THE CAT’S TALE

E. LILY YU

The white cat sitting by the side of the path in unseamed boots and battered hat grinned a huckster’s grin. I tightened my grip on Bitsy’s rope and tried to hurry us past the potions and knickknacks on the cat’s calico cloth. It was daffodil weather, which means mischief, and the wind smelled of earthworms and new hay.

“Where are you going so quickly?” the cat said, its teeth as white as milk.

“To sell this cow,” I said, tugging on the knotted lead. Bitsy had stopped to nose the potions and now looked brown reproach at me.

“Beans,” the cat said. “You’ll get beans for her. It’s a bull market, lass. Not for milch cows and heifers. They’ll eat you alive, bones and all—fo fum.”

“So, you’ll do me the favor of taking her off my hands,” I said. “For a pittance. Is that right?”

“No, no, I speak from pure altruism. I wouldn’t like to see a pretty young maid like you get caught up with beanstalking, breaking, and entering. Jackie’s no good for giant killing.”

“Not interested in killing anyone of any size, thanks.”

“But a potion—might you be interested in that?”

The cat swished a red glass bottle at me.

I shook my head. “Colored sugar water.”

“Madame!”

“You’ll tell me it’s a love potion.”

“Au contraire. A lady as lovely as you must have whole battalions falling at her feet. This is full of giant-killing vitamins. Giganticizing vitamins. See and dee.”

“Not interested.”

“Then this—” The cat waggled a bulbous bottle of smoke. “A domesticated genie to do all your chores.”

“If you want Bitsy,” I said, “try silver. Not tobacco smoke and colored water. Silver is what our landlord wants. Not beans, not potions, not genies nor giants.”

“I’m not interested in your cow,” the cat said. “Go ahead and sell her for a shilling to the butcher, for all I care. But you—” The cat circled me, tail lashing, eyes bright. “You, I’d like to hire. Pays silver. Starts now.”

“I’ll have Bitsy step on you,” I said, cheeks hot.

“Mais non, you misunderstand! I am in need of a lad or lass with opposable thumbs, of a certain height, with a sharp wit. Not all treasure is cat height. Bring the cow if you like—she shall be our Rocinante. Here’s your first week’s pay.”

The cat produced, from its pheasant-feathered hat, a leather pouch that clinked dully when I caught it in my hand. The coins were a hundred years out of date, but good silver, unclipped. I bit one to be sure. Even rang them against Bitsy’s iron bell, to check for fey glamour on leafmold and twigs.

“That should satisfy your landlord,” the cat said, and I had to admit it would.

“Tell me,” I said, “with this much silver in your hat, why are your boots agape? Why the nest of a hat?”

“I’m a cat with a pack of wonders,” the cat-peddler said. “Small, harmless, and slow. You know something about that. Why take chances?”

“I’ll go to Ma with this,” I said, swinging the pouch from its string. “See what she says. Then maybe I’ll be back.”

“You’ll be back,” the cat said. “You’re a clever lass.”

We scrapped, my Ma and I, the words honor and scoundrel flung like stones at the walls. But in the end, the heap of silver sat on the table, inarguable. Ma put the haft of her boning knife into my hand. It was a wicked blade that silked goose meat from furcula in a blink.

“No daughter of mine—”

“I’m sure the cat only means to make me a thief,” said I.

Ma covered her face with her apron and burst into tears.

I returned to the place where I’d met the cat. It was halfway up a tree, hissing. Several dough-faced boys dug through its curios.

“Be off,” I said, and the louts cursed at me. I clucked, and Bitsy ambled into their midst, scattering bottles—the cat yowled—and stepping flat on one unsandaled foot before she tossed a boy on her crumpled horns.

They snatched up painted toys and knobs and fled toward the market, hooting.

“Gibbons,” the cat said, fatly furred.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Present company excepted. Look at this mess!”

“At least the genie bottle’s intact.”

“That’s the one they should have broken. I’d like to have seen—”

“What, exactly?” I said, all innocence.

