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In an unnamed town in an unspecified time, the Masters of a small but well-established university are obsessed with the science of luck. Incidences of war, famine and disease have long since dispelled the notion that a god, or multiple gods, actively intervene on the part of their creations. So why do bad things happen to good people? Why do some have everything and others only crumbs? Which risks are rewarded? If there is a pattern to the universe, these questions must have answers, and only the best and brightest are recruited to help find them.
…
The cat had been following Jean for three days.
Well, at least three days. He’d first noticed it on the way back to the university from a tavern out of which he’d drunkenly stumbled. At first, all he saw were the eyes, golden and glittery, watching him closely from a nearby alley. The next morning, the barest hint of a shadow slipped past the library window. On the third day, Jean finally lost his patience.
“I know you’re there,” he said without looking up from his work. “If it’s food you want, I’m afraid I don’t have anything you would eat.”
Slowly but surely, the cat crept out from behind a bookshelf and leapt silently onto the desk, barely missing the open inkpot. Its fur was uniformly black, its eyes as glowing in the daylight as they were at night. It regarded Jean with an imperious look not uncommon from cats, and blinked slowly.
“Like I said,” Jean continued. “I haven’t got anything for you.”
This appeared to matter little to the cat, who gently bumped its head against his hand and began to purr.
“Oh,” he said, frowning. “You just want some company, then?”
The cat meowed in what appeared to be assent, and leapt off the desk onto a nearby shelf. Jean watched as it curled up and closed its eyes, listening to the soft rumble of its purr as it drifted off into what he could only assume was a well-deserved nap. In his schooling, he had learned that cats slept most of the day and would only let their guard down around people they trusted — he felt a bit proud that this cat already had enough trust in him to nap in his presence, and spent the rest of his afternoon humming quietly as he continued his research.
When he got up to return to his room for dinner, the cat stirred and followed him out of the library.
“You must have a keen sense of time,” he said wearily, scooping the cat into his arms. It was light and its fur very soft. “And you must have belonged to someone at one time. This is not the coat of a stray, is it?”
Once Jean returned to his room, he sat down on his bed and began to strategize. There were no express rules against cats at the university, but Jean couldn’t help but feel as though he should be cautious in allowing the others — especially the Masters — to see his new friend. They weren’t understanding, and the thought of explaining to them that he kept the cat around and fed it scraps because he got lonely throughout the day… well, he was sure they would think less of him.
So he decided to keep the cat a secret, at least for the time being. Its owner might come looking for it, but until then, he was more than happy to give it a place to live and a bit of casual company. He got sloppy, though, and was found out less than a week later when the housekeeper knocked on his room door in mid-afternoon.
“Laundry,” she said briskly.
“Uhhh…” He looked around. The cat was dozing on his pillow, and he was sure interrupting its sleep would lead to a nasty scratch. “Yes, come in.”
She eased into the room with a large basket full of linens. “Good afternoon, Mister Kirschtein.”
“Hello, Frieda,” Jean said, trying his best to remain casual. Maybe if he didn’t mention the cat, she wouldn’t either. “Fine weather we’re having.”
She hummed in agreement and began stripping the sheets off the mattress, pausing when she saw the sleeping creature curled up on the pillow.
“Your cat?” she asked.
Jean frowned. “Not on purpose.”
“Careful with that one.” She regarded it suspiciously as she dumped the dirty sheets in the basket. “Black cats are bad luck.”
Jean chuckled.
“You really believe that?” he asked. “I would think working for the Masters would dispel notions of superstition.”
Frieda sighed and rested the laundry basket on her hip.
“On the contrary,” she said. “I find that the more time I spend at the university the less I trust in the science the Masters practice.”
“Oh?”
She nodded.
“I’m never quite sure what to believe. But I like to stay on my toes,” she said lightly. “Good day, Mister Kirschtein.”
With a small smile, she slipped out the door and shut it firmly behind her. Jean watched her go with a pang of rather unreasonable sadness — it wasn’t as though he and Frieda were good friends, or even friends at all. But she was closer to his age than almost anyone he regularly spoke with, and she was interesting to talk to.
The Masters, on the other hand, were brilliant but boring. Years of studying had made them unable to engage in any conversation not pedantic beyond belief or steeped with jargon, and their field of work meant they lived sheltered lives that minimized risk. Jean shuddered to think that, in twenty years, he might be the same, and whether that fate was worth it he hadn’t yet decided. Being chosen to study at the university was an honor, he’d been told repeatedly. He could read and write and do mathematics beyond simple addition, and that secured him a warm bed, as well as a stipend, most of which he sent home to his mother.
