindedly, the velveteen ripple of under feathers swabbing the tears into my cheeks.

After the children left, L'Ausa Majaur sat hunched against the nettle tree, her black cap pulled low over her forehead, eyes closed. She dangled the scroll from the bridge of her beak, teething on its edges. Above the tree, trundles of gray careened in the southern sky and puddled around the sun, shredding shadows into tattered lace.

"Your father has died." L'Ausa did not bother to open her eyes as she spoke.

I fixed on the branches above me, then at the tangled wisps of sunlight strewn at my feet. L'Ausa yawned, somewhere in the shade, under the great lhedouner.

"There was a ... sadness on Fideus. And Fideus is not used to such nonsense. Perhaps the Chathalans were beginning to forget what death meant to -"

"How," I whispered. Somehow I was sitting on the grass now, stiff and crosslegged. L'Ausa stirred and scratched her back against the trunk of the nettle. Behind us, in the distance, Cucs bayed and bleated at the clouds.

"He died last year, just after the feast days of Sante Llucie." She was kneeling beside me now, trying to smile.

"I guess it won't matter when I get there," I began, kneading my knuckles into the grass. "The how, I mean."

"Did you want him to be dead? Maybe that would make it easier?" L'Ausa cocked her head back. I stood up.

"Then why should I go back now?" I leaned into her, brushing my cheeks across her stomach.

"Do you even care how old he was?" A spongy mat of villi buffeted the old girl's voice. "I suppose that that doesn't matter, either. Yours live so much longer than ours."

With that she grabbed me under my armpits and lifted me up, fencing me inside the corrugated expanse of her breast. She smelled sour, L'Ausa. The muscles in her chest undulated slowly under my forehead, churning ribbons of burning felt against my cheeks, shackles of sinew clanging in my ears. I tried not to hyperventilate, suffocation fizzing at the back of my brain. My eyes began to water and swell shut simultaneously, long slivers of scurf slithering down my face and neck. My whole body tensed into a series of heaves, decompressing finally into a single sneeze. I groped under infinite folds of cape, and pawed at her ribs and latissimus, all the while trying to scream. L'Ausa was speaking, asking me something, clucking or stammering, I couldn't tell.

She relaxed her grip and held me slack against her. I inhaled deeply, and blew upon the wirey, ashen plumage of her face. "This is what you have wanted, for so long."

She was hugging me, at last, just as I had once taught her.

I spent the next month preparing myself for the trip back home. Or what used to be home, up until my twelfth year. It was to be a seven-month voyage, and in the course of those seven months, some forty years would have passed on the Chathalans' colony of Fideus. Forty-one years, more or less I surmised, since my father's passing.

And that was really all the thought I gave to him, or rather his death. I spent the bulk of the time before my departure making peace with the past eighteen years of my life. I thought about L'Ausa's words to me that day; I tried to remember why I wanted to return to Fideus, why it had meant so much to me. She had avoided telling me as long as possible, that her kind agreed to contact the Chathalans again, and that she personally petitioned for my release.

There was a strange plangency to it, to all of it, as I strolled the pastures and olive groves of the Auses' world, my world, or "Questa Terha" as they simply called it. I felt it as I watched infant Cucs scuttle deftly across it, each one pulling her segmented heft across a haze of emerald with only a pair of forelegs for locomotion. It was euphony: the Cucs' thick, rounded tails snapping the reeds at a pond's edge; a breeze twittering from deep within the cloister of a nettle tree's branches. I saw it on the children's faces, in their oblate, hazel-flecked eyes and wet, slivery grins, even as it fluttered from their barking nebs.

The Chathalan word for it is l'enyorance: nostalgia.

The voyage to Fideus I spent by myself. I slept alone, in a corner of my cabin, against the stack of ceremonial pillows that Cucs and Auses use in place of the long, traditionally elevated dais the Chathalans called a llid. It was a peculiar experience at first: sleeping by myself and in an enclosed space, that is. I had no desire to associate with any of my fellow Chathalans, those other children who were abducted at the same time as I was. The Auses had secluded us from each other, the entire eighteen years, in small cells across the planet. In all, I always believed that there could be no more than a hundred of us, plucked at random, or perhaps by the most unfathomably esoteric shred of quasi-logic from deep within the collective bear mind, from the llars familiars that now repined, cold, in our memories. Each of us, La Majaur herself told me once, was assigned to a group of Cucs, who in turn swarmed wholeheartedly under the intellectual and spiritual aegis of an experienced Ausa. These specially selected Cucs spent their formative childhood years on La Terha in what amounted to a kind of finishing school, where they were educated in the Auses' history, language and culture, as well as the entire mind-numbing spectrum of Ausana discoveries and explorations.

