Page 23 of A Beastly Court

Instead, I held on to the censer with the feeble hearth ember with one hand while I rifled in my foraging bag with my other. Maybe the ember still had enough juice in it to protect me while my own magic recharged. Grandmother hadn’t shared the specifics on how it even did that, and I wasn’t sure if it was something I had to activate or if it was automatic. Even a blinding burst of light would grant me the valuable seconds to pull something of use out of my bag.

And as I searched, the creature smothered by the bed linens fought tooth and nail to worm its way free. At the foot of the bed, the owl lay unconscious, feathers fluttering with the movement of the struggling creature. There was a faint popping sound as claws punctured through the duvet, poking out like tiny silver daggers in the moonlight. At my panicked yelp, the bed linens thrashed furiously as yard after yard of fabric was hauled off the beast’s head.

“Ha! Gotcha,” I exclaimed, pulling the black tourmaline crystal free of the bag.

There was an annoyed growl, or maybe it was a victorious trill, and the striped cat freed itself, its fur sticking up in a staticky halo around its head.

“Gah!” I hurled the black tourmaline straight at it, those luminous amber eyes widening to coins as the crystal hit it straight on the pink nose.

“OW,” the cat yowled in a distinctly young male voice. He reared back on his haunches and covered his nose with velveted paws. “Why would you do that?”

I didn’t know what to be more confused about: that the black tourmaline crystal hadn’t activated or that there was a talking cat in my bed. The crystal hadn’t worked against the bear, either, and it should have blasted each of them, for they were no friends of mine.

But pondering the faulty magic crystal would have to happen at another time. There was a cat on my bed. The fact that he was talking didn’t surprised me in the least—every beast of Ossian’s court could talk—it was the fact that he was, indeed, a cat. They were forbidden here, not just in the castle, but in the entire realm. How had this one, and a young one at that, been able to thwart the wards?

“U-uh…”—I grasped for an answer to what I thought was a very obvious question—“Because you’re a cat?”

“Sheesh, Meadow. If that’s how you—”

“How do you know my name?” No sooner did the words leave my mouth did I realize how stupid they were. Everyone knew I was Ossian’s mate.

“Ame told me,” he replied as if I knew exactly who he was talking about. With a swipe of his pink tongue, he licked a paw so he could start smoothing down his fur. He wasn’t all stripes—he had a whitish chin and a tawny belly and his feet were entirely black on the bottom. At his movement, the moonlight caught on a disk of opalescent white hanging from a golden collar around his neck.

“The caliby?” he continued between licks. “She’s like a calico and a tabby mixed together. Anyway, she found me knocked out in a garden bed and told me to find the witch whose name was on my collar. Said it was very important.” He chuckled to himself. “Didn’t even know I could read until she showed me my reflection in a puddle and the letters made sense.”

He lifted his chin so the moonlight could illuminate what I now knew to be moonstone. SAWYER was written in a cursive hand that I recognized. Grandmother? But how? “It says ‘Sawyer.’”

“Oh, heh, that’s me of course.” The tabby tomcat gave the moonstone disk a tap with his claw, and it spun around to reveal the other side.

Property of Meadow Hawthorne. Again, in Grandmother’s handwriting. But since when did I have a cat? I wanted to clutch my head, to fight through the maelstrom surrounding the memories of my past, but the Hawthorne hearth ember was still clutched in one hand and I needed the other hand to defend myself against my bedroom intruder.

My very cute bedroom intruder.

“See?” he said, padding across the bed. “It says I belong to you. So that must mean you must belong to me too.”

I froze as he padded right onto my lap, shocked at his both his trustingness and his audacity, but also afraid Ossian would burst through the door this very instant and accuse me of treason. But he didn’t, and the little cat plopped down, curled his tail around his feet, and craned his head to look up at me with (I had to admit) the most adorable expression. Seriously, his eyes sparkled.

My hands hovered out to my sides, hesitant to touch him and encourage this behavior. Yet, how could something so undeniably cute and downright darling be forbidden? Plus his fur looked so soft.

“This feels better already, doesn’t it?” he asked me. Hesitantly. Hopefully. “I felt like a piece of me was missing, but now, not so much.”

“I-I…” I didn’t know what to say. What to even feel.

His amber gaze flicked to my unoccupied hand still hovering in the air. “You can pet me, if you want. I don’t bite anything but prey and mean people,” he told me proudly.

“O-okay.”

Slowly, I bought my hand closer, pausing a whisker’s length away from him to entertain a slew of second-thoughts. Ossian had expressly forbidden cats from his realm, and now there were two of them galivanting around. It hadn’t been Sawyer’s amber eyes I’d seen in the ceiling yesterday—those had been yellow. Those had to have been Ame’s. That aside, why was there a cat with my name on his collar, and in Grandmother’s handwriting too? By the Green Mother, had she sent him here to further sabotage me? To anger Ossian against me? I knew my choice to stay and love Ossian had broken her heart enough to curse me, but had I angered her so much that she’d send a cat to seal my death? Why—

Sawyer thrust his head under my hovering hand.

And just like that, a blue burst of light zapped each of us.

The young tomcat hissed and sprang away from me just as I dropped the censer to cradle my hand against my chest. But as quickly as the pain of the zap came, it dissipated, and then we looked at each other with new eyes. Memories of him had broken through the maelstrom lock on my mind.

“I know you, little cat,” I whispered. “Sawyer… Blackfoot. It’s still a little murky, but you love tuna treats and you’re really knowledgeable about crystals and you hate—” Lunging forward, I yanked the moonstone collar off his neck and threw it to the end of the bed beside the unconscious owl.

The tomcat shook, smoothing down the fur I’d mussed by removing his collar, and bounded into my arms with a joyous trill.