"Let them talk. The truth will set you free." Oona chuckled.
No one responded.
"Let them," Oona said again, into the quiet, with great satisfaction. "Let every last bonded cat in this house tell every last secret they have been carryin'. The world has been keepin' too many secrets for too many centuries, and the cats have finally had the sense to refuse. I am here to applaud them."
Bramble, from the rug at her feet, belched.
"That's my boy." Oona patted his head.
Maeve, in the chair by the fire, made a small sound between a laugh and exhaustion. Oona's bright eyes went to her. Maeve's eyes went back. Two fierce women took each other's measure.
"Hello, my dear," Oona said.
"Hello yourself."
"What's your name." Oona sipped her coffee.
"Maeve Byrne."
"Are you drinking that coffee or are you drinking something stiffer." Oona winked.
"I would be drinking somethin' stiffer if anyone were offerin'." Maeve giggled.
"Oh, Edgar," Oona said, without taking her eyes off Maeve. "We're going to need the good bottle."
Edgar looked at his wife and Rhoda shrugged and rolled her eyes.
Leahnora set her coffee on the side table and rose. She did not speak. She lifted both hands chest-high, palms open, and turned a slow circle in the middle of the parlor rug. Her purple sleeves moved with her like water. Small red sparks rose out of the floorboards under her feet. They climbed the walls, ran along the picture rails, slipped up around the doorframes, and traced the high corners of the parlor ceiling before sinking back down into the wainscot and out through the boards. The fire did not flicker. The cats did not stir. Nothing visible had happened. Leahnora lowered her hands.
"It is done," she said quietly. "The house will hold. No witch or warlock not already inside it will come up your drive again today. Those of you under this roof now will need to stay until the work is done."
"Thank you, Leahnora," Rhoda said.
Leahnora inclined her head to the room. Then she crossed the parlor and the front hall. Baval lifted from the weathervaneand took flight. She began walking down the lane, and suddenly disappeared in a cloud of red glitter.
Chapter 4
Old Friends
By mid-afternoon, the Hadwin house had found its working rhythm, or as much rhythm as a house could find in a crisis. Honey had taken the desk in her place, working through the steady trickle of cats who had not yet been registered. Out on the wraparound porch, Maeve Byrne and Oona Pierce were halfway through what Edgar had brought them from the cellar. Their familiars, Pepper and Bramble, curled up together close by.
"My third husband," Oona said, "was a great fool. I outlived him by two centuries and I am not sorry."
"My da was a great fool," Maeve said, "and I lost him too soon, and I am very sorry."
"That'll do for a start."
Phineas Grove was making methodical rounds of the parlor with a leather notebook and a stub of pencil. He had started after breakfast and not stopped. He crouched at each cat he could find, asked after them in three different languages, looked them in the eye, and wrote something small and careful in his notebook before moving on. The longest he had stayed with anyone was Quill, the grey tabby on the back of the settee. There, the two of them had spoken in a soft language Honey didnot entirely recognize, which had the slopes of Romanian in it but the cadences of something older, and Quill had answered, occasionally, in the same. But Phineas had not stayed. He had risen and moved on to the next cat, and the next, and the next, his notebook moving with him.
Honey, at the desk, glanced over at him more than once. He was working through her parents' parlor with a kind of patience that did not feel like a guest's. It felt like a man looking for something. Whatever it was, his notebook kept filling.
Across the parlor, through the open back door into the dining room, the long table held the enchanted tracking map. Edgar stood at the foot of it with his lavender-tipped marker in hand. Lazlo stood at his shoulder. At Edgar's desk under the window, Rhoda sat with the bayou book open against a stack of reference volumes. Two more lay open beside it. A small pad of paper at her elbow held her own quick notes, half-thoughts she had been chasing since before dawn. She had not slept or stopped reading, and she had not yet found what she was looking for.
"And these," Edgar gestured down the eastern seaboard with the marker, "these little pulses, are bonds. They go dim when a familiar passes. They go gold when there's a new bond formed."
"Remarkable." Lazlo's eyes roamed across the map with slow attentive care. "And the desk in the parlor. The slit. Where do the pages go."
"Down to the vault. Every page knows its file. They sort themselves on the way. Been workin' that way since my granddaddy."
