As I walked away I pondered how it was that the demonic rats could perceive the Small Folk? They were not cats, they could not be further from cats in beauty or behaviour. I shuddered internally, at the thought of being related to a demonic squeaker. Perhaps it was something to do with qi? It must be. After all, Montadie could see them, and it was clear the rats' cultivation worked in very different ways to my own.

My fur puffed out a little as I thought about it. Here I was thoughtfully, philosophically befriending spirits and elements, cultivating with their love and support. Whereas the rats were thugs, simply ripping the life-force of things they did not care about. Callous, cruel, thieving, ugly, gross thugs.

I made a mental note to try and observe some pixies with my eyes closed. I might end up covered in fairy knots, or mushrooms, or worse, but it would, perhaps, be a good way to train my perception.

My stomach rumbled, interrupting my thoughts. This experiment would have to wait.

I hunted my way through the snowy woods, feasting on a lean rabbit, two fat woodlarks and one scrawny robin before returning, tired and replete, to my cottage. It felt like I had been away for weeks, even though it had only been a few days. Maud was so pleased to see me that she made me a second feast which I was more than happy to devour. Somehow I made room. Then, with a fat, full belly, it was time to dream in front of the fire.

I made sure to stop in with Montadie, just in case.

All was well, I could still reach her dreams, despite the vast distance stretching between us. We had a brief discussion about qi perception, confirming my theory that the demonic rats could sense the Small Folk that way.

“Everything emits a qi signature,” she said.

“Everything living?”

“Everything,” she said. “Rocks, mountains, metal, air, anything with a spirit. Even that which is dead, although working with death qi is not something I recommend.”

“Why not?”

“Dead spirits are difficult, sometimes filled with rage against the living. Almost always dangerous. I have lived a great many years, Jenkins, and in all that time I have known only one or two cultivators who successfully worked to acquire that ability. And both came to a foul end. Stick to your sunshine and grumpy fog spirits, my students.”

I agreed, although, pragmatically, I knew I would use what I needed if I needed it. I thought Montadie knew it too which was why my teacher was so boring on the topic. My inevitable future mastery of death qi disquieted her. Tools lying around unused were just tools wasted. With a necromancer in the area it felt only sensible to learn all I could about death qi. After I mastered the other basic elements, of course.

But back to qi signatures, I had more questions. It seemed the more I learned the more questions I had.

“So is there any way to hide one’s qi signature?” I asked. “Or to change it?”

Montadie shifted on her lily pad. Tonight she was dreaming of moon drenched ponds in a humid forest where small, brightly coloured birds slept on the surrounding branches. I could hear some of them snoring through their long, silly beaks.

“There is,” she said, lifting her great bulbous head to the light of her beloved moon. “It involves studying the qi signatures of other things, analysing what makes them them, and then replicating it outside of your own body. At the same time you need to keep your own qi suppressed and inside yourself, so that the two signatures do not mingle. The degree of control needed is immense.” She eyed me for a moment, then sighed. “However, basic masking can be accomplished by the later phase of Radiant. Moððe and Ule are skilled at this.”

My eyes bulged in excitement. I did not want to hide from the rats. I wanted to kill them, but this had many applications. Especially now as I was picking them off piecemeal.

I bade my teacher farewell and spent the rest of my night in true sleep. When I awoke it was morning. The good night's sleep had restored my energy, and I took a moment, curled in my basket, to once more appreciate the beautifully crafted balls of qi stored in my dantian. They pulsed with energy, just waiting to be called upon in my time of need. How nice to have them!

Feeling a little self-satisfied I groomed myself, pondered the perfection of each of my individual toe-beans, and thought about my day ahead. There was so much to do it was hard to know where to start.

First, there were my physical stretches, so I took care of those. Standing, I stretched out my front legs as long as possible, butt in the air, shoulders down, and luxuriated in the cracks as each kink was worked out of my back one by one. I flexed my legs, my thighs, my claws, my tail.

That done I sprang from the basket, stopping only to glare suspiciously at the cauldron on the fireplace. It was bubbling away, and my Maud was bustling around the big hearth feeding the fire with wood and adding ingredients to the pot. The cast iron cauldron did not speak to me at all, despite the amount of time we had spent as roommates. Maud was clearly very fond of it, but if it had a spirit it had not revealed itself to me yet.