I never have been completely sure, but to this day I believe that all of us who were taken were girls.

I tried to recall those first days, what it had been like to wake up on a strange world; what it had been like to walk under the monstrous nettles and oaks that plumed the strata of warm, clattering breezes. I tried to remember that from the time I turned fourteen, a mere two years or so after my internment began, I was ... afflicted with an extraordinary capacity for guilt. It seemed that every mistake I made, every one of L'Ausa's lessons that I failed, brought me some vague yet very pungent sense of shame-dappled fear.

One day it seemed, all of a sudden, that I had forgotten him all too quickly, too readily. More and more, though, my thoughts and reveries turned to my father, all alone back on Fideus, in our home, his home, on the outskirts of Ciutà Ferré. If I dared to try and recall that man, his face, his smell, his voice, it came only with more guilt. But I could feel, however hard I tried not to, his fingertips, on me, on my waist, coarse knuckles like spurs pleating the skin on my hips.

This went on for the next fifteen years...

Something, listing slowly somewhere in the silt of fifteen years of memory, told me that I had ruined his life.

And so, some seven months after L'Ausa broke the news, I found myself back on Fideus. The four attending Auses left us to our own devices. The return of Fideus' long-lost daughters garnered almost no notoriety at all. In any event, I did not expect any, or so I kept telling myself the first couple of weeks. Most of our countrymen had forgotten us, it seemed, and that disastrous encounter with the Cucs and Auses, almost one-hundred years ago (almost one-hundred years ago from Fideus' way of reckoning, at least). Chathalans are very long-lived beings, or so we tend to think; but even so, the mundanities suffered on such a bucolic little moon cannot possibly be so enchanting as to cause an entire society to forget its first face-to-face encounter with an alien species.

We adjusted as well as could be. I say 'we' although I only maintained contact with one other girl, a certain Juisefine Huguet. She was much younger than I, or so it seemed to me (I outranked her by a mere six years). Within a day or so of our arrival, we both came under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Social Assistence of the autonomous municipality of Ciutà Ferré. First on the (almost subliminal) agenda was the pressing need to reacquaint ourselves with our native dialect. Speaking lhengua des Auses (their language had no official appellation, after all, forged as it was in feigned quaintness), we both were barely and sporadically comprehensible to the Fideans. Varied and ambiguously stylized, yet mutually intelligible, dialects are the sacred birthright of the Chathalan peoples. You may speak one (or two, or three) out of perhaps eighty divergences of the tatty old father tongue, depending on from where in the Nation your paternal order or professional guild descends, or into which semi-anarchistic familial caste or worker's co-op you are adopted. To make linguistic matters murkier, Occitanye was now officially a part of the Nation, melding, once again after more than two millennia, Lleinguedoc, our philological and cultural twin sister, into our already congealing bloodlines.

Within a few days, both my little sister and I rediscovered our individual ancestral idioms (she Aute Ribagorçà, I Rossellonès Nord), and the Deputy City Warden enrolled us in an indoctrination seminar on the basics of the National Standard Dialect (itself a rather prim off-shoot of Rossellonès).

At last, we were (obliged) to declare to ourselves, and to the moon at large: We are no longer Chathalan! We are now, once again, and forever more, Catalan!

After a few weeks at the city's central comune públice, Juisefine and I hugged; longer than I thought was particularly comfortable. Her long, cinder-colored bangs sheathed with both our tears; cobbled together by the tectonic silence, we breathed our farewells.

The next morning I trudged home.

Most of my father's estate had been absorbed by an amorphous, unincorporated outgrowth of the city proper known as Sant Grishome de la Tardor. Grishome was Fideus' first and so far only home-grown saint, canonized by the Innovated Catalan Catholic Church some thirty years after my exile. He was one of the founders of the Catalan colonies on Fideus, was probably Occitan in origin, a subversive and blatantly polyandrous friar and Neo-Catharist, and had endured the fashionably clandestine adoration of the settlers in the area for more than two centuries.

