Prologue
Snow griffins were once as common as kestrels, though larger and with a greater propensity for carrying off unattended family pets.
They were, as the name implies, alike their tawny cousins, the brown griffins, in many ways. Their hindquarters were those of lions; their torsos, wings and forelegs of eagles. But they were different in one predictable regard, being white as clouds in feathers and fur.
All but one.
One snow griffin bore the name as if it was its progenitor, wearing great drifts of crystal ice on a frame of almighty boughs. These were patterned like silver birch and strung here and there with white sedge and pussy willows. This snow griffin alone stood fifty feet tall and roamed the land under the protection of its Shepherd, a person tasked to defend the great creature against poachers and predators.
Because this snow griffin alone was inextricably connected to the magical well of its homeland, and had been for a thousand years. Though ill-understood, its endless pilgrimage ensured the well’s abundance, and underpinned the magic of every witch, wizard and cat dragon in the land.
It was this snow griffin that cast a shadow the size of a building over the landscape, before plunging to the earth below with a crash that levelled the forest.
Chapter 1
Aloysia (A-lo-wish-a) (noun)
1. A famous warrior.
2. A plant used mainly for brewing teas, though rumoured to have some topical healing effects; smells faintly of sherbet lemons.
On the whole, Aloysia Papplewick was proud of this year’s crop of Prattling Pumpkins; but that didn’t mean that they were proud of her. The plumpest row in the patch – the ones she was in the midst of carving, right in the dirt where they sat – were chattering away as she knelt at the soil’s edge, on her favourite cushioned weeding pad.
Some of their opinions, she felt, were unnecessarily enthusiastic.
‘Well you can’t expect to find a husband when you insist on parading about dressed like that!’ squawked the warty orange pumpkin of Great-Granny Ethelbah. ‘Call yourself a witch? You look like a common florist!’
Anyone watching could have been forgiven for assuming that this was the first time the Papplewick pumpkins had set eyes on Aloysia, when in actual fact, their regrowth was part of an annual valley tradition.
The offending sage-green dress, matching pointy hat (with a bend in the end) and dusty white apron with the little pink flowers on it were not new; sadly, neither was her great-grand‐mother’s commentary.
‘H-important to have an heir,’ came the voice of another of the pumpkins, Second-Cousin Grimwald, who was as white as chalk, and twice as tall as he was wide. He declared his opinion with a sober shake of his stalk. ‘H-one never knows when h-one’s lineage might come to an abrupt h-end, h-otherwise.’
‘Indeed,’ mused Ethelbah. ‘Perhaps your darling friend Ivy has a friend or brother she might introduce you to?’
Aloysia’s mouth dropped open at the presumptuousness. First of all, she was quite content all on her own, thank you very much, and second, even if she hadn’t been, neither Ivy’s friends nor her thoughtless, irresponsible brother were anything like Aloysia’s idea of legacy material.
Don’t rise to it, Aloysia thought, as soothingly as she could, and pursed her lips with the effort. An argument was what the pumpkins wanted, she knew, and she was determined not to give it to them. They were family, after all, she reminded herself.
And besides, she reasoned, I’d be grumpy too if I’d spent the best part of a year in a jam jar.
Because that’s what it was to be a Prattling Pumpkin: a choice made by some of the valley’s exanimate residents not to complete their journey to the hereafter, but instead to rest along the way – often for generations at a time – in their own pointed-oval, speckled green kernel. There was a Latin name for them, of course, which Aloysia well knew, but she preferred to refer to them – especially when in conversation with their families – by the less intimidating and more affectionate term, ‘soul seeds’. It was from these that Tangleroot relatives were replanted and regrown every year, as the valley turned brown and gold, so that they might visit with their descendants for the season, beginning on Harvest Night.
‘And that hair!’ Great-Granny Ethelbah was thundering now, apparently hitting her stride; her largest, greenest wart jiggled with animosity. ‘Red hardly gives a … a suitably… arcane impression!’ Then, her voice rising to a wail, as if mortally wounded, ‘And don’t even speak to me about the plaits!’
In her more impressionable years, Great-Granny Ethelbah’s words would have stung for a week. Now in her thirties, however, Aloysia knew better. Being the sensible, fully-grown witch she was, she had taken the logical precautionary measure of carving the pumpkin temporarily hosting the soul of her dearly departed great-granny with the face of a bunny.
