The Feline Wizard by Christopher Stasheff Read Free Book Online Page A

pines, stretching and yawning. They wore robes, turbans, and sandals, but their skin was nut-brown. In the Allustria where she had grown up, they would have been called “brownies.” They looked around them in surprise.
    “What could have waked us at so unseemly an hour, Hurree?” one asked.
    Hurree spread his arms, starting to answer, but a white-bearded sprite spoke first. “It was the spirit of the grove. What moves?”
    “Nothing, now,” said an aged and creaky voice. The air seemed to thicken near one of the pines, then turned into a translucent figure that became more opaque with each step it took until it was solid, showing itself to be a stooped, wrinkled crone, leaning heavily on a knobbly stick. She gave of her life energy to her poor little trees, and though they gave back what little they could, it wasn't very much at all, so she was as stunted and twisted as they, her skin wrinkled and creased as bark. She was robed in garlands of brown needles that rustled as she hobbled forth. “That which moved now sleeps, by my blessing,” she told her brownies, “but she is wounded in head and side, and has need of your aid.” She pointed with her stick.
    The brownies looked, and saw a miserable bundle of fur rippled by the breeze that sifted through the boughs of the pines.
    Hurree caught his breath. “That cat is thick with magic!”
    The dryad nodded. “Dryad-magic, nixie-magic, brownie-magic—it would seem that magic has rubbed off on her from half the sprites in the world.”
    Hurree knelt beside the cat, small hand tracing the rent in her side. “How came she here?”
    “By more magic, surely,” the dryad told him. “I felt the tingling of it, I looked out into the meadow—and lo! There she was, not a cat but a maiden fair, and sick to her stomach, poor thing!”
    A brownie-woman parted the veil from her face to ask, “A maiden?”
    The dryad nodded. “Even so, Lichi. The cows sensed that feeling of magic, too, and took fright. They moved toward the young woman, lowing to urge one another to defend—but the maiden, looking up, saw them, and lo! In an instant she had changed into a cat!”
    Hurree's breath hissed in. “Surely you needed no further proof she was magical!”
    “And surely that transformation must have disturbed the cows even more,” Lichi exclaimed.
    “It did, but the cat was better able to dodge their hooves than the woman would have been,” the dryad said.
    “Not able enough.” Hurree placed a hand lightly on the cat's head, feeling the swelling.
    “Well,” said the dryad, “the cat is alive, where the woman might have been trampled to death.”
    “True enough.” Lichi joined Hurree, passing her hands over the stiffened fur on the cat's side. She called to another brownie-woman, “Aid me, Alii!”
    Alii came to join her magic to Lichi's, mending the wound as two more brownie-men came to rest their hands on Hurree's shoulders, lending him their own magical energy as he healed the head-swelling, both inside and outside Balkis' skull.
    The dryad nodded, satisfied. “Find her some of those mice who keep gnawing at the roots of my trees,” she said, “and show her where the rocks have caught rainwater. When she is recovered, find her better shelter than this.”
    “We will, O Wise One,” Alii assured her.
    “Thank you, little friends.” Nodding in satisfaction, the dryad stepped back into a twisted trunk and disappeared.
    The brownies gathered around the sleeping cat, each giving a modicum of energy to mend bruised and torn tissue as Balkis' breathing deepened into a healthy and healing sleep.
    Matt expected a gloomy, windowless dungeon filled with arcane equipment and bottles of noisome concoctions. Instead he found a wide and airy chamber with tall windows and a worktable against one wall. Fragrant bunches of dried herbs hung over the workbench, and shelves above it did indeed contain bottles, but they held very ordinary things such as pebbles, iron pellets, salt,