Sheltering within Hannah's satchel was none other than me. Despite being bone dry not more than half an hour ago, Hannah's cloak again clung heavily to her.

The rain had done a lot to empty streets. Even so, there were peddlers who'd broken the trade ranks to start selling early on the festival grounds. Frequently, arguments broke out between the local guard and these traders.

“The festival doesn't start until tomorrow.”

“You can't tell me when I can and can't sell. It's a free country!”

“The Viceduke's orders are law. Petition them with your grievances.”

“Oh please, the Viceduke just wants to vampire off the profits of honest merchants. The sales tax during the festival is unreasonable!”

“I would watch your tone, sir.”

Two guards let the familiar indignant cries of the merchant fly right past them as they forced the peddler to close business until tomorrow.

“Another one.” Hannah muttered.

That was the fifth argument we'd seen on the way home today. Whilst there was an undeniable buzz about the festival, the faces of the merchants and peddlers were glum and frustrated.

“It wasn't like this last year.”

I didn't particularly remember last year. We never took part in the festival.

Arguments were also breaking out by the piers. Sailors shouted over the side of their boats down at the inspectors watching like lions.

“Every year! People of Kasper appreciate fine goods! We sell at good price!” One captain shouted. His accent thick, and judging by the short shape of his boat, he originated from the archipelago.

“The tax applies to outgoing and inbound goods.” The inspector said apathetically. “The Viceduke's orders are clear. No goods enter or leave the city without inspection.”

“This is thievery! Extortion!”

“The tax is the same as last year and the year before.”

Perhaps it was the sudden change of weather grinding on everyone's nerves. But ships moored on the banks couldn't even turn back to sea with the threat of storm off in the distance.

“No goods on boat. Just people.”

“Then why did you say you were selling items at a good price?”

The captain cursed beneath his breath as he was pulled back from the side of the boat by his cringing quartermaster.

From what I understood, the main point of access to the continent for the archipelago was this river which could carry trade further inland to the kingdom. Kasper oversaw this point of entry and the Viceduke's agenda was to curb smuggling.

Go figure that this agenda wasn't always popular. When smuggling was rampant, amenities were readily available and often cheap. On the other hand, when smuggling was cracked down, tax revenue was high and thus public investiture typically higher.

The war between magnates and bureaucrats in short.

Being a cursed cat, I was naïve to politics. After all, it was hardly like I could walk up to a minister and ask their views on VAT and Import tax.

The sight of home brought relief to my humble old bones. As soon as we walked through the front door to the building, Hannah savoured the warmth.

“Oh dear.” The Landlady caught us on the way in. She lived on the floor below us. We entered, letting in enough breeze to tickle the wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. “I'll go put more wood on the central heating for you deary. You need to dry off.”

The main entrance to the building lead to a large usually empty spacious hall. Here there was a cosy fire and a chair for the land lady as she worked away at her next knitting project. The tenants had to go past her and up the stairs to arrive at their blocks.

So the Landlady always had a good view of who was coming in and out and in what state. Interestingly though, I don't recall ever catching sight of any other tenants.

Hannah looked conflicted between escaping up the stairs or warming by the fireplace as I slipped out of her satchel.

This room had a warm rustic appeal to it. It was the sort of cosiness you expected from an old lady's home. The chairs were cushioned, the fireplace crackling warmly casting the room in a dull glow. Hanging from the walls were wreathes and wind chimes. Above the fireplace, there was a mantelpiece where little ceramic statues of cats were either watching regally or curled up sleeping.

“Do sit down for a cup of tea. You'll catch a cold if you don't warm yourself up by the fire.” The Landlady who had no right to be carrying that amount of wood for her age spoke.

“No, it's okay. I've got a few things to do.”

“Oh come now, I've already got the kettle boiled by the fire. Five minutes of rest can't hurt you now, can it?” With each stoking of the fire, embers chocked up through the rising smoke and out the chimney. Her gentle yet insistent prodding broke down Hannah's resistance.

Seeing this, I wandered closer to sit by the fire. Five minutes couldn't hurt and besides, the floor was comfortably warm here. This was a prime nap spot.

