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Nott has been a prisoner before. It's always a misery, but this place, this stinking room of crumbling stone and rotten straw, this is likely to be her last prison.
They forget to feed her, sometimes for days. Or they choose not to, just as likely, unwilling to waste good rations on a monster. Either way, she’s always hungry, always, emptiness clawing at the pit of her stomach every moment she’s awake, following her into bad dreams of another life that leave her shaken and aching when she wakes. She is probably going to die in this cell, or if not here then on the town gallows. She wonders if she will come back again, and if maybe next time she will be something less hateful than what she is now.
When the door scrapes open this time she scrambles into the corner, knowing from painful experience that if she makes any move away from that spot they will take the food away with them instead of leaving it.
But it isn't food; it's a man, a ragged human man with blood clotted in his gingery hair. They fling him into the opposite corner from Nott and slam the door, and her stomach clenches for all the wrong reasons at the smell of his blood.
Nott watches him for a long time, but he doesn't stir, although he is breathing. She wonders if he's going to wake or if this is the cell where they dump people to die. She wonders what he did to deserve being thrown in here with a goblin.
At some point her ears catch a sound, and she watches as an animal slinks its way through the narrow barred window high in the wall. There's a flash of fur as it drops lightly to the floor, and Nott shifts into a crouch and watches it. A cat, a rangy black and golden tom with yellow eyes.
The part of her that is her remembers a fat grey tabby curled in sunlight on a polished wooden windowsill, but the parts of her that are goblin are faster and sharper and starving and before she can debate what she’s doing her teeth have already met in the animal’s neck, snapped its spine and opened the big vein in its throat. Its blood is hot and revolting and delicious and awful.
She eats the whole thing, blood and bones, flesh and fur, tears it apart and bolts it down like the starving monster she is. She licks the blood from her palms, curls herself into her corner of the cell. For the first time in ages she isn’t hungry, and it’s unimaginable luxury, enough that she stretches out and sinks into sleep that is dreamless, even with the stranger in the other corner of the room.
When Nott wakes again it's because the human is moving and muttering, enough noise to rouse her from sleep, and she cracks her eyes and peers through the darkness, watching.
He is young, she thinks, for a human, though of course it's hard to be sure with them. Even more so with this one, who is filthy and ragged and bloodied and bruised. He's propped himself up in the cell corner, head leaned back against the stones, legs out in front of him.
"Frumpkin?" He says this a few times before he sighs heavily. "Götterverdammt." For a bit his muttering is so much nonsense along those lines, but eventually it becomes words in Common, with a soft clipped accent Nott can't place.
"You needn't be frightened," he says, rolling his head to one side, turning his face vaguely towards her. One of his eyes is swollen shut and the other doesn't quite find her. Human eyes are useless in the darkness.
Nott narrows her eyes. She’s not sure anyone’s ever said that to her before. “What makes you think I’m frightened?”
“Well. You are holding very still.” His voice is soft and even. “Which is usually what I do when I am trying to make sure nobody notices me.”
Nott snorts. “Maybe I’m just waiting to see what you’ll do.”
“Fair enough.” He sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair on the unbloodied side of his head. There are bandages around his palms and forearms, she realizes, dirty and ragged as the rest of him.
Nott watches from her corner as he searches through his coat, which seems to have a great many pockets sewn into the lining. Watches him withdraw bits of charcoal and odds and ends of herbs and a battered metal dish, watches him make a little heap of them on a bare stone patch of the floor.
She startles when he mumbles and moves his hand and a flame flickers to life in his palm, painfully bright in the darkness. Nott’s hands go to her hood, draw it up over her hair and her ears to conceal them, but the human barely spares her a glance. He sets the little pile in front of him smoldering and then the flame gutters out, leaving only the glowing light of the coals.
The smell of incense and herbs fills the cell, drowns out the stink of rotten straw. Nott can’t help the curiosity that kindles in her chest, makes her creep closer along the wall. “You’re magic.”
He sounds amused. “I can use magic. That isn’t quite the same.”
There’s a long silence, then, one in which he barely moves. Nott itches with the need to know more, see more, find his name and search his pockets, and she wishes she had a drink to quiet those goblinish sensations before they get her into trouble. A regular man his size, scrawny as he is, she’d have the advantage in a fight; humans have no claws and no teeth to speak of. But magic, that makes it a different story, means she’ll be in real trouble if he decides to try anything.
The quiet drags on into what must be nearly an hour before the coal sputters and the last of the incense fizzles away. Nott blinks, and in the moment it takes her to do it there’s a muted pop and quite suddenly the cat is there again, seated with its tail tucked over its paws. A rangy, blotchy tomcat with golden eyes.
Nott yelps and scrambles back to her corner while the cat rises, stretches luxuriously, and rubs itself up against the human’s chest. The human laughs and strokes the animal, turns his face back towards Nott in the darkness.
“Don’t worry, Frumpkin won’t hurt you.”
“. . . Frumpkin?” Nott feels a sinking sensation in her chest as the creature’s yellow eyes flash in her direction.
“Ja, Frumpkin. And I am Caleb.” The human -- Caleb -- sounds more relaxed, now, less weary, like the cat has brought some measure of safety with it into the cell.
Nott swallows the lump in her throat that could not possibly be made of bones and fur. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”
***
They make their escape, the three of them, and then for some reason Nott can’t understand they make their way together through the woods and then along the roads and then in and out of the backwater towns that dot the landscape. She’s sure at first that it will be a few days, then perhaps it will be a week, then two, and then suddenly it has been nearly a month and yet Caleb has yet to suggest they go their separate ways.
