oye como va, mi ritmo
bueno pa gozar, mulata
‘Sweetheart…’ Sperantia’s voice rang clearly in his mind. Mallos glanced down at his cat, who had stopped in her tracks with her nose to the air and her ears pointed backwards. He stopped, but didn’t have the chance to turn around before he heard his grandson hailing him to wait. He and Sperantia turned in unison, the former already smiling, and obediently waited while Tristan sprinted towards them. Sperantia took one look at Celidon barrelling towards them at a hundred miles per hour, and rather wisely leapt up onto Mallos’ shoulders. Or, more accurately, she leapt onto his arm – the highest point she could reach – and then clawed her way up onto his shoulders. The smile became a grimace as he gave her a rather violent shove to get her up there quicker, muttering some choice admonitions in Spanish under his breath. The Siamese-cross ignored him and settled quietly across his shoulders, her tail flicking across her back and her narrowed eyes focused on the giant green dog.
He cut himself off a little sharply as Tristan slid to a halt in front of him. If the young prince started using any inappropriate Spanish words around the castle, Mallos was one hundred per cent sure where Arthur would lay the blame.
“I was only here briefly,” he protested against the accusation, but grinned to show he understood it was a joke.
The question of how he had been was harder to answer. How had he been? Shaman wasn’t the worst place to be trapped indefinitely, but after his experiences in the Alhambra Mallos took understandable offence to being trapped anywhere. The benefits of being stranded on the same planet as his family was also counter-balanced by the problem of being permanently placed in close quarters with the rest of the council. On any other planet Mallos wouldn’t have let that bother him, but here there could be dire consequences if there was even one divine battle. He had the most to lose in a fight, and among the least friends on the council. How had he been? Frustrated, annoyed, worried, missing Ander. None of those felt like appropriate answers, so he adopted a more diplomatic approach.
“In excellent health, thank you,” the overarching politeness indicated a subtle closing of the topic. “And yourself?”
Tristan tried to hide his distress when he mentioned the monsters, but there were tell-tale signs: the broken eye contact, the slight change of tone, an adjustment in the muscles around his mouth. Mallos studied his face carefully, nodded once to the request that they head back towards the castle and started to walk slowly in the direction the prince had indicated. He had a feeling that his grandson wouldn’t want them to reach eavesdropping-distance of the castle immediately. The revelation that Arthur had a closer eye on Tristan than usual was unsurprising, given the knowledge that more monsters could appear at any time, but somehow he suspected there was more to it than that. He didn’t enquire after precisely what Tristan had done to land himself in trouble again, but did shoot him a rather wicked smile.
“Nowhere else I’d rather be,” he replied, the smile fading as he noticed, again, the prince’s somewhat disturbed behaviour. “What’s wrong?”
