Chapter Three: The Yarnwood
By the second day on the road, Codette had learned three things about Smile.
The first was that he walked ahead of her, always, and always pretended he wasn’t checking whether she was keeping up. The second was that he narrated. Constantly. Every hill had a history, every stream had a grudge, every bush was either “an excellent place to hide from a creditor” or “absolutely not, there’s a badger.” And the third, which she had noticed only that morning and which she was keeping to herself like a small, bright coin, was that he stopped talking whenever the silence got too quiet for her.
Nobody had told him to. He simply did it.
“—and that,” Smile was saying, flicking his tail toward a crooked stone tower on a distant ridge, “is the Tower of Whiskers. Used to belong to a wizard who tried to teach hedgehogs to tap-dance. Didn’t end well. For the hedgehogs. Or the wizard. Mostly the audience.”
“You’re making that up.”
“I’m embellishing. There’s a difference.” He paused. “A small one.”
The land north of Pate rolled out in wide golden swells, dotted with lavender bushes and standing stones, all of it bathed in that same unmoving sunset glow. Codette’s hoodie was warm on her shoulders. Her sneakers, which had been white that morning three days ago in another life, were now the exact color of the road. She had sprayed her collar with catnip twice that morning, as instructed, and she was beginning to suspect that she smelled like a salad.
“How far to the Yarnwood?” she asked.
“Another day, give or take. Less if we stop talking, but we won’t.” He glanced back. “You doing okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep rubbing your wrist.”
She looked down. She was, in fact, rubbing her left wrist — the one where, the night they left Pate, she had woken to a warm, light, nearly weightless pressure that vanished the moment she opened her eyes. She hadn’t told him about it. She wasn’t going to.
“It’s the strap on my backpack,” she lied.
Smile made a small noise that suggested he had decided to accept this for now. “There’s a crossroads ahead,” he said. “We’ll stop for water. And, if the gods of cats are kind, a snack.”
The gods of cats, as it turned out, had a sense of humor.
The crossroads was marked by a signpost with five arms, each pointing in a different direction and each labeled in a different, increasingly unhelpful hand. One said TO THE COAST (PROBABLY). One said NOT THAT WAY. One had been pecked at by a bird until all that remained was an arrow and the word “AVOID.”
Under the signpost, in the middle of the road, an enormous tabby cat was stuck in a stile.
It was an ordinary wooden stile — a gap in a low fence, built for walkers to cross a field — and it had been built, Codette thought, for someone roughly forty percent narrower. The tabby had gotten his head and shoulders and one entire front paw through. The rest of him was still very much on the other side. His striped tail lashed furiously in the air.
“Don’t say a word,” the tabby said, without looking up. “Not one word. I know how it looks.”
Beside him, a much smaller cat was walking in anxious circles. This one was black and white — a bicolor, with a white bib, white socks, and a dark mask that made him look perpetually surprised — and perched on his nose was the roundest pair of spectacles Codette had ever seen. A leather satchel nearly as big as he was bounced against his hip, stuffed with rolled scrolls and at least three books, one of which was held together with string.
“I told you,” the small cat said, “that the stile was designed for a maximum girth of—”
“Phillip.”
“—approximately thirty-one centimeters, and you have—”
“Phillip.”
“—a girth, if I may be diplomatic, in excess of that figure, and I specifically advised the longer route around the—”
“I will bite you.”
“You will not bite me, because you are stuck, and also because you like me.” Phillip pushed his spectacles up his nose with one paw. “Though I’ll note for the record that I’m very sorry for the situation, and that I am keeping an accurate log.”
Smile, who had stopped dead at the edge of the road, put a paw over his mouth. His shoulders were shaking.
“Don’t,” Codette whispered.
“I’m not.”
“You’re about to.”
“I’m managing it with grace.”
The tabby heard that. He twisted around as far as he could, which was not far, and glared with one very large, very irritated amber eye. “Is that a laugh?”
“It is,” Smile said, abandoning grace entirely and doubling over. “It really, truly is. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Oh, that’s wonderful. I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.”
“I’ll remember you,” the tabby growled. “I’ll remember your face.”
It took all three of them — Smile, Codette, and Phillip, who contributed a surprisingly rigorous lecture on leverage — to get him out. Codette took one paw. Smile took the other, with some muttered commentary. Phillip stood back and shouted instructions, which turned out to be correct. On the third heave there was a pop, a yowl, and a tumble of striped fur, and the tabby landed on the road in a heap of wounded dignity, with a long splinter-mark across his middle and a ring of lavender caught in his whiskers.
