Chapter Text
January dropped the last of his boxes on the floor of the old cottage and sighed. Sunset was fading fast outside the window, and he hadn’t unpacked at all. He only had four boxes of stuff to his name, but he hadn’t gotten them all unloaded off the cart he’d rented before it started to rain, and half the boxes were dripping onto the floor of the little living room.
He hoped this wasn’t an omen.
He’d gotten his fill of water when the dam over his old village had broken and flooded his entire life in the span of three hours.
The only reason he hadn’t drowned was the fact that he’d been visiting his mum’s grave on the hill, telling her that he’d been accepted to a dance troupe in the city. It was going to be tight with money, but one of his neighbors had agreed to rent the vineyard from him and have their daughters work it for the extra income.
He’d been heading home when he heard the cracking and saw the dam fail. Water had spread over the village valley in a churning brown wave that tore up everything in its path.
January had watched it, frozen, and then he’d started to run down—just as the water smashed through his vineyard, and then his childhood home, and charged toward the hill where the graves were.
January had turned around and run for the top of the hill instead, and the water stopped mere feet from his mother’s grave and flowed around the crest of the hill.
He’d stayed up there for hours, waiting for the water to go down and looking for signs of life. He’d pulled a couple of bodies out of the water when they’d drifted by, though when he saw one of his neighbors’ daughters clinging to a piece of door—concussed and shivering, but alive—he set her down next to his mum’s grave and told her to talk to Mrs. Stirling while he pulled the bodies to the other side of the hill where she couldn’t see. He didn’t try to pull any more out, especially when he saw one of them that was probably her father.
Two weeks later, after the city had sent aid and the funerals had been had, the village was a quiet ruin. Those who had survived had nothing, and went to live with extended family in the city or another village over. Everyone’s crop for the season was ruined.
January still had his land, technically, but the water had snapped or uprooted all the vines, and it would take at least five years and a whole lot of money that January didn’t have to replant and start running a vineyard again.
He didn’t have any extended family to go live with.
He couldn’t afford to live in the city and be a dancer.
So January sold the vineyard and the patch of churned mud that had been his house to a wealthy farmer from the next village over who gave January a better price than he’d expected out of pity, and he used the money to move away where nobody would know him.
He couldn’t stand the pity in people’s eyes when they heard where he was from. So once he arrived in a village on the other side of the mountains called Tharsis, when his new landlord asked where he was from, he gave them the name of the next village over and said he’d moved because he’d heard lots of good things about Tharsis’s weather.
It was lucky that this old cottage was already furnished, with most of the furniture left from the previous occupant. January looked at all the boxes, then sighed and dug out his blankets that he’d been sleeping in during his journey across the mountains, found the bed tucked into a side room of the cottage, and spread the blankets across the top to fall instantly asleep.
Tomorrow would be a new day.
Two weeks later, January had a job with Val, the candle-maker, and an arch-nemesis.
Aubrey Gale.
To be entirely honest, January wasn’t sure if Aubery Gale even knew he existed—though he had a feeling they did, as gossip travelled quick in small villages and a new person was always a topic of conversation—but they probably weren’t aware that they were his nemesis.
They were, though.
Besides the fact that they sold magical floating lights that competed with Val’s candles and that January had instantly sworn undying loyalty to Val for being willing to take a chance on hiring a stranger from over the mountains, Aubrey Gale was responsible for no fewer than half of the village laws that made January moving into Tharsis very difficult.
There had been a variety of interviews with village leaders, he’d had to handle silver and iron and pass over running water to prove that he wasn’t a malicious magical creature, and he was required to check in with the elected village mayor once a week to prove that he wasn’t losing his mind.
“Sorry about all this,” said the mayor at the end of their first interview, “I know it’s a bit unusual, but you know how witches are. They don’t like strangers.”
“Witches?”
“Just the one. Aubrey Gale is our resident witch—they were the one who brought the proposal to the city council for all of this. To help them be more comfortable, you understand.”
January had bitten back a comment about how this was making him very uncomfortable, and if they didn’t like strangers why didn’t they live alone in the woods like a regular witch, and instead smiled and politely agreed with the mayor.
