“Where are your maidenly blushes, Lady Catriona?” he asked. “You stand naked before me, brazen as a harlot.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I am still wearing my stockings and shoes. I can never feel truly naked, so long as I am wearing shoes.”
He grabbed me, threw me to the bed and divested me of my slippers. I obliged him with a maidenly blush across my cheeks and other, more pleasantly rounded portions of my anatomy.
“You will become my mistress.” He laughed as he moved to cover me.
Fool that I was, I did not resist him. So enthralled was I with the body above me—the face and form that had haunted my most heated dreams for years—I did not reject the monster who held me, but instead, let myself believe that seeing was being. That the man I had longed for those years ago leaned above me now, ready to make my fantasies come true.
I parted my lips and let him kiss me. I ran my hands over his face and body, and shortly thereafter, my tongue. He tasted of heat and power, of nothing so simple as human flesh.
I took my time exploring so that when, at last, I took his sex into my mouth, he gasped at the sensation, and curled his fingers into fists. Tension limned him like moonlight on a bank of clouds, illuminating the outer edges while leaving untouched a dark, cold center.
His release eluded me, though I worked my every wile upon him. I wanted nothing so much as to make him lose control, but he held to it, barely. He clutched the sheets and grunted, but did not lose himself. I worked all the more, giving myself over to the task as though I cared for nothing else.
At last he shouted, “Stop!” But I did not. I only took him deeper, applying all the pressure of my lips and tongue to proving my mastery over his flesh. His hands flew to my hair, pulling hard enough to hurt, but I kept on until pleasure overcame him and he lost control.
His body shuddered as completion took him. Shuddered and twisted and shrank. Not just his prick, but the whole of him. His shoulders narrowed, his muscles softened and drooped. His body changed entirely, no longer the man from the mill for whom I had lusted, nor the handsome, silver-haired wizard I had seduced that afternoon in an antechamber.
He became altogether hideous. Small and crooked and old. Greenish skin, the barest indentation of a nose and great dull eyes. I recoiled, simultaneously appalled that I had lain with an ogre, and pleased, at last, to see his true form.
“Don’t look at me!” he shouted. And when I stared, unblinking, he slapped his bony hand across my face.
I bent with the blow, unfazed by it. It was not hard enough to bruise or break bones. When I straightened, he had resumed his habitual form, the sly-eyed wizard. The handsome man with the strong, slim body and silver hair.
I met his glare with a Cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. “At last I’ve seen your true face.”
His hand shot out and wrapped around my throat. “You’ll tell no one, you hussy. Do you hear?”
I bowed my head. “Of course, my lord.”
He glared at me a moment longer, searching for some sign of insubordination though I offered him none. I was meek and mild. The very model of obedient womanhood.
“Tomorrow, midnight,” he said. “Be ready for me.”
“Of course, my lord.”
He disappeared in a burst of purple smoke that filled the air with the strange, electric pressure I had come to associate with magic. I sat still and silent several moments after, listening for some sign of his presence. I heard a buzzing in the air, like a fly or mosquito where there had been none before. As I listened, the buzzing grew distant, and then disappeared. For the first time, I wondered whether the wizard had really disappeared, or if he had become something so small I simply could not see it.
I did not worry over the question, though. I had news for Princess Etheldred, news that would make her championing of my continued residence in the palace worth her effort.
I fell asleep with a smile on my face and woke the next morning bright and early, not six hours after dawn. I ordered a light breakfast, and had myself clothed in my newest gown of satin and samite over panniers nearly six feet across. And beneath the massive skirts I wore gold embossed slippers of white gloving leather so delicate that the slightest misstep would mar the pristine surface. I let my maids powder my hair and dress it in a somewhat more fanciful style than I’d worn during my mourning. I was in fine fettle, feeling every bit as clever and powerful as I had felt when the king was alive.
“You look lovely, my lady,” my maid said.
“Thank you, Mary.”
“Maggie, my lady.”
“Of course.”
