Chapter One: Into the Kingdom of Pate
The last bell of the day always sounded the same at Elmswood Secondary — tinny, a little too loud, and, to Codette, like the starting gun of the best part of her afternoon. She slung her backpack over one shoulder, the strap already fraying at the seam from three years of being yanked on and dragged through hallways, and pushed out through the side doors before the crowd could bottleneck her at the front gate.
It was late autumn, the kind of afternoon where the light turned gold too early and the air smelled like wet leaves and somebody's neighbor burning brush two streets over. Codette liked this time of year. She liked the crunch under her sneakers, the way her breath sometimes showed if she walked fast enough, the small ordinary magic of a Tuesday that asked nothing more of her than getting home before dinner.
She was three blocks from her own street, cutting through the overgrown lot behind the old Hendricks place like she did most days, when she saw the cat.
It was sitting — not crouched, not slinking, sitting, upright and composed as a porcelain figurine — on top of a fence post that had no business supporting anything heavier than a pigeon. Its fur was the white of fresh snow before anyone has walked on it, so pale it seemed to hold its own light even as the afternoon dimmed around it. Its eyes were a strange, pale gold, and they were, unmistakably, looking directly at her.
Codette had grown up around cats. Her aunt bred them, badly and lovingly, and she had been scratched, purred at, and ignored by enough of them to know what a cat's attention usually felt like — brief, transactional, mostly about food. This was not that. This cat watched her the way a person waits for someone to notice they've been noticed.
"Hey," she said, feeling a little foolish. "You lost?"
The cat blinked once, slow and deliberate, the way cats do when they've decided you're not a threat. Then it turned, hopped down from the fence post on the far side, and trotted off into the tangle of brush and skinny birch trees that marked the edge of Miller's Woods.
She should have kept walking home. She thought about it — genuinely, for a second and a half — the thought arriving and leaving almost as fast as the cat had. But there was something about the particular white of its fur, and the way it had looked at her like it knew her, that made the thought of just letting it go feel wrong, like walking past a dropped wallet.
"Wait — hey!"
She ducked through the gap in the fence and went after it.
Miller's Woods wasn't big. Everyone in town knew that — it was the kind of place you could walk end to end in fifteen minutes if you kept a straight line, a thin stretch of birch and pine wedged between the highway and the reservoir. Kids rode bikes through it. Dog walkers used it. It was not, by any account, a place a person could get lost.
Codette got lost in it anyway.
At first it was almost fun — the white cat staying just ahead of her, always a little too far to catch, ducking under a fallen log or slipping between two boulders in a way that made her laugh under her breath even as her legs started to burn from the uneven ground. She kept telling herself she'd turn back after the next tree, the next clearing, the next glimpse of that impossible, glowing-white tail vanishing around a trunk.
The next clearing didn't come.
Instead the trees got taller, closer together, older — trunks wider than she could get her arms around, bark gone black with a kind of damp she didn't remember birch trees having. The light changed too, dimming in a way that had nothing to do with the hour, going a flat, directionless gray as though someone had turned a dial down on the whole forest. She stopped, chest tight, and turned in a slow circle.
There was no highway noise. There was no reservoir glint through the trees. There wasn't even birdsong — just a heavy, cottony quiet that pressed against her ears like she'd gone underwater.
"Okay," she said out loud, mostly to hear her own voice. "Okay, this is — you just came from that way."
She pointed at a gap in the trees that looked, with a sinking feeling, exactly like every other gap in the trees. She tried it anyway, walking fast now, not quite running, telling herself that running was for people who were actually in danger and she was just a girl who'd followed a cat too far into a park.
The gap led to more trees. So did the next one. So did the one after that.
The gray light kept sliding toward black, and panic, when it finally arrived, came in fast — a cold prickle up the back of her neck, her breath going short and high in her throat, her sneakers slipping on wet roots as she half-ran now, snapping her head left and right for anything, a fence, a trail marker, a streetlamp glow. Branches caught at her hoodie sleeve. Somewhere off to her left something shifted in the underbrush and she bit down a scream, spinning toward the sound and finding nothing but darker dark.
"Mom," she said, very quietly, to no one. "Mom, I don't — "
She pushed forward, faster, one hand out in front of her now to keep from walking face-first into a trunk, the forest floor tilting and rising in ways she didn't remember it doing, roots like knuckles under her feet, and just when the thought I am actually, actually lost had fully and terribly landed in her chest —
she saw the light.
