The Cats of Tanglewood Forest Read Free

imitation of a hound’s mournful howl and bounded off, higher up into the tree.
    “But I
am
a girl,” Lillian said.
    She started to get up but she seemed to have too many legs and sprawled back onto the grass.
    “Or at least I was.”
    She tried to get up again, moving gingerly until she realized that this cat’s body she was in knew how to get around. Instead of worrying about how to get up and move, she had to let herself move naturally, the way she did when she was a girl.
    This time when she stood she saw the body of the headless snake, and it all came back to her. She backed away, the hair rising all along her spine, her tail puffing out. It hadn’t been a dream.
    She’d been snakebit. She’d been dying. And then… and then… what? She remembered a tunnel of light and voices.
    Fairies, she thought. The fairies had come to rescue her.
    “Squirrel!” she called up into the branches of the tree. “Did you see the fairies? Did you see them change me?”
    There was no reply.
    “I don’t think I want to be a cat,” she said.
    Now she
really
had to find the fairies.

    By the time she’d bounded all the way down to the creek, she was more comfortable in her new body, though no happier about being in it. There were no fairies about, but then there never were when she was looking for them. What was she going to do? She couldn’t go through the rest of her life as a cat.
    Finding a quiet pool along the bank, she looked in. And here was the strangest thing of all: There was her own girl’s face looking back at her from the water. When she lifted what was plainly a paw, the reflection lifted a hand.

    Lillian sat back on her haunches to consider this.
    “They changed you,” a voice said from above. “Now you’re not quite girl, not quite cat.”
    She looked up to see an old crow perched on a branch.



“Do you mean the fairies?” she asked.
    “No, the cats.”
    “The cats?” she said. “But why?”
    “You were dying. They had no madstone to draw the poison out, nor milk to soak it in, nor hands todo the work and hold the stone in place. So they did what they could. They changed you into something that’s not dying.”
    Lillian had seen a madstone before. Harlene Welch had one. Her husband found it in the stomach of a deer he was field-dressing, a smooth, flat, grayish-looking stone about the size of a silver dollar. You had to soak it in milk and then lay it against the bite, where it would cling, only falling off when all the poison had been drawn out. It worked on bites from both snakes and rabid animals.
    “Will I be like this forever?” Lillian asked.
    “Maybe, maybe not,” the crow said.
    “What does that mean?”
    “You know the stories,” he said. “What was changed once can be changed again.”
    “I don’t know that story,” Lillian said. “I don’t know any stories about snakes. I only know that song about the awful, dreadful snake, and the little girl dies in it.”
    The crow nodded his head. “That’s a sad song.”
    “Can you tell me what to do?”
    “Can’t.”
    “But—”
    “Not won’t,” the crow said, “but can’t. I know the stories, but the stories don’t tell how one thing is changed into another, just that it is. You have to ask someone who knows something about magic.”
    “Like the cats.”
    “Well, now,” the crow said, “any other day and I’d say yes to that. But that’s a big magic those cats did, and they’ll be hiding now.”
    “Hiding from what?”
    “You know.”
    Lillian shook her head. “But I don’t. I don’t seem to know
anything
anymore.”
    The crow looked one way, then another.
    “Him,” he said in a soft croak. “They’ll be hiding from him. Cats are magic, but they’re not supposed to work magic. He doesn’t like that.”
    Lillian gave a nervous look around herself as well, though she had no idea what she was looking for.
    “Who are you talking about?” she whispered.
    “The Father of Cats.”
    Lillian’s eyes went