Reserved for the Cat

by Mercedes Lackey

  A tap at Nigel’s office door caused him to look up and smile broadly. “Alan, my boy, good to see you!” There was the young man himself: lean and fit, a good six feet tall. He had a chiseled face with handsome, angular features, frank blue eyes, and hair just a little untidy.

  “Sir, if I may interrupt your work—” Alan began in that Scots burr tamed and softened by his terms at university.

  “None of that,” Nigel interrupted. “There will be no ‘sirring’ here. You are our peer in power and it is high time you got used to thinking that way.”

  The young man’s mild blue eyes lit a little, and he smiled. “Very well, Nigel. ’Tis true enough my people at home treat me in that way, but I never expect it outside our walls. My uncle said only that you had a rather nasty problem, and a dangerous one. What can I do to help you?”

  “Close the door, then come sit down; this will take some explaining.”

  As Nigel laid out the situation that faced them, he noted with approval that Alan was actually paying close attention; he interrupted from time to time, and asked Nigel to explain some things further.

  Finally Alan sat back in his chair and absently swept his sandy brown hair off his forehead with his thumb, then rubbed his eyebrow a moment. “This is a puzzler,” he admitted. “You’re all right, though, a good place to start would be to hunt for places where our Elements are excluded, and I have just the tools for that particular task.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Nigel said with relief.

  “Just one more question, and this one is personal, so you can tell me I’m an impertinent brat if you like and that I should keep my nose out of your business.” Alan paused a moment, but on getting no reaction from Nigel, went on. “Why are you spending all this time and effort to protect this girl? She’s nothing to you, and from what you’ve been telling me, she has scarcely enough magic to qualify as such. She lied to you from the beginning, so why are you repaying deception with trust and protection? I tell you now, my uncle would likely have turned her out the moment she revealed her falsehoods.”

  “Good questions.” Nigel had been prepared for something of the sort. “For one thing, we like Mademoiselle Dupond. She might have begun with a lie, but other than her wild tale of how she arrived on these shores, she has been completely honest and above-board with us. She says that this was all the idea of the cat, the cat says the same, and I for one believe them. It’s not as if she were a Princess Caraboo, Alan. The imposture harms no one so far as I can tell, and she is a very fine dancer. You’ll see that for yourself. She’s thrown herself whole-heartedly into this company, and stepped into the breech when we lost a few acts earlier in the season. That’s one reason. For another reason, she is a legacy.”

  Alan nodded at that. A “legacy” was the offspring or spouse of an Elemental Master, especially if they had been left without that magician for whatever reason. The other Masters—at least those in the circles that Nigel traveled in—regarded such people as the particular responsibility of all other Masters. This was doubly so if those left behind had no magic of their own. Granted, few Masters had any sort of feuds going that would extend to the next generation—yet such a thing had been known to happen.

  “Point taken,” Alan agreed. But Nigel was not yet finished.

  “Last of all, I will admit to you that I have not only liking for her, I have a very solid pecuniary interest in her. She has talent. She is probably not as good a dancer as the greatest of our time, but she is a fine performer, and she knows how to charm an audience. Well! Heaven knows Loie Fuller was no kind of dancer, either, and like Loie Fuller, our Ninette gives every bit of value with every atom of talent she has. And she works hard; performers are rather lazy dogs, in my experience—this girl is not. I expect to build many shows with her as the star turn, and I expect she will be grateful enough to remain here in Blackpool, take what I can give her and not what other, more wealthy impresarios will offer.” He nodded at Alan’s uplifted eyebrow. “Oh yes, I readily admit to you that I am prepared to exploit her as far as she will let me.”

  Alan smiled crookedly. “You mean you will exploit her as far as your own good conscience and her good sense will allow. But I can understand a motive like that, I am a Scot, after all. Very well then, I am prepared to accept her as you have and give her the benefit of my abilities. Well! When can I meet the rest of our little group?”