“Never mind. What matters is that you’re back—and useful. Put on these gloves. Clean this up. Then we’ll be on our way.”

Much broken glass and wrung-out calico later, the cat sat atop its bundle on Bitsy’s back, directing us both with a reed in its paw. Up there the cat looked like a king, never mind the broken boots and hat.

“I figured you a scoundrel,” I said. “Will you teach me to steal?”

“Something better than that,” said the cat.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To an ogre’s fief.”

“I said no killing.”

“You shall snap the neck of nothing larger than a rat.”

“I can kill a rat,” I conceded, and touched the haft of Ma’s boning knife.

Once the cat was sure of my wayfinding, it would nap atop Bitsy for hours at a time. I listened with amusement to its small, soft snores.

We stopped in towns and villages, selling charms, marbles, tricks, and mummies’ teeth for enough coin to buy me a cot for the night, as well as fodder for Bitsy and a trout for the cat. When there wasn’t a town, or it wasn’t to our liking, we camped under the trees. I milked Bitsy for us and ate the ears of wheat I picked while walking, roasted upon a small fire, and the cat ate the creatures that scurried in the wheat fields.

Soon the fields we passed grew rich and lush, the grain shining like silk, the cows fatter than sows. Sheep like puffs of cloud roamed over green grass.

But the people we saw were thin and subdued, their clothes patched and gray with washing and wear.

“Ho!” the cat called to a laborer in the fields. “Whose land is this?”

“Lord Walter’s,” came the dismal reply. “May he live in health and happiness.” And the farmer spat into the dirt.

In an emerald paddock, fine horses paced under the eye of a ragged groom.

“Whose horses are these?” the cat called to him.

“Lord Walter’s,” the groom said, and looked aside and spat.

We passed vineyards heavy with sea-dark grapes, bursting with liqueur and busy with bees. A boy swept the bees from the grapes with a whisk.

“Whose vines are these?” the cat asked the boy.

“Lord Walter’s,” the boy said, yawning, his eyes red and blear.

“Cat,” I said, “do you know this Lord Walter?”

“Well do I know him,” the cat said without joy. “His first wife was my mistress.”

“Was.”

“A grim ogre of a man,” the cat said. “You’ll hear more of him.”

We came to a town as grim and gaunt as the land’s inhabitants, the houses’ foreheads louring toward each other. The innkeeper was surprised to have lodgers on his step and left us outside to take a broom to the upstairs. The key he eventually presented to me was swollen with rust.

“Do you have hay for my cow?” I said and was given wisps of something musty and gray. Bitsy, wise cow, tossed her head and would not eat.

“Come,” the cat said, pulling a coin from my ear. “Buy a drink. Sit down. When the townsfolk enter, say—”

“Why in all this rich good land are the folk so thin?” I said into my sour beer.

“These are Lord Walter’s lands,” came the reply.

“And what does that mean?” I asked.

“Water in the ale. Two of three barrels of grain to his stores.”

“Ever-changing laws.”

“Our prettiest daughters.”

“Health and long life to him.”

“Health and prosperity to him.”

“Have you considered what he’d do without you?” I asked. “If you laid down your plows and stopped tending the wheat?”

“He has soldiers,” the freckled barmaid said. “They’ll shed blood soon as sneeze.”

“But if you all refused,” I said. “Could he kill you all?”

“He might.”

“He had a wife, see. Kind and wise and good.”

I said, “Where is she now?”

“He has another wife.”

I sipped my beer.

“There’s a kind of evil,” said a shepherd, the sheep muck still on him, “gets bored of kindness and goodness. Wonders what’ll happen if he tortures her. Wonders when she’ll break, and how.”

The cat, who had been quietly curled in my lap, dug needle claws into my legs. I made no protest. I said, “Did she break?”

A silence. Then:

“He has another wife now.”

“Health and long life to them.”

I could hear Bitsy lowing from her damp stone stable.