He sat up slowly. He did not look at any of them.
“Thank you,” he muttered, to the road.
“Anytime,” said Smile.
“Don’t.”
“Fine.” Smile held up his paws. “I’m Smile. This is Codette. She’s my cousin. From the south — the grain country. She’s a Golden. Shy. Doesn’t talk much.”
Codette, caught off guard, managed a nod. It felt like a very small, very silly performance. She was suddenly aware of every inch of the yellow hood on her head.
“Tom,” said the tabby, jerking a thumb at himself, and then, with a long-suffering gesture at the smaller cat: “That’s Phillip. He’s a book that learned to walk.”
“I prefer ‘scholar,’” said Phillip, bowing from the waist. “I’m delighted to meet you both. And on behalf of Tom, I’d like to apologize for the language.”
“I said nothing.”
“You thought it, very loudly.” Phillip straightened and peered at Codette through his spectacles, head cocked. His nose twitched. “Forgive me. This is going to sound strange. But you smell—” He paused, a scholar reaching for the correct word. “Interesting.”
Codette’s heart skipped. “It’s — the catnip,” she managed, in her shy southern mumble. “I wear a lot.”
“No, no, I recognize the catnip. It’s quite a high grade, actually. But beneath it there’s—” He sniffed again, and Smile moved a half step to the left, slipping smoothly between them as if he’d just been stretching his legs.
“Goldens,” Smile said. “It’s the grain dust. Whole family stinks of it. We don’t notice anymore.”
“Fascinating,” Phillip said. “That would explain the—”
“Where are you two headed?” Smile asked, much louder than necessary.
Tom brightened for the first time. He puffed his chest, which was a lot of chest. “Mount Banana,” he said. “By way of the Marsh of Claws. There’s a martial arts manual in a cave at the center. It’s a legendary one — grants the strongest technique in the Kingdom to whoever finds it. Whoever’s got that book becomes the greatest cat who’s ever lived.” His ears flicked. “I’m going to find it.”
“And you?” Codette asked Phillip, before she could stop herself. It was the first full sentence she had spoken in front of them, and her voice cracked slightly on the vowel.
Phillip’s face went soft and a little shy. “I’m going to see the Cat Witch,” he said. “I know most cats say she isn’t real. But I’ve read every account. There are twenty-three in the library at Whistlewick, and eleven agree on the details. I think she’s up there. And I think—” He hesitated, as though he were about to confess to something embarrassing. “I think she could teach me magic. Real magic. I’ve been studying for years, and I can only move a teaspoon. On a good day.”
“A teaspoon is a good start,” Codette said, quietly.
Phillip smiled at her, so openly pleased that for a moment she forgot she was lying to him.
“We’re heading the same way,” Smile said slowly, with the air of someone doing arithmetic he didn’t like. “More or less. I’m going to the Valley of His Majesty. Not the mountain. The Valley.”
“The Valley’s on the road to the mountain,” Phillip said.
“It’s a very long road.”
Tom looked from Smile to Codette and back. “Well,” he said at last, brushing lavender off his fur. “You pulled me out of a stile. I figure I owe you a few days of company, at least. The road’s safer with more cats on it.”
“That’s — that’s a good plan,” Phillip said, a bit stunned. “In fact, there is strong evidence that traveling in groups of four or more reduces mortality in the northern territories by—”
“Phillip.”
“Sorry.” He folded his paws. “I’m very happy.”
Codette looked at Smile. Smile looked at the sky, the way he did when something was happening that he hadn’t planned and wasn’t sure he minded.
“Fine,” he said. “But if either of you tells anyone I carried your books, I’ll deny everything.”
“I carry my own books,” said Phillip.
“I’ll deny that too.”
They made camp that night in the lee of a great flat boulder, a few hundred paces off the road. Tom produced a battered tin kettle from nowhere. Phillip produced a very small, very serious spread of dried berries. Smile produced the rest of the cheese buns, which turned out to have been a lot more numerous than Codette had assumed, and which he distributed with an air of casual generosity that fooled no one.
“I’d like it noted,” he said, handing her the last one, “that I’m not doing this because I’m nice. I’m doing it because carrying them is heavy.”
“Noted,” said Codette.
