Howarth had found his tongue. The dapper old man now looked drawn and pale. He pointed a shaking finger at me but spoke to his wife in the pitched voice of the near deaf. “She can prove nothing! Nothing! The money Aubretia gave me, she gave me for love of me. She cannot legally force me to return it.”

  His wife’s jaw dropped. I thought she would faint from mortification. I let the silence gather, then floated my words upon it. “And with those words, you admit a guilt and a shame greater than anything I could wish to prove. Keep the wealth, Howarth. Choke on it. You have dirtied it, and I have no need of anything you have touched.”

  I turned on my heel then and walked away. A stunned silence hung behind me like a curtain, one that was suddenly rent by the wind of a thousand tongues flapping. Like a stirred beehive, all of the Great Market circle hummed and buzzed. The scandal that Howarth thought he had left behind him would now mark his declining years.

  “Nor will his granddaughters wed Traders’ sons. His wife would do best to sweep them back to Jamaillia and marry them off where she can, for after this, they will never mount into Bingtown society.” My pendant whispered to me in savage joy. “You have done it, my dear. You have done us all proud with your success.”

  I made no reply, but cut my way through the crowds, ignoring the comments and stares that followed me. My steady walk slowly cooled the angry flush from my cheeks and calmed the thundering of my heart. I had found my way down to the Bingtown docks where the cool wind off the water swept the heat from my face. I pondered the words I had said and what I had done. At the time it had seemed so perfectly fulfilling. Now I wondered at it.

  “But what did I accomplish?” I lifted the pendant from my neck and looked at the tiny face. “I thought I was doing all this to regain my inheritance. I thought I would force him to give up the wealth he had stolen from my grandmother. Instead, I walked away with nothing. Not even an empty ring remains to me. Only you.”

  “Only me,” the pendant agreed. “And your name. Taken back out of the dust and raised to pride once more. It is what your grandmother abandoned, and what I wished you to reclaim. Not money or jewels, but the rightful self-worth of a Lantis. You are a Bingtown Trader now, by resolution as well as by right. Perhaps you will work as a servant by day, but what you earn will be your own. And when the Bingtown Council meets, you will wield your rightful vote.” The little face smiled up at me. The warmth in the small voice was a family’s love. “And that, girl, is your inheritance.”

  Cat’s Meat

  How is it, I sometimes wonder, that a dog person like myself writes so many stories that feature cats?

  I really don’t have an answer to that. While dogs have dominated my life as companions, I’ve had a fair number of cat companions as well. The first that was mine, really all mine, was Loki, a long-haired black tom when I was a young teenager. He was fearless and as much dog as cat it sometimes seemed. Sometimes I’d find him outside in the dead of a Fairbanks winter, curled up snug between a couple of huskies.

  When I was newly married in Kodiak, we enjoyed the company of my husband’s childhood cat, Chlorophyll. As an unspayed female, she contributed quite a bit to the gene pool of cats on Kodiak Island and was fondly known as “Cat Factory” by the neighbors.

  Today, I am owned by Pi, a black-and-white tuxedo cat who is currently nineteen years old. She has been the most faithful of writing cats, sitting on my lap for long hours while I typed over and around her. Sam, a junior cat at only eighteen years old, is the table-walking, snack-stealing bane of my husband’s existence. And despite my resolution not to acquire any more cats, in December of 2009 both Princess and Fatty were added to our household. Grown littermates, they’ve proven remarkably adaptable to our dogs, kids, and senior cats.

  Fatty is orange. With blue eyes. And full of tales to tell.

  I made a mistake and I’m still paying for it.” Rosemary tried to sound stronger than she felt. Less forlorn and more matter-of-fact.

  “You’ve already paid enough for that mistake,” Hilia responded stoutly. Her best friend since childhood, Hilia always took her part. She might be tactless sometimes, but she was loyal. Loyalty had come to mean a great deal to her.

  Rosemary picked up little Gillam and bounced him gently. The toddler had been clutching at her knees and wailing since she set him down. The moment she picked him up, he stopped.

  “You’re spoiling him,” Hilia pointed out.

  “No, I’m just holding him,” Rosemary replied. “Besides, I don’t think he’s the mistake. If anything, he’s the only good thing I got out of my mistake.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean him!” Hilia responded instantly. Her own baby, only a month old, was at her breast, eyes shut, all but asleep as she nursed. Gillam arranged himself in Rosemary’s lap and then leaned over to look down curiously at the baby. He reached a hand toward her.

  “Let her sleep, Gillam. Don’t poke her.”

  “You paid enough for your mistake,” Hilia went on, as if there’d been no interruption. “You’ve suffered for close to three years. It’s not fair he should come back and try to start it all up again.”

  “It’s his house,” Rosemary pointed out. “Left him by his grandfather. His bit of land. And Gillam is his son, as he bragged yesterday at the tavern. He has rights to all of them.”