“Listen,” I said. “I have a magic cow, whose milk is courage. And I have money for you, if you’ll do as I say. If you desire to govern yourselves and have no lord.”

I dropped the cat’s purse of copper coins onto the inn’s scarred table. It made a satisfying sound.

Their faces furrowed. They leaned forward.

“For your families,” I said. “For your future.”

Then I peeled off my gloves to show the garnet ring the cat had given me, simply done in silver and graven with a G.

“For the Lady Griselde.”

They sucked in their breaths when they saw.

“For the Lady Griselde,” the barmaid said.

“For my daughters,” the shepherd said.

“For the whipping he gave me,” a farmer said.

“Tell us what to do,” they said.

They were ill fed and hungry, and the inn’s bread, as I found when I took my boning knife to it, contained equal measures of sawdust and flour.

“This won’t do,” I said. “Boy, bring us grapes from the vine. Shepherd, a fat sheep for the spit. Do not fret your hearts over whippings and the like. It is all paid for,” I said, lifting and dropping the purse. “Barmaid, you shall milk my cow.”

The forbidden things were done, and a little later there was a fire blazing in the hearth, fat hissing as it dripped from the sheep into the flames.

“That is better,” I said. “One must not decide on matters of state— and overthrowing a lord and usurping his fiefdom is most certainly a matter of state—upon an empty stomach.”

And indeed, there was more color in their cheeks once they had eaten and drunk.

“The difficult thing is the children,” I said. “He will threaten your children and elders and all who are too weak to fight. He will kill them if you disobey. Or he will beat you in front of them, and shame you thereby.”

Around me came stiff nods. Hands curled into fists.

“So, we shall hide them,” I said, popping a grape into my mouth. “Just as the deathless enchanter hid his heart in a needle in an egg in a duck in a tree. And no one shall touch them.”

“But—how?” the shepherd asked.

“Isn’t there a hill between the pastures and the vineyards, a hill that has no crops or paddock or houses on it?”

“Aye.”

“And don’t the children hear music from that hill at midsummer?”

“That is true.”

“And didn’t the Lady Griselde bring a bowl of cream to the hill on that night, to honor those that live in the hill? And didn’t she shake her stick at the cats that might drink from it?”

“Now how do you know that?” the barmaid said, her eyes sharp.

I stroked the cat and felt it purr. “I wear her ring,” I said. “Is it so surprising that I know her business as well?”

“But what does the hill have to do with our children?” the shepherd asked.

“We shall hide them in the hill,” I said, speaking the cat’s words with the cat’s great confidence. I had none of my own. Fairies and a genie and children in a hill! If this was a caper and a con, it was a cruel one.

“How, exactly?” the barmaid said.

“I have a German flute of bone,” I said. “It plays a tune fit to break a heart, or split a hill, or trot a mouse on. On my word, I shall lead the children there and safely home once your lord is gone.”

“There is still the matter of the soldiers,” the farmer said.

“That’s if we believe you about the hill,” the barmaid said.

“You shall see and believe,” I said with a smile. “As for the soldiers—give them no reason to harm you. You are ill. You shall cough. Get green slime from the brook to smear on your skin. Mix madder and cherry juice and pox yourselves. Stink so vilely that they will not come near but cross themselves against the plague. And dig burial plots for your children and elders. Say they are buried there. Weep.

“The soldiers shall retreat to the castle,” I said. “Wail and mourn from day to night, while you eat and drink what is yours to eat and drink. And this shall go well, so long as all swear to it.”

“I swear,” the shepherd said.

“I swear,” the farmer said.

The barmaid said, “If you open the hill for my son and the other children, I’ll swear too, but not until then.”

“Wisely said,” I told her. “All of you, go home to bed, but bring your children and elders to that hill in the purple hour before dawn.”

I accepted a rushlight from the barmaid and went up to my room on the upper floor. When I wrestled the door open with the bloated key, rust fell like scales. There was no locking it after that. I wedged it closed. The room smelled mildewed.

“I’ve half a mind to skin you, cat,” I said.

