Fool’s Assassin

I felt a moment of dizziness as the floor wavered before my gaze. Then a small, scowling cat face emerged from nothing. He rose slowly out of the floor, stretched, and gave me a rebuking Wowr. Only the barest edge of rolled butterfly wing betrayed the cloak in a heap on the floor. I pounced on it and snatched it up, holding it to my chest. It was warm and smelled of black cat. “What were you doing?” I demanded of him.

Sleeping. Was warm.

“This is mine. You’re not to take things off my shelf.” I saw now that the plate I’d put on top of my bowl of hard bread had been pushed aside. With the bundled cloak under my arm, I made a quick inspection of my supplies. The bread had been chewed at the edge and rejected. I’d had half a sausage up there. Only a few scraps of casing remained. “You ate my food! And slept on my cloak.”

Not yours. Hers.

I paused in mid-breath. “Well, it’s mine now. She’s dead.”

She is. So it’s mine. It was promised to me.

I stared at him. My memories of that day had an overlay of haze, not for the evening events but those from the morning. I could not remember why I had gone walking to that part of the estate grounds. They were shady and chill, uninviting during the gray and wet days. I could scarcely remember seeing the butterfly wing on the ground; I could not tell if it was a memory from that day, or a memory of my dream. But I did recall that as my father had approached, he had given a shout of surprise. And something had raced away into the brush. Something black and furry.

Yes. I was there.

“That doesn’t mean the cloak belongs to you.”

He sat up very straight and wrapped his black tail neatly around his white feet. He had yellow eyes, I noticed, and the candlelight danced in them as he declared. She gave it to me. It was a fair trade.

“For what? What does a cat have to trade?”

A gold glitter came into those yellow eyes, and I knew I had insulted him. I’d insulted a cat. Just a cat. So why did a little shiver of dread go down my back? I remembered that my mother had told me to never be afraid to apologize when I was wrong. She had said it would have saved her and my father a great deal of trouble if they had only followed that rule. Then she had sighed, and added that I must never think that an apology could completely erase what I had done or said. Still, it was worth trying.

“I beg your pardon,” I said sincerely. “I do not know much of cats, having never had one of my own. I think I have misspoken to you.”

Yes. You have. Twice. The idea that a human could “have a cat of her own” is equally insulting. Abruptly, he lifted one of his hind legs, pointed his foot toward the ceiling, and began to groom his bottom. I knew I was being insulted. I chose to bear it in silence. He carried on for a ridiculously long time. I began to be chilly. I surreptitiously picked up an edge of the cloak and draped it around my shoulders.