Cat is lured away

The heavy train of Catan’s wool cloak billowed and clapped like a flag in her own wind. She would be late for supper again. She was already late, but still she ran. Every second that passed would only compound her cousin’s anger. She could do no right in his eyes, which meant that whenever he did not have her beneath them, he was certain she was doing wrong.

“Cat!”

Her name had sounded soft and short among the trees to her left, like the plash of a pebble dropping a short distance into a pond, swallowed up by water and sinking into silence.

She stopped and listened. The evening was starkly cold, and her head was lost in the fog of her own panting breath.

“Cat! Friend!”

She had not heard the voice well enough to judge it, but her scalp prickled, warning her through instinct that it was not the elf she knew. She slipped her hand into her cloak and patted the hilt of her knife before turning off of the path and into the trees.

There was a man nearby, scarcely hidden, towering over her like the pines. His clothing was strange enough that she knew he must have been an elf. She patted the hard knob of her knife’s handle through her cloak.

“You are Cat?” he asked. His voice was soft and breezy.

“I am Catan, daughter of Flann.”

“Are you friend of de blind elf?” His ‘f’ hummed almost like a ‘v’, and he did not pronounce his ‘th’ at all.

“I do not believe he thinks me his friend, and I have told him what I think of him.”

“He tinks you are friend of him. Listen: he sends me for you. He falled in a hole, and he breaked his… his spine?”

“He broke his back?” she breathed.

“Yes, his back, and now it is not walk for him. It is no legs for him.”

Cat’s hand went to her mouth. The fog around her head had cleared: her breath had stopped. Her heart might have stopped as well, for a moment – it ached so.

“Oh, no!” she squeaked.

“Yes, and he says it is die soon for him. And he says he wants to see you, for telling you it is friend of him you are.”

“Oh, no!”

He leaned uncomfortably close to her and breathed deeply. The cloud of his breath mingled with hers and surrounded their heads.

She could scarcely see him at all. The moon was dark, and though the air had the crystalline purity of a frosty night, the light of stars was dim even to the eyes of a cat. She was all but blind, and her cat’s instincts were telling her to beware.

“Who are you though?” she asked.

“A friend of him.”

“He has no friends.”

“Ah!” She heard a smile on his voice. “It is many friends for him. It is like for you: we are friends for him because we want, and he can not stop us to do.”

If he knew about that, then it proved he knew the blind elf. It also proved that the blind elf had told someone about her. Perhaps he had only mocked her with them, but now he had admitted that he thought her his friend. Now – now that it mattered – now that it was too late – he wanted her.

It was bitter, but it was something besides loneliness. The last month had been the most dismal of her life.

“Take me to him!” she whispered eagerly. His dark face was obscured by the fog of her hot breath, glowing with the dim light of stars.