“The princess?” he said. “I thought you merely meant to save the princess and get me a title.”
“I do mean to get you a title. Two, in fact. First you will be a marquis, and then a prince.”
“But how is that to be accomplished?”
“The princess must marry in order to become queen. She needs an honorable suitor who will not vie for power once the vows are said. I suggested you.”
“But who says I even want to marry the princess? I want the Lady Catriona.”
“And you shall have her.” I let my voice drop to a low whisper. “The princess needs to marry, but she does not need to stay married. Even after the princess divorces you, you shall remain the highest-ranking man in the land—a place of status that will surely earn you the attention and goodwill of the Lady Catriona.”
“How do you know?”
“I am close to her. I know her thoughts on this.”
“I don’t understand. She has never met me.”
“But she saw you at the same moment you saw her. She wants you as surely as you want her.”
“Truly?” he said, a smile spreading across his handsome face. “She wants me?”
“More than you can know.”
Julian was hesitant, but he agreed to go along with my plan. It probably helped that I did not tell him of my curse, Galfridus’s true form or that I planned to kill the wizard to regain my rightful shape. I felt a twinge of guilt for my omissions—a first—but I quickly squashed it. Guilt and regret are like vermin. If not eradicated immediately, they linger and breed until one’s thoughts are lousy with them. I’d neither the time nor the inclination to second-guess my heretofore profitable aversion to honesty, so I occupied myself with the details of my plan.
We bought cheap stationery and set about duplicating the estate manager’s script. Julian’s letter was a masterpiece—a tale of woe about burned grain storage and peasants who would starve come winter. When it was done he affixed the seal from the old letter to the new one and paid an urchin to take it round to the palace.
Sans boots and hat, I climbed the wall of Galfridus’s tower and watched him as he read. He did not, as I had imagined, immediately call for his horse and rush to the aid of his crofters and his lands. Instead he crumbled the missive and tossed it into the fire muttering, “Bah! What do I care?”
I went immediately back to the inn and told Julian the bad news.
“Has the man no heart? That letter was a work of art!”
“It was.”
“Wait,” he said. “We shall simply write another.” He grabbed paper, pen and inkwell, and wrote a single sentence.
“What does it say?”
“Someone also stole all the coin from your strongbox.”
“That’s it?”
“For a man as cruel as he, that is all it will take.” We sent the second letter to the palace, and no sooner had the wizard read it than he grabbed his greatcoat and ran from the room shouting for his horse.
When I told Julian that his letter had been a success, he grinned mischievously and said, “What’s next?”
“Next, we hunt.”
Chapter Eight: The Hunt
“We can’t do this,” Julian hissed. “’Tis death to hunt in the King’s Wood.”
“Only if we get caught. You said you were an excellent hunter. Now is the time to prove it—catch, but don’t get caught.”
“Can you help at all? Sniff out deer trails or scare game my way?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what a deer smells like.” I turned up my nose. “I shall stay at our camp and make sure it remains undisturbed.”
“You said you would make me rich, but I am doing all the work.”
“You are the one with opposable thumbs.” I could not hide the envy in my voice. “I can’t hold a musket or a bow. So unless you want me to take a brace of rats and songbirds to the palace tomorrow, you will have to hunt.”
“Very well.” He smiled, took up his bow and jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’m going that way.”
“Show off!” I shouted as he walked into the woods. His laughter marked his path long after he had disappeared behind the trees.
The camp seemed very quiet with Julian gone. I paced around the firepit several times, and then fell to grooming myself. It should have disgusted me to clean myself as cats did, but it seemed only natural. When I was a cat, my instincts were those of a cat. And when I was human…
I thought of the night I had awakened human beside Julian. Of what we had done—what I had done. My human body had human hungers. Hungers to which I was not subject in this feline form.
Strangely, I was glad of my curse, for I did not think I would have befriended Julian without it. I would have lain with him—certainly that—and perhaps conversed with him. But I was too much in the habit of twisting men around my finger to ever be honest with one, much less claim him as my first and only friend.
I sat in meditative silence for some time, wearing, I am sure, that wise, faraway look so common to cats when they are at their ease. As a child I’d told myself it was pure imagination to suppose a cat with such an expression was pondering deep and meaningful subjects and not simply the rat he’d had for breakfast or whether to begin licking his own hindquarters. But in that same pose, I pondered subjects of no small importance—the nature of friendship, the state of my soul, the possibility of love.
“Did you eat a canary while I was away?” Julian’s voice startled me. My fur stood on end, and I jumped straight into the air, claws out.
He dropped his catch at his side and fell down laughing.
I wanted to take up a haughty pose and glare at him, but it took a great deal of preening to make my fur lie flat again. Belatedly, I noticed that hours had passed since he’d left. The sun had set, and the moon was rising.
“Poor Cat,” he said. He lifted my hat and scratched behind my ears.
My eyes drifted closed, and a purr rumbled from my chest. “Where is my pride? It seems I will forgive you anything when you do that.”
“You forgive me because you are my friend, and you know I meant no harm by laughing. If you stop and think about it, you’ll admit it was funny.”