It was small at first — a seam of gold, no wider than a doorway, hanging in the black air between two trees like someone had torn a hole in the dark and daylight was leaking through the other side. Codette stopped so fast she nearly fell.
Every instinct she had, every safety talk she'd ever half-listened to, told her not to walk toward a glowing hole in the middle of the woods at night. But the alternative was standing here in the cold and the quiet with her heart going like a fist on a door, and at least the light was warm. At least it looked like somewhere.
She walked toward it.
The seam widened as she got closer, or maybe she was just seeing it more clearly, until it wasn't a seam at all but an archway of light, waist-high grass bending gold on the other side of it, and past that — she stopped again, right at the threshold, one sneaker in shadow and one in that impossible warm light, and simply stared.
There was a village. Or something like a village, spread down a gentle slope in front of her under a sky gone the deep orange-purple of a sunset that had decided to last. Cottages with round doors and crooked, friendly chimneys. Lantern-lit streets, paved in flat river stone, winding between rooftops shingled in what looked, absurdly, like fish scales made of copper. Bridges strung with fairy lights over a stream that ran silver instead of clear. And moving through all of it — walking upright, wearing little vests and scarves and carrying baskets and lanterns and what might have been a rolled-up newspaper — were cats.
Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe, farther down where the village thickened into something like a town square. Tabby cats in aprons sweeping doorsteps. A sleek black cat in a monocle arguing pleasantly with a fishmonger. Two kittens chasing each other around a lamppost, shrieking with laughter in voices that were unmistakably, impossibly, words.
Codette's brain did the thing brains do when they are handed something too large to process all at once — it simply stopped trying, and let her stand there, mouth slightly open, one hand still braced against the cool bark of the tree beside the archway, staring at a kingdom of cats going about their evening as if this were the most ordinary thing in the world.
"You're staring," said a voice, low and amused, right at ankle height. "It's rude, you know. Even where you're from."
She looked down.
The white cat sat there, tail curled neatly around its paws, looking up at her with those same pale gold eyes — except now there was no mistaking the shape its mouth had made around the words. It had spoken. Out loud. In English. To her.
"You — you talked," Codette said, which she was fully aware was not the most useful thing she could have said, but it was the only sentence her brain would produce.
"And you followed a strange cat into a dark forest at night, so I'd say we're both making questionable choices this evening." The cat rose, stretched — an unhurried, theatrical arch of the back that seemed designed to be watched — and sat back down, somehow managing to look both bored and pleased with himself at once. "Name's Smile. And before you ask, no, it's not because I'm friendly. It's because of this." He tilted his chin up so she could see the dark, curved marking under his jaw, faint against the white fur, shaped almost exactly like a lazy, crooked grin. "Cute, right? I didn't pick it."
Codette dropped to a crouch without quite deciding to, bringing herself eye to eye with him, the golden village noise humming on behind her — laughter, a distant bell, someone calling out that the fish stall was closing early. "Okay. Smile. That's — fine. That's a name. Where am I? What is this?"
"You're in the Kingdom of Pate," Smile said, with the particular relish of someone who enjoys being the one holding information. "Population: a great many cats, and, as of about four minutes ago, one extremely lost human girl." His tail flicked. "Which, I'll be honest, is not something we get a lot of. You're going to want to keep that hood up, by the way. People here have opinions about your kind."
"My kind — " She glanced down at herself. Jeans, yellow hoodie, the same sneakers she'd left the house in that morning. "You mean humans."
"I mean humans," Smile agreed. "Big scary dangerous humans, if you believe half of what gets said in the taverns around here. Which, for the record, I mostly don't. You don't look very dangerous. You look like you're about to cry, actually, which is different."
"I'm not going to cry," Codette said, in the exact tone of someone who might. She pushed her hood up anyway, tucking loose strands of blond hair inside it, and made herself breathe out slowly through her nose. "I just — I need to get home. My family doesn't know where I am. It's going to be dark soon — it is dark — they're going to be looking for me."
Something shifted in Smile's expression, quick and almost too fast to catch, gone before she could name it. "Yeah," he said, quieter than before. "About that."
"About what?" Codette's voice had gone very still.
Smile sighed, the particular sigh of someone who has had to deliver this exact bad news before and hates it every time. "Humans don't leave Pate. Not on their own, anyway. Once you're through that archway — " he flicked his tail toward the trees behind her, where the seam of light had already faded back into ordinary darkness, gone as though it had never been there at all — "there's no walking back out the way you came. Believe me, plenty have tried."