“Whyever for?”

“If we’re here to fleece these folk and flee in the night, leaving them to the mercy of their unmerciful lord—”

“Have some faith,” the cat grumbled. “And get some sleep. It’s five hours until dawn.”

“I don’t even know how to play the flute!”

“It plays itself,” the cat said. “The trouble is getting it to shut up. Like you, sometimes. Now, sleep.”

I tried, and eventually I did.

The sensation of very sharp claws pressed lightly against my nose awoke me. The sky was the plum color of a new bruise. A long, thin object was pressed into my palm, smooth but for a series of holes: the aforementioned flute.

“Get up,” the cat said. “We haven’t any time to waste.” It poured a long list of instructions into my ear, which it made me repeat until I had them by heart.

The barmaid, looking as rumpled and sleepless as I felt, was waiting for us downstairs, her yawning son in hand. She gave a grim nod when she saw us.

We walked in near silence to what the cat claimed was a fairy hill, the long grass whispering against our clothes. The townspeople had gathered there with their old and young. The herdsman held his daughters’ hands. They shivered in the dewy cold.

“It is good you came,” I said. “Have the children and the aged ones stand close to the hill.”

This done, I lifted the flute to my mouth and blew. And it did not matter where I placed my clumsy fingers, for the flute made its own music, as the cat said it would.

“Woe to my sister, fair Ellen—”

“Not that one!” I said, for that story I knew, and I wiped the flute on my tunic and tried again. And this time the flute played a song without words.

A dull gleam spread across the hill, brightest in a bisecting line. The children murmured.

In the predawn gloom, it was hard to see clearly, but it seemed to me that the green sward opened like wings, like a mother hen gathering in her chicks. I blew on the flute, and the flute played them in. The young and the old walked into the soft, silvery light at the heart of the hill. I thought I heard an answering fiddle and a drum.

Then the grass knit up, and the hill was as it had been. The flute fell silent in my hands.

“Well, that’s taken care of,” I said, as if I opened and closed fairy hills regularly. Around me, men and women shook themselves, with the air of those emerging from a dream. The sky had lightened to the color of storm clouds, with a gray glimmer beginning upon the horizon. “Now, listen to me. This is what you must do—”

By noon the next day, men and women were fainting in the fields, or shivering and weeping in their beds. Lord Walter’s soldiers went through the town and the fields and kicked them here and there, and roughly shook one or the other, but the rashes and greenish pallor of those they touched unnerved them.

The soldiers gathered in the town square and conferred, and then they marched down the winding path to Lord Walter’s castle.

Once they were gone, the cat and I emerged from our room and led Bitsy to pasture. She was glad for the good green grass and expressed her gladness with lowing. The townspeople continued to moan most pitifully in the fields, though where fruit or fat green grain was within reach, it was surreptitiously eaten, and here and there a poxy body moved itself to a shadier spot.

As the day grew long, and the soldiers did not return, some rose and put their shoulder to the false gravedigging that needed to be done, and others quietly gathered enough for a good meal. In their homes that night, they ate and rested and refreshed the dyes on their skin.

In the morning, three soldiers rode out from the castle and found a dozen of the townsfolk wracked with chills in the square, even more miserable than they had been the previous day.

“Water!” the farmer croaked, grasping at their ankles with his red-stippled hands. “Mercy!”

The soldiers returned to Lord Walter with alacrity. The cat was sure they would report the fresh graves along the road. As we expected, no one emerged from the castle for the rest of the day.

On this day, the townspeople arose from their pantomime a little earlier, and harvested and cooked supper a little more freely. Though one or two looked longingly in the direction of the fairy hill, their hearts were brave now, for they could see the structure of the play.

On the third day, I led Bitsy to the castle with the cat upon her back.

Bitsy was a peaceful, placid creature, and we did not make much speed. Her bell clanked as she went.

“Ho!” I called to the two soldiers we met on the road. “What rich and beautiful land is this, that has no people in it?”