I resumed my inscrutable affect. “I suppose.”
“Perhaps this will soften your heart.” He retrieved a good-sized pheasant from his string. “Three brace for the princess and an extra bird for our dinner.”
My stomach rumbled.
“There,” he said. “I am forgiven.”
“Not just yet. Read me a story from your book of tales.”
After we had set the pheasant on its spit, he took the book from his pack and sat down in the fire’s shallow circle of light. “Which one would you like?” He trailed his finger down the table of contents. “‘The Cinder Witch’? ‘The Beastly Beauty’? ‘The Wolf and the Red-Cloaked Girl’?”
“Whatever you read, do not choose one of those tales about a virtuous girl who suffers in silence only to be rewarded with marriage to some nameless prince at the end of the tale. I hate those.”
“Why?”
“Marriage is not a reward. It’s a means to an end.”
“Such the cynic, Cat.”
“Such the pragmatist. Marriage is quite the best way there is to improve one’s station in life. Just look at what will happen when you marry the princess.”
“What will happen when I marry the princess?”
“I told you, you will be a prince—even after Etheldred has your marriage dissolved. Lady Catriona will look favorably upon suit from a prince.”
“But what of you, Cat? What will you do?”
His question brought me up short. No easy answers fell from my tongue. “I—I suppose I shall go away.”
“You will not stay with me?”
“Stay and do what? You will have your title and your lady. You won’t need me anymore.”
“I shall need a friend beside me. There will be palace intrigues, I am sure. Plenty of plots and plans to keep y
our clever mind occupied.”
“I am a cat.” My voice was bitter. “What business have I among men?”
Julian turned and stared into the fire. I could tell his attention was a hundred leagues away. The book of tales lay forgotten on the blanket beside him.
I should have cheered him from his sorrowful thoughts, but I did not. All I could think was that his sorrow was for me. That he wanted me beside him. That he would miss me when I was gone—not my beauty nor my body, but me.
I went and sat next to him, a deep purr rumbling from my body. I rubbed my face against his knee, and he scratched behind my ears.
After many minutes, he said, “Need we even go through with this plan at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if I no longer want to marry the princess? I do not love her.”
“But what of the Lady Catriona?”
“I’m certain she is a very fine lady, but I neither know nor love her.”
“But she is beautiful.” I wanted to believe he had but to see me in my habitual finery to fall in love with me, but the more he spoke the more tenuous my belief became. His silence whittled my assurance to mere hope, and then to the faintest wisp of a wish.
“You will come to love her.” My wavering voice sounded anything but certain.
“I do not know her any better than a stranger. For all I know she might be as cruel and vain as Lady Hildithe claimed.”
I heaved a sigh at his vacillations. Would that we could simply skip to the point at which my plan concluded, when Galfridus would be dead, and I would be human once more. Julian’s misgivings would wither when at last he beheld me by the light of day. They had to.
If he was not besotted by my beauty, what hope had I of keeping him? I had nothing else to offer—I had neither virtue nor kindness, nor any of the domestic skills expected of most wives. And as clever as I thought myself, I had to admit my cleverness owed more to innate cunning than trained intellect. I knew nothing of Julian’s beloved maths and sciences, and had no hope to learn. I could not even read.
“If the Lady Catriona will not sway you, you must, at least, save the princess from marriage to the foul wizard.”
“I suppose,” he said. “But I do not want you to risk yourself for this plan of yours.”
“But the princess—”
“No!” Julian almost shouted. “You are the one I worry for. I don’t care what the cause, I do not want to see you harmed.”
“Then help me.” I placed my paw upon his knee. “Help me in this and you will get everything you’ve ever dreamt of.”
He threw his hands into the air. “I don’t know what I want anymore. This idea to be a nobleman, to have the Lady Catriona—it is shallow and silly. I’ve no guarantee it will make me happy.” He sat down in the dirt and looked me in the eye. “But I know I am happy now. I like the adventure we have had. After we save the princess, let’s go out into the world and make our fortune.”
“But you could be a wealthy lord.”
“Are you so eager to leave me?” he asked.
“It isn’t that. I am not eager to go.”
“Then stay. When I am wealthy, Cat, I shall assign two servants just to follow you about with pillows and fans and tell you how clever you are.”
“Oh, you know I am vain,” I said.
“I adore that you are vain. Your vanity is not undeserved and is often amusing.”
“Along with my deceptions and my thefts. Believe me, Julian, you are too honest to put up with such as me for very long.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
There was a lump in my throat. My eyes felt hot and itchy. Did cats cry? I could not remember ever hearing that they did and yet there were tears in my eyes. I shook my head, hard, and cast about for some way to change the subject. “You said you would read me a story.”
“I don’t feel much like reading,” he said, still staring into the fire.
“I feel like listening.”
“Very well, then.” He flipped open the book with a swift, careless gesture and began reading the first tale in a bored monotone. It was the tale of the Cinder Witch. Though I had heard it before, cursed as I now was, I heard it with new ears.
