A winged cat walked around the stove on the blue-tile bench. He had gray fur, amber eyes, and brilliant emerald wings that lay crossed on his back. When he reached Terlu, he paused and looked at her.
“Hello!” Terlu said. “Aren’t you a beauty.”
Almost certainly agreeing with her, the winged cat proceeded toward her and climbed onto her lap. He kneaded her thighs through her tunic with his claws, turned around once, and then settled onto her. His emerald-green feathers ruffled as he shrugged his shoulders into a more comfortable position.
“Um, okay, welcome,” Terlu said, enchanted by such unexpected feline friendliness. Gently, she stroked between his ears. The fluttery fear in her throat receded as she petted the winged cat. Slowly, her heart calmed, and she could breathe without feeling like she wasabout to shatter. His fur was as soft as velvet. She smiled as he tilted his head so she’d pet his cheeks and neck. “So happy to meet you. I was beginning to think I was all alone here.”
He purred.
CHAPTER THREE
“Do you have a name?” Terlu asked the winged cat.
He didn’t answer, of course. She wasn’t surprised. She’d never heard of a talking winged cat. She’d read a travelogue once about a distant island that was rumored to have a breed of talking lizards. The explorer had claimed they were prophetic, but he’d also devoted an entire chapter to the glories of a type of hallucinogenic mushroom so his other claims were considered suspect.
“Is there someone around here who feeds you?” she asked. “You don’t seem feral.”
The cat was contorting himself so that she could pet beneath his wings. In her experience, strays were never this friendly… unless he’d been raised with humans and then abandoned? If so, that would explain why he was so desperate for cuddles.
“I know how you feel,” she told him. “That’s me too.”
That was the whole reason she’d cast the spell that destroyed her life in the first place: she’d been lonely. It was that simple.And that pathetic,she thought. She had believed that a position at the library would mean helping researchers find obscure bits of knowledge, educating curious patrons, and sharing her favorite books with like-minded colleagues. She’d specifically requested and interviewed for a public-facing position only. By the time she’d finished her training, though, the imperial laws regarding magic had tightened even more,restricting the vast majority of the volumes in the Great Library. Only the most elite sorcerers were to be granted access to the spellbooks and related materials, and Terlu wasn’t senior enough to be assigned to those luminaries. With apologies from the beleaguered librarian in charge of the second floor, Terlu had been reassigned to the stacks, where she was lucky if she saw another soul once a week, and then only briefly. The library, as a rule, did not attract social beings.
Terlu was good at many things: she’d excelled at all her classes and proven herself to be a very organized and efficient researcher—her professors had universally recommended her for the librarian position when she’d asked for references. She spoke nine living languages and could read six extinct ones, including the complex and highly nuanced First Language, plus she was fluent in several dialects used by the exclusively seafaring clans of the outer sea. She could also bake an excellent blueberry pie (thanks to a cookbook she’d found in the library), play an eight-string guitar (at least a few primary chords), and sketch a reasonable facsimile of whatever she was looking at.
But she wasnotgood at being alone.
She liked to talk, she liked to listen, and she wasn’t interested in listening to herself talk. She was the kind of person who could walk into a shop and know everyone’s stories, from the customers to the stockers to their cousins twice-removed, by the time she walked out with a tub of butter and a half-dozen eggs. This was not a useful skill, however, in the empty and quiet library stacks, and it wasn’t useful inside an abandoned greenhouse either.
I’m not alone here. There’s the cat.
“How about we look around and see if we can find anyone?” Terlu asked the cat. “And maybe see if they have something to eat?”
Now that she was warm and mostly dry, she noticed she was hungry. In fact, “hungry” felt like a massive understatement. Her stomach was writhing as if it wanted to punch all her other organs. Scooping the cat in her arms, Terlu stood.
The cat promptly squirmed out of her arms, fluffed his wings, and then climbed up onto her shoulder. She tensed, hunching her back, unsure of what he was doing and how he could possibly balance there. He flopped around her neck so that his front paws draped over her left shoulder and his hind paws draped over her right.
She laughed as she straightened, her new furry scarf snug around her neck. “Aren’t cats supposed to be aloof?” She loved that he wasn’t.
He yawned in her ear.
“Any suggestions for which way to go?” Several paths split from the white spiral stove and its toasty blue bench, disappearing into the greenery as they curved out of sight. One led back to the door she’d come through, but any of the others could lead to help and (hopefully) an explanation. Perhaps there was a grand house associated with this greenhouse. Or even a village. She wouldn’t know until she looked, and she had zero interest in sitting around, waiting for someone to come looking for her, especially after her experience with nearly freezing outside in the snowy woods. “How about left?”
As if in answer, he swatted her face with his tail. She decided that was a yes.
She started down the gravel path between wide-leaf plants. Orange-and-blue flowers grew on either side of her, their petals shaped like bird wings. Other plants leaned above the path as it curved and wound between their stalks. After a few twists, though, the walkway ended in a circle with an empty bird cage in the center, its door wide open. Ornate with jeweled flourishes, it looked large enough to hold a peacock. “Your former lunch?” she asked the cat.
Terlu heard a flutter above her, and she looked up. Perched in the rafters was a bird with flowers growing out of its feathers. Roses cascaded from its tail, a lilac sprig sprouted from its head, and bluebells coated its wings.
“Not lunch,” Terlu said, “for either of us.”
The flower bird opened its mouth and sang a trill like a soprano’s aria. Even more remarkable, with the song came the delicate scent of a just-bloomed flower.
“Beautiful,” she said.
The winged cat swatted her cheek with his tail, as if offended she was admiring another creature. She grinned and reached up to pet his chin.
Returning to the white stove, Terlu tried another direction, and her second-choice path meandered for longer through the thick greenery before ending in a glass door rimmed with fancy ironwork. “See, I knew it had to lead somewhere.”