I knew instinctively that what remained of the House of Ildefons would be just that: the house. The stucco on the gatehouse was drenched in grime the color of dried honey, the bloat of its mushroom-shaped roof crumbling onto itself under a sluggish sky. I flung the gate open, absent-mindedly surprised by the ease of it, and started up an incline path dotted with weeping limestone ibexes.

It had rained that morning, just like any other morning in equatorial Fideus. Mud creaked against gravel and the plastic soles of my feet. Beyond the hill, a row of shaggy cypresses waned under the lollop of a thunderhead. Within ten minutes I stood at the front door. The lintel loomed above: thick, high, fractured ivory enamel. Among the scribbled reliefs of carnations and hibiscus blossoms, Guifré injected his lance into a Moorish dragon, while anonymous Ildefons patriarchs dallied upon ill-fitting thrones in a demilune above him. The double doors hunched between posts of burned teak. I began to knock and sighed, despite myself, as knuckles traipsed across a patchwork of stained glass and compacted schist. I pushed on each door instead and followed a crimp of wan light into the mudroom. I didn't bother to remove my clogs.

Ca d'Ildefons had been maintained, feebly, and escorted through its decrepitude by Llòrdes, a fully molted, eighth-age Cuc who had been my father's housekeeper, bodyguard, best friend, masseuse, and towards the end, his nurse. She was nowhere to be found, even as I called (self-consciously) for her. I snuck through the house, peering around every gently rounded corner, down burrowed hallways, grinding my teeth on my own trepidation.

I marveled at the moment, a nexus of a stunted childhood and a silent homecoming. My shoulders hurt; a canvas of pain and wetness hoisted itself back and forth across my scapula, finally twinging in each acromion.

I finally found my way to the southern wing, where my bedroom waited. I set my pack on the wood floor and divined which was the warmer end of the room. I then unbundled the pillows and stacked them in a corner next to a window. Lowering myself to both knees, I smothered my face in them, fingering their blazoned coolness, nuzzling their embroidered dampness.

I slept the rest of the morning.

That afternoon, I woke to the stench of the llar.

Llòrdes sat, fully erect, in front of the hearth, snout peeled back, whiskers simpering at the trickling flames, the muscles of her underbellies tattered with the platinum glister. She smelled me immediately and swept her head 180 degrees around to glimpse me. Her green eyes slammed forward into their front sockets. There was a sharp crackle, then a shrill chirp; she had dislocated her jaw to speak. "B-Bone tarde, f-filledte."

The next few days I spent in Llòrdes' constant company, acquainting myself with Sant Grishome, rambling down palm-studded avenues that basked in the chatter of Catalans and Cucs. Shops jutted from the sidewalk, some in the shape of the bows of ancient, capsized canoes, to scrape the trellis of fronds that dangled above them. Tent-like office buildings hurtled down from their apexes and fastened themselves to the curb, all in twinkling ocher, lazuline, and pyrite sheets of local river shale. Big, saggy polygonal windows stretched across their faces. The village was alive, festering with cheerful inter- and intra-racial commerce. Llòrdes for her part would greet her sisters in passing, unraveling her tongue from its furry muzzle, the many forks of the glossa clapping rhythmically, percussively, over each nostril. The entire moon had burgeoned, in my absence. Provincial economic tranquility had coalesced into a teetering wonderland of financial imperiousness.

L'Ausa had told me, just before we departed, that our three peoples had reached agreement some years after the Auses began their "ritual of cultural exchange". There was no word for it in their counterfeit language. Chathalans merely had to trust that hers had initiated the ritual to acclimate both themselves and us to the new bond between our kinds, a bond that inevitably begins with the inaugural contact, whether the aliens want the bond or not. It takes years, but rarely decades. But Catalans always have to be different, I suppose. "I will never understand the lack of patience on the part of yours," the old bear once told me, sincerely perplexed. "For ones whose lives span virtually without end."

In keeping with that quizzical precept, a few hundred Cucs stayed behind on Fideus, clustered in sororities in and around Ciutà Ferré.

Llòrdes related their history to me one day as we walked through town. The Cucs here were raised by Catalans in the monasteries of Fideus. They were adopted into paternal orders, given Catalan names, educated in the Innovated Church University of Sante Génevive, and integrated, upon their 30th year, into workers' castes.