Instinctively fingering the end of one of her two thick braids with her free hand, she blinked… let go, and allowed herself a small smile. Then she returned her attention to carving the green-and-cream-striped pumpkin in front of her as symmetrically as possible: as she worked her wand to have the knife make the right eye a perfect, tiny circle, the left one watched. Next, she directed her wand a little lower than the eyes, so the knife hovered precisely between them; just a tiny, crescent-moon-shaped fick of her wand later, Auntie Madge’s carving was complete.
‘Fanks for keepin’ it quick, love!’ Auntie Madge cried, with an exuberant giggle. ‘On’y it don’t ’alf tickle!’
There was a collective sigh and general shuffling from the rest of the row – carved and uncarved – as, to a pumpkin, they tried to put some distance between themselves and the new arrival. Auntie Madge was a chatterbox, and a gossip, and had left witching behind in her early forties to pursue a quiet life as a lady publican. Ever since, the general consensus had been that whatever had caused this ill-advised change in lifestyle might be catching.
‘NOW THEN!’ Great-Granny Ethelbah suddenly bawled, as if she might resist whatever it was that had afflicted Auntie Madge by sheer force. ‘ON to the subject of your FAMILIAR!’
It was around this time that Aloysia realised she’d rather stick her head in a bucket of cockatrice droppings than stay here any longer, and she stood up, tucked the knife into her neatly embroidered toolbelt, pocketed her wand and brushed the dust and the grass from her skirts.
But Great-Granny Ethelbah wasn’t about to let her great-granddaughter go before she was finished with her.
‘Witches…’ the warty pumpkin said meaningfully, and she looked Aloysia straight in the eyes with such conviction that she couldn’t help but look away; Aloysia knew what was coming, and together it would make up the two words most feared by all magic-users across Tangleroot Valley ‘…help.’
To the uninitiated, ‘witches help’ could sound fairly innocuous: the kind of tired cliché a harried parent might trot out to scold an indolent child. But to those who grew up in the valley, it was a phrase with a special power: a shorthand for everything it meant to be blessed – or not – with the gift of magic.
For those born without, the expression meant that your services were not required; that you could rest at ease, since your magically inclined neighbours had everything in hand.
For those born with, its meaning went far deeper: it was an idiom that had been repeated over your head since you were a babe-in-arms; sung in lullabies at your cribside; in nursery rhymes while your pudgy first still thwapped and waggled your first wand. These were words you’d heard since before you could understand language: they went straight to the core of you, to a part of you that formed before your ability to think. They were primeval and fundamental; a truth so obvious that to question it would be as much use as questioning whether you existed.
It was in this way that these words struck Aloysia, who felt them like a blow to the chest.
While no one, magical or non-magical, could hope to fully express all that they encompassed, that did little to stop the wizard-poet Cassius Centrificus from trying, in the sixteenth century:
‘Witches help’: they are the first to arrive and the last to leave; they ease pain and lift spirits; at all times, they are an ear and a shoulder and a cool head.
‘Witches help’: they each of them do their part; they ask neither recognition nor reward; they come to the aid of their magical brothers and sisters, and protect their non-magical neighbours, who cannot protect themselves.
‘Witches help’: they are thoughtful and intellectual; they are kind and approachable; they are fierce and indomitable; they are the sage and the salve and the shield.
It had taken Aloysia almost an hour to harvest all thirteen of the pumpkins she had carved that day (Second-Cousin Grimwald’s tiny, buttercup-yellow wife, Lisandra, included), and even then, she’d still had to load them into the wheelbarrow she kept by the back door and wheel them, in two trips, along the dirt path and into the cottage.
There had been some discussion over whether Auntie Madge absolutely had to come, but then Auntie Madge had wound back her thickest, thorniest vine and aimed it at the loudest voice of dissent – Second-Cousin Grimwald – who had impossibly managed to shade even paler than he was already, and the matter had been quickly settled.