“Looks like Adam has already made up his mind.” The Landlady chuckled. “I'll pour you a cup of tea. My treat.”

The Landlady would've offered biscuits and muffins if she had any at hand. She seemed to delight in company.

“All right. Just this once.”

“My my, just this once? I suppose I'll have to make the most of it then.” The Landlady set the kettle back down by the fire. “How is your studying going?”

Hannah sat herself down on a stool next to the fire after hanging up her cloak by the door. She accepted the cup of tea and paused for a moment to savour the heat now coming through to her cold hands. “Studying? It's going okay. Not bad I guess.”

The Landlady nodded. “You're a bright child. An asset to us all, I'm sure.”

“I don't know about that. The academy might get rid of me soon.”

“Oh no, what a shame dear. I'm sure it's not your fault.” The Landlady reassurance had little substance and yet wise old ladies could be very convincing with their encouragement. “You can stay as long as you'd like. Problems like this will seem small compared to what you'll have to face in the future.”

“What do you mean?” That wasn't exactly the most heartening encouragement, granny.

“It's not the problems you see coming on the horizon which hit you hardest, it's the sudden ones that catch you with your knickers down whilst you're on the loo.” She chuckled as she prodded the fire with her poker.

“Granny, I'm not sure anything like that's going to happen to me.” Hannah frowned with words mixed with equal part disbelief and hope.

The Landlady raised a brow at Hannah's sureness. “Maybe not. But nevermind me all doom and gloom. The rain really brings out the worst of me.”

Her situation was somewhat tragic. The Landlady lived alone. No relatives or family, just a large house and some disparate tenants. The Landlady surrounded by all this empty space, empty rooms, in such a large building, seemed quite lonely.

She must have been quite rich though.

After the tea was finished both Hannah and I went upstairs to our floor.

As soon as she got through the door she went for a chair by the dinning table and fell into it with a pained groan.

“Why is Granny sooo nice?” Thud. She fell sprawled out across the desk, boneless.

It was an odd sight to say the least. By now she'd be unpacking her satchel, maybe preparing food or setting herself up to study.

Instead there she was. Like a deflated balloon hanging off the side of the table.

I leapt up onto the table to get a closer look. “Hannah?” I voiced quietly, aware that Granny was still just downstairs.

“Mmm?”

“What are you doing?”

“Suffering.” To breathe was to suffer, to suffer was to breathe. That was very much the impression she was giving here.

This irked me. Of course, everybody gets exhausted after a long day. Her expectations had been subverted, bad news had been heaped onto her, the meaning of her suffering threatened, and her career path dug up.

I wasn't surprised. This was to be expected. But I didn't have to like it.

Where was the poster girl for determination? Dog-headed willpower which brought disaster after disaster and yet was never dissuaded?

I wasn't concerned though. I wasn't worried nor anxious for her. After all, I'd never get that invested in the lives of my caretaker. They were there only for the blink of an eye. Their names, faces, and the time we spent together were fleeting. There was no point in getting invested as I waited for this curse to end.

“What?”

And yet as I found myself placing my paw on her head, pushing my claws into her forehead in an attempt to annoy her, I couldn't get over how much I hated this sight.

What if she became burned out?

She looked up at me barely reacting.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

“You're annoying.” I casually comment.

“What?” This time there was a little more tension in her voice.

Are you trying to annoy me? Her glare wordlessly asked.

Yes, I answered as I sat infront of her and repeatedly batted my tail against her nose.

“Can't I have a day off even once?” Everyone deserved a day off, granted, but I'd quite like it if she could explain things to Linth before she broke down.

“Have a day off when you're dead.” I was the one who'd crawled through a river of muck, after all. Sure the news she'd received was probably to her akin to being told the gallows was waiting for her. But that gallows was still weeks, maybe months away.

Her head sunk once more. Was this the effect of tea? Was the power of Granny so powerful it could mellow Hannah's flames into melancholy?

Granny, I know you think you were doing her a favour, but this was probably not what you intended.