And over the course of the next two weeks, as people said hello and watched him with obvious interest due to his status as the New Guy, many of them told him how glad they were he was settling in and had he met Aubrey yet? They were wonderful, he was going to absolutely love them.
January had decided, rather petulantly, that he was not. They’d made him jump through all these hoops just to come and live here, and he was supposed to start hero-worshipping them like everyone else? Not likely.
So he avoided them when he could. He never set foot in Aubrey’s magic shop, and when he saw a clump of people in the street, surrounding someone tall with a ringing laugh, he crossed to the other side and continued on about his business.
This worked very well for a while, until January thought he might be able to finish out his interviews with the mayor and then be permanently done with Aubrey’s influence on his life.
This lasted for exactly two weeks and one day, and then Aubrey did something that set the entire town abuzz.
“Have you heard?” said Val that morning when he came in for work, “Aubrey Gale has opened a competition for their hand in marriage. Very fairy-tale hero type thing—they’ve promised to marry the person who brings them their silver key. Only trouble is, they’ve put it around the neck of their cat, and set the cat loose.”
January blinked. He stared at Val. Val pulled down a rack of the setting candles and started to work them loose.
“Sorry,” said January, not sure if he’d heard correctly. “You’re saying that in order to marry Aubrey Gale, you have to hunt down their pet cat?”
Val shrugged. “Seems that way. Witches are strange.”
“And cruel,” said January, frowning. “That poor creature’s going to have no rest being chased all over town. Surely there must be some other way to pick who they’re going to marry.”
Val poked him with a dubiously anachronistic[1] feather duster. “Why do you care? Considering putting yourself in the running?”
January laughed. “No, of course not. I’d rather marry a complete stranger than Aubrey Gale. Literally anyone else would be better than them.”
“Mmm. Anyway, Mr. Confirmed Bachelor, I need you to stop by the butcher’s to pick up the latest batch of tallow before you get started today. And the Weavers need their candle delivery by tonight.”
By the end of the day, January walked into his cottage smelling of animal fat and beeswax and most likely horrifically sunburned, as he’d forgotten to wear a hat. He also desperately needed a haircut, as he’d been flicking black strands of sweaty hair out of his eyes all afternoon.
The day had been long, and greeting everyone as he walked about on Val’s various chores had been exhausting; everyone knew who he was, as the first new person who’d moved to town in months, and he felt horrifically guilty asking people for their names a second time, so he was trying to learn names and faces as fast as possible.
The only saving grace of the whole day had been that he hadn’t seen Aubrey Gale, and he personally counted it as a good day if he managed to go about all his various candlemaker’s-apprentice-jobs without running into the periphery of the witch.
And then, of course, as he walked into his living room, he nudged something soft and alive with his foot, which promptly yowled and shot off into the kitchen. January jolted back and yelled in surprise, and the thing that was now in his kitchen softly hissed at him.
January swallowed. He lit a candle. He looked around his threadbare living room for a moment and wearily picked up his least favorite of the two blankets. He’d probably have to burn it – who knew what diseases the creature might be carrying?
He stepped slowly into the kitchen, holding the candle down in front of him, and glassy eyes reflected the light back from next to the icebox.
It wasn’t a raccoon, or a possum, or a badger.
It was a cat.
A black cat, with a silver key tied around its neck with a blue ribbon.
“Oh no,” he said, “You’re Aubrey’s cat.”
It yowled at him.
“You’re the one who got into my house,” January told it. “If one of us deserves to be yelled at, it’s not me. You gave me a fright.”
He came forward, hoping to pick it up, but it darted through his legs and ran back out to the living room.
“We’re not playing this game,” January told it. He walked back to the front door and swung it wide open. “Scram. I don’t need cat hunters breaking down my door to find you.”
The cat blinked at him from under the couch.
January sighed and went around behind the couch and got down on his knees to try and shoo it out, but the instant he did, it shot out the door.
“Thank goodness,” January said, and he closed and locked the door and hoped that would be the end of it.