In the tale, moonlight is the mechanism by which spells are negated, and true faces revealed. I did not want to believe in a story meant for amusement only, but moonlight had been the only light that night in the woods when I had briefly found myself human again. My curse had returned with the dawn.
In the city, there were lamps and other sources of light to keep the moonlight at bay. And in the city, my human form had not returned. Was it so simple? Was the answer truly contained in a book of tales? I could scarce credit it, but tonight would provide the test.
After he finished reading, Julian lay down on his blanket and pulled the free edges over his body. He did not invite me to sleep beside him. I curled myself into a ball on the opposite side of the fire. “Good night,” I said.
He did not answer me.
It seemed an eternity until the fire died. When it cooled down to dimming embers, I stood and left the circle of the fire’s feeble light. As soon as I was away from it, in amongst the trees, an acid itch raced across my skin and my body began to change. In mere moments, I was human again, standing tall on my two bare feet with only my hair to cover me.
I wondered, briefly, how it was that Galfridus managed to keep his clothes when he changed shape, while I had lost mine. I would have appreciated a dress and cloak to keep the cold from my skin and a pair of shoes to protect my soft feet from the rocky path beneath them.
I must have retained my feline vision, for the darkness did not seem very dark at all, though the sky held only a quarter moon. I moved through the trees nimble as a deer, quiet as a ghost until I came to our camp where Julian still slept.
I watched him, the shadow of his form in the dim moonlight. He breathed, but otherwise did not move. I could have gone to him. I could have lain beside him and let his body respond to mine while his mind was yet asleep. But I did not want to be another figment of his dreams. I wanted him to see me, to crave me. To be with me and no one else.
I imagined how it might happen. He would wake and glimpse me through the trees. He would approach. I would flee and he would follow me through the shadows of the woods until we came to a meadow where the grass grew tall and soft.
There, I would let myself be caught. And he would catch me. Hold me. Have me. He would bear me down unto the ground and cover my body with his.
He would—
He woke!
Between one breath and the next, Julian sat up and spotted me amongst the trees. “Who are you?” he called.
I kept my mouth shut and shook my head. This was not how I had imagined meeting Julian as a human. Dirty and naked, I’d no clothes or jewels. There were twigs in my hair. Twigs!
He took a step toward me, with such caution as might befit anyone approaching a madwoman. I took a corresponding step back.
“Wait!” His voice was rough and desperate.
I did not wait. I fled. Not the pretty, girlish trot I had affected in my fantasy, but a panting, all-out sprint. Suddenly I did not want to be caught. I did not want to explain how I had come to be a cat, and I did not want to make up lies. Not to him.
Julian followed close on my heels. He was bigger, stronger and more accustomed to such exertions. He devoured my lead. His feet pounded and his breath bellowed behind me. He was close, but not quite within arm’s reach. If I could just run faster I might make it.
A sharp tug seared my scalp. My hair pulled taut and snapped my head back. My feet flew out from under me, and my bare bum hit the leaf-strewn forest floor with a bone-jarring thud.
I looked up. Julian stood above me, his fist tangled in the trailing ends of my hair, his face a study of stern confusion. He leaned down, placed his fingertips beneath my chin and tilted my face up to the dim beams of moonlight filtering through a gap in the tree-cover overhead.
“Lady Catriona?”
Chapter Nine: The Talk
“Lady Catriona.” This time, the words were a statement instead of a question.
I didn’t answer, not even to deny him. What good would denial have done? Mine is not a face men easily forget. I raised my chin and met his gaze. “Release me.”
I realized my mistake the moment the words left my lips. My body had changed, but my voice had not. It was as it had always been whether I was human or feline, a melodic purr. Low and smooth and seductive.
His eyes widened in surprise before narrowing in suspicion. “Cat?”
I had no clothes, but I hadn’t felt naked. Not until Julian spoke my name. Not until my deception was revealed.
Bowing my head, I curled my knees up to my chest. My muscles were slow and stiff from running. The night air chilled the sweat drying on my skin, raising goose bumps. I hadn’t the strength or the energy to run again, not even when I felt him loose his hold on me.
What a pathetic picture I must have made.
Leaves crunched as he knelt beside me. “Cat.” He smoothed my tangled hair.
I did not raise my head. I knew that when I met his eyes, his gentleness would give way to curiosity, perhaps even outrage at my deception. Much as I hated his pity, I needed it to cover all the questions I did not want to answer, to stand in for the excuses I couldn’t bring myself to make.
“What—”
I kissed him. It was impulse, motivated more by desperation than desire. Yet that hurried kiss roused his hunger. It parted his lips and brought his arms around me. It made his pulse pound hard against my breast.
I lost myself. Perhaps it was the feel of his lips against mine, the warm brush of his hands across my bare skin, or the simple, sweet thrill of holding him and being held.
It seemed there was some kind of madness in me, a weakness I had never known before. I who had played at love so many times and never lost my wits or my will—I surrendered both, and happily. They left on a contented sigh, hounded from my head by the hammering of my heart and the shivers his touch roused in my body.
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