No, this probably was what Granny intended. To rest her feet by the weary fire with a warm cup in hand. To encourage people to slow down and walk life at an easy pace. But Granny, you take life in the slow lane because if you go any faster it will all be over. Hannah had still had fuel so butt out.

I leapt off the table and onto the kitchen counter. My ineffective strategies crumbling before Granny's shadow, I needed to do something a little more annoying.

To put it one way, encouraging the cat out the door had made it more certain it wanted to stay inside. The cat being Hannah and outside being work in this metaphor.

I knew of a relatively good way of lighting a fire under her again.

“Well, I suppose now is the perfect time for you to give up on magic.” I commented airily as I pawed the fruit bowl closer to the edge.

Slowly, surely, Hannah rose in her chair and stared at me coldly. With my back turned, I couldn't see it. But I could feel it. Two holes being bored in the back of my fur.

“I mean realistically, what can you do? You move forward, you trip, your face lands in mud. You get up but it starts raining. You take another step but you lose a boot to the quagmire beneath your feet. To your left and right, people tread the ground you have to wade through as though they were walking a smooth cobbled road. Your heart burns with indignation, you yell internally 'if I try harder, I will make it' but the disparity in the ground you burn your soul to cover and the distance they make in the world kills you more than the effort to move your enfeebled limbs. Time will erase your progress. Better to sit down and let it happen.”

The fruit bowl hurled itself off the table all on its own. Witnesses might claim that it was under duress from a cat's paw, but they should be ignored.

“Oops. Teehee, I'm such a clutz.” I look over my shoulder to Hannah without a shred of remorse.

“You know, you really are a dick.” Hannah stared down at the scattered fruit. “Do you have any redeeming features?”

“Ehhhh...” Redeeming features? That's probably a pass. Remorse and shame were as alien to me as walking on the moon. “Maybe I'm trying to get you to give up. For the last two weeks, I don't think you've had a single success. And yet, the problems keep mounting up. All that's been happening is one problem showing up after the other without any easy workable solution.”

“And how is giving up going to help that?” She shot me a hard glare.

“If you give up, being kicked out of the academy doesn't become a problem. If you give up, do you really need to care about people stealing from Riker's office? If you give up, Kyle and Killian can abuse eachother whilst you take a nice long refreshing nap in the sun. Does Linth really need new friends? She's fine and what comes to her later in life is her own doing. Shame about the Nurse, but wasted hours are just wasted hours when you learn to put them behind you.”

“Not everybody can curl up into a ball and sleep their long life away.”

But could I even do that? “Nobody can. A child could kill me after all. Without a caretaker, I'm just bad luck. So what if I can talk? Will that actually help me or will it enthuse my dissectors? I can be crushed with a single step. Rolled over by a careless wagon. Ribs broken, legs smashed, neck snapped, organs crunched, and wholly starved. How am I supposed to fix this? I don't even have opposable thumbs. But I can enjoy some life if I nap under the sun with a belly full.”

“That's just contended subsistence. No dreams or aspirations. No goals or milestones. I'm not going to be like that.” The hiss of her words was like the steam rising from a boiling kettle.

And the conversation hit a lull, tension ripe in the air like the still of a storm.

But the fact there was a storm, was my victory. A minute ago, she'd been struggling to find the motivation to work. Now she was struggling to help back the urge to strangle me for accussing her giving up.

I pushed an empty cup off the kitchen counter.

“Stop pushing shit off the edge!”

“Oops. Teehee. My bad.” Was that really necessary? I might have actually gone too far. In reflection, maybe I was bordering on bullying here. No, without a doubt what I was doing was nothing short of emotional abuse.

There was nothing wrong with giving up. There was nothing wrong with taking a rest. To surrender to the passage of time. Having no dream or aspiration was not inherently evil as no matter what, a person would pass through life's milestones whether they ran full sprint or proceeded with a gentle pace.

But people with narrow focus only looked ahead and could only see the milestones they hadn't passed, whilst behind them the flags of victory gathered unnoticed and unappreciated.