I left my rooms with a spring in my step, enjoying the sweep of my skirts as I moved, and the faint tap of my heels against the tile. The princess’s ladies admitted me to her presence immediately, and when I entered the garden, she waved away her servants, leaving us alone with the birdsong, the sunshine and our secrets.
“What have you learned?”
“The council is planning to marry you off, Your Highness, and I do not believe you will like your potential groom.”
“Oh?” She urged me to sit on the bench at her side. “Tell me everything.”
I told her of Galfridus’s plans to marry her, of his influence on the council and of his true form. She seemed none too pleased.
“My uncle Osmont will not stand for this,” she said. “I shall have him speak against it in the council.”
“It might help your cause if you evinced interest in a different groom.”
“Yes, yes.” A sneer of distaste twisted across her lips. “I must, of course, be wed. Whatever would a woman do with the throne all to herself?”
“I was given to understand that you would be happy so long as you had your garden and, of course, your ladies.”
“Why, Stepmama,” the princess said. “Are you being snide?”
“Never, Your Highness.” I schooled my features to make myself seem the very soul of seriousness.
She pinned me with a glare. “Understand, this is my kingdom and mine alone.”
“I’ve no desire for political power.”
Etheldred was silent for a moment, her expression thoughtful. “You haven’t any political ambition, have you? How very strange.”
“My parents played in politics and it brought them only sorrow. I am a woman of simpler desires—pleasure, status and luxury.”
“Quite simple, indeed.”
“Your Highness, are you being snide?”
“Not I, Stepmama.” Etheldred’s laugh was a pretty, brittle sound. “I would never have believed you would be my most loyal ally.” She sighed. “Very well. I will tolerate a consort at my side, but not a king. Find me a titled man who is handsome and pleasant, one who has no interest in getting heirs and no influential relatives, and I shall marry him. After all, once I am queen there is nothing to say I cannot simply strike the law that forced me to wed, and then divorce the poor man.”
“Nothing at all, Highness.” I smiled my slyest smile. “I shall find you the perfect patsy.”
When I returned to my rooms, I found Galfridus waiting. Anger burned in his gray eyes, a combination of betrayal and injured pride. “You lying slut,” he said, his voice low and his words slow. “You not only betrayed my plans to that royal bitch, you plotted with her to counter them.”
I spent a moment deciding whether to feign ignorance, or brazen it out. He seemed too angry and too sure of himself to have guessed at my actions. I wondered if one of Etheldred’s ladies had turned traitor and then remembered my suspicion that the wizard could take a small, unnoticeable shape. He might have been anything—a bird or a butterfly or the lowliest worm crawling in the dirt beneath our feet.
When I answered him, I did not bother to hide the anger in my voice. “It was no betrayal. I told you I would not be your mistress.”
“But I had you,” he said. “I gave you bliss.”
“You made me come. Any man with a hard cock and passable knowledge of the female anatomy could do the
same—and many have.”
“You’ve the loyalty of an alley cat, and morals to match.” His hand flew at me again, but did not strike. Instead, I found myself squinting into a blinding light. A conflagration of purple fire enveloped me, burning away my skin and flesh.
My body turned to dust and light. I felt myself shrinking, bending into a form not my own. I screamed, but the sound came out as a yowl. My feet hit the floor and my dress collapsed on top of me.
I struggled, twisting out of the heavy fabric, hissing as every hair on my body stood out with fear and anger. I scrabbled up from the boned bodice of my dress into the light of the room. No sooner had I won free, than I felt a heavy hand upon my neck, grasping me by the scruff and lifting me from my four dainty feet.
“Do you know what they call a female cat? A queen.” He laughed at his own joke. “Congratulations, Lady Catriona, I have just made you queen. Or as close to it as you shall ever get in your sadly truncated life.
“I say ‘sadly truncated’ because everyone knows there’s only one thing to do with pesky cats.” The wizard used his free hand to pull a pillow from its satin casing. In the next moment he dropped me into the casing and tied a knot at the top. “Now that I have you down to a manageable size, it’s the mill pond for you.”