Even without her vines – now harmlessly loosed, along with everyone else’s, as part of the harvest – Auntie Madge seemed fully able to handle herself against all twelve of her detractors. In fact, as Aloysia pulled the blue-green-painted front door closed on them, let out a heavy sigh and slumped against it, she could hear through the wavy-glass windows Auntie Madge attempting to strike up a rendition of ‘What We Did In The Haystacks (a-roll, a-roll, O!)’, and she knew that by the time she got back, the green-and-cream pumpkin would have at least one window-ledge to herself.
Before she could turn her attention to her other chores, Aloysia was interrupted by a smallish, completely black bird coming crashing out of the sky and landing in a flurry of feathers on her wrought-iron garden table.
‘Crow!’ she shouted and “ung herself across the narrow paved area to where the bird lay shaking.
‘It looked at me, Alo!’ the bird called Crow croaked, in the kind of high, nasal voice that Aloysia had always felt shouldn’t be possible from something with so little in the way of nostrils. ‘The big one! It was tryin’ to kill me!’
A wave of relief mixed with prickling anger “ooded through Aloysia, and for a moment she was paralysed by whether to squeeze the bedraggled pest or shake him. Crow seemed to sense this: he stiffened his scaly black legs, rolled his black eyes, opened his hooked beak and moaned.
‘If you’re going for pitiful,’ she said, adjusting her hat where the wind had threatened to take it, ‘you don’t have to try so hard.’
‘I could have died!’ Crow whined, not entirely successfully keeping the offence out of his voice. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’
‘I’ve told you enough times,’ Aloysia said, ‘if they’d wanted to kill you, they had plenty of chance before I found you. And if you’re really that scared of cockatrices, I don’t know why you insist on going in their coop.’
The coop! she thought, and felt the panic rise in her throat. She turned and started tramping back along the dirt path in the direction of the building, glad of her stumpy, clunky brown-leather boots on the uneven ground, but resolving to hide them among the compost sacks and the pails in the entryway when she got home.
As a witch, she wasn’t technically allowed to charge for her services – witches help – so as payment for her magicobotanical spells, she accepted everything from crusty rolls and pats of butter to strings for the violin she’d never own. On the rare occasion she took her cart into town, she respectably exchanged these with other magical folk for various good, sensible witching essentials like cauldron polish or wand rebalancing.
About the only job she could do that paid in gold was letting her cockatrices brood on the occasional dragon egg, since several species could only be hatched this way, and their natural inclination to protect hoards of treasure made them excellent security systems.
‘I have to go in there if you refuse to get me glade mice,’ Crow argued, flapping awkwardly along beside her. He’d clearly hurt himself in the fall, around where his left wing met his body; Aloysia made a mental note to check him over after she was done at the coop. ‘I’ve eaten all the ones in the big barn. Well, all the ones the coos didn’t flatten.’
The coos were a squat, fat little mountain cow that stood almost as high as Aloysia’s chest, and gave a creamy yellow milk with a taste like crème brûlée. It was also good for rashes.
As Aloysia reached a fork in the path, Crow flew suddenly around in a small circle; he threw her a pained-yet-smug look in an attempt to pass this off as intentional. Another circle followed.
She sighed, rolled her eyes and, before he could reach the ground, put out her hands, scooped him up and restored him to his rightful place on her shoulder.
‘Make up your mind,’ she said, in a long-suffering way, as they bent their heads reflexively to touch each other’s in proper greeting, before setting off again. ‘You’re either a wild bird, out there catching your own glade mice, or you’re a pet who sleeps in a nice warm cottage and occasionally shares my teacakes. Which is it?’
Crow tilted his head thoughtfully – blinked – tilted it back.
‘I reject the premise.’
By now they’d reached the cockatrice coop, though they’d both heard them long before they got here. Born from a snake’s egg hatched by a chicken, the cockatrice is commonly described by non-magical people as being something like the demon offspring of a serpent and a rooster, since both males and females feature the long, frilled tail of the former, and the legs, head, wings, forebody and – importantly – throat of the latter. The sound coming from the coop, then, was something like twenty slightly strangled cockerels heralding the morning – all day, every day, without so much as a pause for breath – punctuated by occasional hissing.
There was a reason Aloysia’s forebears had built the cockatrice coop on the farthest edge of their property.
‘You should leave the door to that thing open! Let them wander into the woods and get eaten!’ Crow yelled above the din. ‘I’m telling you, that fat, fluffy one would have smothered me underneath it if you hadn’t got me out!’