“No people?” said one soldier. “Did you not come through that town there?”

“I did pass through on my way here, and thought to stop,” I said. “But the doors are barred, and all is silent as the grave. Indeed, I saw many fresh graves there. Is there a plague? Have the townsfolk fled to your castle? If any live, they must have come this way.”

The two soldiers looked at each other, then wheeled about.

“Nay, slow down and answer me! If you do not know of this plague, then none from your castle has visited the town lately, and I will be safe if I shelter with you—”

But they did not stop and answer me.

“Well done,” the cat said.

We came to the castle’s reeking moat and the soldiers who were posted there, halberds in their hands.

“Long may you live!” I said to them. “Whose lands are these, that have been stricken with so deathly a pestilence?”

“These are Lord Walter’s lands,” one of the soldiers said. “Is the pestilence deathly, then?”

“I counted many new graves along the road. I did not enter the town for fear of disease, but some of the townsfolk are hitching carts to mules, that they may come to this castle for succor and respite. So they called out to me.”

“They are coming here?” the soldier said.

“By and by. The sickness makes them dizzy, and they may be some time. Please let me speak with your lord before they arrive and overwhelm him with their petitions, for I bear news from abroad as well as matters pertaining more closely to his estate.”

“Enter,” the other soldier said, and we crossed the moat and passed through the bailey. Glancing backward over my shoulder, the cat informed me that the pair had laid down their heavy arms and deserted their posts.

“They’ll ransack the stores and slip away,” the cat said. “Just as every other soldier is doing or plotting now.”

Indeed, Lord Walter’s guard seemed thin on the ground as we progressed. Only one deigned to speak with us, and that reluctantly, his eyes darting this way and that like a bird’s.

“Tell me, where may I find your lord? And has this castle enough stores for the ill and ailing folk from town? They are coming this way in carts as I speak.”

“He sits in the great hall of his keep,” the soldier said, and took his leave of us with unbecoming haste.

“Sit here for a minute with me,” the cat said, and I set us both down on a stone bench by a pond. Red and silver fish swam in its murky depths.

“Why are we dawdling?” I asked. “There is much to be done.”

“Give the soldiers a few minutes to gather their goods and gear. Let them gossip to the servants, and let the servants slip away as well. Soon Lord Walter shall have none to serve him. Besides, my lady liked this pond,” the cat added, its whiskers twitching at the fish. “The water used to be clear as glass, and she sat here for hours to watch them. Permit me a moment of mal du pays.”

“It is a great pity your lady is gone.”

“He shall surely answer for it,” the cat said.

We watched the fish swim back and forth in their muddy demesne. All about us was a furtive rush and bustle, as each one in Lord Walter’s household sought to steal and desert without any other knowing.

Soon it was almost quiet enough to hear the watery thoughts of the fish.

“Let us go,” the cat said, leaping down from the bench.

It led the way into the keep and to the great hall, where Lord Walter sat in an ancient chair of dark and heavy wood, his face sallow and sour, his eyes like embers. Only two soldiers remained, one on either side of his chair, though they seemed ill at ease. The last servants were fleeing from the hall as we entered—on the pretext of fetching food or fresh rushes for the floor, I presumed, for relief flashed on their faces as they passed.

The lord’s second wife, little more than a child, perched on the arm of Lord Walter’s chair. She was dressed like a doll in heavy silks and rubies, and her feet swung in space. She stared at us with wide eyes.

The cat took no notice of her.

It strode down the hall toward the ogre, fur on end, tail a bottlebrush, fine and fearless in its fury, reciting poetry as it went.

The sclaundre of Walter ofte and wyde spradde,

That of a cruel herte he wikkedly,

For he a povre womman wedded hadde,

Hath mordred bothe his children prively.

Swich murmur was among hem comunly.

No wonder is, for to the peples ere

Ther cam no word but that they mordred were!

For which, whereas his peple there-bifore

Had loved him wel, the sclaundre of his diffame

Made hem that they him hatede therfore;

To been a mordrer is an hateful name.