Since I had been gone awhile I trotted over to Maud to make myself available for scritches and affection. I knew how she got when she missed me, but annoyingly, she seemed a little distracted. She was doing things with herbs. Again.

Right now she was boiling some of them up, and mashing others into sharp smelling pastes. This was how she made the pretty potions she sold sometimes. When she did this she sang and danced around the house and the air got tingly and very, very smelly. Like iron and like the herbs from outside but stronger. When she makes food the air doesn’t get tingly, and she mumbles more and dances less.

Both moods have their advantages - the food–mumble-mood one I get snacks, the tingly-air-dancing-mood is fun to watch. Not only is my Maud manic and funny, but the colours and pretty ribbons of light that come out of the cauldron are very interesting. Some of them sparkle and explode into tinkling stars, bright lights blooming green and red and gold and purple. Other times the things that come out draw the darkness close, wispy-shadowy creepy crawly things.

All of the things that come out of the cauldron are uncatchable. I knew this, after extensive experimentation. It was like swatting mist. They disappeared after a minute or so, dissolving like mist in the sun and leaving behind only the pungent scent. Maud called all of this witching and Mama told me witching was a particular brand of two-legger magic, and the smells are the smell of one of the Old Gods. I was pretty sure it was the female one who pranced through the forest with the trooping trails of fairies and spirits when the seasons changed.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Hush and Thimble told me that the villagers don’t particularly like having a witch nearby, but they complain when they run out of Maud’s potions or if someone gets sick and she is not around. Because Maud is a witch that makes me a witch’s cat, and extra lucky, even on top of having so many lives. I said I would like to make my own sparkles in the air myself. Mama said all in good time. So I watched and learned some things that one day might be useful about which smells made me sneeze and which ones made me purr and so on.

I did not try to cultivate when Maud was witching, because it did not seem like a good idea while the air was so crackly. And I did not want to get a bit of Old God inside me by mistake, that would be most improper.

Maud is very insistent that I was not allowed to help in the conjuring of these funny tingly magical things. Not yet anyway. Once, when I was younger, I stuck my paw into a hissing pot and the fur turned green up to my shank for a week. So now I helped by keeping a careful eye out from my perch on the sill, and lifting the ambiance of the room with my presence.

It’s not just me who likes to watch. The tingling air and funny smells also attract the Small Folk in droves. Last time Maud made magical things the shutters were shut but this time I could see them all. The Small Folk were not allowed in the house so they crowded around the windows, their faces pressed up against the glass. I licked my fur smugly, from my comfortable front row seat.

Even though Maud could not see them she knew about them, and used her witch magic to stop them coming in, which I thought was very funny. Her charms were nailed over the doors, front and back - elder branches hung with hag stones, beads of amber, and most magnificent, over the front door, a huge iron horseshoe.

I think the metal gave the Small Folk headaches. It did not give me headaches, but was probably why I was not natural friends with metal qi or the cauldron - my cat-fae heritage was getting in the way. Anyway, the horseshoe was so big it must have belonged to one of the enormous carthorses I saw in the distant fields I crossed on my trip to Montadie's. The ones with the great shaggy ankles and the slow, majestic gait.

Whatever the horseshoe is, it does the trick. The Small Folk don’t cross the threshold, and the house is mercifully free of their tricksy ways.

Because my eyes were intent on the tingly light show around the hearth, I did not immediately notice the brouhaha in my garden. When a cluster of small fairies smashed into the glass right next to my face, I did notice. Small cheeks mashed sideways, eyes bulging they hammered on it with tiny fists before pulling away screaming and babbling. A blur of brown shot past, knocking one of Maud’s outdoor pots with a crash.

The Small Folk scattered in all directions.

Rats! Rats in my garden!

I exited the house at speed, qi circulating, claws flaring, smoke seeping from my jaw.

The garden was in chaos.

Pixies, fae-folk and spirits running all over the place. Quickly I scanned the scene trying to identify the source of the threat. There were two rats, but they were behaving strangely. Not as fast as I would expect, and their gait was off…in fact something was off altogether. I skidded to a halt, and watched curiously. The two ‘rats’ were running a little bit too high in the air, and instead of the usual four legs they seemed to have six or more. Six or more long, spindly pixie legs, some of them wearing stripy socks.