Aloysia shook her head in amusement. This had been Crow’s story ever since she’d found him, as a fledgling, in the coop that same springtime. But when it came to cockatrices, it was rarely their behinds you had to worry about – it was the eyes. The ancestral cockatrice could have killed you with a look, and even now, a stare from their domesticated descendants could render a non-magical person unconscious, and leave a magical one feeling as though they’d had a regrettably heavy night on the strawberry wine. Which was why Aloysia always came prepared.
‘Well, maybe just try to remember you owe me your life the next time you’re complaining about the snacks!’ she teased.
She was already loosening the cords of a red-velvet pouch on her toolbelt, and removing two misshapen, honey-coloured balls, each smaller than her own thumbprint; they shimmered in the golden light. She squashed each one between thumb and forefinger until it was a narrow, rounded cone, then stuffed it into an ear. The sounds of hissing and squawking were immediately dulled, like she was hearing them from underwater.
Thank goodness for that.
Crow took off from Aloysia’s shoulder and perched a little way off, on a low branch of one of the bright-orange trees that marked the edge of Papplewick land.
As he flew, Aloysia slipped on her next protective item from her toolbelt: ornate, silver-rimmed spectacles with mirrored lenses that shone like oil, and reflected powerful biological magic – her circumspecs. Finally, from her hip, she detached a pair of thick, flaking gloves, covered all over in something rough, and mottled white-and-yellow.
Dragon hide.
She pulled these on, crossed to the coop, took a tin bucket of dried grasshoppers from a hook on the outside wall and headed inside.
Having been bred mainly for their feathers (a potent magical ingredient whether whole, powdered or drained for essence), these days, the once majestic, near-legendary cockatrice was little more than a truculent puffball.
As the flock swarmed around her, her eyes behind the circumspecs watered at the smell of their droppings – sharp, and acrid – but blinked and darted above their heads, squinting through the smoky lenses for any signs of a newly hatched drakeling: scorch marks on the flagstone floor; claw gouges in the wooden posts; piles of hay, newly blazing (oh, please, no!).
Cursing herself for letting the Prattling Pumpkins delay her afternoon rounds, Aloysia emptied the bucket of grasshoppers at her feet, extracted herself from the huddle of keen beaks and ruffling feathers and hurried over to where she’d left the newest egg: in a nest of Urtica ignis. The favourite food of several dragon species, the nettle had a useful tendency to turn alarmingly yellow, spotted with red, as dragon eggs approached hatching: the thinning of the leathery shell allowed contact with the drakeling’s pheromones, to which the magical plant responded by appearing poisonous.
The brooding cockatrice had shown a level of loyalty typical to cockatrices, and vacated the nest the second she spied the grasshoppers, so it was easy for Aloysia to see that she had been lucky this time: the egg remained whole, the nettle green.
Late afternoon was spent as it always was, in the shop: a cool, shady stone room off the kitchen, where Aloysia sat, as she always did, on the same stool smoothed by generations of Papplewick posteriors. Here prior orders were filled, new ones taken and messenger birds welcomed and sent away with missives to their owners, directing them to collect their pumpkins – and their spells, after a couple of hours’ work in the greenhouse – at the Harvest Fair in two days’ time.
For the most part, they were the usual sorts of things: Mrs Honeysuckle exchanging a small meat pie for another extract of tickler’s bind for her son’s Hovering Hay Fever; Miss Gulati at the bait shop downriver trading a jar of worms (still wriggling, to Crow’s delight) for an ointment of Raining Cotton for her dry hands, and several other orders in the same vein.
The one unexpected pleasure – a thing that caused Aloysia’s heart to pound – came in the form of a letter from Mr Kingyosō, proprietor of Highly Drammable, the familiar-shop in Tangleroot town. The bottom-right corner of the parchment had been burned away.
Dear Witch Papplewick,
I hope you are having a pleasant autumn season thus far, and that you are in the best of health.
HELP!!!
Cat dragons have emptied the store of dragon-nip!!! They are running WILD!!!! Remedy required WITH URGENCY!!!!!
In exchange for your discretion, I propose 1x appointment at my shop at your earliest convenience.
I look forward to your kind assistance and wish all the best to you and your beautiful farm, shop and home.
