Chapter Fourteen

The longest journey I ever took was the two hours I spent locked in a carriage with my father on the way to my wedding.

-Lady Chatterwick’s Journey

Tia hugged Maria a little too tightly as she watched the carnival wend its way down the narrow road toward the town. Maria understood, but she found that the longer she was a cat, the more she felt like a cat, and cat’s didn’t particularly enjoy being hugged.

“They’re gone,” Maria said finally. Tia continued to stand, staring, even after Fedder, who had been waving from the back of the last wagon, disappeared from view. It took a sharp nip to draw the girl’s attention back from wherever her thoughts had taken her, and Tia glared balefully when she looked down.

“I know,” the girl said, huffily. “I was just thinking!”

Maria glared back. “Stop thinking and start walking! We’re so close to Bremerton. We could be there tomorrow!”

Unexpectedly, a tear glinted in Tia’s eye, and she swiped at it with the back of her hand, sniffling. “I know that! I just… I mean…”

Maria hesitantly patted her cheek with a soft paw. “You want to be home, but you don’t want to go there.”

Tia blinked, sniffled loudly, and nodded. “That’s it. I don’t want the excitement, and the questions, and all of that. I just want to be home.”
Maria leaned her head against Tia’s thin chest and purred in what she hoped was a reassuring manner. “Me, too. Mother and Father are going to be so upset. I don’t want to have to tell them what happened. I mean, it’s not like they’ll believe me, anyway. Plus, there’ll be so much… hubbub! Everyone usually pretty much ignores me, you know, and I thought I hated it, but now, well, I kind of miss it.”

Tia took one more sticky swipe at her face and started walking toward the muffled sound of the river. “No one ignores me,” she said, almost proudly. “But, I guess sometimes I wish they would. I watched you and your family for two weeks, you know, before-” she broke off, coughing awkwardly. “Yes, well. In any case, I thought it must be awfully nice to be you. Nobody expects anything from you. Your parents love you, so you don’t even have to worry about being married off to someone you don’t like, so you just… did whatever you wanted. I mean, you had to go to some parties, but mostly you didn’t even do that.”

Maria firmly resisted the urge to dig her claws into Tia’s supporting arm just a tiny little bit. “I had a lot to do! Princess classes, and dancing classes, and piano lessons, and tea parties, and dress fittings. I almost never got to do anything I wanted to do!”

Tia ducked as she walked beneath a particularly low-hanging branch. The sound of the river rapids was much louder now. “You skipped the tea parties and the dress fittings! Your mother knew you did it, too. She told your maids to pretend they didn’t see you. They almost always knew where you were, especially since it was usually just sitting in that half-empty bookshelf in the library. They let you go, and your mother told everyone you had a headache. Almost everything thinks you must be a ‘terribly sickly child’.”

This last was said in such a perfect imitation of Lady Agnes Montfort (albeit with a lisp), that Maria couldn’t help giggling. She sobered a moment later, however, and started preening her ears uncomfortably. “Does she? I thought she didn’t notice. Or that she was angry.”

Tia snorted as they pushed through the last of the low brush, and the girl very nearly fell into the water as her foot broke the weak edge of the riverbank. She righted herself and they both stared into the rushing, white-capped waves, marveling that they had survived the wild flurry of water. It was doubtless only the fact that, though powerful, the river was little more than five feet deep, that had saved them. That and Tia’s heroic efforts.

The silence stretched, until Maria licked Tia’s hand, and said softly, “Thank you. For saving me, and telling me about my mother.”

Tia looked down and grinned cheekily. “I never would have heard the end of it if I turned the princess I was supposed to be watching into a cat, and then let her drown, to boot.” Her expression softened into a smile. “Your mother loves you a lot. Your father, too.”

They walked on in silence, broken by waves pounding on rocks, and the sound of Tia’s bare feet in the mud and grass. Finally, Tia said, “The Grimalkin is going to be… really angry with me. I messed up my proving quest. I turned you into a Felis. I got lost on the way home. Worst of all, I’ve been lying to everyone for years.”

