"Aye, darlin'."
"Put it somewhere safe. I'll let Leahnora and Vera know." She whispered.
"Aye, darlin'."
Edgar's big hand closed gently around the small rabbit's foot. He crossed into the dining room with it and laid it on the green leather blotter of his desk. He passed his hand once over the small dark thing, and a faint lavender flicker settled across it before fading into the leather. Then he came back to her.
Honey, still on the rug, watched her mother cross back from her father. She did not ask who Vera was. She did not ask what was for another day. She did not ask why a small rabbit's foot had made her mother go the color of a buried memory. She had been raised in this house long enough to know that some questions had their own clock, and that clock had not yet struck. She let it be.
Outside, in the growing dusk, the stray cats had moved closer to the porch step. They had not been pulled here by the Telling, and the Telling had no claim on their leaving. They watched thehouse with their long slow eyes and waited to be told what to do now.
In the front hall, Fat Bastard rolled to his feet. Boba came up behind him. Jango came up behind Boba.
"Sir," Fat Bastard said. "Mr. Hadwin."
Edgar turned from the parlor doorway. "Boys."
"We'll be takin' our leave, sir. Zelda's wonderin' where her three favorite gentlemen got to, and we ought to head home before she gets to wonderin' too loud. Zelda's a fine witch and a fiercer one when she's wonderin'."
"You tell Zelda," Rhoda said from behind him, her voice slowly coming back to her, "that the Hadwins of Cauldron Falls owe her three favors. Any cat from her place will be welcome on this hill for the rest of her long life."
"Ma'am." Fat Bastard nodded his enormous head. "We'll tell her."
The household moved as one slow procession out onto the porch. Rhoda first, with Edgar at her shoulder. Honey behind her, with Roam's hand at her lower back. Dean Martin lit on the railing without comment. Quill came out of the parlor on his own four feet. He did not stop to be petted. He did not look at anyone. He crossed the porch boards on a small steady pace and sat down on the top step facing the lawn, with his small grey back to the house, and he did not move again.
Fat Bastard came down the porch step first. Boba behind him. Jango stopped, last of them, at the bottom of the step, and looked up at Honey.
Honey crouched. She laid two fingers on his head. He pressed up into them.
"Thank you, Jango."
"Ma'am."
He went, and the three of them rolled out across the lawn in their odd ragged formation, past the unbonded cats, past thebend in the road where the wisteria-tangled oaks turned the lane, and the late-day light went with them.
The porch was quiet. The moon, which had not been there when they had come out, was a thin pale shape over the oaks now.
On the lawn, and along the porch railings, and on the wood basket inside the parlor, the cats who had been summoned by the Telling began to go. They did not slink. They did not run. They sat where they had been sitting, and they lifted their tails once, and they were gone. A calico from the wood basket here, a Persian from the armchair there, a russet queen from the lawn, a long-haired white tom from the porch rail. Each one fading slowly out of the dusk like a thing being unmade by a hand that had finally remembered them.
Some of them flicked their tails once in small respectful goodbyes as they went. Some did not.
The Hadwin family stood on the porch and watched them go. The lawn emptied. But the unbonded did not move.
Edgar stepped down to the top step. The wisteria moved softly behind him.
"Friends," he said.
The grey tom with the scar from lip to ear lifted his head.
"You'll come back inside," Edgar said. "There's a fire. There's a place by it. And there's a place in this house, for any one of you who would like one."
The grey tom looked at him a moment. The cats behind him looked at the grey tom.
The grey tom looked back at Edgar. "We did not come for that, sir."
"No, son," Edgar said. "You came for Lazlo. But that thing is done. Now you'll let us give you this."
The grey tom held his eyes a moment longer. Then his shoulders moved once with the small letting-go of a creaturewho had been holding a careful posture for years. "My name is Mose."