Yours faithfully,
Mr R. Kingyosō
P.S: RETURN PACKAGING ENCLOSED!!!
Aloysia immediately suspected her services might not have been chosen because of her familiarity with the plant at hand, or even her skill and swiftness in identifying its opposite. More likely, Mr Kingyosō had called on her simply because, at more than twenty-five years older than the age at which most magic-users found and magically bonded with their cat-dragon familiars, Aloysia had still failed to do so. Mr Kingyosō’s reputation, therefore, was put at no risk by admitting fault to someone who wasn’t actually a trading customer.
Or at least not yet.
Whatever the reason, it couldn’t dampen Aloysia’s excitement at the prospect of finally bringing home her own cat dragon. Wand in hand, she directed her silver secateurs to magically clip the scarlet catkins of grimalkins’ sorrow from the little bush in the shop with alacrity.
Since Mr Kingyosō’s bedraggled messenger pigeon seemed in no hurry to return to a home filled with marauding half-cat half-dragons, Aloysia even promised Crow Mrs Honeysuckle’s entire pie if he delivered the package into town straightaway, along with Aloysia’s note informing the familiar-shopkeeper that she’d keep her appointment the next day, as soon as the doors opened.
Crow was a wonderful, irreplaceable companion, she thought, as she watched him disappear over the horizon, but the bond between witch and cat dragon was said to be incomparable.
Aloysia had spent most of her life wishing she knew how it felt.
Chapter 2
Pancakes.
They were always the first thing Aloysia thought of whenever she stepped into Mr Kingyosō’s shop. For other magic-users, the smell was so normal, so familiar, that they soon stopped noticing it altogether, but not being around infant cat dragons – or, to give the youngsters their proper name, dramalkittens – every day, the maple-syrup scent of their coats had wafted around Aloysia, putting her in mind of great, warm buttermilk stacks, before the brass bell over the door had finished jingling.
She closed her eyes, breathed it in
Better make the most of it, she told herself, a little giddily, before I get used to it too!
Something in her chest burnt fierce and bright with anticipation.
Aloysia opened her eyes and they fell on Mr Kingyosō himself. The non-magical man was thought of fondly by most of the magical people in Tangleroot, as a stalwart of the valley, and the person who had brought their beloved cat-dragon familiar into their lives at just eight years old.
Taking in how much he’d changed since the last time she’d seen him brought it painfully home to Aloysia just how many years it must have been. The once slight man was now round, and rubicund; just a few thin, age-whitened strands remained of his dark hair, plastered across his otherwise bald pate. His trademark green-and-gold jacquard waistcoat was a size or two too small, and the mother-of-pearl buttons strained against his white shirt. These and his breeches were strewn all over with cat-dragon hairs, in all manner of colours, and Aloysia could see the occasional thin scratch or singed hair running along his thick arms.
Mr Kingyosō turned to Aloysia and spread his arms as wide as his smile.
‘Witch Papplewick! Welcome, welcome!’ he cried, crossing the room more quickly than Aloysia had thought possible, and planting his hands on her shoulders, so close she could smell his – mercifully garden-mint – breath. As quickly as he’d approached, he dropped back and rocked on his heels, his face suddenly overcome with remorse. ‘I beg your forgiveness. A witch such as yourself – of your calibre – after what you did for me – for my shop—!’ Aloysia eyed a long crack along one side of the grandfather clock in the corner, which seemed to have been optimistically scrubbed at with several walnuts. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I daresay that’s exactly what has stood in our way all this time!’ He raised a quill in his hand with a flourish. ‘I didn’t see it – didn’t see you for all your now-very-obvious talents!’
Aloysia felt her cheeks heat, half with embarrassment and half hope.
What was he saying? Had he solved her familiar problem – really solved it – after all these years?
Was today the day?
‘And now that I have,’ he went on, ‘how can we fail?’
Aloysia tensed at the question, and tried fervently not to recount the ways.
__
‘Piebald…?’ Mr Kingyosō muttered, moments later, as he paced thoughtfully around the shop floor: a busy, uneven room lined with square shelves, soft, oval cat-dragon beds in patterned fabrics, and complicated, tree-like wooden scratching posts that stretched from floor to ceiling. Young cat dragons mewled, stretched and rolled on almost every surface.