He was lucky, people said. How ironic.
“You’re lucky,” he mumbled to the dozing cat. “You can sleep all day and chew on my things all night, and never worry about any of this.”
The cat opened one eye and regarded him lazily, then put its head back down on the pillow, as if it understood its good fortune.
Days passed, and the pleasant air of late summer gave way to the chill of early autumn. The cat remained with Jean. Tempting fate aside, it wasn’t half bad to have a companion during the mundane tasks that made up his everyday life. Jean had never been a particular fan of cats, nor had he spent much time around them, but when he rambled about his work or narrated as he wrote, he got the sense that the cat wasn’t just hearing him — it was listening.
There was something so unsettling, so human about its eyes, that, at least at first, he wasn’t even that surprised when it spoke.
“Wrong foot.”
Jean glanced down at the left shoe he was unsuccessfully attempting to shove over his right heel and sighed. He’d been far too distracted recently. Any grown man should—
“Wait.” He turned around to face the cat, who was sprawled across his unmade bed, shedding all over the sheets. “Did you just… say something?”
He looked into its golden eyes, searching for that hint of awareness he’d seen so many times before when he rolled the same pair of dice over and over to record the results or described why the Masters were so preoccupied with the idea of understanding luck. The cat looked at him uncomprehendingly. For a moment, he wavered. Maybe he’d been imagining things. Maybe it was just a cat. After all, cats didn’t speak.
“Oh, alright.”
Jean gaped. “You did say something.”
The cat sighed — a real, human-like sigh — and nodded.
“I suppose there’s no point in hiding it now that I’ve slipped,” it said dryly. “Don’t go telling anyone about this though. They’ll just think you’ve lost your marbles.”
Of course, there was still a real chance he had. Jean sank slowly to his knees next to his bed and tried to come up with a logical explanation — any logical explanation — for the scene that was playing out in front of him. He could be dreaming. He could be drunk. This could be a side-effect of a weird mushroom, like the ones that grew on the edge of the forest and were said to grant visions to those who consumed them.
But Jean couldn’t remember eating any mushrooms recently, and making small talk with a cat certainly didn’t sound like the kinds of mushroom-induced visions people usually had. And, when he really thought about it, the cat’s voice didn’t sound at all the way he would have expected. It was possible the thing was actually talking.
“You’re right. What would I say?” He rubbed his temples. “‘I found a cat following me around and now it’s speaking to me’?”
The cat made an annoyed half-scoff half-meow. “‘It’? Have some manners. I’m a he.”
Jean rolled his eyes.
“Alright, fine,” he said. “I found a cat following me around and now he’s speaking to me. Better?”
“Much better.”
The two of them glared at one another for a moment, Jean’s arms folded across his chest like a father scolding a child, the cat in a lazily defensive stance reminiscent of an adolescent boy being told off for missing dinner.
“Wait,” Jean said, holding out a hand. “If you’re so clearly a magical genius talking cat, why have you been pretending to be regular this entire time? And why are you doing it with me?”
“Ah,” the cat replied in a businesslike tone. “Well, I work for a witch, and she needs you for something. I was going to wait a bit longer to reveal everything, but I blew my cover. Oh, well. We should go see her tomorrow.”
Jean raised his eyebrows. A witch needed him for something? A minute ago, he wouldn’t have believed that witches were anything more than perfectly ordinary women unfairly targeted for being successful and unmarried, but a minute ago he hadn’t known a cat would be speaking to him.
“She isn’t going to hurt you,” the cat added conversationally. “In fact, I would be surprised if you sustained any lasting damage of any kind at all, fragile as you are.”
“And if I refuse?” Jean asked, choosing to ignore the statement on his fragility.
The cat yawned, baring his teeth. “Then I’ll kill you.”
…
Jean wasn’t quite sure how credible the threat was, given that it had come from a cat. On the other hand, it had come from a cat. And if the cat could talk, there was no guarantee he wasn’t hiding other capabilities. So early the next morning, Jean wrote a note to the Masters explaining away his absence as the result of a mild illness, put on his walking boots and followed the talking cat into the forest.
At first, he didn't want to speak during the trip. But it soon became clear that, had the cat not been going on and on about whatever it was cats do with their day — Jean wasn’t really listening — the two would have been separated immediately.
“You walk too slow,” the cat said.
“You walk too quickly,” Jean corrected. “And you dart around too much. If I didn’t know better, I would think you were trying to lose me.”
He glanced up at the low-hanging branches around them and strained to make out more than a hint of the sun, or even the oppressive blanket of gray that so often fell over the town as the days grew shorter and colder. It was already early afternoon, but the light was spare and the black cat melted into the shadows and disappeared behind the twisted roots too easily for Jean’s taste.
