The Catswold Portal

But from the cottage, Mag had seen her look into the trough and had been enraged. “You must not look at reflections. Not your own, not anyone’s reflection. A reflection is an image, and it is powerful. In this kingdom the queen does not allow images.”

After that, Sarah had avoided the water trough for a long time.

Now she touched the brittle papers, knowing they held a reflection too, a reflection of her own past. Her stomach felt hollow. The yellowed papers rattled in her shaking fingers.

Two sheets had been torn from books, their left-hand edges were ragged and they had page numbers. They were made of strange, foreign paper, very smooth, and the printing was not the usual handwritten script, but rigid and precise. The third paper had thin blue lines to guide a childish handwriting, and the child’s words stirred her strangely.

May 9, 1938.

She is dead. My little Mari is dead. She was so small when I found her, just a little lost kitten alone and hungry in the garden. She had long white whiskers, she was so beautiful, her colors all swirled together like the silk tapestry that hangs in our hall. Her eyes were golden, with black lines around. She rolled over, flashing her eyes at me. She was starving, she wanted a home. Her throat was white, and her paws white, waving as she rolled. I picked her up and took her in the house and fed her leftover scrambled eggs and toast and milk. She ate until I thought she’d burst. I knew her name should be Mari, I don’t know how I knew.

She slept with me every night of our lives together. Five years. She always met the school bus, racing across the neighbors’ yards to the corner. She never went in the street after I scolded her. Sometimes when she looked at me I thought she wanted to tell me something. I thought she was trying to talk human language, but of course she couldn’t. She could only talk with her beautiful golden eyes, or by touching me with her paw.

Now she is dead. The doctor couldn’t mend her sickness.

I hate doctors.

I buried her under the fuchsia tree. I dug the hole, I wouldn’t let Daddy help. I dug it deep, and I wrapped her in her blue blanket. I put in her favorite sofa pillow and her little dish. I made a clay headstone with her name and picture drawn into the wet clay, and baked it at an art school. I will miss her forever and I will love her forever.

There was no signature. Sarah knelt on the cottage floor holding the lined paper, shivering with pain for the child’s agony.

Was this her own childhood grief, embossed into the page? Had she been that child? How could she forget such a thing as the death of a loved animal? And she didn’t think she had ever seen a cat; cats were forbidden in the Netherworld. At least they were forbidden in Affandar—the queen’s edict said cats belonged only in the upperworld among foreign evils. For an instant she felt on the brink of realization. Then the sensation of dawning knowledge vanished.

The other two papers only intensified her confusion.