  There was a flutter of wings that made Alan start, and Wolf landed on the perch beside Nigel’s desk. “You can meet two of us now,” the parrot said, tilting his head over sideways. “So this is the Water Master. A child prodigy, I am told?”

  “You should be familiar with that, Master Wolfgang,” Alan replied, recovering quickly. “Quite familiar, in fact.” The bird clicked his beak delightedly.

  “So I am! Well, do not emulate me by dying too young. And here is Arthur, who hasn’t got the benefit of wings to whisk him through the backstage.”

  Alan stood up and turned around as the conductor entered the room, and shook Arthur’s hand heartily. “A pleasure, and I wish this were under better circumstances,” Arthur said, taking a seat of his own.

  Alan shook his head. “Our kind always seems to be meeting under unfortunate circumstances,” he said, sitting down again. “I met Nigel when he was assisting my uncle with a bad bit of business about five years ago.”

  “In Scotland?” Arthur asked, and at Alan’s nod, continued, “Yes, he told me a bit about that. Very ugly doings. Someone should have done something about that old man long before he got to be a menace. It’s deuced easier to prevent a disaster than it is to clean up after one.”

  “Well, we like our freedom and our privacy, north of the border, and we don’t care to meddle in a man’s business if he wants to make a hermit of himself,” Alan countered. “The worst that could be said of Auld Geordie was that he was a misanthropist and generally had a quarrel with anyone to cross his path, but up until that last, he had never done any soul any harm. We had rather leave our eccentrics alone; we’ve had more than enough of witch hunting in the bad old days. It’s only when the eccentric goes and calls up ancient evils because his neighbor’s a better fisherman than he that we feel we need to do something about him, d’ye ken?”

  “Yes, but the general populace saw the damned thing, and might well have gotten eaten by the damned thing if the Masters hadn’t acted,” Arthur protested. “As it is, Loch Ness is going to have a notoriety I much doubt the natives will care for!”

  Nigel snorted; having been up there, he was well acquainted with the hard-headed nature of the natives, as well as their sly sense of humor and the ability to wring a penny out of stones. “Being Scots, they’ll find a way to exploit it and make money off the Sassenach,” he said. “Without a doubt.”

  Alan smiled crookedly. “I expect so,” he replied comfortably. “When a Scotsman butchers a pig, he uses everything but the squeal. When presented with a monster, he’ll find a way to make someone pay to strain his eyes looking for it. I’d be very much surprised if this didn’t make the papers, or at least, the pages of the annals of fantastic occurrences. Once that happens, every landlady and publican will be re-chalking the order boards with new prices for those who come to gawk.” Then he laughed. “And every man jack of them will be lamenting that the little castle by the Loch is too ruined to rent out, and crying pity that you can’t charge for taking or painting pictures of it.”

  Nigel turned to his friend. “Did you manage to pry Jonathon and Ninette away from the new trick?”

  Arthur rolled his eyes. “Pry is nearly the right word. Something or other got misaligned or malfunctioned or something, and Ninette was trapped in it for a bit.”

  Nigel frowned. “That couldn’t be—”

  “No, it was not caused by magical interference,” Wolf assured him. “Jonathon and Arthur both made sure of that. It was nothing more sinister than the usual business with one of Jonathon’s contraptions. Evidently when he tested it, he hadn’t allowed
for the weight of someone inside.”

  Nigel shook his head. “Poor Ninette.”

  Arthur shouted with laughter. “Poor Ninette! Poor Jonathon, rather! He had every stagehand and half the acts clustered around him while he tried to get her out, all of them offering advice. We had to restrain Bob Anderson from hacking the thing open with a fire-ax. I swear to you, a vein was throbbing on Jonathon’s temple by the time he got her out.”

  “Ninette wasn’t helping, either,” Wolf said merrily.