It was not.
The next evening, January spotted a flash of black and blue from his window that faced the woods.
The evening after that, there was a tail in the bush just outside of his cottage.
The morning after that, a shadow streaked across the path and into the woods as he headed into town.
This, unfortunately, set a pattern for the rest of the week.
From what January could tell, Aubrey was not a very good pet owner. Aside from the whole making-all-potential-suitors-hunt-the-poor-thing-down, he hardly ever saw it on the streets around Aubrey’s house.[2]
Instead, it seemed bound and determined to live in his backyard. At first, January had just thought it was because his cottage backed up to the woods, and was the building farthest away from the central bustle of town.
And then Val had mentioned, in passing, the cottage he’d bought had actually used to belong to Aubrey’s previous spouse. A quiet soldier named Max, who’d fixed up the place and was otherwise a very quiet neighbor before they got hitched with Aubrey and moved in with them.
“And that’s where the drama starts,” added the baker, coming through to trade a pastry for a piece of Val’s inexplicable supply of chocolate, “because that’s where Max met River, and we all know what happened after that.”
January tilted his head. “What happened?” He’d sort of been assuming Max died, based on what the landlord had said when he’d rented the place[3], but that didn’t seem to suit the baker’s knowing tone.
“Right, you’re new,” said the baker. “Max and River ran away together. Left in the night with only a note for poor Aubrey. It happened just about a month ago, actually—right before you came to town.”
“Yikes,” said January. “And who’s River?”
“Aubrey’s sibling,” said Val. “Went away to university for a while and came back with a cartful of books and a tendency to speak in tongues. Not a witch, though. Only Aubrey got that gene.”[4]
January considered what it must feel like to have your sibling run away with your spouse. “If I were them,” he said, “I’d never get married again.”
“You’ll never get married in the first place if you don’t stop gossiping and stoke that fire,” said Val. “Nobody likes a lazy candlemaker.”
January rolled his eyes and went back to work. But this information did provide potentially an alternate explanation for why the cat seemed to always be hanging around his cottage—If Max and Aubrey’s marriage had been rocky, then Max might have retreated back to their own space to be alone.
And, based on Aubrey’s current treatment of the cat, January was pretty sure he could guess which spouse had been in primary charge of cat-care. Thus, the cat kept coming back to January’s cottage because it thought that was where dinner came from. Even though it was massively skittish, and scampered off into the bushes whenever he made eye contact with it, it kept showing up at his doorstep and pawing at the door.
So he started feeding it. Grumbling the whole time about Aubrey’s irresponsibility and capriciousness, mind, but he did feed it. Since it didn’t let him get close, he’d put a few scraps of meat in a bowl that had chipped when he moved, carry it out to the edge of the forest, and leave it there for a few hours.
When he returned, it would always be empty, so something certainly was eating it, even if he couldn’t definitively prove it was the cat.
And then, two weeks after he’d started feeding the cat, he stopped by his cottage on his lunch break because Val’s spouse had brought her lunch and she’d lovingly kicked him out, and he found the cat laying limp on his doorstep.
“Oh no,” said January, staring at the lump of black fur. “Cat?”
A very quiet mournful little meow came from it, and January was instantly relieved that it wasn’t dead. He knelt down in front of it, hesitant to touch, especially when he noticed that its fur seemed matted and damp.
The key was still tied on the ribbon around its neck.
“Okay,” said January, “We’re getting that off you.”
But the cat’s ears twitched, and when he reached for it, it struggled to its feet and hissed at him.
Admittedly, it wasn’t very impressive, because the animal was visibly trembling and it could barely stand, but the message was clear: don’t touch the key.
January put his hands up in surrender. “Fine.” At least now with the cat standing, he could see what the problem was—it was refusing to put any weight on its back left leg. “But if you want me to help, I am going to have to pick you up. Please don’t bite me.”
The cat made a tired mrrt! sound, and did not move when January reached over it to unlock his front door and push it open. And, most importantly to January, it did not slash January’s hands to bits when he gently put his hands around its ribcage.