I yowled and struggled to no avail. I was well and truly trapped in that thick satin casing, and no matter how I scratched with my claws or gnawed with my sharp teeth, I could not get free of it.
I listened as he carried me from my rooms, and down the marble tiled floors of the palace. I recognized the sound of his shoes against the cobbles of the carriage yard, and the soft pad of his footsteps upon the dirt and straw of the stable yard.
He called for a horse, and shortly thereafter I heard the clop of hooves. I yowled and hissed and screeched, but the stable attendants never asked what the wizard was about. It wasn’t their place to interfere if he wanted to drown a cat.
He tied my prison to the saddle and rode away from the palace. After more fruitless screeching, I let my muscles go slack, relaxing into the curve of the bag. I listened as he rode through the city, inhaling the thick, sickening scent of the place—cabbage, sausage and sewage. And over it all the reek of men, women and children packed close as carrots in a jar.
The smell abated as he rode. I heard the laughter and conversation of the guardsmen at the gate, followed by the squish of his horse’s hooves in the muck of unpaved roads outside the city walls. He rode until I smelled the sweet, clean smell of grass and trees, and heard the steady splash of the millwheel.
“We are here, Lady Catriona.” Galfridus untied the sack from his saddle. “I wonder what the miller’s son will think when he finds your body washed up on the banks. Probably not much. I’m told the whole village disposes of unwanted felines here. He must be used to finding drowned cats in his pond.
“How ignominious for you to die as a beast. Poor thing. You should have known better than to betray a wizard.” He gave the bag a heave and I felt myself flying. Falling. Water surrounded me, soaking my fur, pulling me down. I struggled to the surface and took a breath, but the wet fabric of my satin prison was waterlogged and sinking. How ignominious, indeed, to die this way. Unknown and unmourned. Not even human.
I surged upward, struggling for one last breath. Instead, I inhaled a lungful of water. I coughed and took in more water. Drowning. Dying. My consciousness began to fade, my world began to shrink. Smaller than the sinking bag. Smaller than my burning lungs. Smaller than the last spark of my soul clinging to this body of inhuman flesh.
In death, I felt myself changing, reverting to my original form just as the wizard had regained his true shape when the little death overtook him. The satin bag split at the seams and I was struggling, swimming, gasping. My bare toes hit mud, and I stood, coughing up pond water, lunging for the shore.
I fell upon the muddy bank, spewing water but happy to be alive. The first breath I took was heaven. The second, torture. My lungs burned and ached. My muscles were weak. But I was alive, and the wizard’s spell was broken. I pushed myself up, looking at my mud-caked hands.
Alive.
Alive and…changing.
As I watched, my hands shrank and grew black fur. My fingernails curved into claws. In seconds, I had four legs instead of two. I was cursed again, but happy to be breathing.
I dragged myself under a tree, curled into a tight little ball of wet fur and slept.
Chapter Three: The Miller’s Son
Cats sleep light as a feather and wake sharp as a pin. It hardly took a sound to rouse me. Before I knew it I was on my feet, eyes open, ears alert to the sound of voices.
Men. Arguing.
Curious, I strolled past the family burial plot to stand beneath the window of the miller’s house.
“You can’t do this to me,” said one voice. Male. Youngish. Well-spoken.
“Eldest son gets it all. That’s the law of the land, and you won’t find a soul to tell you otherwise.” This voice was rough and sly, with an unabashedly common accent.
“But I did all the repairs. I ran the mill. I—”
“You are the third son.” A new voice, also rough and common. “He gets the mill, I get the mule and you get what’s left.”
“There is nothing left.”
I jumped up on the window ledge to peer at the speakers. They were three men in rough-spun garb. The eldest was fat and bald, with a ring of brown hair around his shiny pink pate. The second was hirsute and stocky, muscles gone to fat. Coarse black hair poking over the back collar of his tunic. And the third…the third was just right. He was the man I had seen on my journey to the city. Perfect in face and form.