  “Well, it is a very good thing that Ninette is not afraid of the small places,” said the lady in question, causing all the men to rise out of politeness. “It was not tres amusant, but at least I was not feeling that my breath was being stolen.” She shook hands gravely with Alan before taking a seat. The cat promptly curled up at her feet and watched the newcomer with unblinking eyes. “I am Mademoiselle Dupond, as you know, and this is the cat, Thomas.”

  They had only just gotten settled when the last of the party showed up. Nigel immediately felt sorry for him. Poor Jonathon, indeed! The magician’s collar was half off and unfastened, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and the knuckles of his right hand were scraped and a little bloody. “Damn genius mechanics to perdition!” he swore bitterly. “Give me an honest craftsman who isn’t too concerned with being clever!” He offered his right hand to Alan. “Forgive my shabby appearance, but I have been wrestling with someone else’s Muse.”

  The Muse almost won, the cat remarked. I was beginning to think Bob was going to have to use that fire-ax after all.

  “If I hadn’t got the catch to turn, I would have been the one using the ax,” Jonathon replied.

  “All is well as ends well, n’est ce pas?” Ninette said calmly. “You have discovered the trick of it, and I was able to abuse you most amusingly and you could not touch me!”

  Jonathon shook his fist at her and scowled fiercely and she laughed. “You frighten me not at all, magician! Where else would you find an assistant of my sort? But we should not waste this good young man’s time with our silliness,” she added. “Pardon. Now, you are the Water Master, yes? And good Nigel has told you of the plague I have brought upon his house?”

  “I am and he has,” Alan nodded, and Ninette smiled warmly on him. “And I have some ideas I would like to share with you all—because this will need you all before we are through.”

  “Then say on,” said Wolf, bobbing his head rapidly. “You will never have a more attentive audience.”

  19

  NINA reflected slyly that one of the many, many advantages of being what she was, and not a human dancer, was that she never had to trouble herself with the tedious work of classes and rehearsal if she didn’t care to. Of course, when she was dancing with a ballet company, she had to attend the company rehearsals. It would have looked odd had she not. She had not gotten as far as she had by slipping up in so careless a manner. She faithfully attended all company rehearsals and all rehearsals with her partners, but her mornings, given by mortal girls to round after round of endless classes and exercises and the solitary practice of tricky parts in the ballets then being performed, were entirely free. Ostensibly, as the great prima, she was taking very private lessons and doing her exercises in her own comfortable studio, well lit, well ventilated, warmed by good stoves in the winter and catching cooling breezes through opened windows in the summer. And of course, she always took care to have such a studio, with a gramophone in place of a pianist. All very grand. But of course, she never used it.

  And now, thanks to the fact that she was not a frail little mortal, she was able to devote all of her time to the battle with the imposter, when a human would have been forced to continue those classes and lessons in order to stay at the top of her form.

  But all Nina had to do in order to restore muscle strength, tone, and flexibility was to assume the form she had stored in her memory, of the ballet dancer she had taken when the girl was at the peak of her abilities and in the best of health. In fact, once, on a lark, when the season had concluded and other dancers were taking concert venues and tours, she had decided to truly indulge herself. After all, she had been between benefactors, and she had never yet tried the so-called “sin” of gluttony. So during the glorious month of June, she had spent the time getting enormously fat, eating every good thing she ever cared to try. And of course, when the company gathered together again, she was back instantly to her slim, trim self, with never a hint that she had ever so indulged. Gluttony, she thought, was overrated. These things were pleasant to eat, but they gave nothing like the rush of feeling and power when she absorbed a victim.

  So it was without the need to dance or to attend rehearsals that Nina assumed the schedule she preferred; sleeping until noon, rising late, and going out to pursue her various tasks and needs by night.

