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Rupert had always been honest to a fault, and—absent the meddling of fate or faerie—there was no denying the bulk of the fortune should go to the firstborn son.
It was one of those things that had always been and always should be.
He continued. “Harris. He left you the donkey and cart.”
Harris nodded his acceptance silently, not even looking up from his stool. Again, it was the sort of inheritance any second son should expect to receive.
That only left one matter of business that should have been as trivial as a footnote.
“And, Archie . . .” Rupert shook his head and held the will out again. A strange action for a man who did not appreciate theatrical suspense in the same way Archie did. “Well, perhaps it’s best if you see it for yourself.”
Rupert pushed the parchment over the tabletop, the rough movement scrambling the ink figures so they more closely resembled a nest of gray mice fleeing from an angry tomcat.
Then, the mice became letters.
Then, the letters became words.
And that was the moment when time seemed to stop, and everything in Archie’s dreary and ordinary life changed.
* * *
Chasing mice was overrated. Something that a lower, less intelligent creature might do. No, Leo didn’t chase mice. He waited for them to come to him.
The tricky part was not using his claws to tear into the winter’s store of grain. If he did, the cantankerous miller would see the brown tabby cat as another nuisance and attempt to block him from his favorite hunting ground. So, instead, Leo climbed halfway up a grain sack that hung from a pulley, already hoisted and ready to be fed through the central floor-shaft leading to the grindstones in the room below.
But the mill wasn’t moving now. The humans used gates to divert the water from the wheel at night or when the ice proved too much of a hazard. At the very least, the lingering cold of the late winter melt would ensure that the miller and his three sons would make a later start than usual and give Leo all the time he needed to complete his task. After giving the bag a shake, it deviated from its course enough to sprinkle a few kernels onto the floorboards.
Perfect. The bait was set. Now, he just had to wait.
The mill’s upper story was a maze of shadows and wooden beams. The predawn light trickled in through the cracks. Leo climbed to the top of the pulley, hiding himself to wait for something small and tasty to walk under his trap. His tail twitched with anticipation. His mouth watered, just thinking of the tender sweetness of a freshly caught mouse-tail. The wait wouldn’t be long. The mill was a prime place for mice to assemble through the winter months, and it hadn’t disappointed him yet.
It helped that he had learned to keep his expectations low.
Leo still didn’t have a master. None of the humans were going to help or even attempt to understand him, and he found he didn’t need them to. He had at least a half-dozen homes—including the mill—where he might stop to sleep or eat, and a few humans he liked more than others, but he wouldn’t say he belonged to them.
He could find food all on his own, and he needed little more than that.
As for the desperate danger of before—well, he never was able to tell anyone about that, and even his partial memories had faded. He knew there had been a voice in his head demanding that he kill all the rats, but maybe that wasn’t so strange. He was a cat, and cats killed rats.
And whatever other trouble there had been, it just didn’t seem to matter anymore.
Something made a scraping noise below him. Leo prepared his claws, ready to release the pulley and make a tasty mouse pancake to break his fast.
The trapdoor opened from the floor with a bang. After straining his senses to pick up any approaching mice, the sound rattled his ears and seemed far too loud.
“Puss?”
Leo’s fur rose, a hiss building in his throat. Humans. Must they mewl and crash around like overgrown bull calves? The towheaded youth continued to pull himself up and walk toward the central floor-shaft, making more noise in his bare feet than anyone had a right to. “Puss? Puss?”
Archie wasn’t a human Leo had any reason to actively dislike, but he was a nuisance. There would be no mouse-tails. No mouse parts of any kind. Nothing Leo could properly smash with the weight of the sack alone, but he released his trap anyway, just to show his frustration.
After all, Archie was also the youngest of the miller’s sons and least likely to retaliate.
The sack came down.
“Ow!” the youth cried, nursing his foot. Satisfaction rippled through the brown tabby cat from his pointed ears to his silken tail. Archie stood like a stork, though he had already spotted the grain on the ground and was searching through the shadows. “Puss. I know you’re here.”
So what? The oaf would never catch him. Archie had bulked up in the last year, but the sudden change had left him entirely graceless. Even if Archie tried to shut Leo up somewhere, it wouldn’t work. The mill was old and had plenty of loose hinges his claws could exploit.
