Chapter Twenty-three

While the place I returned to had many things in common with the home I ran away from, it was still subtly different. It was some time before I realized that the difference was me. Having faced one-eyed goblins and marriage-minded rakshasas, I knew I could handle anything my family could throw at me.

-Lady Chatterwick’s Journey

She was beautiful. She had known that the silky, deep brown fur of her paws and tail shaded up to rich cream on her body, but she hadn’t known about the mask that covered her sharply pointed face. Rich brown covered her wide, high cheekbones, and surrounded her eyes and nose, making the green of her gaze resemble fresh spring leaves catching the light in a pool of shadow. Her ears, too, were chocolate brown, accentuating the graceful curves and delicate points. Her fur was neither short nor long, but perfectly in between. Thick and soft, it gleamed in the filtered sunlight, the thin filaments almost sparkling.

But she was still a cat.

Beside her, Tia seemed to be having a similar experience. She stared at herself, her fingers tracing her high, arching brows, and touching the corners of her yellow-green eyes. She plucked at her fluffy hair, and turned her coal-black hands back and forth as if she’d never seen them before.

Their eyes met in the mirror. “What’s wrong?” Tia whimpered. “Why didn’t it work?”

“It did.” A new voice came from behind them, and an adult tabby with rich golden fur and bright green eyes stepped gracefully through the door. Her voice was tired, and her gaze was locked on Maria with a strange kind of hunger mixed with pride and sadness all at once. “The mirror shows you the truest essence of yourself. You are each exactly as you were meant to be, and have always been.”

Maria and Tia exchanged glances as the female cat glided toward them majestically. She stepped gracefully forward until the sun caught perfectly in her fur, and angled her chin so the green of her eyes glittered like emeralds. Though the cat was strange, her mannerisms were ones Maria had been attempting to emulate since the day she was born.

“Mother?” she whispered.

Her mother tilted her head in regal acknowledgement. Then her immaculate demeanor broke, and she scampered forward, sniffing at Maria as if making sure her child was unhurt. “Are you all right?” she asked, plaintively. “You were gone so long, Maria! I was so worried!” Roughly, she began grooming Maria’s ears and shoulders, pinning her beneath strong paws so she couldn’t wiggle free.

“I’m fine,” Maria cried, “but Mother, you’re a cat!”

Her mother snorted in a very unladylike way, and nipped Maria’s ear. “A Felis. Yes, I am.”

“Is Father-?”

The queen shook her head. “No, your father is a human man, and I wouldn’t change that if I could.” She slanted a glance at Tia. “As your cousin knows, not all of us are meant to be Felis Queens. My mother expected me to follow in her pawprints, but when I met you father, well… I knew that would never happen.”

Tia and Maria blinked, exchanged another glance, and blinked again. “Cousin?” Tia squeaked. “Then you’re-”

Maria’s mother gave her one last lick, and sat back on her haunches, sighing deeply. “I was born Talia, daughter and heir of the Grimalkin, Griselda. I was raised to lead the Felis, but they are,” she hesitated, wrinkling her nose, “so terribly primal. I was never a particularly good Felis, and, honestly, I was a terrible Felis princess.”

Maria shook her head. “Then how did you meet Father?”

The golden tabby huffed in fond nostalgia. “As part of my adult journey, the Grimalkin sent me to meet the human royal family. Since our kingdoms overlap, our families have a long history together, and the human kings and Felis queens have political, as well as personal ties. I came upon your father in the park, and changed to my human form to greet him. But when we met, it was… magical.” She sighed again, in the blissful way she always did when telling this story, though Maria was quite certain Felis had never before been mentioned.

Tia was almost glaring. “That doesn’t even make sense,” the girl snapped. “There’s no way the Grimalkin would let her only daughter marry a human, king or not.”

“True,” another voice interjected. All three cats turned as the Grimalkin sauntered into the room. She looked around and sniffed, wrinkling her nose. “Talia, this room reeks. How can you stand it?”

Maria stared at this latest intruder with new eyes. Now that she had seen herself, she realized that she herself was almost a miniature copy of the Grimalkin… Her grandmother! The older cat’s eyes were sapphire, instead of emerald, and her fur was slightly lighter than Maria’s, but otherwise they were nearly identical. She wondered, if she had known what she looked like before, would she have guessed? Then she glanced at Tia, who was looking poleaxed, and decided that it was simply such an outlandish idea that no one could possibly have known.

“But King Magnus is not, quite, entirely human, no matter what my daughter would like to believe.” Griselda sounded extremely self-satisfied as she came to sit near her daughter, whose slumped shoulders and lowered ears looked abruptly sulky. “While the human strain breeds true when a Felis marries a human, if that offspring weds another Felis, some of their kits will be human, but some few may be Felis.”

“Then Grandma is-” Maria broke off at the absolutely absurd idea that her absent-minded, embroidery-loving, gentle grandma could possibly be a cat in her spare time. In fact, neither of her father’s parents had any of the rather sharp and forceful personality traits that Maria associated with the Felis - at least the ones she had met.