They talked late. Tom told a story about a wrestling tournament in the hill country in which he had come, in his own words, “an extremely respectable second,” and which Phillip later revealed, in an undertone, had had only two entrants. Phillip drew a diagram in the dirt of the three trials between here and Mount Banana, which Codette studied with some dismay. Smile said very little, which for Smile meant a great deal, and kept looking at the sky as though he were measuring it for something.
“The Yarnwood is tomorrow,” Phillip said at last, tapping the first mark on his map. “I’ve read about it. It’s said to be the first of the three guardians. Every cat who enters feels a pull toward the yarn that hangs in the trees. A kind of ancient compulsion. The accounts suggest it’s not so much magic as—” He searched for a word. “An overstimulation of instinct. Like a lock your own body’s built to open.”
“That sounds fun,” said Tom, with an enormous yawn.
“It sounds fatal. Several chroniclers recorded cats found curled in the undergrowth, quite peaceful, quite dead, a ball of yarn between their paws.”
“Peaceful’s something,” said Tom.
“Tom.”
“I’m kidding.” Tom’s eyes had gone very wide for a second, though, and Codette caught him glancing at his own paws as if they might betray him. “We’ll be fine. We’ve got a plan, don’t we? Phillip’s got a plan.”
“It’s a preliminary plan.” Phillip rummaged in his satchel and pulled out four long strips of dark cloth. “Blindfolds. Wax for the ears and nose. We go through blind, in a line, holding on to Smile’s rope — you do have rope, Smile?”
“I always have rope.” Smile pulled out a coil of twisted cord, as thick as her wrist. “You’d be surprised how often it’s useful.”
“Excellent. We’ll tie ourselves together and walk straight north until the trees thin. According to the map, it’s a quarter-hour’s walk. Eighteen minutes at a brisk pace.”
“And Codette?” Tom asked. “Does she wear one too?”
Codette hesitated. The answer was no — the answer was absolutely not, because she was a human being and the Yarnwood’s pull did nothing to her at all. But she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t say any of it. All she could do was sit there in the firelight in her yellow hood, with the false ears and the borrowed smell, and feel the weight of her own secret like a stone in her stomach.
Smile cleared his throat. “Codette’s from the grain country,” he said smoothly. “Goldens grow up around spinning mills. Whole cities of yarn. They get desensitized as kittens.”
“Desensitized,” Phillip said, eyes bright. “A recessive trait, then. A regional adaptation. That’s remarkable. I’d love to take notes.”
“She’s very private,” said Smile.
“Of course. Of course. I’ll leave you alone.” Phillip jotted something in his notebook, nonetheless.
Codette lay awake for a long time after the others slept, staring up at the unmoving sunset glow and listening to the faint, wondrous sound of three cats snoring in perfect, mismatched harmony. Smile was lying on the far side of the fire with his back to her. He wasn’t asleep. She could tell by the set of his shoulders. But he didn’t say anything, and neither did she.
Somewhere in the dark, a night bird called three notes and fell silent.
The Yarnwood did not look dangerous.
That was the first thing Codette thought, standing at its edge the next morning, with the sun hanging in the same golden place in the sky and a long, wind-rippled meadow stretching out behind her. It looked, if anything, like a celebration.
The trees were enormous and ancient and had been strung with yarn. Not neatly. Not on purpose. It hung from every branch in tangled skeins and looping swags, crimson and cobalt and saffron and emerald and a deep, glowing violet, in bundles as thick as her arm, in single strands as fine as spider silk that caught the light and shimmered like threads of stained glass. Balls of wool the size of beach balls hung from high boughs like fruit. Streamers drifted across the forest floor. The whole wood hummed faintly, a low, soft, contented sound, like a very large cat purring in its sleep.
“Oh,” Codette said, softly. “It’s beautiful.”
“That’s the problem,” said Smile, hoarsely. He was standing very rigid. His pupils had gone huge.
“Tom,” Phillip said, in a small voice. “Tom, I’d like to — I’d like to put on my blindfold now.”
“Yeah,” said Tom, who was standing with one paw slowly rising, as though it had a mind of its own. “Yeah. Good idea.”
They tied the blindfolds. They stuffed the wax into their ears and noses, gagging and sneezing in equal measure. They looped Smile’s rope around each of their waists, Phillip first, then Tom, then Smile, then — with a nod of understanding from the others — Codette at the back, where she could keep the line taut. Smile took a long breath, and she saw his throat work.