Without thought, I leapt lightly from the sill and twined myself about his ankles.
“There,” said the oldest. “You get the cat.”
“That’s not our cat.”
“No, now she’s your cat, brother. Don’t forget to close the door on your way out.”
“Fine.” He turned and started for the door. “You’ll regret this, Alfgar.”
“Not in this lifetime, Julian.”
Julian stomped away as Alfgar, the bald one, laughed. “That boy always did get above himself.”
I skittered out the door just before Julian slammed it shut. He walked briskly to the mill and climbed the ladder to the loft above the millstone where a straw mattress and a small, ordered collection of possessions awaited him. Among them were two books writ on fine parchment pages with gold embossing on their blue leather spines. Odd to see such fine goods beside a peasant’s pallet. I wondered if he had stolen them.
Curious, I settled myself on Julian’s thin bed to watch him pack. As he piled his possessions onto the blanket, I noticed something: his thumbs. Specifically, he had them and I did not.
Imagine, for a moment, navigating the world without thumbs. And then imagine doing so at the height of a cat. The world becomes a difficult place, so much so that it would behoove any sentient creature who wanted revenge on the ogre who’d turned her into a cat to engage the services of someone who had height and thumbs on his side. Someone strapping and strong and not unpleasant to look upon. Someone, in short, very like the late miller’s youngest son.
I cleared my throat.
“You’re still here.” He frowned. “You do know you’re not my cat.”
I laughed. The sound came out surprisingly human. He turned and looked sharply at me. I tested my voice with the words, “I am a cat, my lord. We belong to no one but ourselves.”
The miller’s son jumped back, his dark eyes wide with surprise. “You talk!”
“Apparently, I do.” I was almost as surprised by this felicitous event as the man beside me. I had not been able to speak when Galfridus had turned me into a cat. Nor when he had tied me in a pillow casing, taken me from the palace and chucked me into the mill pond.
Perhaps the ability had something to do with the transformation I had undergone as I’d drowned. I had reverted briefly to my
natural form. Was it possible I had retained some human traits? And if I could speak, what else might I do?
Testing my body, I stretched up on to two legs. I wavered but steeled my spine with determination. I would not trot about on four feet like a common animal. If I was to be an animal, I would be most uncommon. The air hummed around me and I felt the faintest frisson of the electric pressure that had surrounded me when Galfridus first transformed me. But this time it seemed to come from within me, rather than without.
My back straightened, and I steadied on my dainty black back feet. I soon caught the hang of walking upright. I took one step, then two. I executed the turn step from my favorite ronde, and the kick step from a jig. “Give me a pair of slippers.” I laughed. “I could dance the whole night through!”
“Slippers?” the miller’s son said. “Whoever heard of a cat in slippers?”
I looked down at myself. My elegant, furred feline body stretched into a slim, upright line. “You are correct, my lord. Boots would suit me better.”
“Boots!” Julian buried his face in his hands. “No. I—I must have gone mad and imagined this exchange. I cannot be discussing footwear with a talking cat.”
Claws out, I swiped his forearm with my paw, raising four bleeding red lines upon his skin.
“Ow! What did you do that for?”
“To prove you are not mad or dreaming.” Sitting, I brought my curled paw to my mouth and cleaned his blood from my claws. “Now, about those boots.”
“What?” Julian’s lovely brown eyes were wide and panicked. His face flushed. “No. You shouldn’t wear boots. Cats don’t wear boots. They don’t even wear clothes.”
“But I am a talking cat, my lord. Sentient, and well aware of my own nakedness. I really cannot run about unclad.”
“But why not a tunic, then? Or breeches?”
“As I am female, my clothing would properly be a dress, my lord. Though I think I should look quite silly in one, rather like the plaything of a child who has lost her dolls.” I paused, imagining all manner of dress upon my current form, and finding none that looked dignified. “No. A dress simply will not do. It must be boots.” I batted my outer lids. “I have found that I never feel naked when wearing shoes.”
Cat's Tale Page 3