January, with the sort of caution one would carry an unexploded grenade[5], carried the cat into his house and placed it upon his kitchen table. The cat sank gently to the surface in a lopsided attempt at loafing that kept all the weight off its hurt leg.
“Once again,Please don’t bite me, but I just want to check if you’re hurt anywhere else besides the leg.”
The cat blinked slowly at him, and January carefully ran his hands over the cat’s neck and back, watching for any signs of pain. It didn’t react to any of it, though it did flick an ear when he poked its front paws.
Then he turned his attention to its back leg. There wasn’t any blood or exposed bone that he could see, but it was twisted in a way that didn’t look entirely right.
“I need to get the vet,” January said, and like it had understood him, the cat opened its eyes and yowled.
“No,” he told it firmly, “I can’t fix this, and you’re in pain. The vet will help.” And then, recklessly, he added, “I’ll need them anyway, to give you a checkup and make sure you’ve not got fleas. Aubrey is clearly a terrible pet owner, so I’m stealing you away. They don’t deserve you. And if you’re mine, you’re going to get looked after.” January realized he was lecturing a cat, and felt himself blush. “So get ready for that, I suppose,” he finished weakly, and went to fetch a towel to wrap the cat in to keep it warm while he got the vet.
The vet, a grumpy sort of person with a bad knee named Dr. Okonkwo[6] looked at the cat for a long time.
January was fidgeting nervously. “Can you help it?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Okonkwo, running a hand down the cat’s back with a frown. “Is this animal yours?”
“Yes,” said January, too fast.
Dr. Okonkwo raised an eyebrow.
January broke under the pressure. “Okay, well, technically it’s Aubrey’s cat, but personally I think this whole cat hunting thing is animal abuse because who ties a heavy key to an animal’s neck and then makes everyone chase it? And I found it on my steps like this an hour ago because it came to me for help and not Aubrey and so I’m putting my foot down and stopping this whole thing and I’m keeping the cat.”
Dr. Okonkwo lowered the eyebrow. “You say the cat’s yours, the cat’s yours.”
Then they firmly scruffed the cat and began to inspect its leg.
The only major injury, in the end, was the back leg, which was fractured. Dr. Okonkwo wrapped the cat in a towel and had January help hold it still so they could give it a shot to calm it down, and then, once the cat’s eyes had gone sleepy and dazed and it stopped yowling to be released, Dr. Okonkwo set the leg with a quiet crack and wrapped it firmly in bandages.
“I’ll want to check again in two weeks,” said Dr. Okonkwo at the door. “Make sure it’s eating, and come to me if it gets lethargic.”
“What do I owe you?” January was hastily doing financial math in his head.
Dr. Okonkwo looked at him for a long moment, then sighed and said, “Nothing for this. Just treat the cat well, that’s all. I can’t stand callousness toward animals.”
And then they left, and January was suddenly a pet owner.
To January’s surprise, the cat did not seem particularly resistant to its new status as an indoor-only housepet. Then again, it could not move particularly fast with the plaster cast that the vet had put it in, so maybe it was actually desperately trying to escape anytime it limped from room to room to stare at things.
January was pretty sure it wasn’t, though. The cat’s slow circuit of the cottage appeared to be in the vein of an exploratory survey, and it didn’t flee from January when he approached it anymore.
January took this newfound trust very seriously, and made sure to bestow gentle pets and ear scritches and the occasional treat every time the cat let him approach.
The cat repaid this favor by covering his couch in cat hair and claiming the foot of his bed as its sleeping spot. The first night, after the vet had given it the shot to calm it down for the cast, it had staggered around a bit as if drunk until January had squished a blanket into a comfy circle on the floor and placed the cat in it. It had slept off the medicine there, but every subsequent night it had clambered up onto January’s bed to sleep next to his ankles, and he didn’t have the heart to shoo it off.
By the third day, January had accepted that he was probably going to become a crazy cat person.
He’d been talking to the cat since he’d first seen it, and the habit had, if anything, only gotten worse once the cat became a permanent resident.