“Oh, please,” the cat said derisively. “This isn’t even close to top speed.”
Not at all eager to learn more of the aforementioned top speed, Jean put his head down and tried to quicken his pace. After a short time, they came to a section of the woods where the path was slightly more beaten down and the trees not as thick, and the break in necessity for concentration on his footing allowed the panic to creep back in.
Why had he followed a talking cat into a forest? Superstitions and magic aside, his chances of returning home in one piece were shrinking before his eyes with each step he took. And despite his disdain for the way the Masters treated any sort of risk-taking, he was starting to understand their perspective. It was impossible to spend years attempting to calculate where pools of good luck accumulated and then purposefully take action that went against those very findings.
Jean gritted his teeth, tried not to think about his impending doom and turned an ear towards the cat, who was in the middle of a long explanation about gathering herbs.
“... which is alright, of course, but I have to use my mouth to pick them,” he said in a mildly exasperated tone. “And I have to be really careful! I don’t mind being careful. It would just be easier if I were a person. Or if I had opposable thumbs.”
He glanced back at Jean and sighed. “You have very nice opposable thumbs.”
“Oh, uh,” Jean flexed his hand. “Thank you.”
“Show-off,” the cat muttered.
The pair spent the rest of the afternoon in a similar manner. The cat chattered his head off, Jean listened politely and occasionally interjected. He was hungry, tired and thirsty, but it wasn’t an unpleasant journey in the least. And by the time the sun was slipping past the horizon, they arrived at a small but sturdy-looking cabin tucked in a glade.
“Is this it?” Jean asked. He glanced at the windows. “It doesn’t look like she’s home.”
Whether or not witches locked their doors was beyond him, but the last thing he wanted to do was spend the night outside at this time of year. The cat just nodded and trotted up to the front door, then pressed his paw on the lower right corner below the knob. He skittered out of the way just in time for the door to swing out towards them, revealing the house’s interior.
“Welcome,” the cat said with an air of the dramatic, “to our home.”
It only occurred to Jean now, as he stepped over the threshold, that he had been expecting something worse. Cobwebs, gutted animals, cauldrons filled with sickly-looking potions bubbling over onto the stove. As the cat — somehow, some way — lit a candle, Jean was pleasantly surprised to find that the house looked relatively ordinary.
To be sure, an ordinary person was unlikely to have so many dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, and no one he knew outside of the university had access to the wealth of books stacked haphazardly on every available surface. But it wasn’t a place of evil, he decided. Just one of seclusion.
“There isn’t much food,” the cat said from where he stood on his hind legs on the table, poking through cabinets and burlap sacks with one paw. “Will bread do?”
Jean’s stomach rumbled painfully at the mention of food, and he nodded. “Anything will.”
With some direction from the cat, whose tirade against being born without opposable thumbs only intensified as he watched a man fumble around in an unfamiliar kitchen looking for a cutting block and a good knife, Jean prepared his dinner. Two thick slices of seeded bread lathered with butter and toasted in a hot pan over a fire whose origin he couldn’t determine didn’t fill him up quite as well as the meals he ate at the university, but it tasted better than almost any food he’d ever had.
“This is fantastic,” he said, absently tearing a corner off a bread slice and offering it to the cat. “Does the witch bake her own bread?”
“Sometimes,” the cat said as he gnawed on the crust. “I think this is from the town on the other side of the forest, though, as is the butter.”
Jean raised his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware witches were welcome in any towns around here.”
The cat laughed dryly.
“The other town has no university and no Masters,” he said with a pointed look at Jean. “And no way to avoid the latest bout of the plague. In times such as those, it’s easier than you might think for a witch to cozy up to a community.”
Jean nodded. Every five to seven years, a new version of the same illness struck towns along the river. The Masters had become uncannily good at predicting when it would occur, and had recently begun retreating into the hills just before it came. Three years prior, when half the town had contracted the disease, Jean had been sitting alone in an old, broken-down castle with a view of the mountains. People told him he was lucky to have the opportunity to leave with the rest of the university. That he was lucky not to have fallen ill.
It all seemed a bit contrived to him — there was nothing lucky about fleeing and leaving everyone else behind to suffer.
“Did she help them?” he asked. “The other town.”
The cat made a small warbling sound Jean had come to understand meant yes. “Her art could not control the spread of the illness, but she did provide treatment to those who caught it. I imagine she’s there now, actually. Many of the children who survived it have had a bit of trouble breathing since.”