Objectively, Hannah was a brilliant person. I say objectively as I would never become emotionally invested in one of my caretakers. Only a day out of her care after she burned her arms and I'd ended up attacked by children.

Hannah's first priority after being released from the Nurse's office was to chase down the gang of children who hurt me. I believed this was what friendship was. A relationship in which two parties endeavour in a pact of trust to please and look after eachother in life.

Of course, there was a flipside. Chasing a stranger's children and threatening them with violence in retribution was inherently evil to most if not all societal norms. But it was the thought that counted.

And despite loathing my guts, despite butting heads, she still looked after me. I couldn't think of a caretaker who had been more at odds with me and yet put up with me this long.

“You can give up Hannah, but to be honest...” it wouldn't suit you.

“I'm not going to give up!” She snapped before I could finish. “But I really feel like grabbing you by the tail and swinging you out the window!” Crack. She exercised her knuckles.

“H-hey now. I was just about to say something really nice.”

“Should have started with that then, shouldn't you?” She stopped infront of me, at full height with her chest pumped out with her hands loaded at her hips.

“I was just trying to annoy you. Please don't kill me! You looked like you were about to give up so I wanted to light a fire under you!”

“I was just resting because of a stomach ache! Oh my god you absolute dumbass!” She pointed her finger damningly down at me.

“What?”

“I'm a very busy woman! I didn't want to spend half an hour chatting to Granny so I drank the tea as fast as I could. Look! Look at how burned my tongue is!”

“W-what?!” Why then, had I opened my mouth?

Why then, had I tried to bul-ahem-encourage her?

Why then, was I about to admit she was my favourite caretaker in quite a while?

For a fucking stomach burn?!

I wanted to grind my head against a wall. If I curled up into a ball hard enough I could hug myself out of existence.

Isn't this what happens when I try to give advice? Heartfelt, honest, genuine advice. Decades of mistakes had not taught me my lesson. I'd said some mean and embarissing things.

Without shame? Without remorse? Who, me? I would never live this down. This conversation would be a thing of nightmares.

Finger still aggressively pointed down at my face buried deep in my paws. “Here's a tip, dumbass. Look up the dictionary definition of encouragement next time. I think you'll find it's about 'giving hope', not existential dread.”

“Noted...” I replied very weakly. “Now please make it painful as possible so I carry this lesson to the afterlife.”

“Are you kidding me? What if I hurt my hands. The Nurse said to wait for them to recover.”

The cheek of her saying that after she'd punched a wall.

“Although I could just use my legs... Maybe we could reenact that bit you talked about about being crushed with a single step.”

“Please do.” Maybe if I try my hardest not to think about this, I can stop this scene being burned into my memory forever. But dead people don't feel shame or regret. Hello, otherside? I'd like to book an appointment.

“Honestly, Adam, do you know the difference between 'nice' and 'cruel'? If you'd settled with a 'you can do it' or 'I believe in you', the results would have been so much better and it wouldn't have taken even half the time or been a quarter as embarrassing. Instead you had to complicate things by being a dick.” The verdict was clear. The executioner needed no guillotine with which to cut me, for it was on my own petard I'd be hoisted.

Surprisingly, Hannah walked away. Although it shouldn't have been to surprising. As much as she threatened me, she'd never carried out any act of physical violence on me even once in life.

Off into the pantry she went as she prepared dinner for the evening. Rummaging with a huff and a deep scowl. Her situation not helped by the stocks running low. We'd need to go out shopping tomorrow.

On the subject of tomorrow, I probably should tell her. But what if- No, if something bad happened, I could remember that instead of that awful time I bullied a student for having a stomach ache.

“Hey uh... Hannah.”

“Not listening so don't bother.” Her voice rang from the pantry.

“Linth knows I can talk.”

“I said I'm not listening.” Not the reaction I was expecting. She continued, determined to ignore me.

“No seriously though, I screwed up big time. Linth knows I can talk.” I hoped she didn't ask how it happened because I was still puzzling that bit together. Although if she carried on ignoring me that wouldn't be a problem.

Hannah backtracked slowly out of pantry. “Sorry, say that bit again?”

“Linth knows I can talk.”