The Grimalkin snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous, girl. Those soft fools wouldn’t last a day in the Felis court. No, the last Felis in that family was over a hundred years ago, but breeding will tell.” She fixed her daughter with a gimlet eye. “I told Talia that, as I had no other female children, if she wished to wed her human prince, she would have to bear as many children as she could, in hopes that one of them would be Felis. And,” she turned a measuring gaze on Maria, “here we are.”

“But,” Maria swallowed. “But Tia turned me into a Felis when she bit me…”

Both the Grimalkin and Maria’s mother snorted. Griselda outright laughed. “That’s a ridiculous tale for children. A human can no more become a Felis than a Felis can become a human.” With that, her hard stare shifted back to her daughter, who immediately stopped looking amused, and shifted to defensive.

“In any case,” Maria’s mother said, “I changed my name, and Mother told the other Felis that I had died. So long as they believed I was alive, there would be those who insisted I was the rightful heir, and no one else would be accepted as the new Grimalkin. The Felis are very strict about inheritance.”

Tia nodded at this, frowning. “That’s true. The only reason anyone was willing to accept me was because I was the Grimalkin’s granddaughter.”

Maria looked at her friend with new eyes. No wonder Tia had been so worried about being a perfect Felis! If she was expected to become the next queen, her qualifications would need to be unassailable, and having an imperfect human form, or being unable to shift at all, would probably disqualify her.

Their grandmother shook her head. “Those sons of mine were unable to produce a single female kitten, except for Petunia, and Petunia has been avoiding her lessons since she was old enough to understand what they were lessons for. That’s why I sent her and young Tobias here. I hoped that one of Talia’s girl kits would be a true Felis, in spite of their father’s blood.”

“But then why did I turn into a cat?” Maria asked, trying to turn the conversation back to the topic at hand, because her own mother was now glaring daggers at the Grimalkin.

Surprisingly, it was Tia who answered. “Because you were frightened,” she said, slowly. “That’s usually how it happens. We start off as cats, of course, and shift to our human shape when something happens that we need to be human for. You fell from the tree, and instinctively, you knew you’d be hurt if you fell so far as a human. But a cat… Well, a cat always lands on their feet.” She sounded quite smug.

“Exactly right,” Griselda said. “You needed to be a cat, and so you were.”

“But then why haven’t I shifted back?” Maria demanded, looking at herself in the mirror again. “Tia changed when we were drowning,” she ignored her mother’s gasp of shock, “so I should have, too, right?”

“But Petunia knew she could. Your mother never told you any such thing, and so you believed, to your very core, that the only way to turn back into a human was through some kind of magic, which would counter the magic used to change you in the first place.” If the Grimalkin had been human, she would have raised one brow as she looked at her daughter chidingly, as if to say everything was Queen Evelyn’s fault.

“I told Jelly,” the queen muttered. “She was the eldest. By the time Maria was born, and none of the others had shifted, well, I was too busy with my duties, and all the children, and dear Jelly was so upset that she couldn’t change. I thought it would be best to just wait and tell all of them later.”

Jalinda was upset? Perfect princess Jalinda? Jalinda who had always been everything that Maria wanted to be? That Jelly wanted something that Maria had? In spite of herself, Maria found a dark corner of her heart lit with a satisfied sort of glee. She poked it down, but it sat and giggled quietly to itself, whether she acknowledged it or not.

“Nonsense,” Griselda snapped. “You’ve never had the sense God gave a flea, Talia. It’s all for the best that you ran off with your golden prince. Now, your daughter,” she turned an approving gaze on Maria, she shows some gumption and independence. She’ll make a wonderful Grimalkin.”

Maria’s jaw dropped open. “Wait. What?” She and Tia chorused.

The Grimalkin tapped a paw impatiently. “Well, of course. You’re the daughter of my daughter, and the Felis line carries through the mother. Your claim is far better than Petunia’s, and she never wanted it anyway.”

Maria turned to stare at Tia, who stared back. A huge grin was forming on her friend’s face, and Maria’s heart lifted at the sight of it. Tia whooped, which led to all three of the cats shushing her. “Yes!” Tia whisper-yelled. “I can do whatever I want!” She turned her grin on Maria. “I’m going to be just like your Lady Chatterwick! I’m going to travel all over the world, and maybe I’ll never come back!” She giggled gleefully, and Maria suddenly felt quite worried about what being the Felis Grimalkin entailed, exactly.

“But,” Maria said, weakly, “I still can’t shift back to a human.”

Her grandmother scoffed. “Of course you can. You haven’t actually tried, yet.”

Maria opened her mouth to say that of course she had tried, and then realized she hadn’t. Not since she had first shifted, and Tia had told her that it was Felis magic making her stay a cat. Even when she stood in front of the mirror, she hadn’t really tried, she had just waited for more magic to turn her back into a girl.

“Oh”, she said, and closed her eyes again.