“So she’s like a doctor,” Jean said, gesturing to the ceiling. “But she uses these?”
“A bit like a doctor,” the cat agreed. He licked his paws clean and yawned. “We should sleep. I’m sure she’ll return in the morning.”
He led Jean to the back of the cabin, where there was a large, soft-looking bed.
“This is where she sleeps,” he announced. “You cannot sleep here.”
“Then where should I sleep?” Jean asked.
The answer turned out to be a long sofa, and he was more than happy with that. It was softer than his bed at the university, at least, and once he found a blanket and rested his head back, he was really very comfortable. To his surprise, the cat, who he had assumed would either sleep on the witch’s bed or leave for the night, curled up in the crook of his arm.
He raised his eyebrows. “Are you—”
“Don’t say a word.”
Jean chuckled, but did as he was told. The cat whispered some words in a language Jean didn’t understand, and the candles burned lower. They were magic, then. For some reason, even a talking cat hadn’t quite dispelled him of his skepticism. But it was certainly gone now.
“So, this witch of yours,” Jean said, feeling every syllable of his own artificial nonchalance fall unsteadily into the stillness of the room. “What’s she like?”
He could almost hear the cat’s eyes roll in their sockets.
“She’s not going to eat you or anything like that,” he said.
Jean frowned. “That’s not what I— oh, forget it.”
“No, no, I’ll tell you.”
Was he imagining it, or had that normally sharp and sarcastic voice softened around the edges?
“She’s young,” the cat said. “Around your age. She was born somewhere far away, and came here out of necessity. I met her when she was very small.”
How witches and their familiars became acquainted wasn’t something Jean knew much about, and he sensed it might be rude to ask. Something about the way the cat spoke of the witch, though, made it seem like he thought of her as a part of his family. Did cats have families? Jean couldn’t remember.
“She loves children,” the cat added. “But not eating them. Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Jean echoed. “Anything else?”
“Why do you care?”
“Oh, I don’t, really,” he said hastily. “I was just trying to make conversation. And I don’t get to meet new people that often. Or even see the ones I already know, for that matter.”
He sighed and adjusted his position slightly, careful not to pinch the cat’s tail.
“Working under the Masters is good,” he continued. “What everyone should aspire to. I’m fed, sheltered. Taken care of. But I’m…”
“Lonely?” the cat finished.
Jean sighed. “Yes, Mister Cat. I’m lonely.”
“I did get that impression.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You shut up,” the cat said wearily. “Go to sleep. She’ll be back in the morning.”
Ordinarily, Jean would never have let a cat order him around. Ordinarily, a cat wouldn’t have been able to do so, and ordinarily, Jean would already be long asleep in his tiny bed in his tiny room at the university. He was bone tired and quite unable to process the events of the day, but he felt the need to speak.
“One more thing,” he said.
“Hmm?” the cat replied.
“I’ve been asking myself this whole time why I agreed to come with you,” Jean said. “And I think I know now what it is.”
“Have you?”
He nodded. “I suppose I’m playing the odds.”
…
Jean had never slept so soundly as he did that night, and despite how exhausted he had been upon arriving at the witch’s house, he awoke as rested as he could remember waking up in his entire adulthood. Birds chirped, sunlight filtered in through the windows. It was very peaceful until he realized what had shaken him out of his dreams.
He sat up quickly and looked over the back of the sofa towards the front door, where a small, black-haired woman stood with a large burlap sack over one shoulder and a long walking stick in the opposite hand. She had the look of someone who had just arrived — and she must have, he thought, because the sounds of the front door had disturbed his sleep.
Remembering that she was expecting him, he hurried to make himself halfway decent. Luckily, he hadn’t bothered to fully undress, and was still wearing both a shirt and his traveling pants. He ran his fingers through his hair, hoped he seemed passable, and walked towards the witch.
The closer he got, the more he wished he’d woken with adequate time to prepare. Gray eyes that reminded him of a hawk’s settled on him with an air of cautious curiosity as she rid herself of her things and overcoat, which came off to reveal a dress even the women who worked at the tavern wouldn’t be bold enough to wear. The wine-colored fabric clung to her figure in a way that made it hard for him to focus on her face. Even when the cat had told him the witch was young, this wasn’t at all what he’d been expecting.
Despite her obvious dishevelment, she was beautiful, and he felt incredibly uncomfortable presenting himself to her without proper regard for his appearance. She was allowed to look windswept. As far as he was concerned, she was allowed to do whatever she liked.
She frowned.
“And who might you be?” she demanded.
“I’m…” Jean trailed off, looking to the cat for help. “I’m not sure.”