“If I say something stupid in there,” he said, “don’t listen.”
“You always say something stupid,” said Tom.
“I mean stupider.”
They stepped into the Yarnwood.
For the first minute, it worked.
Codette walked at the back, hand on the rope, eyes wide open, and watched three blindfolded cats shuffle into the strange, shimmering wood like pilgrims into a cathedral. The yarn brushed over them as they went, soft as breath, trailing across their fur. The air was warm. The purring sound rose around them. Phillip was murmuring numbers under his breath — counting steps, she realized, in an effort to stay anchored — and Tom, in front of him, was humming something tuneless and brave.
It was the third minute that went wrong.
She saw it first in Tom’s shoulders. They started to loosen. His head tilted. The humming stopped. A strand of red yarn drifted across his path, and his paw came up without his seeming to know it, and tapped it once.
“Tom,” she said.
He tapped it again.
“Tom, don’t—”
The red strand wrapped itself around his wrist. Tom made a sound, a low, helpless, tender sound, nothing like his usual bluster. And then he let go of the rope.
It happened so fast she barely had time to react. Tom tore off his blindfold and flung himself at the enormous crimson ball hanging from the branch ahead, claws out, and the whole forest seemed to sigh. In seconds he was tangled to the shoulders in red wool, rolling in it, biting it, purring like an engine.
“Tom!”
Behind him, Phillip had stumbled, jolted by the loss of the rope. He yanked at his own blindfold. His glasses went flying, spinning into a drift of blue yarn at the base of a tree. For a moment he stood blinking in the swirling color, white-faced, clutching his notebook to his chest, whispering “No, no, no, I counted, I counted—” and then a long, glittering strand of green drifted across his nose, and he went down on his back with all four paws in the air and began to bat at it, murmuring in a high, wondering voice that had nothing to do with scholarship.
“Smile,” Codette said. “Smile.”
He hadn’t moved. He was still standing in the middle of the path with his blindfold half off, ears flat against his skull, trembling all over. His eyes were fixed on a golden ball of wool dangling from a low bough, spinning gently in the air.
“I’m okay,” he said, very quietly. “I’m okay. I’m—”
The ball swung closer.
“—Codette,” Smile said. His voice came out strange and strained. “Codette, I think — I think I’m going to — if I say something stupid—”
“I’m right here. Smile, look at me.”
He turned his head. For a half second his eyes found hers, gold and wide and terrified, and she saw him fight, saw him pour every ounce of will he possessed into holding on to that one point in the whole shimmering forest, her voice, her face, her name.
“Say it again,” he whispered. “My name.”
“Smile.”
“Again.”
“Smile.”
His paw was lifting. He didn’t seem to notice. His whole body leaned toward the golden yarn like a plant toward the sun. “Keep saying it,” he said, his voice thick and slurring. “Please. Keep—”
The yarn touched his whisker.
And then he was gone. With a sound like a sigh he launched himself at the golden ball and wrapped himself around it, rolling, tangled, drunk with delight, and all three of them were lost in the shimmering wool, bound in great coils of red and green and gold, rolling and purring and entirely, gleefully, helplessly insane.
Codette stood very still in the middle of the Yarnwood, alone on the path, holding the end of a rope that no longer connected to anyone.
The yarn brushed over her sleeves and shoulders and did nothing at all.
It was just yarn. It was wool. It was pretty. That was all it was.
“Okay,” she said aloud. Her voice shook. She clenched her fists. “Okay. Okay. Think.”
She had a flashlight that no longer worked. A French textbook. A pencil case. A rope. A half-empty vial of catnip. A very large, very fragile idea.
And three friends, rapidly turning into cocoons.
“Okay,” Codette said again, and went to work.
Tom first.
He was the largest, and the closest, and the most deeply wrapped. By the time Codette reached him he had been rolled into a thick cocoon of crimson that left only his tail and the tip of one ear visible. The tail was thrashing joyously. She could hear him purring through the wool.
She looked around for something, anything, to work with. Her eyes fell on a small ball of orange yarn lying in a drift at the base of a tree, a bright little thing no bigger than an apple, with a loose end trailing across the ground.
She picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy.
“Hey, Tom!” she shouted. “Tom! Look what I’ve got!”
The tail stopped thrashing.
“Look!” She waved the ball high in the air so the loose end fluttered. “Look at this! It’s the best one! It’s the fastest one! You’ll never catch it!”