It made his house feel less lonely, as if he had someone to come back to instead of just dust and empty corners.
Every time he came home, the cat would come and greet him. Sometimes slowly, if it had been taking a nap – he would hear the thump of the cast landing on the floor from his room, and then the cat would eventually appear to blearily blink at him while he started dinner in the kitchen. Other times, though, it would already be waiting for him at the door, to get underfoot right as he stepped inside, batting at his shoelaces while he worked to take off his shoes.
Once, the cat jumped onto the kitchen table when he wasn’t looking. By the time he turned around, it was sitting next to the cup of water he’d placed there, and was clearly succumbing to instinct.
A few bats of the paw, and the water cup was right on the edge of the table.
“Hey! No! Bad!” January said, too loud, and the cat startled and jumped off the table. Its cast caught the cup as it went down, and then there were two thunks and a yowl as cat, cup, and water all splashed down on the kitchen floor.
January lunged forward and grabbed the cat, pressing it close to his chest as he carried it to the living room. He sat on the small couch and held the cat in his lap as he grabbed the nearest blanket to dry it off.
His hands were shaking.
January glared at the cat and pinned it between his legs and his left arm while he dried it with his right.
The cat was wriggling and wailing about having gotten wet, but most of the water seemed to be on its back. The cast had escaped with only a few droplets of water, which January carefully wiped off before turning his attention to its dripping fur.
“That was bad,” he told it, and there was nobody human to notice that his voice wasn’t as steady as it usually was. “Bad, okay? You can’t go knocking things off counters. Especially water. Water’s bad for your cast, and it could—you could get hurt. Water would ruin it.”
The cat had mostly stopped wriggling at that point and seemed to accept its fate. January took a deep breath and forced himself to loosen his grip.
The cat didn’t leap away, but rather turned itself around enough to headbutt apologetically into January’s wrist, the same way it did after nearly tripping January out of his shoes.
January gave in and scratched behind its ears. It gave a plaintive little mrraow? and he dropped his head down to touch their foreheads together. “You’re okay,” he told it. “I just don’t like spilled water.”
It was oddly freeing to say. He hadn’t even alluded to his hometown in nearly a year. It had been a locked door on grief—but also on who he was.
January-the-candlemaker’s apprentice was barely a person. Just an identity a few months old, and all it could really hold was work, and sarcasm, and trying to survive.
January-from-over-the-mountains was a son and a dancer and a neighbor and a boy who’d run through the trees of his family’s vineyard until he’d become a man. That was decades of identity, and it held so much that he’d kept shut away in Tharsis.
He cleared his throat. He restarted rubbing the blanket along the cat’s back, making sure it was dry, and he spoke to it. “Have you ever heard of Cornwall?” He kept his voice gentle and soothing. Just a comforting noise for the cat while he dried it off, but also something that January himself needed to hear aloud. “That’s where I’m from.”
There was a rumbling sound beneath January’s fingers. The cat had started purring. It looked almost as surprised as January—he hadn’t heard it purr before.
“There was a dam over our town. It had been there for decades; part of the landscape. I was—I had actually been about to leave in the next week, to join a dance troupe. But the dam failed.”
The cat was definitely dry by now, but January kept working the blanket over it, in time with its rumbling purr.
“Four people who had been in town survived. There were a few families who’d been out of town that day who were okay too, but—there wasn’t really anything left.” He shook his head. “So I came here, to get interrogated for Aubrey Gale’s comfort just to live someplace where people would look at me without seeing floods and tragedy. And to take care of their poor cat.”
The cat’s fur was puffy now from all the static electricity January had rubbed into the dry fur. He set the blanket aside and smoothed down all the fur with his hand.
“But that’s okay,” he told it. “You make it better.”
That night, the cat found a loose piece of thread from January’s scarf and chased it clumsily around the living room. It tripped over its own paws and lost track of the thread and once attacked January’s sock foot instead of the thread.
January laughed until his eyes watered.