But natheles, for ernest ne for game

He of his cruel purpos nolde stente;

To tempte his wyf was set al his entente!

“I charge you with the murders of your own daughter and son!” the white cat cried. “I hold you to account for my Lady Griselde!”

Lord Walter stirred upon his dark chair.

“Now that is a name not often heard these days,” he said. And he reached down and seized the cat by its scruff. With his other hand he drew a hunting knife from his belt, and before I could move, he had cut off the head of the cat.

“Nor do I wish to hear that name again,” he said, and tossed the pieces of the cat to the rush-covered flags. “You’ll remember that, won’t you, little Pearl?”

“I shall,” the girl said, her face very still.

I stood speechless, as if bespelled to stone, or I would have shrieked. The cat’s plan, whispered into my ear, had not included a hunting knife or a beheading. Then my legs turned to water, and I wished to run.

But before I could do so, the limp, bleeding body of the white cat changed size and became the body of a handsome woman, strong and proud, with white hair and a well-traveled sorrow about her.

Lord Walter’s soldiers stared at her, astonished.

She stood before Lord Walter and said again, “I charge you with the murders of your own daughter and son, and with the attempted murder of the Lady Griselde.”

“They’re alive,” Lord Walter mumbled. “Both of them. I sent them to the Pope, to live in honor and wealth. This was all a test. You have passed the test. Finally, you are worthy to be my wife.”

“You lie.”

“What if I do? I shall kill you as many times as I must—”

He lunged with bloody knife in hand. But she raised her arm to point at him, and he froze, transfixed, as if enchanted. Then she laughed, a laugh so rich and clear the whole hall rang with it. Lord Walter snarled at her, his eyes afire. And his snarl rose in pitch to a squeak.

For as she laughed, holding her sides now, red with mirth, Lord Walter shrank to the size and shape of a black rat. His second wife stretched out her hand for him, but he leapt off the chair and scuttled into the thick shadows beneath it.

Now I knew what I was to do. I took out the bone flute and set it to my lips.

The flute played a joyous jig that made my own bones itch to dance. From every corner of the keep, from storehouse and kitchen, the rats swarmed out. Out came the black rat from beneath the chair.

They twined and curvetted, pranced and minced. I led them out of the keep, across the courtyard, and through the bailey gate, all of them dancing as they went. And then I stood on the bridge above the moat and played the rats into the foul water. They poured off the bridge in a wriggling stream. First, they swam, and then they began stepping on each other, struggling to find purchase on the sheer rock to either side.

I lowered the flute and left them there.

“I think this is yours,” I said to the Lady Griselde, holding out the white cat’s garnet ring.

“Thank you,” she said, “but you may keep it, if you will remain in my service. You have been clever, faithful, trustworthy, and brave, and I would have none other for my seneschal.”

She turned to the one that Lord Walter had called Pearl.

“I have no quarrel with you. You are welcome to stay here, and you shall never lack for anything, but I think you might prefer to return to your father’s house.”

The girl nodded.

“Then you may go with all the silks and jewels that you wear, and a sack of gold besides, with these soldiers to escort you. They are blackhearted ruffians, but they shall have a purse of gold each for their pains. And should they say or do naught to harm or distress you,” Lady Griselde added, “open the bottle that I shall give you, with Solomon’s own seal upon it, and a genie shall tear them limb from limb.”

Both the soldiers flinched. The lady arched her brow.

“Do not think I cannot know your secret thoughts,” she said. “With all the arts I have studied over the years of my enchantment, you are as present and breakable to me as a hair of my own head. And I shall break you, however far you flee, if you so much as scratch this Pearl.

“As for you,” she said to me, “I think the flute has one more song to play.”

I went as she bid to the fairy mound, calling the townspeople to come with me. There I played the melody that opened the hill. How it was done, I could not see clearly, but where there had been only grass before, now there was a tumble of young and old, every one of them wearing a flower crown, giggling and tripping and sleek and well fed.