Don’t get her wrong, it’s good. It’s better than good. They work easily together, keep pace effortlessly with one another, and sometimes Nott catches herself thinking that Caleb is something like her friend and that if he wanted to stay together for good she would do it gladly.
She isn’t being very honest with him, of course, and he isn’t being especially honest with her, and that’s fine, you can’t possibly go through the world expecting people to be honest with you about things, not when you look like Nott does, not when you make your living the way she’s had to make hers. But this, with Caleb, this feels different. Like maybe in time he could be the sort of person she could tell things to. Like maybe in time he’d be the sort of person who would listen.
Only every time she thinks like that for too long, she catches a flash of mottled fur or a low contented mrowr at the edge of the firelight, and she remembers that she has been keeping not only her own secrets but one that concerns Caleb himself, and that’s a different dishonesty. That’s the kind of thing a person like Caleb would be revolted by, infuriated by, if he knew. Caleb loves that damned cat, Nott can see that easily, and Nott tore it to pieces and ate it, because Nott is a monster, and maybe Caleb mostly doesn’t hold her being a monster against her but that doesn’t make it right.
Caleb is making their scant rations into an evening meal and Nott is laying out their blankets and arranging their packs into something they can sleep on when Frumpkin pads out of the darkness, stops long enough to give her a slow once-over, and then makes his way to Caleb’s side of the fire. Guilt settles sick and heavy in Nott’s guts while Caleb greets the cat and talks offhandedly to it as he works. Nott tries to take a deep breath and shove the subject away again, but it doesn’t work and she has not had enough drink today to make her able to ignore it anymore.
"I ate your cat." The admission bursts out of her past the jagged blades of her goblin teeth, and she hunches goblin shoulders and fists her clawed, crooked goblin hands in the stolen blanket and she does not look at him.
"Hm?" Caleb goes still, she hears him; clever human hands cease their work and Nott can picture it, the look on his face, the shock, the disgust.
"Frumpkin." She says, uselessly, "The first night, when you couldn't find him. I ate him." Nott squeezes her eyes shut tight, tight, buries her face in the blanket. Her face burns with shame. "I was so hungry."
"Nott." He sounds strangled, like he can't quite get his breath. Oh gods, has she made him cry? She shrinks into herself. "Nott?"
She hears movement now, Caleb standing, Caleb coming near, Nott tries to school her breathing, tangles her claws in the blanket so she won't try to fight back on reflex, because she deserves it this time . . .
He crouches down beside her and Nott cringes. Caleb clears his throat, chokes back one more small noise that isn't a sob. His voice is . . . gentle?
"Nott," he says, so gently, like she is the frightened child she looks like, "Of course I already knew that."
“What?” Nott jerks her head up, staring. “How?”
“He is a familiar.” Caleb says, like that is any kind of answer. He is looking at her with an expression she can’t decipher, though if he didn't have such good reason to be angry with her she might have called it amusement. His hand lands between her shoulderblades, light as a bird, and there are creases at the corners of his terribly blue eyes, but they fade when she flinches. “Do you . . . I am not going to hurt you.”
Nott can’t bear how gentle his voice is. “I’m sorry,” She says miserably, “I’m sorry, Caleb.”
He doesn’t take his hand away, or move away from her side. “Nott, there is no harm done.” He snaps his fingers, and Frumpkin’s there on his shoulders, purring. “You see?”
“But I didn’t know that.” He doesn’t understand, or maybe Nott herself doesn’t. She only knows that she did something monstrous and that this man has every right to hold it against her.
“Ja, well.” Caleb sighs and takes his hand away, shifts so he is sitting next to her, and Frumpkin leaps down and leans heavily into Nott’s side, still purring. She freezes like she’s been caught in the glare of a watchman’s lantern.
“He does not bear a grudge,” Caleb says. “And neither do I. So please, think nothing more of it.”
". . . aren't you angry?" Nott tangles her claws tighter in the blanket, feels it shred in her grip.
Caleb's face shifts, emotions there and gone like clouds across the moon, and he shakes his head.
Nott feels like she might cry. "Why not?"
"I have been hungry, too." Caleb says easily, "I have been desperate."
Nott looks at him, at his too-thin too-weathered face with the sad old man's eyes, the bandages wrapped tight up his arms beneath the shabby coat. "You're very kind," she says in a ragged voice, and she means You feel like a trap and Somebody hurt you and Please never leave.
Caleb laughs sharply. "Me? No." Frumpkin mrrts and leaps up to perch across his shoulders. Caleb reaches up absently and sinks his fingers into fur. "I am cross and solitary and terrible company.”
Nott chokes out a laugh, and forces herself to untangle her claws. Caleb smiles at her, and it’s remarkable, how when he smiles the loneliness in Nott’s chest loosens its terrible grip just a little.
“There, look at that. Something like a smile.” He pats her shoulder gently and then draws his hand away, and Nott wants it to stay more than she has wanted anything in a very long time, but Caleb has already done more than she has any right to ask, smiling at her like that, forgiving her like this, staying by her side as long as he has. “Now. Come and eat, ja?”
She will never leave him. Never, never, not until he leaves her first, Nott will walk at Caleb Widogast’s side until her feet are bloody stumps. She knows it in the marrow of her goblin bones.
“Not Frumpkin, I hope. He's awfully stringy.” She bares her dagger teeth in what she wishes felt more like a real smile, hoping Caleb can maybe somehow tell that it’s the best she can do.
And miracle among many miracles, he does, and Caleb throws his head back and laughs so loudly it startles Frumpkin, which makes him laugh harder, and Nott surprises herself by laughing, too, following him closer to the fire, settling at his side like it is the most natural thing in the world.