“Ah right.” Hannah nodded to herself as she digested that piece of information. “Well... if she's okay with it, do you think she could look after you from now on?”

Ouch. That hurt far more than it should have. Ignoring the twang of pain in my chest, I forged on. “She knows I can talk, but, um-”

“You did explain to her, right? You did sit her down and talk her through it, let her ask question, and then answer them calmly like a responsible adult, right?”

“Well... Not exactly.” As far as I recalled, I ran into her den, stuttered out a few words in a haze, realised my mistake, and ran away.

“Just what is you deficit?” Her glare was unequivocally hateful. That was an expression I'd never seen, a look in her eyes I'd never felt pointed at me, and a genuine intent to harm. “Linth. Is. Our. Friend. But isn't it so nice of you to repay that in kind. Was it the usual existential dread you dished out on her or did you just traumatise her so thoroughly she will never be able to look at house cats the same way again.”

Both? I caught myself before I answered. Death had her scythe around my throat. No threat of violence was uttered, for with death's dark shadow cast over me, such pleasantries were unnecessary.

Now was not the time to dig myself a hole. Unlike humans, cats didn't need the full six feet of depth.

“Adam, we'll sort this out tomorrow. But in the meantime, I think you need some time alone to reflect. Outside.”

“Understandable.”

I couldn't complain. I wasn't in a position to complain. Seconds of reflection were all I needed to understand that.

This punishment was awfully light.

Gracious even.

I had just enough self-awareness to see reality. This sentence was not dished out by the often grey decision-making of a jury. No. This was a judge holding my actions up against the cast-iron universal laws of decency.

Huddled beneath a windowsill beneath the very building I'd been exiled from, the warm light from the first floor beaming out softly above me whilst I attempted to shelter from the rain.

Well at least I wouldn't need a bath anymore. There were more comfortable ways to get a shower.

Clink. The shutters to the window above opened and the kindly shadow of the Landlady cast over me.

“Perhaps you'd like to come inside, Adam?” The Landlady looked down at me, her offer certainly tempting.

But I didn't move.

This was penance. Remorse? Shame? These were feelings I should learn.

Sorry Landlady, but leave me be. I looked the other way. Closing my eyes to warmth and comfort of sanctuary.

But how did she know I was here?

What evil deed did she think I was accused of?

Probably pushing over the fruit bowl and making a mess. That's what an ordinary cat would do. Little did she know that I was not an ordinary cat.

But I had pushed over the fruit bowl so she did have me there.

Me sticking to this punishment was, admittedly, entirely symbolic. After all, I had just enough self-awareness to know who I was. I'd lived a long life. Did Hannah think this was the first time a caretaker had thrown me out like this?

No. Probably not.

And I'd never learned from each time either. After all, I wasn't a very good person. Consideration was something you had when you paid attention to life and its nuances. I slept through it. I'd continue to do so. I was composed of spite and sloth, with my only motivator in life being slices of ham or smoked salmon.

Right now, this moment. It was nothing but the blink of an eye. I wouldn't remember it. And if I did, it'd be a vague recollection at best.

The root of my problem, my sloth, would never be destroyed. What good was trying when all you are is a talking cat? What made me run from explaining things to Linth, was my own laziness. The daunting idea of having to explain my situation was in of itself exhausting. Better to run and leave it to someone else.

But that laziness has also saved me from problems as well. I had to commit to it. Never doing, never saying anything out of place so that I'd never need to clean up after myself. Half-arsing laziness was a sure way of causing trouble for myself.

Lesson to learn, in the future I should never ever talk to anyone but my caretaker. Nobody but my caretaker should ever figure out I could talk.

There was always the option of running away. It may be a few days or weeks going it alone, but I could find another caretaker far away from this mess.

“You know, Adam, it's a good thing I'm not housing any other tenants right now.” The Landlady looked out across the street, lips lifted in a calm and collected smile. “Because the floors and walls are built quite thin.”

Closing the shutters, leaving that odd last comment to linger in the air, she left me out in the cold.

What did she mean when she said the floors were thin?

…

Oh for fu-