When the town’s children and elders had been claimed and kissed, there remained two small children who had come out of the hill with the rest. No one in the town knew whose they were.

I thought I knew.

It did the heart good to see the Lady Griselde when her two lost children ran to her. She swayed like one stunned, then knelt, held them tightly, and wept into their hair. She remarked that they smelled like honeysuckle and blackberries, and listened as they whispered the mysteries of the hill to her, one at each ear.

Then she addressed the townspeople, who had gathered in the square.

“Hear me! No longer shall you have a lord and master. I shall judge disputes among you for three years, and then you shall choose a judge of your own every three years thereafter. One tenth of your grain and dried meat shall be stored at the keep against famine and fire, to be shared among all should either occur, and if not, in three years the old stores shall be exchanged for new.”

She could have told them she was confiscating their wine and requisitioning their sheep and they still would have cheered her, I thought, so glad were they to see their beloved lady again.

“I do ask you one favor, if you will grant it,” she said. “I ask for your help in building a cottage and preparing a plot for my seneschal’s mother, that she may join us here and live at ease, without payment of rent. If my seneschal thinks her mother will approve.” Here she looked at me.

“I think she will,” I said, my cheeks burning.

“I shall lay the foundation myself,” the farmer said.

“And I shall build the walls,” the shepherd said.

“I shall thatch it,” the boy from the vineyard said.

“Everything that your mother might need, I will acquire,” the barmaid said.

Then the others vied to outdo one another in making promises.

It was too late by then for me to ride forth, so I dined that night with Lady Griselde at the keep. She had pillaged the castle stores for the village, that they might eat well this night and thereafter, but the two of us shared a more modest meal, of trout and bread and wine from a cask, as we had done many a time on the road. Her children had fallen asleep early, worn out from the excitement of their return.

“My lady, are you an enchantress now?” I asked. “Powerful enough to change the shapes of men?”

“Would that I were,” she sighed. “Let them think it. But in truth, there was only the one spell—that kept me as a cat, and turned me to a woman, and my lord to a rat. And it was not by my starry weaving, but the fairies’.”

“How came you to be caught in that net?”

“I think it was the only thing they could catch me in. He pushed me out of a window, you see. And a cat can fall from a height that a woman cannot.”

“I see. I think. But when he cut off your head—”

“It is an old precept of magic, decreed by Madame d’Aulnoy herself, that a woman transformed into a cat must have her head severed to return to her form. As to my husband’s transformation, I think there was a little magic left, and I understand that a law of physics requires matter to be conserved, so a cat growing to the stature of a woman requires the diminution of another. Or so I theorize,” she said.

“How came the fairies by your children?”

“Not long after each child was born, Lord Walter had them thrown from a high tower. Until today, I did not know that the fairies had saved them as well.”

“Surely he was the wickedest of ogres ever born,” I said.

“It is by their own choice, and not by birth, that men become ogres,” she said. “But enough of all this dour talk. I shall send you home on the fleetest of horses, that you may come back just as quickly. And if you don’t mind, while you are gone, it’s Bitsy’s milk that I’ll give the fairies. I shall see to her care.”

“Greater honor hath no cow than this,” I said, and the Lady Griselde spit out her wine.

In the morning, which was clear, blue, and faintly bitter with the beginning of fall, I set off on a fine horse with a bone flute, a pocket full of silver, and a couple of many-colored bottles that Lady Griselde said would stand me in good stead. I wore the lady’s garnet ring on my finger and Ma’s knife by my side. Whatever adventure came to me on the road would be well met.

I passed through town and the fields around it, stopping only at the fairy mound. There I set down a silver bowl and poured cream into it.

“Thank you for minding the children,” I said. “Weave me, if it please you, a net to catch me in, of starlight and story, as you once caught the Lady Griselde.”

As I rode down the ribboning road, all the world before me, rich and strange, I thought I heard, from the hill behind me, the sound of fairy fiddles and pipes and bells.