The key was still around the cat’s neck. Every time January had tried to remove it, the cat would hiss and swipe at him—the only time it ever got aggressive. He had attempted bribery with cat treats, distraction with a piece of string, and halfheartedly arguing with the cat about how it surely couldn’t be comfortable, but the cat was resistant to all of it, and he wasn’t willing to manhandle the poor thing to get it off. It needed to have a human with gentle hands in its life, and January had a feeling that if he broke its trust now, it would have nobody.
So the key stayed on the cat, and the cat stayed in January’s cottage, and nobody in town was getting any closer to marrying Aubrey Gale.
When January was out running errands, he could hear people complaining.
“Nobody’s seen the cat in days!” said someone.
“At this rate there won’t be a wedding until next year,” said someone else.
“When was the last time someone saw it, anyway?”
“In the square, when a couple people teamed up to catch it. Guang said they’d actually grabbed it, but it bit them and they lost their grip.”
“That must have scared it off, if it’s been hiding away ever since.”
January frowned. He’d assumed the cat had gotten hurt in the forest, doing cat things, but if a human had caused it? He was more glad then ever it was safely locked away in his cottage where it could live in peace.
Val was already at work with the next batch of candles when he got back, and the fire was burning low. January went to stoke it and ask Val about his next task, but he never got the chance.
The door slammed open and Aubrey Gale stormed in.[7] They were lovely, with long black hair that flowed down their back and eyes that flashed like fire and orange robes that shimmered like dust on some alien planet.
“January Stirling!” they said, poking him in the chest with a finger. “You’ve got my cat.”
January blinked. “No, I don’t.”
“I knew it!” screeched Val. “Wait, what?”
Aubrey seemed entirely wrongfooted. “Yes you do. I know you do. I—ah, I saw Dr. Okonkwo leaving your place the other day. And last I checked, you didn’t have a pet, but you have one now. Ergo, you have my cat. And my hand in marriage, which is why I’m a bit surprised you’ve waited this long.”
January hated every inch of their tall, willowy, witchy glamor. They were the kind of person that the world moved to suit, rather than having to force themselves to move to suit the world. They had never moved hundreds of miles away from home just because their vineyard had flooded and left them destitute.[8]
They had never faced anything like that, and it made January want to pop their breezy confidence with a pin.
So he did.
“I told you,” he said. “I don’t have your cat. I have my cat, but there’s nothing in my home that belongs to you.”
Aubrey blinked. “Black cat, about this big, ribbon and a key?”
January shrugged. “That sounds like my cat.”
“No,” said Aubrey, “That’s my cat. It’s got the key because I promised to marry the person who catches it. So it can be our cat, now.” They put their hand on his elbow.
“Nope. It’s still just mine.” January took his elbow back. “Because unlike most people in this town, I don’t find shameless animal cruelty very attractive. I’m not playing your marriage game. I found a mistreated cat in the woods with nobody looking after it, I picked it up and carried it home, and nobody came looking for over a week. It’s mine now. Sorry about your competition. You might want to pick something else.”
“I—” Aubrey sputtered. “Animal cruelty? No! That’s not—it doesn’t count!”
“Why not?”
“Because—I’m a witch!”
“All right, what’s your cat’s favorite food?”
Aubrey shrugged. “Cat food?”
“No. Raw fish. Where does it like to be scratched?”
“On the back?”
“Behind the ears. Does it sleep on your bed?”
“No,” said Aubrey, a little quieter.
“It sleeps on mine. Because I pay attention to what it’s eating, and when it’s giving happy purrs, and it trusts me. So it’s my cat.”
“It’s my familiar,” said Aubrey, but halfheartedly, like they’d realized they were going to lose. In the corner, Val was looking very unimpressed.
“Being a witch’s familiar seems like a very rough job,” said January. “I think it deserves an early retirement. If you get another one, I suggest you treat it better.”
Aubrey looked at him for a long moment, then shook their head and walked out of Val’s shop.
January collapsed into the nearest chair. He’d been running mostly on righteous animal-rights anger, but with Aubrey gone, it sunk in that he’d just faced down a powerfully magical witch—and, apparently, won.