A single amber eye appeared in the red wool. It fixed on the orange ball with the intensity of a hawk.
“Fetch,” Codette said, and hurled it as hard as she could, off the path and into the trees, over a fallen log, toward a thick tangle of bramble.
Tom exploded out of the red cocoon like a cork from a bottle.
He tore across the clearing in a blur of striped fur, taking down a hanging yellow ball on his way, leaping the log with a roar of pure feline bliss, and plowed bottom-first into the center of the bramble, where he stuck fast, tail waving, bottom wedged, utterly delighted. The orange ball rolled to a stop a few inches from his nose. He could not reach it. He could not move. He did not seem to care.
“One down,” Codette gasped.
Phillip second.
He lay on his back where she’d last seen him, paws kicking at a streaming green ribbon that wrapped him in loose, silky loops. His glasses were nowhere in sight. His eyes had gone enormous and unfocused. He was making a tiny, rapturous “mrrp-mrrp” sound, nothing like his earnest, anxious voice.
She dropped to her knees beside him and dug through the blue yarn, praying, until her fingers closed on a cool circle of wire. The glasses were bent but intact. She gently untangled the green ribbon from his face, slid the frames back onto his nose, and then — remembering what she’d learned from her aunt’s seventeen cats, from a dozen summers of being the only one in the family who could get the grumpy ones to settle — she slid two fingers under his chin and scratched.
Phillip’s eyes rolled back.
“Right there,” she murmured. “I know. I’ve got you.”
She moved her other hand to the back of his neck, just behind the ears, and scratched firmly in slow circles. A deep, helpless rumble started in Phillip’s chest, rising and spreading, a purr like a small engine finally catching fire. His whole body went limp as a dishrag. His paws stopped batting. The ribbon slid off his belly and puddled in the leaves.
And then, as the purring slowed and deepened, the glassy shine in his eyes gave way, drop by drop, to something clear. He blinked. He blinked again. His gaze found Codette’s face, and then her hand, still scratching under his chin.
“Oh,” said Phillip faintly. “Oh, my. That’s, ah. That’s very good. That’s — what a — I’m so sorry—”
“Stay here,” said Codette. “Don’t move. Don’t look at anything colorful. Keep your eyes on me.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Absolutely.” He took a long, shaky breath. “I’ll just be right — I’ll just lie here and be mortified.”
“Perfect.”
Smile last.
She saved him for the end because she was afraid of him. Not of what he would do — of what she might see.
He had curled himself so tightly around the golden ball that she could barely tell where wool ended and cat began. Strand after strand of yellow thread had wound itself around his body, over his shoulders and under his belly, down his legs and across his tail, until he lay in a loose, shining chrysalis of gold, eyes half closed, purring in long, breathless rumbles. One ear stuck out through the strands. It twitched, very slightly, as she approached.
“Smile?” she said.
No answer.
She tried the trick that had worked on Phillip, kneeling and scratching under his chin. His purr deepened. But when she tried to coax him out of the wool, the golden strands tightened, and he muttered something she couldn’t make out and rolled away.
“Okay,” said Codette. She stood. She looked at him. She looked at the flask on his hip. “Okay. Not the nice way, then.”
She’d seen where he kept it. The big flask — the one he’d patted like an old friend, the one he’d said he had plans for — was tucked into the leather pouch at his belt, half-hidden in the folds of yarn. She unbuckled it with trembling fingers. It was far heavier than the little vial, a squat, round-bellied bottle, sloshing with something that smelled, as she pulled the cork, like every spring afternoon she’d ever loved, compressed and bottled into pure, dizzying green.
She nearly dropped it.
“Whoa,” Codette breathed.
In the corner of her eye, a shimmer of gold stirred. One of Smile’s ears twitched toward her.
She looked at the nearest tree. It was an enormous old oak, gnarled and thick, ten feet across at the trunk and draped in swags of yarn, a good thirty paces from the golden tangle where Smile lay.
“Okay,” she said. “Hold on. I hope you hate me later.”
She ran. She crossed the clearing in a dozen strides and, without stopping, drenched the trunk of the oak with the entire contents of the flask. Streams of brilliant green splashed down the bark. A powerful, sweet, nearly physical scent exploded across the clearing, a wave of pure catnip that rolled out through the trees like the smell of freshly baked bread through a hungry village.
