Sweetdew is accused

Her Most Gracious Ladyship Snowgleam Pearlpaw the Fair was not at her most gracious best. She growled softly through gritted teeth as she trotted up the hill behind the raggedy young male, but she let him go ahead of her in spite of the difference in their ranks. She needed his testimony.

The Princess flattened her ears and turned her hunched back to him as Hellbone approached – Snowgleam privately thought the Princess must have smelled him coming – but even that did not faze him.

“Good morning, Your Majesty,” he whined.

Males were accorded a certain liberty of address, but this was a bit much. Snowgleam swatted his rump with her paw and hissed, “Highness!”

“Highness,” he corrected quickly.

Snowgleam laid back her ears and sighed, but she quickly straightened ears and back and tail alike as Princess Sunleaf turned away from the wall and strolled towards her.

Sunleaf sniffed lazily along Snowgleam’s flank and drawled, “How are you, darling?”

“Good morning, Your Highness, and I hope you are as well as I, thank you.”

“If by ‘well’ you mean ‘in the company of this riffraff’, then I suppose I now am.” The Princess pointedly sneezed.

“Begging your pardon,” Snowgleam cringed, “but we’ve come for an important matter.”

“And what is this important and rather pungent matter?”

So reminded, Snowgleam hurriedly began to wash the paw she had offended by swatting Hellbone’s greasy fur. “It’s about– that so-​​called– Lady– Sweetdew– Honeynose,” she squeaked between strokes of her tongue.

“Sweetdew again?” the Princess yowled.

“It’s important!” Snowgleam protested. “Listen!”

“I am full to the gullet with you and your baseless accusations against that poor creature – scarcely more than a kitten, I’m told!”

“Poor creature indeed!” Snowgleam howled in an outrage born of weeks of jealousy and frustration. “Who eats roast chicken under the table and who only goes out when she likes – poor creature! Who sleeps in a girl’s own bed!”

“The criminal…” Sunleaf muttered, her golden eyes gleaming with sarcasm.

Snowgleam tucked her tail beneath her haunches and sat. She had forgotten herself.

“A ‘creature’ she well may be,” she said haughtily, “but ‘poor’ I am not certain. Nor even ‘kitten’. Nor even ‘lady.’ And this time I have evidence. Tell her, Bone.”

All she heard from Hellbone was a crash and a clatter as he leapt into a pile of dry leaves at the far end of the Princess’s court.

“Bone!” Snowgleam wailed. “Have you no manners?”

“Sorry,” Hellbone said sheepishly as he trotted back to the ladies. “Them was Your Highness’s private patch of leaves, was’m?”

“I do not care to count leaves among my possessions,” the Princess muttered.

Snowgleam reached out a paw to Hellbone to threaten a smack, though she did not deliver it for fear of sullying herself again. “I meant that when you are in the company of a princess, you sit quietly and wait to be addressed or dismissed.”

Hellbone shrugged the scruff of his neck and flopped down onto his belly. Snowgleam decided it was not worth scolding him for the impropriety of that.

“Tell her!” she said eagerly. “Tell her what you learned about Sweetdew.”

Hellbone sighed through his nose and looked up lazily at the pattern of leaves and sky over his head. “Waaaall…” he drawled.

“Get on with it!” Snowgleam spat.

“Wall now!” he protested. “I was only thinking how to tell it with manners.”

“We don’t have time for that!” Snowgleam huffed. Before Hellbone could rouse himself again, she hurriedly explained, “Yesterday Bone lay down next to Sweetdew where she was sleeping, and when he woke up – ”

“You mean she didn’t wake up?” Sunleaf interrupted with a laugh. “You’re right, darling! I take everything back. Sweetdew is obviously not a cat! You didn’t tell me she doesn’t have a nose!”

Snowgleam laughed with her, but Hellbone did not seem to understand the joke.

“That’s not what’s wrong with her,” he groaned. “She got a nose but she don’t got fleas!”

“She – what?” Sunleaf asked.

“She doesn’t have fleas!” Snowgleam cried triumphantly. “Not a single one! And Bone lay next to her for half the afternoon, and not a single flea jumped from him to her!”

“And I got lots of ‘em,” Hellbone said proudly. “Even my fleas got fleas!”

“I’ve never seen a single flea on her,” Snowgleam said. “And if Bone can’t give her fleas, nothing can give her fleas.”

Hellbone grinned as if it had been a fine compliment, but he leapt as two pairs of paws landed heavily on atop the wall and then dropped onto the stony surface of the court. Tom Dragonhowl had made another of his dramatic, unheralded appearances, and young Hellbone knew from prior cuffs to get out of his way.

“Morning, ladies,” the great Tom purred.

The Princess lifted her nose in feigned scorn, but she could not hide the pleasure in her meow. “Morning, Drag.”

“Morning, Drag,” Snowgleam added meekly. She dropped onto her flank in her confusion before remembering that one did not lie before Princesses and Toms without leave. She began furiously washing her foreleg to calm herself.

“What’s this about Bone’s fleas?” Dragonhowl asked carelessly as he and the Princesses sniffed one another’s faces.

“We were trying to decide whether Sweetdew Honeynose is a cat or not,” Sunleaf said. “Bone and Snowgleam say she isn’t, since she doesn’t have fleas.”