"I", Llòrdes snickered proudly, "was adopted by your father. He rescued me from a m-mob in Quatre-Tourrons. That w-was decades ago now, in the days just after our arrival."

I bit my lip and glanced down, somewhere toward the sidewalk. I wondered, muzzily, eyes squinched in the odd pelting of sunlight, if she really knew him; if he had ever told her about me, what he did to me, even in his dying hours.

I had yet to be accepted into a professional co-operative, unqualified as I was by my years off-world for entry into the University. I passed my time in town, browsing the innumerable shops and restaurants, though the stipend I received from the government left me with no pocket money to speak of.

It was several months later that, departing the grocery of Sr. Abreu, I had a chance meeting with a childhood friend. Public subsistence allowances had rent my countenance with a certain bitterness, traceable, I was sure, by Jouenodte Aupiste as she struggled to recognize me: "Mercè, Holy Mother, can you really be here? I read about your return, all of you, I mean. They said it was you, when I saw your projection in Simeó Square. By Grishome Himself, I never thought ..."

I hastened to smile. "I've been back for some months now. I -"

"It must have been ... Well, it must have been ... horrible? I mean, all those years, away from home, away from your father. Your readjustment must be so difficult. I'm sorry, I have to admit that I just don't know what to say, really." Jouenodte cackled, a little self-consciously perhaps.

"It will be difficult," I rubbed fingertips into my hips. "Once I start to readjust."

"I've had such a time, really. I have three husbands now, in the order, fourteen children, twenty-nine grandchildren scattered all across the Bruixe System-"

I didn't remember asking how the past hundred years had gone for her. How was I to know, or care, that she had three fathers for her children when I could not have guessed that she had even one? I barely recalled her at all, and even then with contrived, halting affability at best. But yes, we had been best friends, confidants, inseparable playmates, or so she reminded me throughout our conversation.

Jouenodte blithered on; deep sepia eyes backlit by some flittering embers of self-satisfaction, stuffing bundles of (plum with glistening pewter highlights) hair behind her ears, about her dredging business that now spanned three inhabited moons. I always felt so sorry for you, really I did, she repeated ad nauseam, a diffuse little smirk dangling behind some film of rapturous pity.

"You look so young, Mercè! You look like such a young girl. I can't believe we're the same age ..." (As if one-hundred nine years was considered old among the Catalans. As if we really were the same age.) I cocked my head to one side, to appraise the worth and intent, I suppose, of that rarity of a compliment. "Well, I am only thirty years old, Jouenodte. I guess I can thank my captors for that much."

Jouenodte squeezed my arm, tenderly, sisterly and motherly at once, and sighed into my face. She smiled. "I used to think about you, you know. Everyday. About what your life could have been, had you stayed with your own kind … Now I will again."

My old friend squeezed my arm harder, just then. She craned her neck up towards me, (I always was taller) beyond her muscular shoulders, pulled me close, and sighed again.

"I always have felt so bad for you, my beautiful, dear Mercè."

She was beautiful, and she pitied me.

And now she was kissing me.

Father's estate was too big for the two of us. Even so, Llòrdes always managed to hunt me down, regardless of what part of the compound I was trifling in, and call me to dinner, or to share in the stoking of the llar, or to indulge me with one of her famous massages, or worst of all, to recount another one of the old man's hallowed exploits. "Y-you were always the qu-queen of his heart," she lectured at the end of the tale.

And I would listen, mindlessly, each word presumably more sumptuous than its predecessor, the Cuc's voice sulking in the dank and dun. Rèné Ildefons was a scholar, (that I knew already) and a peacemaker (which I did not). He defended the Cucs; to his deathbed he defended them. He took them in, educated them and fed them with the most austere of charities, all when his brethren wanted to exile them from the moon altogether. The Generalità Local voted to launch war parties (feeble as those war parties probably would have been) to try and locate their world. My father was among the first to petition the governing body to make peaceful contact with the Auses first. He incited his countrymen to take mercy upon the aliens on their world; they were, after all, just children.

Llòrdes would cough and unhinge her mandible as she offered her tender accounts of my father's benevolence. She would shamble across the room, rasping and snarling story after story. The Cuc dragged herself in fluid, candlelit arcs across the floor with the hind arms of her forelegs, as though she were chasing her own stumpy tail, her forearms splaying and rustling a stilted soliloquy of shadows against a stuccoed wall.

