AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Archie kept speaking, like he was reading out the lines from another faerie story or a play. The ornery brown tabby cat might already be gone, and it might already be worthless, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. The hollow emptiness carried him on, though he still wasn’t sure if it had to do with his father’s death or the change the death had brought to his own circumstances.
Throughout the Kingdom of Umbrae, the business of death had become far too routine—a steady haze that had made it difficult to mourn each loss of life individually. Archie had lost childhood friends and other family members, but it was his mother he had missed these past four years. She was the one who had loved the old faerie stories and taught him to read. She was the one who kept him clinging to the desperate hope that there was some path still open to him, some way to better himself beside the joyless drudgery of the manual labor expected of him.
She was the one who would have loved the idea of a “magic cat.”
That’s what his father had called Archie’s inheritance—listed after the mill and the donkey given to his two elder brothers. The magic cat. And most men would have called it out of character. From the time Archie was small, his father had been strong, distant, and far too practical, but they had no cause to fight about it until four years previous—the same year the cat had shown up.
“Father,” a younger and higher-pitched version of Archie had said, coming down from the mill’s upper story, “have you noticed that new barn cat—the brown tabby with the white paws that look like boots—will kill the plague rats without eating them? He only eats the healthy ones. And he kills so many of them—more than any cat could eat. Like he knows they’re trouble. How does he know to do that?” The cat should have been half-feral—not even a pet. Archie’s father never would have allowed for pets. But the cat had wandered into the mill on its own and had been permitted to stay in hopes that a few less mice would get into the grain.
The miller shook his head without looking up from the grindstone. “What does it matter? Your mother still got sick, so it’s not like it’s doing us any real favors.”
A smarter boy might have known to leave it at that, but Archie hadn’t. He knew he was right. “But, Father, have you ever seen it eat or make its waste? It washes its paws first. And it uses the outdoor privy or chamber bucket instead of sand! Harris once shut the cat into the privy without looking, and the cat ruined his blankets the next day—like it remembered!”
“It’s your imagination, boy. And keep your eyes on the mill. You know the farmers don’t like it when you grind their animal’s feed as fine as the bread flour.”
Archie nodded absently, his eyes still far away. “Mother said that in the Fae Queen’s court, there are magic animals as smart as you or me. She said Granddad Archer saw a few faerie beasts himself hunting in the Darkwood. Do you think the cat could be one of those? How did it get so far out of the forest?”
“Curse it, boy! It’s just a cat!”
Eventually, Archie had learned to keep all cat-related comments to himself. He never said a word about how the cat twisted up a pair of dogs with their own leads or closed a window to keep out the cold on a winter night, but by that point it didn’t matter.
The damage had been done.
The new barn cat was the “magic cat,” and Archie was the fool who believed in it.
But maybe that was just his fate. After all, Archie had always been a little bit different, and some of it wasn’t even his fault. He was the youngest of three boys, and it only seemed natural that his mother kept him home longer than his brothers, teaching him to read and a few other more domestic skills she might have passed on to a daughter if only one had been available.
But the same year the cat came, his mother had gotten sick with the plague, worse than anyone else in his family, and Archie was made to work with his brothers and father more often. And while his father wasn’t spiteful or angry with most people, Archie knew he hadn’t imagined what came next. His mother died, and Archie couldn’t turn around without his father calling him out for daydreaming, listing all his faults while comparing him to his elder brothers.
He should have been stronger. More focused. Driven.
Like every bit of Archie that came from his mother was not only different, but wrong—a painful reminder the elder man just couldn’t tolerate.
In that light, the so-called inheritance of a “magic cat” could only be read as a way to continue to rub Archie’s nose in it beyond the grave, but with it came something else, like a sign from the fates. The determination for Archie to prove he had been right all along and somehow make something better of himself than his father could have ever dreamed of.
But now his words and all his hopes had slipped out of his fingers, lost to the wind.
The cat was gone, and it might never come back.
Chapter 4
When the Cat’s Away
“The smith might take you in as a farrier. The farmers always need more nails and horseshoes than he can handle on his own,” Harris said without preamble. Or at least, it seemed that way to Archie.
The two brothers rode together in the donkey cart Harris had inherited from their father, and the streets of Castletown carried a steady stream of distractions. Each uncanny stranger or unknown path beckoned Archie’s eager imagination to join them on a thousand different adventures full of new magic, romance, and a greater life than anything usually offered to a shoeless miller’s son.
Archie really hadn’t been paying much attention to anything else.
But, under a floppy hat and a flat mop of straw-colored hair that made him look like a scarecrow, his brother was growing more impatient and starting to scowl. Like he might use his switch on Archie instead of the piebald donkey pulling the cart. “Archie? Did you hear me?”
Yes, but only in that distant sort of way where Archie had to say the word out loud before it made any sense. “Farrier? You think I could be a farrier?” Not even a full smith, as there might have been something romantic about crafting a sword or a jewel-encrusted goblet. Something destined to complete noble deeds or bring true beauty to the world.
There was nothing romantic about horseshoes.
Harris made a sharp, breathy noise he must have learned from his donkey. He sat at the reins while Archie rode in back with the dwindling sacks of flour they had been delivering to customers around the town. “Only if you stop daydreaming. You might stumble into a furnace, and then where would you be? But you’re still young enough to consider an apprenticeship, and if he sees how much you can lift . . .”
What he could lift. It always came down to that, didn’t it? Archie might be able to make his own way, separate from his brothers, but only as grunt labor. It was foolish of him to have any hope a cat could save him from that fate, but in the cat’s absence, life had quickly returned to normal, and Archie had just as quickly been reminded how dreadful a “normal” life could be.