When January got home, he couldn’t help smiling. “Cat!” He slung down his bag and kicked off his shoes. “Cat, I have good news!”
The cottage was silent for a moment, and January had half a second of panic before there was a curious mrrw? and the cat came trotting in from the kitchen.
“There you are.” January crouched down to give it good ear scritches. “Guess what? You are officially stolen, my friend. Aubrey found out I have you and they didn’t turn me into a frog, so you can consider yourself officially Cat Stirling.” He ran a hand down its back. “Once you get the cast off, we can maybe loosen up on the house arrest. I don’t want you hunting birds, but maybe some outside time. You like the woods, don’t you?”
The cat was still headbutting him for pets, but it wasn’t purring, as it often did these days.
“None of this means anything to you, does it? Just a January making noise at you. That’s all right, let’s get you a treat or two so you know it’s a special occasion.”
He stood up and went to the kitchen, and after a moment, he heard the distinct tapping of the cast as the cat trotted after him. It leapt up onto a chair, and from there to the counter.
“Hey, no cats on the counter,” January said, coming to lift it off, but before he did the cat yowled briefly and then batted its paw against the key. January stopped.
The cat batted at the key again, and then it ducked its head.
“Do you…want me to take the key off?”
January was suddenly wondering if being a familiar-cat was different than being a cat-cat. He’d thought it was just an ordinary cat, but this was strange.
The cat didn’t nod, but it stayed still, and when January reached out a careful hand and looped two of his fingers underneath the ribbon, it didn’t maul his fingers to shreds.
Quickly, January pulled apart the knot and the ribbon came loose, letting the key[9] fall to the counter with a clack.
“There you go. I bet that feels better, doesn’t it?”
The cat blinked at him for a moment, then it leaned down and carefully took the key between its teeth, and leapt down from the counter to stalk off into the living room. January, bemused, followed it and watched as the cat put it into his shoe. It did so with remarkable care, pushing it all the way in with a paw so you couldn’t see it when you walked by.
Again, strange.
“Can you understand me?” January asked, feeling foolish but also half expecting the cat to turn to him and say ‘yes’.
It did not. It batted at his shoe a few more times, then came and rubbed against his ankles and gave a sad little mrrw?, which was how it asked for a treat.
January shook his head and laughed at himself. “I’m being silly. You see a witch once and it throws off your expectations for the rest of the day.”
The cat gave another mrr and paired it with big longing eyes looking up at him.
“Yes, yes, I promised treats. I am entirely susceptible to your sweet-talking, puss-in-boot. Ask and ye shall receive.”
1. The anachronism is dubious because this is fantasy so who’s to say what’s really been invented yet. But in this kind of pastoral slightly-post-medieval pastiche that a lot of cozy fantasy these days is set in, it’s quite possible they have created our modern conceptions of feather dusters for their various ornamental knickknacks. All that is to say, Val wanted one, and who is the narrative to deny her? [↺ go back]
2. Not that he often went near Aubrey’s house, but it was often unavoidable in his position as Val’s apprentice/errand boy. [↺ go back]
3. “The previous tenant is no longer with us.” [↺ go back]
4. Johann Gregor Mendel studied genetic inheritance traits between 1856 and 1863. We’re counting the 1800s as suitable worldbuilding for this fantasy pastoral slightly-post-medieval pastiche. Just roll with it. [↺ go back]
5. These did not currently exist in our fantasy pastoral slightly-post-medieval pastiche landscape either, but anything’s possible in metaphors. Haven’t you read Douglas Adams? Just be glad I’m not talking about whacking you upside the head with bricks wrapped in lemons. [↺ go back]
6. Dr. Okonkwo was the name of the person, not the knee. Just to be clear. [↺ go back]
7. Literally. Witches have a flair for the dramatic, and Aubrey Gale was no exception. They had a particular fondness for banging open windows and doors with their namesake. [↺ go back]
8. January’s fine. He’s fine. Don’t worry about it. [↺ go back]
9. It was a pretty key, silver and fairly small, with a few scratches on it, probably from being dragged around in the woods for a few weeks. [↺ go back]