  “This is not his house! Don’t you dare say that! Don’t you dare defend that wretch! His grandfather said it was for Gillam when he deeded it over. Not Pell. His own grandfather knew he couldn’t trust Pell to do the right thing by you and his child! And you are Gillam’s mother, so you have just as much right to be here as Pell does. More, because you’re the one who did all the work on it. What was this place when he left you here, with your belly out to there while he went traipsing off with that Morrany girl? A shack! A leaky-roofed shack, with the chimney half fallen down, and the yard full of thistles and milkweed. Now look at it!” Hilia’s angry words rattled like hail on frozen ground as she gestured around the tiny but tidy room. It was a simple cottage, with a flagged floor and stone walls and a single door and one window. On the sill of that window, an orange cat slept, slack as melted honey in the spring sun.

  “Look at those curtains and the coverlet on the bed! Look at that hearth, neat as a pin. Look up! That roof’s tight! Well, it needs a new thatch, but where you patched it, it held! Look out the window! Rows of vegetables sprouting in the garden, half a dozen chickens scratching, and a cow with a calf in her belly! Who did that, who did all that? You, that’s who! Not that lazy, good-for-nothing Pell! That stupid little slut winked an eye and wriggled her rump at him, and off he went, to live off her and her parents. And now that she’s done with him, now that her father sees what a bent coin he is and has turned him out, what makes him think he can come back here and just take over everything you’ve built? What right does he have to it?”

  “As much right as I do, Hilia. Legally, we are both Gillam’s parents. We both have the right to manage his inheritance for him until he’s a man. As Gillam’s mother, I can claim that right, but I can’t deny it to Pell, too. And that is how it is.” She spoke sadly, but a smile had come to her face to hear her friend defend her so stoutly.

  “Legally.” Hilia all but spat the word. “I’m talking about what is right and real, not what is legal! Has that wretch actually dared to come here?”

  Rosemary bit down on her rising fear and hoped none of it showed on her face. “No. Not yet. But I heard yesterday that he’d come back to town and was talking in the tavern, saying it was time he went home and took up his duties as a father and landowner. I think he’s working up the courage to confront me. I heard he was staying up at his father’s house. I don’t think his mother has any more use for Pell than I do. Her life is hard enough, with the way Pell’s father knocks her around, without having another man to wait on. So I don’t know how long she’ll tolerate him under her roof. They’ll both lean on him to leave, and I suspect his father will push him in this direction. He’s always resented me living here. He’s always said that the cottage and land should have come to him first, not gone directly to Pell.”

  “Didn’t his grandfather offer it to Pell when he got you pregnant?”

  From anyone else, such a blunt reminder might have stung. But this was Hilia, her oldest, truest friend. Rosemary sighed. “Yes. He actually brought us both out here, with a minstrel to witness the vows. He told Pell it was time he stood up and acted like a man and took care of the child that he’d caused and the woman he’d ruined.” It was still hard to say the phrase aloud. She sighed and looked at the wall. “Pell refused then. He said we were both too young, that one mistake shouldn’t cause another. And a month or two later, he proved he was right on that. He left me. But at least I’m not married to him. He gave me that much freedom.”

  “Freedom!” scoffed Hilia. “No woman with a babe on her hip is free of anything. What did his grandfather say when Pell said no?”

  Rosemary forced her mind back to her tale. “Soader was a good man. He tried to help Pell do what he thought was right. When Pell said he wouldn’t wed me, Soader said he wouldn’t waste the minstrel’s fee. He willed the cottage and land to my unborn child, boy or girl, right then. It made Pell angry but he dared say nothing. He was already out of favor with the rest of his family. Our baby owning a cottage at least gave us a place to live. It made Pell’s father furious, I heard later. He felt that the cottage should have gone to Soader’s daughter, his wife, so that he could have the good of the land. Not that there was much good to it when we got it.

  “But Soader meant well. He said that a couple that works together takes the true measure of each other.” Rosemary sighed again. “Well, I guess that when I was here alone, I got Pell’s true measure. I was sad when Soader died last year. He was Pell’s mother’s father, and the only one of Pell’s family who came to see Gillam at all after Pell left. Right up until he took the lung cough, he came every month.”

  “He gave you money, then?”

  Rosemary shook her head. “No. But he brought food sometimes, and other things. He gave me a rhubarb start, and walking onion bulbs that spread. Things I could use to better my life, if I were willing to work with them. He was a good man.”

  “Good man or not, letting Pell refuse to marry you was not the ‘right’ thing for him to do.”

  “Actually, it was. Hearing him refuse to speak the marriage oath before a minstrel was important. Up until then, I was sure he would marry me, right after the baby was born. Not that he’d ever asked me or I’d ever asked him. I guess I was afraid to ask. Soader wasn’t. I didn’t want to hear what he made Pell say, but it was a good thing for me to know sooner rather than later.”

  Rosemary sipped at her cooling tea. It loosened her throat that had closed tight as she recalled that humiliation. Kendra the minstrel had looked aside from her shame, but Soader had met her gaze steadily and quietly observed, “So that is how it will be.”