Maria wasn’t sure what to say, so she just leaned harder into her friend, purring heavily. Tia sighed. “At least I won’t have to worry about… about her deciding my future for me, anymore. I mean, someone who looks like me obviously can’t become the-”

The girl cut off, biting her lip, then abruptly changed the subject. “Can you walk on your own, yet? We’d go faster in Felis shape.”

Maria stretched out a paw. It didn’t tremble, but it also didn’t feel as strong as she’d like. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m definitely getting better, but it might be best to keep on like this for a while longer. I think I’d just slow us down, and if you leave your clothes behind, then if you had to become human again,” you’d be naked, the words were unspoken, but both girls giggled slightly at the mental image of a naked Tia traipsing through the woods. Not that it would be funny if it actually happened, but nudity was always somehow slightly ridiculous.

“All right,” Tia sighed. “But can we talk about something else?”

Maria thought, then remembered something Tia had said earlier. “Have you ever heard of Lady Chatterwick?”

Tia’s big yellow eyes blinked at the shift, even though she had asked for it. “Not really,” she admitted, cautiously. “Didn’t she write that book you were always reading?”

Maria’s ears twitched in excitement. She hardly ever got to talk about her favorite book. “She was the daughter of a Count. Around a hundred and fifty years ago, her father told her she had to marry a man she’d never met. She asked around and found out that while he wasn’t a bad match, he wasn’t exactly a dashing prince, ready to take her away to adventure and riches. She wasn’t interested in getting married, anyway, and so when her father took her to the church on her wedding day, she told him she needed privacy to pray.”

Tia was listening raptly now. “Did she run away?”

“She did! But she was very careful about it. While she was out buying her wedding jewels and being fitted for her gown, she found a shop girl who looked like her. Lady Chatterwick hired the girl to pretend to be her on the day of the wedding, and once the girl was dressed in her dress and veil, she knelt in the chapel and prayed. Meanwhile, Lady Chatterwick escaped, wearing a maid’s dress and taking her jewels and part of her trousseau with her. She went on to have a great number of adventures, and traveled all over the world. In fact, she swore she traveled west the entire time, and eventually found herself home again!”

Tia tilted up her nose. “Of course she did. The world is a great sphere, after all.”

“They didn’t know that, then,” Maria said, bumping her skull against her friend’s ribcage roughly. “I mean, some people said it was, but others thought it was flat, or a huge bowl, with the sky as a lid, and the ocean in the center.”

Tia took this in, then frowned. “What happened to the girl? The one she hired? I mean, wouldn’t she be in an awful lot of trouble?”

Maria laughed. “Normally, yes, but her father was fairly progressive, at least in the way he treated his people. Lady Chatterwick knew he wouldn’t hurt the girl. But that’s not the best part!”

“What happened?” Tia asked, spellbound.

“The Baron she was meant to marry fell madly in love with the girl the moment he saw her. He insisted upon marrying her, and she became Lady Dallinder that very day. The Dallinders are a small family, but they’re still around, and if you’re ever seated next to one of them at dinner, they’ll tell you all about their great-great-however many greats-grandmother Isabel’s miraculous love story.”

“Really?” Tia laughed delightedly.

Maria nodded. “It’s the only real claim to fame the family has, and they trot out the story at every opportunity.”

Tia snickered. “I bet. By the time I was in your castle for a week, I would have sworn that half the people of your country are some kind of minor nobility, while the other half are their servants.”

It was Maria’s turn to snort. “Sometimes I think that’s true. And I’m expected to know all of their houses, histories, and lineage. It’s the most boring thing in the entire world.”

Tia shook her head, nearly walking into a gorse bush. She dodged to the left, and a thorn grabbed at Maria’s fur, pulling out a tuft. Maria yowled, glaring resentfully at the branch with the poof of soft, light tan fur as it shrank behind them. Tia was moving surprisingly quickly for such a small girl.

“So what happened to Lady Chatterwick?” Tia asked. “You said she had lots of adventures and finally made it home. What kind of adventures did she have?”

Maria perked up, her moment of pain forgotten as she launched into a retelling of her favorite story. “Well, there was one time she fell down a hole, into a land where everyone wore their clothes inside out, spoke backwards, and walked on their hands!”