Aloysia, sat now on the red-leather-backed wooden chair that had been brought out from behind the counter, nursed a cup of sweet tea – the non-magical answer to all ills – as she watched him work. She held the cup a little way off the saucer at all times, to prevent rattling.
A small girl struggled past her, towards the back room, with a cat dragon in her arms. This was Ryūka, Mr Kingyosō’s daughter. Since the creature was almost as long as Ryūka was tall, she’d pointed its fire-breathing end perspicaciously away from herself, wrapped her arms around each other and hauled it up from under its forelegs, so its bottom dragged on the ground.
Even though this particularly rambunctious cat dragon had been labelled a menace, and was belching small puffs of white smoke as it went, Aloysia couldn’t help finding it – like every other cat dragon she laid eyes on around the room – adorable.
The familiars all shared the same basic physiology, having the forked tongues and wings of dragons, in all manner of lengths, spans and shapes; some even had two sets, while one had a pair too tiny to be anything other than ornamental. Their snouts – some reptilian, some cat-like – ranged from round to pointed and even flat, giving them a look as if they’d once run very fast into something very stubborn.
Their ears and tails were feline, but their eyes varied: some had the round pupils of a lizard, others the vertical slits of a cat or serpent. And they were all covered from head to toe in fur akin in length to some species of cat or other, from classically short to floor-sweeping; fur in patterns from plain and mottled to spotted and striped, and in colours from sophisticated blacks to muted browns and greys, to more reptilian jewel tones: peridot greens, carnelian oranges, lazuli blues and soft, quartzy pinks.
I wonder which of you is mine? Aloysia caught herself thinking, and kicked herself reproachfully, as if there was a table in front of her to hide the movement.
‘Maybe … even … a Trimtail…?’ Mr Kingyosō put in, as he stretched up to assess a striped specimen, lifting its narrow tail – about half the length of the average cat dragon Aloysia saw prowling around the room – before scribbling a few notes in his black-leather pocketbook. Then, raising his voice: ‘Would that be acceptable to you, Witch Papplewick?’
Distracted by trying not to fawn over a dandelion-yellow – and particularly pint-sized – cat dragon that had just snuggled down onto one of her feet and was now chewing on the end of her bootlace, Aloysia jerked her head up at the sound of her name. She had been so busy trying not to get any more emotionally invested in the idea of finally taking home a familiar after all these years, she had completely forgotten the etiquette.
It was a commonly held belief among many magical families that the cat dragon a magic-user chose – or rather, Aloysia thought, with a twinge, who chose them – was connected to that witch or wizard in a deeply personal way. While there were those who studied the subject, it was still not well understood, and so as usual when knowledge is lacking, myth and speculation had rushed in to fill the void.
There were those who held, as Great-Granny Ethelbah did, that the qualities of a cat dragon were symbolic of qualities in its owner, and that certain physical attributes (pupil shape, fur colour, tongue length and so on) reflected personality traits such as trustworthiness, kindness, generosity – and their inverses.
Others believed these cat-dragon qualities, along with additional aspects such as the rarity of the coat pattern, hue of the flame and certain behavioural quirks, reflected not the personality but the destiny of a witch or wizard: gold and silver coats with uncommon shimmer indicated wealth, while a rare, hairless cat dragon was a warning of a life cut short.
It was polite, then, given these cultural associations, for Mr Kingyosō to give his customers privacy during these consultations, and to gently request to be permitted to put forward any cat dragon that possessed a quality that could cause controversy.
Aloysia wondered briefly if there was a respectful way to say that, at this point, she’d happily accept one with three heads.
‘No, no!’ Mr Kingyosō blurted before she could reply, and he snatched the page from his pocketbook, screwed it up and tossed it over his shoulder. ‘Listen to yourself, man!’ he reprimanded himself enthusiastically. ‘What am I suggesting?’
Aloysia set down her teacup on the desk behind her, and tried to adjust her posture, to make herself as comfortable as possible for a prospective familiar. For his part, Mr Kingyosō bustled off back among the cat dragons, and began lifting them down from shelves and scratching posts, variously arranging them about his shoulders, arms – even his head – until he finally made his way back over to her, looking exactly like a city statue come to life, and perched upon by some highly unorthodox pigeons.