Each rendition, it seemed, was designed to imbue my memory of the man with a redoubtable sense of compassion. The fact that she could speak now and compart these experiences to me, Llòrdes declared, was thanks only to my father's generosity. While it was technically possible for an adult Cuc to lisp the rudimentary phonetics of Catalan speech, my father took it upon himself to have Llòrdes' larynx modified. It was an experimental procedure that consumed a goodly portion of the old man's personal fortune, amassed over a period of two-hundred years. In the end, the Cuc managed to stammer her way through our language and solidify her place in his heart and his household.

Every night Llòrdes stumbled through another collection of stories; a ritual seemingly designed to secrete in me, over the months, some murky reservoir of love for the man.

And after awhile, each story, ambiguously crafted from stuttering alien recitation, became a wafting, a miasmic echo that divested me completely, and forever I feared, of the entire fount of disgust I had felt since my adolescence. It occurred to me, all at once, that from the day I set foot back in my own house, the impact of him, and of what he did to me, simply was not there. The house was void: of all profundity of touch, or shame, or revulsion.

But there was resentment there. Every time I walked the cream colored halls, wanting to feel what I had always felt: the trembling, the gentle twinge of terror that blossomed when I saw his portrait, when I listened to Llòrdes pontificate about him. I resented him for making me feel the way he always did, for telling me not to talk about it, not to open my eyes even as I smelled him on me. I resented Jouenodte for being so goddamn happy, and successful, and ravishing, all while I had practically languished, motherless, on that far-off island, squatting among those child-beasts, sleeping under goddamned nettle trees. The resentment was having to hazard another childhood (or perhaps it was really my first) on Fideus at age thirty, not knowing the warmth of another woman's bed and llar until that abysmal day Jouenodte found me at the market.

Subconsciously at least, it occurred to me that as real, immediate, and barbed as it seemed, all that bitterness was somehow just a fabrication. It had to be, I reckoned slowly over the months, because I needed it. The resentment, then, was my reward for coming home. It had to be my justification for feeling the way I had for so long.

It was a little over a year since my return when Llòrdes grinned a snout's full of serrated dentition, chased her tail for a gleeful second, and informed me that the Generalità Local was going to grace my father's memory with the special dedication of a permanent resonance projection of him in Simeó Square. Sant Grishome's Cuc community would be out in force, obviously, as the whole affair was mainly their idea. Llòrdes and her sorority had petitioned the Generalità for a couple of years, totally in secret it would seem, for the honor. The Assembly finally acquiesced, most Catalans probably believed, in a move to try and atone for our trespasses in the past and to enhance our kind's standing with the Auses.

The news couldn't have meant any less to me.

Dedication Day would arrive about a month later, in late October. A week out, Llòrdes bought me a dress for the occasion: bright ruby red, trimmed at the neckline, short sleeves, and brief, billowing hemline with what resembled a sort of gilded Greek Key, with a blazon of the Crosses of Old Provence and Toulouse on the chest just above the left breast.

"Your father would have loved you in this," she slurred admiringly, as if a Cuc could possibly fathom even one of our myriad interpretations of beauty.

In the mirror I traced the outline of one of the Crosses against my skin, wishing numbly that I hadn't heard her.

I already knew that I had no intention of going. I could drink till I got sick or simply sham illness. Jouenodte had invited me to spend the night with her, but insisted on accompanying me to the ceremony the following day. So, I thought, I can just drink to the point of nausea, spend the night basking in her llar anyway, and then oblige her to nurse me all Dedication Day.

Somehow, of course, that plan never quite cemented itself. Jouenodte had to leave Fideus on business. Llòrdes insisted that I remain at home the evening before the Dedication so that she could inspire me with more trumped up tales of my father's saintliness. I sat, across from her in front of the llar, my jaw deposited on the ledge of my palms, gazing out the oval picture window in the front room.

Somewhere between pirouettes, the Cuc must have noticed my lack of interest. "Pay attention, l-little Mercè! This is … your father I'm telling you about."

I thought of Jouenodte, my Jouenodte, and how strange it was that I should now think of her as mine. Resentment, again, as always, this time mottled with the texture of Jouenodte's hard, round shoulders, her flaring trapeziuses, the taper of her long neck - - and then, only the resentment again.

