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Pireet sat on Maud's bed, kneading the coverlet with alternating paw movements. She ran her fingers down his spine and he pushed against her hand, scooting closer, wrinkling up the bedclothes. "It was a good day," Maud said to him softly.
The cat answered only by purring.
If it was one of the other cats, Maud would be satisfied with that, but she knew Pireet could talk, even if he wasn't talking at the moment. "Are you going to stay on my bed? Or leave as soon as I stop petting you?" she asked him, rubbing under his chin. He turned his head so her fingers caught in his whiskers.
"Hunt." The word was audible in the midst of the purring. She curled up around him, lulled to sleep by the vibration.
When Maud woke from an unhappy dream, it was still not light. There was no cat. The tendrils of her power had gathered in response to the dream and filled the room, curling all the way to the corners. They did not damage anything, but Maud didn't like it when her power escaped accidentally.
She had been learning how to coax it into new shapes. Maud picked up a piece of the folding paper from her nightstand and creased it diagonally, imagining the tendrils loosening their curl, smoothing out like her hair under a comb. She creased it again, then began the folds of the spell to create floating lights. She liked that spell the most of the few she'd memorized so far, because the cats would leap and chase at the floating lights if she got it just right.
The tendrils of chaos magic, oh, she wasn't supposed to call it that anymore. Her teacher, Wizard Tammas, had helped her rename it; they'd called it smoke magic, because since she had began to learn to use it instead of hide it, it looked more and more like smoke. But in her mind, secretly, Maud sometimes called it cat magic, because inside her, it felt kind of like a cat.
The magic was violent and scary when it was threatened, but so was a cat, all claws and shredding frenzy. And when she coaxed and coddled it and treated it well, it was soft and warm and sleepy like a cat, and when she convinced it to do a trick, it was clever and deft like a cat. Smoke didn't do any of those things; smoke was only how the magic looked.
The tendrils of Maud's cat-acting, smoke-looking magic smoothed out, though ready to spring back into their curls when she unfolded the paper; they filled with potential for bouncing, tiny lights. When she made the final fold -- a quartered-halved triangle bent to the left at the tip, above the rectangle fold that supported it -- the lights leaped to the corners of the room, then across the ceiling, almost like fireflies.
If a cat had been in her room, Maud felt sure the cat would have chased those lights. So, Pireet had gone out hunting as he'd said. Well, he would be back when the sun came up, for breakfast, she was sure. Maud drifted back to sleep, bad dream forgotten, her magic purring in her as happy as the cats would be to see their bowls filled in the morning.