“Oh, she’s a cat, all right,” Dragonhowl chuckled.

Snowgleam paused in her washing to wonder what the Tom had meant by it, but just then she felt his hot breath as he sniffed over her hind parts.

She reared back a paw and swatted him over the nose, claws bared. “Not today, Drag!” she hissed.

“Only checking, kitten, only checking,” he soothed.

“What do you know about her?” Sunleaf asked.

Dragonhowl sat back on his haunches, lowered his eyelids into a seductive gaze aimed in Snowgleam’s direction, and licked his cheek suggestively. “Everything…” he meowed.

“Not her,” Sunleaf spat. “Sweetdew Honeynose!”

Dragonhowl chuckled to himself, but for reply he only cocked his head and languidly licked the other cheek.

“Oh, Drag, you didn’t!” the Princess gasped.

“Someone had to,” Dragonhowl pointed out. “It was I or Bone here,” he said wryly.

Hellbone flattened his ears against his skull and his belly against the earth, plainly pleading that he would never dream of such a thing.

“But she’s practically a kitten!” Sunleaf scolded.

“Not any longer,” Dragonhowl smirked.

“Oh, Drag!” Snowgleam yowled. “Her first time with you! You’re so rough!”

“I am not rough,” he purred. “I am firm. Some ladies find that reassuring. Others,” he said, slyly staring at Snowgleam, “find it irresistible.”

Snowgleam twitched her tail in disagreement and displeasure, but she could not hold the gaze of his eyes, and the Tom surely knew why. Those eyes had the power to remind her of things she had felt and not seen – of his hot breath in her ear, his strong forelegs gripping her shoulders, and the great weight of his body pressing her down and grinding her breast into the earth…

But it had been the same for that insufferable Sweetdew Honeynose, and that Snowgleam could not bear. Her own first had not been the likes of Hellbone, but neither had it been a great Tom like Dragonhowl.

“Do you truly want that little black shrew to bear your kits?” she snapped.

Dragonhowl tossed back his broad head and sighed. “If she can, she’s welcome to them and worthy. They never take the first time.”

Snowgleam licked her paw in frustration. She had heard of cats getting kittens on their first try – usually, tragically, the ambitious young ones who went first to some landless male like Hellbone to open themselves up before they went to one of the Toms. They got no more than they deserved if they ended up with a litter of baby Hellbones, but Snowgleam thought Sweetdew was getting far more than she deserved if Tom Dragonhowl noticed her at all.

“What’s your quarrel with Sweetdew, anyway?” he asked.

Sunleaf sniffed scornfully. “Snowgleam thinks she isn’t a cat, since she doesn’t have fleas.”

“Fleas don’t make the cat, ladies,” Dragonhowl said. “Otherwise Bone here would be Tom over us all.”

Hellbone smiled weakly up at him, unsure whether he was even permitted to laugh at such a heretical suggestion.

“In her country they must roll in something we don’t know about, that’s all,” Dragonhowl sniffed. “If you ladies weren’t so jealous of one another, you would befriend her so you could find out what it is. And anyway…”

He paused to lick his tail, and Snowgleam leaned towards him in suspense until she was nearly sitting up.

He yawned provokingly before continuing. “Anyway, Sweetdew isn’t the one who has something wrong with her – it’s all the rest of you in that house. Sweetdew is the only one I’ve met outside recently.”

Snowgleam fell back onto her side. “You’re meeting us now,” she grumbled.

“At night, I meant.”

“We been real tired lately,” Hellbone ventured.

“It’s true…” Snowgleam said thoughtfully. “Lately I fall asleep as soon as I return from my twilight prowl, and don’t wake until dawn.”

“Exhausting work, being jealous,” Sunleaf said smugly.

Dragonhowl batted her nose to silence her. “When did this start?”

“When they started being jealous!” Sunleaf spat.

“When Sweetdew come,” Hellbone said. “Same night.”

“All the cats in that house?” Dragonhowl asked.

Snowgleam and Hellbone exchanged a worried glance.

“I don’t know…” Snowgleam mewed, twitching her tail anxiously. “Since I’m always asleep then.”

She did not add that she had been too embarrassed by her recent poor success in hunting to have mentioned it to the other cats at all. A cat that did not kill enough rats was not long granted the great boon of access to a house – unless she were some girl’s indolent pet, like Sweetdew Honeynose.

“That’s your problem, friends,” Dragonhowl said. “Forget the fleas – you need to find out why you’ve all turned into lazy lumps since she arrived.” He sat back and looked at the sky thoughtfully for a moment before he sprang up, yowling, as if he had startled himself. “I need to find out, by God’s hidden name! That’s my land!”

In her relief, Snowgleam allowed herself a luxurious stretch. She was more worried than ever now, but Tom Dragonhowl had taken matters into his mighty jaws.

“Come with me,” he commanded.

The protocol was clear on the precedence accorded a Princess of royal blood before a Tom, but at such moments one of the hidden truths of their race was made plain. If the ladies led, it was because the Toms let them. Their silent mastery was the foundation of the cats’ society.

In this anxious hour, even the Princess fell in behind him, graciously and gratefully.