Nine Lives

Chapter 1 – You’re in My Spot

Lord Merrow has the ugliest ceiling in Kellsport, and I’ve been staring at it for an hour.

That’s the job when you’re hiding on a rafter. You lie flat, you breathe quietly through your nose, and you count the gold leaf some poor b*st*rd painted onto every bloody beam.

Below me, his study smells of lamp oil and too much money. The guard outside the door coughs, scratches his *ss and shuffles off down the hall. Changeover. The next one’s always late, Morag says, because he stops in the kitchen to pester the cook.

One letter. Green wax. Take it, leave nothing, be back at the Keep before they light the kitchen fires.

My first job alone. Seven years of Morag rapping my knuckles with a spoon and calling me useless. Tonight she finally looked me up and down and said, “Go on, then. Don’t make me regret it.”

She won’t. I’m going to be so perfect she’ll have to dig around for something else to sneer at, and she’ll hate every second of it.

Something heavy lands on the beam behind my feet.

The whole rafter trembles. My heart tries to climb out of my mouth. I turn my head as slowly as I can.

It’s a cat. A fat tabby, striped like a badly made bed, strolling down the beam toward me and taking his time about it.

He stops at my boots and sniffs them. Then he looks me dead in the eye.

“You’re in my spot.”

I nearly go over the side. My hands grab at the wood, my knee cracks off the beam, and for one awful second I’m hanging half off it while my whole life flashes past. It’s mostly shoveling horse sh*t. Not a great life, honestly.

I haul myself back up and stare around the study. Nobody. Just the cat.

“Who said that?” I hiss.

“I did. Move.”

His mouth moved. It’s the cat. It’s the actual f*ck*ng cat.

“No,” I whisper, because apparently I argue with animals now. “I was here first.”

“This is my beam. I’ve slept on it since I was a kitten. You smell like horse, and you’re lying on my warm bit.”

“I’m working.”

“Don’t care.”

Okay. Okay. Either all those poison lessons have finally rotted my brain, or Lord Merrow owns a talking cat, and I honestly don’t know which one scares me more.

“Move,” he says, “or I yowl.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

He opens his mouth wide enough to show me every tooth he owns.

Fine! I wriggle backward along the beam on my belly, splinters going into my palms. He waddles into the warm patch where I was lying, turns round three times and flops down.

Then he looks right at me and yowls anyway. It’s a horrible sound, like a gate hinge being murdered.

“You little shite,” I breathe.

Boots in the hall, fast ones. The door bangs open, and a guard with a lantern stands there squinting up at the ceiling.

“Bloody cat,” he says. Then the lantern swings, and the light finds my face.

So much for perfect.

I drop, hitting the desk with both knees bent, and papers go everywhere. The letter’s right under the lamp, where Morag said it would be. Green wax seal with a little hound pressed into it. I shove it down my shirt.

The guard’s coming at me with his sword half out.

I grab the nearest thing, which turns out to be an inkwell, and throw it.

It hits him square in the face. He stands there with blue ink dripping off his eyebrows, looking so shocked I nearly say sorry. Then he roars, and I’m out the window.

The roof tiles are wet with dew. I run across them the way Fergus taught me to run along a hayloft beam, light and flat-footed, never looking down, and jump the gap to the next house. Behind me, Merrow’s entire household is waking up. Somebody’s yelling “Thief!” Somebody else is yelling for the dogs to be let loose.

Something thumps onto the tiles behind me.

“You threw a pot at Barnaby,” the tabby pants. “Barnaby gives me ham.”

“Go home!”

“This is home. This is my roof. These are all my roofs.” He trots after me, his belly swinging side to side. “I’m Terror-of-the-Eaves. Everybody knows me.”

We stop behind a chimney to catch our breath. The moon catches the little brass tag on his collar.

It says MUFFIN.

“Terror-of-the-Eaves,” I say.

“Don’t.”

Two more roofs, then the drainpipe behind the Drowned Man. I slide down it, lose my grip near the bottom and land on a bench.

Unfortunately there’s a man already sitting on it.

“Oof,” he says, because most of me is in his lap.

“Sorry, sorry, I’m-”

Lanterns swing round the corner. Three of Merrow’s men, coming at a jog.

I’m about to bolt, but he’s quicker. He whips his cloak off his shoulders and throws it over both of us. Then his hand’s on the back of my neck, pulling me in until we’re nose to nose in the dark, under a tent of wet wool.

“Pretend we’re lovers,” he breathes.

Easy for him to say. His breath’s on my mouth. His thumb’s on the side of my throat, right where my pulse is kicking like a horse that hates its stall.

The lanterns go past. One of the guards snorts. “Get a room, you two.”

They don’t stop. Their boots go on down the alley, and the light goes with them.

Neither of us moves.

The tavern’s back window throws a bit of light in under the cloak, enough to see him by. Raven black hair that won’t lie flat. A little scar cutting through one eyebrow. And he’s looking at my mouth.

I’m looking at his too. What’s wrong with me? I’m actually thinking about kissing my unexpected savior. I’ve got a stolen letter down my shirt and half of Merrow’s house out for my blood, and all I can think about is how lovely and plump his bottom lip looks.

He swallows. He’s thinking about it too. I can see it in his eyes.

Nobody kisses anybody.

He lifts the cloak, and the cold rushes back in. “They’re gone.”

He doesn’t talk like someone from Kellsport. He’s got that up-and-down Caerwen lilt, every sentence lifting at the end. And now that I think about it, he froze when the guards came round the corner, same as me. Whatever he’s doing in this alley, he didn’t want them asking about it either.

His hand comes off my neck. There’s a heavy signet ring on it, turned round so the face sits against his palm. Nobody turns a ring like that unless the face would give them away. There’s ink on his fingers, too. A clerk? With shoulders like that?

From the top of a rain barrel, Muffin licks a paw. “He smells like dog.”

The man doesn’t even glance at the barrel. He just keeps smiling at me, waiting for me to get off his lap.

He didn’t hear it. Why would he? Cats don’t talk, Shannon. You’re losing your mind, and in the stupidest possible way.

“Thanks,” I say, getting to my feet in a hurry as reality rushes back in.

“Wait, what’s your-”

I’m already gone, round the far end of the alley and into the dark.

“I’m Owen, by the way!” he shouts after me.

I don’t turn around. I just say it once in my head, to see how it sounds. Owen. It’s a good name. Suits him.

But I’m not prone to flights of fancy, and I’ll probably never see him again.

The kitchen fires aren’t lit yet when I drop over the wall into the Scarra kitchen yard. It was far from a flawless execution, but I actually made it back. With the letter.

There are six cats scattered across the woodpile by the door. Every single one turns its head and looks straight at me.

“Who’s this, then?” says one.

Another one sniffs the air. “Smells like Muffin. And dog.”

Chapter 2 – Cats Don’t Talk

Somebody’s left a pair of boots on my bed.

I see them the second I open my eyes. Good boots, too. Black leather, soft as a foal’s ear, with a scrap of paper tucked in the left one: From the household.

Like the household’s ever given me anything but chores and a bed the width of a plank.

I’ve been in this room two weeks. One morning the steward knocked and said the Queen wanted me moved up from the stables into the servants’ wing, and that was that. No reason. Bastards don’t get reasons.

I try the boots on. They fit like they were made for me, which is creepy. Who measured my feet? When?

On second thought, it’s probably just coincidence that they fit. Rosie must have nicked them off some dead lord’s laundry pile and she’s too shy to own up.

My knee’s purple where it cracked the beam.

I sit on the bed and dig splinters out of my palms with the tip of my knife, and then I