"I'm not, uh, I'm not feeling so well, Llòrdes. I need to lie down for the night."

Maybe I dreamed that night, I still don't know for sure. When I woke on the morning of Dedication Day, I felt as if I had spent my whole life in that house, as if I had slept in that same bed every night for as long as I could remember. There were no Cucs in the world - as soon as I awakened, before I ventured to open my eyes - no Auses, no Llòrdes. Father was still alive, somewhere downstairs I could have sworn, probably making me breakfast. Strange, too, that he really wasn't my father. He was just Father. I must have dreamed, sometime that night, that that was all I needed to feel.

Downstairs, the Cuc sat upright in front of the fire, fore and hind arms across one of her bellies, eyes shut. I sidled up to her, as quietly as I could, but her shuttering nostrils got the better of me. The old girl blinked empty lids repeatedly, jogging both eyeballs from the depths of her skull.

"So there you are." She began to smile, a Cuc's smile, a wolf's smile as Juisefine Huguet once described it. "Your father would be so proud of this day." I don't remember hearing her jaw unhinge.

I reached up and stroked a forearm. "I can't go, Llòrdes."

"Never mind that, little ch-child. We-," she twisted her head towards me. She began to scowl, I think, but her lips suddenly coagulated behind a row of fangs. "What do you mean, girl?"

"I can't go. I don't want to go." My words must have just glanced off her. I have never believed that Cucs were particularly adept at reading Catalan facial expressions either.

"You're sick, then?" Llòrdes whisked around me, inspecting every centimeter of my frame.

"No, not especially."

"Then why? This is a g-great day for your father. You have to g-go! I will not allow this, this - disrespect - for his memory. He was your f-father, he was -" She was standing in front of me again, looking me up and down, head ticking, and then bobbing slightly. I had never seen one of hers angry before. She was baffled and frustrated beyond all Fideus. "Why?"

I put my arms around the beast and leaned into her with all my weight. Her venters were warm, almost prickly, against my cheeks, my arms. "I want to tell you. I do." I sighed and took a breath of her: all mildew and burnt cinnamon. "I'm sure he never did."

And then the Cuc's arms were on my shoulders, twining around my neck, her fur almost molten. "He was a great m-man. He was y-your father, Mercè." She ran her forearms down my back and pulled me into her.

"You never suspected, did you? Could you suspect? Can yours even begin to understand?"

"He w-was a good father. You can n-never say anything"

I waited for it: the shame, the guilt, the touch: any of it. I wished desperately that I could feel it, resurrect it, use it for whatever it was worth right then. I wanted to hate her, because he wasn't there. "He was NOT a good father! You can never know how he was!"

"D-Don't say that, tiny Mercè." Llòrdes squeezed me into her, the claws of hind arms rasping my lower back. Her bellies tightened and began to spasm, walling me in a cleavage of muscle. She purred into my ear. "He never hurt you."

I refused to cry. I could barely breathe now, as it was. I clawed at her bellies, pinched blindly at tufts of sinew. Jaw limp and bludgeoned with pain, I could only whisper: "How do you know what he did? You're not one of us. You're just an animal, a thing. How can you ever know?" I was losing my voice.

Llòrdes nestled the crown of my head with her snout and blew on my hair. Her breath was slush; it was thick and cool and oozed through my drenched scalp.

"You c-can never understand what he d-did for me, girl. I d-don't care what you s-say. He never h-hurt you. S-Say it. Say it, girl!"

I felt a rib crack and coughed. Somehow, I had begun to cry. The Cuc wedged me into her, harder and harder. My jaw began to dislocate. "You do know, don't you? Did he confess to you? I bet he did. But you still can't under-" I sputtered under the strain of the last question. My jaw just popped out of its sockets.

"Say it! Say it, Mercè! He was g-good. You don't k-know what he did for m-me … I don't w-want to do this to m-my little Mercè …" The creature trailed off.

Her arms were back around my neck, her nails at the base of my skull. She was killing me, I knew it.

But does she really know, I wondered.

And then: Why can't I feel it anymore? Why can't I still be sure, now of all times?

This is the last bit of anger I can ever feel, I thought. All this time, it occurred to me, and this is all I have to show for it.

Maybe I felt another rib snap, just before she dropped me on the floor.