"That's — no. No, that's not — " Codette stood up fast enough to make her head spin, turning to stare at the black wall of forest where the archway had been. There was nothing. Not even a shimmer. "There has to be a way. There's always a way."
"There is a way," Smile said, and something in how carefully he said it made her turn back around. "Maybe. There's a story — everyone here grows up on it — about a witch. The Cat Witch. Supposedly she's the one who made this whole kingdom, way back whenever, and supposedly she's the only one with magic strong enough to open a door between worlds that actually stays open. Send you home. For good."
Hope moved through Codette's chest so fast it almost hurt. "Okay. Okay, so we find her."
"That's the part where it gets bad." Smile's ears flattened slightly. "She lives on top of Mount Banana. And I do mean lives — nobody's actually seen her in, oh, generations. Half the cats in this kingdom will tell you she's not even real anymore, if she ever was. But say she is. Getting to her means getting through three places, and every single one of them has a body count."
He counted them off on one paw, claws flicking out one at a time. "There's the Yarnwood — sounds cute, isn't. Something about it makes any cat who walks in lose their mind completely, and I do mean completely; cats have walked into that forest and simply never walked out, found later curled up dead around a scrap of string, perfectly content and perfectly gone. Then there's the Valley of His Majesty — that one's got a king. Sort of. A cat, enormous, not right in the head, who's crowned himself ruler of that whole stretch and doesn't take kindly to trespassers. And past that, the Marsh of Claws, which is exactly as friendly as it sounds, crawling with things that bite first and don't bother asking questions after." He looked up at her, and for once there was no jokiness in his gold eyes at all. "Nobody sane goes near that mountain. That's not me being dramatic. That's just true."
The golden lantern-light of the village went on humming gently behind them, laughter and clattering pots and someone's off-key singing, so ordinary it made the words he'd just said feel even more impossible.
Codette wrapped her arms around herself, hugging her elbows through the sleeves of her hoodie, and looked out at the little lantern-lit town — at cats going home for dinner in a world that wasn't supposed to exist, under a sky that had forgotten how to be night. Somewhere out there, past a wall of trees that no longer opened for her, her mother was probably calling her name into the empty lot behind the Hendricks place. Her little brother would be asking why dinner was late. And she was here, in a fairy tale with teeth, being told the only door out ran straight through three separate ways to die.
She thought about being scared for exactly one more second. Then she made herself stop.
"Fine," she said. "So we go to the mountain."
Smile's tail stopped mid-flick. "Did you hear anything I just said? Yarn forest. Insane king. Swamp full of teeth."
"I heard you." Her voice shook a little on the way out, and she hated that, and kept talking anyway. "I heard all of it. And I still have to go home. So I'm going to the mountain, with or without directions, because staying here and being scared isn't going to get me back to my family. It's just going to get me stuck."
Smile studied her for a long moment, head tilted, ears twitching in a way that on a human might have passed for reassessing someone. Whatever he saw, it seemed to land somewhere. He exhaled through his nose — a very cat-like sound, somewhere between a sigh and a scoff — and stood.
"You're either the bravest human I've ever met or the dumbest," he said. "Possibly both, that tracks, actually." He started walking, low and unhurried, down the slope toward the lantern light, and after a beat, glanced back over his shoulder at her. "Well? You coming, or are you going to stand at the edge of the forest all night looking tragic?"
It wasn't kindness, not exactly — his voice still had that same dry, put-upon edge to it, like helping her was a chore he'd been assigned and resented. But he slowed his pace to match hers as she caught up, matching her uneven, exhausted steps instead of trotting ahead the way he had through the woods, and when the path dipped into a stretch of true shadow between two lantern posts, Codette flinched at the dark without meaning to — and felt something curl, warm and light, around her wrist.
His tail. Just resting there, barely a weight at all, gone again the instant they stepped back into the light, as if it had never happened.
"Watch your feet," he said, gruffly, not looking at her. "Root, right there. Wouldn't want you breaking an ankle on your first night in a magic kingdom. Terrible first impression."
Codette almost smiled. Almost. "Thanks," she said instead, quietly, and meant it for more than the root.
Smile didn't answer. But he glanced back at her again — quick, checking she was still there — before turning his eyes forward and leading her down into the golden dark of the Kingdom of Pate.