The witch raised an eyebrow. “Is that why you’re here? I assumed you sought some sort of medical care when I felt you cross the barrier last night. Do you think I can somehow assist with… what, a loss of memory? Total amnesia is very uncommon. I’ve never encountered it myself.”
“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” he said quickly. “It’s…”
Mercifully, she turned away before he could stumble over his words any further and set her gaze on the cat.
“Good morning,” he said. “I missed you.”
“What have you done?” she hissed. “Because if this is about what I think it’s about, you are in for a world of trouble.”
The cat sighed and stretched. “You said—”
“I wasn’t being serious!”
“But you said to bring something.”
“And you brought back, what, the first man you found on the street?”
The cat made a noise somewhere in between a scoff and a sneeze, a much more feline sound than Jean had heard from him since he’d started speaking.
“Don’t insult me like that,” he sniped with a flick of the tail. “I did my research. And for your information, he was not on the street.”
“Hanji…”
“Oh, alright, he was in a tavern.” The cat — whose name, Jean now gathered, must have been Hanji — licked his paw and rubbed it across his face. “But I’ve spent quite a bit of time with him by now, and I think he’s really very tolerable.”
“He’s also standing right here,” Jean interrupted, waving awkwardly. “And would potentially appreciate being spoken to, rather than about.”
The witch turned to him and pursed her lips. “Alright. What are you doing here?”
“Your cat,” he said, pointing vaguely to the spot the creature sat, “told me you needed me for something.”
“You listened to Hanji?”
“He said he would kill me otherwise!”
The witch scoffed. “And you believed him?”
Jean opened his mouth to retort, but found it empty of words. “I– I– he’s a talking cat!”
“He barely weighs more than a holiday ham.”
“He can do magic!”
“Fair enough, I suppose.” She extended a hand. “Pieck.”
He scrambled to shake it. “I’m Jean. Jean Kirschtein.”
Pieck smiled and gestured to one of the chairs sitting around the large wooden table. Not at all eager to find out what would happen if he refused the offer, he sat and looked at her expectantly. She seemed kind enough. And, really, what regrets would he have if he died here? Maybe that he hadn’t been able to see his mother or Frieda again, but that was all. He waited for her to unpack the contents of her bag — herbs, a journal, eggs and what looked like bacon wrapped neatly in brown paper — before speaking.
“So,” he said. “What is it you need me for?”
Her shoulders sagged. “I’m afraid the answer to that is rather embarrassing.”
She stepped forward towards Jean, who had to fight all his instincts to keep his eyes trained on her face.
“As I’m sure you know,” she continued. “Witches often have their familiars… run errands, collect things.”
Jean nodded. He’d read enough story books to grasp Hanji’s role in Pieck’s life.
“A few weeks back, I had a bit too much to drink, and…” She winced. “I may have asked him, in passing of course, to bring me something so I didn’t feel quite so alone all the time.”
“Oh.”
She glared at Hanji. “And it was obviously unserious.”
Were Jean a braver man, he would have questioned her. He would have stood up, looked her in the eyes and told her he didn’t believe that she’d been joking. That she was lonely and he could tell, because he was lonelier. But a single day in the forest hadn’t yet freed him from all his risk-averse behaviors, so his head and heart made a compromise.
“It’s alright,” he said. Pieck turned her gaze back on him. “It would be alright if it had been serious, even. I’m glad I got the chance to do this. I’m lucky Hanji chose me.”
He groaned internally at his own choice of words.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say lucky,” Pieck said, as if she could read his mind. Which, given her profession, might have been possible. “Even if I wasn’t joking…”
She shrugged and smiled slightly.
“... I’m sure you earned his high opinion through your own actions. Nothing at all to do with luck.”
Jean pointed at Hanji. “He said I was tolerable.”
“That’s high praise from a cat.”
He chuckled, and Pieck joined, and they laughed together with an ease he could only have dreamt of until that very moment.
“I know it was quite a long walk through the forest to get here,” she said. “And I understand if you would rather get back as soon as possible. But would you like to stay for breakfast? It’s the least I can do.”
She gestured to the basket of eggs and fresh bacon sitting neatly on the table where she’d set them.
“Yes,” Jean said. “I’d like that very much.”
…
In an unnamed town in an unspecified time, an unconventional trio makes regular visits. Although the Masters of the small but well-established university appear disinterested, the townspeople look forward to the days they see the visitors. Those days, according to superstition, should bring bad luck. According to science, they should be no different than others. But everyone knows that the days the visitors come will be good ones, and children run in the streets announcing the arrival of the witch, the ex-scholar and their small black cat.