‘My dear witch,’ he said, with an unfamiliar deference that made her blush harder than ever. He held out a forearm to which clung, by both full sets of front claws, a lilac-coloured dramalkitten. ‘This Single-Fanged, Curl-Tongued Quadwing is most pleased to make your acquaintance. CUSHION!’
This last to Ryūka, who appeared with said item and placed it in Aloysia’s lap, before her father allowed the cat dragon to drop onto it.
The familiar took an immediate interest, gazing up at Aloysia and cocking its head from side to side, before getting up on its hindlegs and pressing its front paws against her chest. Her chin wobbled at its beauty, and its long, pink forked tongue unfurled to lick her just as Mr Kingyosō barked a refusal, and the cat dragon was swept away.
The two on his shoulders met the same fate, one of them barely grazing the cushion before he cried out, ‘Pah! Ridiculous!’ and replaced it with the fourth: a ‘Velvet-Pawed, Pin-Clawed Longhair’ who purred insistently at Aloysia.
She knew what Mr Kingyosō was waiting for, of course – over the years, she’d done this dance a dozen times. It was the reason Ryūka was now fidgeting gently beside him, elbows out, with a small, reddish-brown tortoiseshell brush held tight in both hands.
The Flickering, as it was called when magic-user and cat dragon first connected – the most important stage, before three uninterrupted days together sealed their lifelong Bond – involved three immutable steps. First, the familiar must be allowed to assess its prospect by whatever means it deemed appropriate. Second, trust was indicated by the creature rolling onto its back to show its stomach, tail lowered and all four limbs slack; at this point it was acceptable for the witch or wizard to stroke or otherwise fuss the bared belly. Third and finally, should this prove acceptable, the cat dragon would right itself, the ritual brush would be passed, and the magic-user would use it to stroke the cat dragon from the top of the head to the tip of the tail.
This much Aloysia understood, though she had never made it even as far as the second stage. But here was where it became purely theoretical to her: ‘a successful match,’ the books said, ‘will reveal itself when the breeze becomes lightning.’
Even as an eight-year-old she’d known this had to be a metaphor; or else, she’d reasoned, Mr Kingyosō’s shop would have required a lot more mops.
She’d glanced instinctively over at the side door – the eight-year-old part of her apparently still keen to make certain about the nature of Mr Kingyosō’s cleaning supplies – when Ryūka squeaked. Aloysia looked quickly back at the girl and saw that her eyes were wide, her little feet running on the spot with excitement. Aloysia followed her gaze to the cat dragon in her lap – which had rolled onto its back.
Chapter 3
Aloysia’s skin prickled; the hairs stood up on the back of her neck and arms, as if each was lifting its head to watch.
Perfect imperfections, she thought.
She waggled the little beast affectionately, and its front paws – hard, rubbery pads, with just the tiniest pinpricks of drawn-in claws – closed gently around her fingers.
Somewhere far away, there was the skittering of soles on the stone floor, a skidding sound and a squeak of complaint: Mr Kingyosō was having to hold Ryūka back.
It came to Aloysia as she looked, smiling, into the cat dragon’s huge, round-pupilled eyes: a name she’d forgotten she’d ever thought of, when she was just eight years old, and abuzz with the anticipation of her first visit; a name she must have held onto for all these years – these decades – somewhere hidden even from herself.
‘Hello, Stardancer,’ she said, tightening her fingertips in a playful scratch.
Stardancer held her gaze, bent her head low to lick the top of Aloysia’s middle knuckle, and then a lot of things happened at once.
Stardancer bit down, hard; Aloysia squealed; Ryūka wailed; there was a muffled crash that seemed to come from a different room.
A sharp, deep pain bloomed in Aloysia’s knuckle, and she jerked instinctively to pull her hand away.
Stardancer held on, dangling from her hand by teeth and – now – claws: Aloysia sucked in air with the shock as the claws scratched at the side of her hand and the base of her thumb.
‘Witch Papplewick!’ Mr Kingyosō cried, stumbling over himself to get to her.
‘Ooh – fire! Fire, Daddy!’ cried Ryūka, and Aloysia saw, through the blur of tears, the shopkeeper stop dead in his tracks, twisting on the spot with indecision. A small, pink flame had burst into life and could be seen flickering through the high window in the side door: it must be burning somewhere at the end of the hallway beyond.
