Madame Mimi LeMeow's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Madame Mimi LeMeow dimmed the lamps herself every night. Low light kept the captains calm and loose-tongued, and loose tongues built the finest pleasure house on the pirate seas. She wanted more than the house. She wanted Captain Whisker Blackpaw, the ruthless tabby who never once looked at her twice. Tonight he sat in her best corner, and a hundred admirers had already sent him wine, songs, and painted smiles. Mimi had nothing he couldn't get from any of them. She watched him from behind the bar. Blackpaw ignored the girl on his knee. He drummed his claws on the table and stared at the door, waiting for someone who never came. A drunk quartermaster leaned close to Mimi and slurred a secret in her ear. She barely heard it. For once, a captain's loose tongue bored her. Then Blackpaw spoke, low and clipped, to the man beside him. "Someone took it. Off my ship. A compass." He turned his good eye on the room. "Points nowhere north. That's the one I want back." Mimi's paws went cold. She knew that compass. Weeks ago a sailor had traded it across her bar for three nights' lodging. She had thought it junk, a green and rusted thing pulled from some drowned man's coat. It sat in her strongbox still, its needle swinging to no true north. Every admirer in the room could offer Blackpaw a face or a song. Only Mimi could offer the one thing he was hunting. She climbed the stairs to her strongbox and lifted the weathered compass into the light. The brass was scarred. The face showed a faded star and stains like old blood. It was ugly. It was his. She returned and set it on his table without a word. Blackpaw stopped drumming. He picked it up, turned it once, and pressed a hidden catch on the rim. The back sprang open. His shoulders dropped, just slightly. "Where did you get this," he said. Not a question. A test. "A sailor traded it for a bed," Mimi said. "I kept it. I didn't know it was yours until you spoke." Blackpaw looked at her then, really looked, the way he had never looked at her before. "Most people would've named a price." "I'm naming one now," she said. "Remember who returned it." He closed the compass in his fist. "I remember debts." He stood, tucked it inside his coat, and left silver on the table that meant nothing to either of them. At the door he paused. "The sailor. I'll want his name." Then he was gone into the dark street. Mimi pressed her paw flat on the wet ring the compass had left on the wood. She had won his eye at last. But she had also promised him a name she did not have, and a man she could not find.