  She had chosen her dwelling with an eye to being able to get in and out without any of the neighbors noticing, especially at night. In a way, this was turning out to be one of the most comfortable times of her life, in all truth. She was able to hunt and consume whenever she wanted—which was nightly—without worrying about a protector catching her away from the luxurious flat he was keeping her in. Or worse, catching her at her feast. She had no performances to concern herself with, so she could hunt from sundown to sunup if she chose. She had the wherewithal for the luxuries she had grown fond of, and the leisure to enjoy them without rehearsals taking up her time, or protectors hovering over her. This was, in many ways, a glorious life of freedom that she was actually enjoying. It occurred to her more than once that the girl had actually done her a favor, waking her up, shaking her out of herself, reminding her of what she truly was. It was so easy to get immersed in a human life, to think of it as the be-all and end-all, rather than the means to an end. Sometimes she too was very foolish.

  And the truth was, if the imposter had not stolen her identity, she might well have had done with “Nina Tchereslavsky” in the not too distant future. Human life-spans were very short, and the practical life of a dancer shorter still. What injuries or illness did not cut short, simple old age generally did. She had already begun attracting a few comments, mostly spiteful and from those who wished to take her place in the limelight, about how well preserved she was. It was very likely that within the next two or three years, she would have been forced into counterfeiting her own death as she had so many times in the past, and assuming a new persona.

  That was the awkward part of this; curse it. She did not age, naturally, but mortals did. The first and best way to be noticed in an unpleasant fashion was to seem not to age. She had always been able to find a way to transfer her accumulated wealth and goods to the new persona before but—

  Well, this time it was going to be awkward. She was well known; if she died and left her possessions to someone no one had ever heard of, there would be questions. Worse, if she died and the bulk of what she had owned turned up missing, there would be even more questions. She had been looking into the fabrication of a distant relative—

  But now she would not have to. No one knew her here in this country. For all they knew, she was no older than the twenty years she appeared to be, rather than the forty that Nina would have been if she were actually alive.

  Furthermore, she had two strings to this bow. If she could manage to get the girl alone, for just long enough, she could simply assume her appearance and identity. That was the riskier of the two, because the Masters protecting her might be able to tell the difference before she killed them. Or, she could do what she had come here to do in the first place: expose the imposter for what she was, and use the notoriety to engineer herself a brand new career in England, where no one knew her history, and where she could go on dancing and attracting wealthy old men for at least twenty or thirty more years. By then, she could establish a “daughter,” and in due course the “daughter” would inherit her famous “mother’s” estate.

  A shy, retiring daughter . . . plain, studious, the sort that attracted no male atte
ntion of her own. The sort that preferred to remain closeted up with her books and not be seen too often. Short-sighted, with enormous glasses. Calf-clumsy, and ill at ease in company. No one would wonder why she was so seldom seen.

  There would have to be a husband, of course; that was easily arranged. And the husband’s tragic death soon after the “birth.”

  How to arrange a baby . . . buy one, of course. A fat bribe to an orphanage, a false name, and it would be done. No need for messy things like a human birth. Then absorb it once the fiction had been established; no one of any consequence wanted to see babies or infants. They were messy, noisy, unregulated creatures best left to the attentions of wetnurses and nannies. That would hold things for at least three or four years, until the child would be presumed presentable for brief moments of time to adults. At intervals, then, she would get one of those workhouse children, trot it out for inspection, and absorb it when she no longer needed it. A teenager she could counterfeit herself—and easy enough to arrange rare appearances when her mother was supposed to be sleeping, or dressing, or otherwise not immediately available for company . . . in fact, the whole art would be to find a way to present herself that would not arouse sympathy, but would, at the same time, make it clear just why her putative child was never seen in polite society. Rabbity little red eyes, she decided. Big, thick glasses, and rabbity little red-rimmed eyes. She would say that the light bothered her always and gave her headaches. No, not say it. She would whine it.

  For a few moments more, she found herself so immersed in the details of her next life that she forgot there were the details of this one to sort out before she could move onwards. It was only when the maid-creature brought in the morning mail, which included a large, flattish box postmarked from her flat that she gave herself a mental shake and attended to the present.

  The contents of this package were going to provide her with the makings of the last distraction. And it would be one that they would never, ever anticipate.