A noise at the garden gate attracted my attention. Hush and Wuot had arrived for a visit.

“Is that rat… dead?” my tabby sister asked, her fluffy face perplexed as she surveyed the scene.

The “rat” careened drunkenly through the snowy flower beds, pixies running from it dramatically. Some of the rat’s legs were giggling. I glimpsed a familiar pinecone-headed face peering out from underneath its swollen belly.

“I suspect so.”

“Is that rat…floating?” asked Wuot, and I remembered she could not see the Small Folk. “Should we be doing something?”

“It’s not rats,” said Hush, her eyes busy watching the screaming pixies. Some of them were pantomiming being gored to death by the rat-corpse puppeteered by their fellows. “Or rather that rat is already dead. It’s the Small Folk. I assume my brother is recruiting…?”

“Absolutely,” I said, straightening a little.

The ‘dead’ pixies scattered across the snowy grounds were watching me through half lidded eyes which snapped shut when I looked directly at them. I sighed. “You get that one,” I said, nudging Hush, “I’ll get the other.”

We tackled a ‘rat’ each.

The corpses were, in fact, the ones I had killed back in the woods, and they flopped to the ground easily, revealing the tricksy little puppeteers, who all screamed and ran away waving their hands dramatically. I let them all go, except the ring leader who I recognised as the bold one with the soft rabbit ears and the half pinecone head.

I pinned him down one paw, gently, so as not to injure his scrawny, twiggy untasty little body. He gabbered at me earnestly, in his high pitched pixie voice, not seeming the least bit perturbed by the situation.

“Do you really think they would be of any use?” I asked, over my shoulder to my companions.

“Hey!” said the little pixie, clearly, and quite distinctly. He poked at my paw.

Hush trotted over, another pixie swinging from her mouth.

This one was long and delicate, wearing a leaf frock with all the substance of cobwebs. Her hair was wild, the eyes ice-blue with no sclera. Gossamer dragon-fly wings protruded from her back. Her fingers were long, and her fingernails as long again. So sharp and spindly were those nails that they looked like they could slit a throat without the owner being immediately aware of the injury. She too was jabbering away, a stream of incomprehensible gibberish.

Wuot, oblivious of the noise, was poking at the rat corpse with some disgust.

The rest of the pixies stopped play-acting, and drew closer, all of them yelling and shouting. They didn’t sound aggressive, although they were clearly wary. They wanted something. Well that was just fine. The problem was how to communicate. The little creature beneath my paw yelled something, and all the Small Folk fell quiet. Then he started chattering away passionately, looking deep into my eyes and gesturing at my cottage.

It was worse than deciphering Maud. I cocked my head on one side. Listening hard, trying to separate the noises out into language. What was it trying to say?

“What do you want?” I said, as clearly as I could when he drew breath.

There was a pause.

The little pixie pointed to himself. “Berryman Devil-lad.” He pointed to the gossamer winged fairy dangling from Hush’s jaw. “Polly-wally!”

Polly-wally waved and smiled. Her face splitting to reveal sharp, blue-stained little fangs.

“Ey uppp!” she said in a voice like nails over cracking ice.

“Jenkins,” I said.

Berryman Devil-lad nodded and chattered away incomprehensibly. Then he slowed down again, and said, as if with supreme effort.

“Och! Help!”

“What do you want?” I asked again, a little warily.

He pointed to the cottage again. “Eeeeeee in there,” he said, smiling and nodding. “Safe t’with tha’ big kittlin. We help. Ayeee?”

He flexed a tiny nut-brown bicep, then gestured wildly to one side, beckoning.

Three more pixies, long-limbed delicate fellows, trotted hurriedly across the snow, carrying something almost as big as themselves. They came to a stop before me, and presented me most ceremonially with…what were they? Ah honey glazed mice on sticks. Skewered through, and rolled in sesame seeds. They looked quite tasty. My nose quivered despite itself at the smell.

I looked at Hush, and then at the clueless Wuot. Hush’s eyes narrowed, and she gave a small nod. Gently, she set Polly-wally down. I, too, released Berryman Devil-lad.

Neither ran away, a little to my surprise.

“I think we will need to bargain,” I said. “Before we decide anything.”

“Champion!” shouted Berryman Devil-lad. “Bargain, aye!

All the Small-Folk started to whoop.