  “Of course, later, when we were alone, Pell had all sorts of reasons why I shouldn’t be angry at him.” Rosemary forced the words out, trying to keep her tone light. “And I believed them. I believed that he was ‘married to me in his heart’ and that there would ‘never be another woman.’ I was so foolish.”

  For the past three years, she’d been pushing herself to take responsibility for the mess she’d made of her life. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes she looked around and thought, If I can make that big a mistake, I can make just as big of a correction. And she’d thought she’d done so. She’d worked hard. The repairs to the cottage had been done by her own hand or paid for by barter. She’d turned the old garden over, one shovelful of earth at a time. She’d barrowed in manure dropped on the roadside by passing horses and worked it into the soil herself. She’d traded labor for seed and starts, and she and Gillam lived cheap and stingy to save up the coins for a spindly, worm-plagued yearling cow. That cow, healthy now, was soon to drop her first calf. The chickens had been eggs, kept warm near the hearth and turned daily, a dozen eggs to hatch a mere two pullets and a cockerel. But they had multiplied to a decent flock now. Her daily gathering kept a stack of wood by the side of the house and a neat pile of split and ready kindling beside it. She could do things, make things, and cause change to happen.

  She looked away from the window to find Hilia staring at her, eyes full of tears and sympathy. “You deserved better, Rosemary.”

  But, “I can’t run away from what I did, Hilia. I made a bad choice when I let that man into my bed. My mother warned me about him. I didn’t listen. Let’s admit the truth. There were two of us in that bed. And I’m going to have to deal with him the rest of my life. Pell will never be my husband, but he will always be Gillam’s father.”

  “You were scarcely more than a girl and your father had just died. Pell took advantage of you.”

  Rosemary shook her head at her friend. “Don’t. It took me six months to come out of wallowing in self-pity. I won’t go back to that.”

  Hilia sighed. “Well. I won’t argue that you’re a lot more pleasant to be around now that you’re not constantly weeping. You’re tougher than you think, girl. When that man shows up here, I think you ought to bar the door and pick up the poker. Don’t you let him under this roof!”

  Rosemary looked down at Gillam in her lap. His lids were heavy; the fuss had only been because he was tired. “The boy has a right to know his father,” she said. She wondered if that were true.

  Hilia snorted. “The boy has the right to grow up in a peaceful home. And if Pell is here, you won’t have that.” She stood with a sigh, closing her blouse and shifting her dozing baby to her shoulder. “I have to go home. There’s butter to churn and the house to tidy. Two of our cows are with calf and will drop any day now. I need to stay home for the next week or so. But you listen to me. If Pell is drunk or even unpleasant when he gets here, you just take Gillam and walk away. You know the way to my house.”

  Rosemary managed a smile. “Weren’t you telling me to stand my ground just a few minutes ago?”

  Hilia pushed a straggling black curl back from her face. “I suppose I was. In truth, Rosie, I don’t know what to advise you to do, so maybe I’d better shut my mouth. Except to say that I’m always your friend. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”

  “I know that,” Rosemary assured her.

  Hilia stood up to leave. She paused by the window and stroked the sleeping cat. He lifted his head and regarded her with cobalt eyes. “Now is not the time to be lazy, Marmalade. I’m counting on you to look after Rosemary and Gillam,” she cautioned the cat aloud.

  The cat sat up slowly and yawned, curling a pink tongue at her. She scratched him under the chin and he closed his eyes in pleasure. “I mean it, now! You’d have gone right into the river in a sack if I hadn’t saved you! You owe me, cat. I saved your life.” He returned Hilia’s gaze with narrowed eyes.

  Cats do not enjoy being reminded of debts. Cats do not incur debts. You did what you wanted to do. My being alive as a result of it is something you caused, not something I owe you.

  Rosemary stood up from her chair. She deposited her sleeping boy on the bed and came to join her friend by the window. She put out a hand toward Marmalade, and the tom butted his head against it. “Don’t say mean things to Marmalade, Hilia. He is the best thing that anyone ever gave me. In those days before Gillam was born, when I felt I was all alone, little Marmy was always with me.” She moved her fingers to tickle the white triangle at his throat. A grudging purr ground its way out of the big tom.

  Hilia narrowed her eyes and spoke to him. “Well, even if you don’t owe me, cat, you owe Rosemary. You’d better take care of her.”

  The orange tom closed his eyes and curled his front paws toward his chest. I have no idea what you think I can do against a human male.

  Hilia cocked her head at him. You’re a cat. You’ll think of something. Or you’ll help Rosemary think of something.

  She doesn’t have the Wit to listen to me. He tucked his head to his chest and apparently sank into sleep.

  I’m not stupid, cat. No one needs the Wit magic to hear a cat. Cats talk to whomever they please.

  Obviously true. But I didn’t say she couldn’t hear me. I said she doesn’t listen to what I tell her.

  Hilia reached over to tug at one of his orange ears, demanding his attention. Then you’d better make her. Pell is not kind to beasts of any kind. If you’re used to being fed and sleeping inside, you’ll find a way to help her. Or your life will be just as miserable as hers will be. “Rotten cat,” she added aloud. “I should have let Pell’s father drown you.”