‘Mr Kingyosō!’ shrieked Aloysia, as he fled through the side door to put out the fire, leaving her and Ryūka to stare after him, and back at each other.
‘It’s okay!’ said Ryūka, apparently recovered from the initial shock, and now sounding positively cheerful at the chance to make herself genuinely useful. ‘I know what to do!’
Why my wand hand? Aloysia cursed, trying to reach across herself and into the pocket of her dress for said magical instrument. After a brief, infuriating struggle, she managed to fumble her wand out – only to flinch at the pain of another scratch and drop it, with a metallic clatter, onto the familiar-shop floor.
‘There, there,’ Ryūka cooed, softly. Aloysia felt the girl’s hot breath in her ear where she’d turned to look at her pocket.
‘Ryū—’ she began, turning to explain – as patiently as possible when the pain in her finger was sharpening – that while she appreciated the girl’s attempts to calm her, this situation was very different from Ryūka’s parents trying to soothe her at bedtime. But she broke off at the feeling of pressure being released from her knuckle.
Aloysia winced at a final scratch from Stardancer and watched as Ryūka moved the little hand that had been ruffling the cat dragon under the chin down, over its ribcage. This cat dragon was much younger and smaller than the one the girl had hefted out earlier, and she was able to lift it away with one hand on its chest, and one under its rear end.
‘You’ve just got to know where to tickle them!’ she said brightly, and she twisted on tiptoe and dropped the cat dragon gently onto its paws, among the handful of marauders who Aloysia now saw were surrounding them, yowling with interest.
Aloysia drew her feet up onto her seat instinctively, clutching her hand to her chest; it throbbed.
‘Thank you,’ she breathed, looking at the small girl with almost as much awe as she had at the now-hateful cat dragon.
__________
Aloysia found herself one golden letter-opener heavier as she stepped out of Mr Kingyosō’s shop into the mid-morning light.
The shopkeeper had refused to take no for an answer, pressing it into her good hand between fervent, seemingly endless apologies as he tried to convince her to let him clean and bind her bad hand in the traditional non-magical way: with searing rubbing alcohol, strips of gauze and tape.
As she examined her own magical dressing – a discreet ointment that was already getting to work – Aloysia thought wryly that, had Mr Kingyosō had his way, her wand-hand would look like a particularly grim – and poorly wrapped – Harvest Night present.
She gave herself a little shake. She couldn’t be wasting time dwelling on what – let’s be honest – were really just glorified pets, when you thought about it. Not when there was so much still to get done back at the farm before the next day’s festivities.
But even as she thought it, she felt years of quiet resolve crack, and she knew she wasn’t fooling herself anymore.
Because the truth was a thing she’d spent twenty years trying to keep at bay, whenever she passed a paint-spattered coven of artistic witches creating a beautiful mural in perfect synchronisation, or a group of musical wizards sipping ginger beer and laughing with disbelief as they improvised a melody by wand. The thing she’d shut out when a mudslide that dammed the river had seen every other magical resident in the valley come together to shift the very earth itself.
Not only was a magic-user’s bond with their cat dragon precious for its own sake, but they were also the only known creature that could create a conduit between magics, combining the strength of witches and wizards who shared a specialism so they could cast the most powerful kinds of spells, spells that required multiple casters at once: collective magic.
Witches help.
But without her cat dragon, Aloysia’s help was forever limited.
She sagged, her mind replaying the precious seconds when she’d thought her life was about to change – that she was finally going to make that precious connection she’d yearned for all these years – so vividly, she could have sworn she heard Stardancer mewling behind her.
The world blurred.
But just for a moment.
A messenger bird – a collared dove – flapped around the corner and landed on the cobblestones in front of Aloysia, its message in a canister attached to its leg.
She tossed the bird some seeds from one of her pockets as she unrolled the parchment to see Crow’s writing, which he did by beak and quill, and which she’d come to think of, affectionately, as Crow-scratch. There were three words.
DRAGON!
COOP!
FIRE!
To find out what happens next in Cat Dragon, you can purchase the book here, in paperback or eBook format.
Cat Dragon: ©️ Samantha Birch 2025