Behind her, the purring stopped.
She turned.
Smile had lifted his head.
His nostrils flared. His eyes opened, half-lidded and drunk, and fixed on the dripping green trunk. For a long moment he stared at it with an expression of such pure, mystic reverence that she nearly burst out laughing. Then he began to crawl.
He slithered out of the golden coils like a snake. He dragged himself across the clearing on his belly, whining softly, and flung his arms around the base of the oak. He pressed his cheek to the soaked bark. He licked it. He licked it again. He rubbed his face against it, whispering, “Oh, you beautiful, you wonderful—” and then something that sounded very much like a love poem, delivered in a hoarse, reverent whisper, and then, with one last, blissful shudder, he slid down the trunk in slow motion and lay at its roots, boneless, limp, and sound asleep.
Codette stood very still, holding the empty flask.
“Wow,” she said, to no one. “That’s — that was a lot.”
Then she picked up a long, sharp branch from the ground, and, panting and shaking and aching in every muscle, she began to cut them out.
It took the better part of an hour. She sawed through yarn until her arms burned. She dragged Tom out of the brambles, tail first, by Smile’s own rope, and then Phillip, who kept apologizing the whole way, and finally Smile — the lightest, but somehow the hardest, because she had to lift him in her arms like a sleeping child, with his head lolling on her shoulder and his tail trailing limply over her elbow, still smelling of catnip and warm wool and something else, something just underneath, that she didn’t have a name for.
She dragged them out of the Yarnwood and laid them on the grass of the meadow beyond, and then she sat down heavily beside them and put her head on her knees, and shook.
Tom woke first.
He sat up, blinked at the sky, and looked down at himself. There was a smear of green wool stuck to his chest. A long, lazy thread of crimson was caught in his teeth. He picked it out slowly, with the expression of a cat who knew exactly what had happened and was prepared to take it to his grave.
“Did I,” he said, “do something.”
“A little,” said Codette.
“How little?”
“You rolled in a very large ball of yarn for about twelve minutes. And then you chased a smaller ball into a bush and got stuck.”
Tom put his face in his paws.
“There was a lot of purring,” she added, as gently as she could.
“I’m so sorry,” Tom said, muffled. He lifted his head. His ears were scarlet beneath the fur, and for the first time since she’d met him, there wasn’t a shred of bravado in his face. “I’m — that’s — I wanted to be strong. I’m supposed to be the strong one. I was the — I told them—”
“Tom,” Codette said.
“I got stuck in a bush.”
“You got stuck in a bush because you were the first to be taken. And you were the first because you were closest, and you were closest because you were walking in front.” She said it plainly. “If you hadn’t been out front, Phillip would’ve gone first. Or Smile. Somebody had to. It’s not a weakness. It’s just — a thing that happened.”
Tom stared at her for a long moment.
“Huh,” he said, finally.
“Also, you looked really happy.”
A small, crooked, reluctant grin crept across his face. “I did, didn’t I.”
“It was a lot of purring.”
Phillip, who had been lying on his back looking at the sky and murmuring “I counted, I truly counted,” now sat up with an air of tremendous dignity, replaced his glasses, and cleared his throat.
“I would like,” he said, “to formally note my gratitude. To you, Codette. For your — your remarkable composure. You didn’t panic. You didn’t run. You assessed the problem and applied three distinct solutions, tailored to each of our individual — I mean, that was the most extraordinary display of—” He gestured, helplessly. “You have a spine of steel.”
“I had a lot of cats growing up,” Codette said, flushing. “It’s mostly experience.”
“I’d like to write about it. If you’d permit me. There’s a paper in it.” Phillip’s eyes shone. “‘The Immune Golden: Resistance to Yarn Compulsion in the Southern Shorthair.’ I’d cite you in the acknowledgments.”
“Please don’t.”
“I’d cite you anonymously.”
“Please really don’t.”
“Fine,” said Phillip, with deep regret, and wrote it down anyway.
Smile slept on.
He’d been lying in the shade of a lavender bush for a good half hour, curled in a loose crescent, tail tucked over his nose, ribs rising and falling in slow, even breaths. The catnip had worn off on the others. On him, it seemed to be lingering. Tom nudged him once with a toe. Smile mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “the tree understands me” and rolled over.
“Should we—” Phillip began.
“Let him,” said Codette. “He earned it.”
Tom and Phillip exchanged a long glance. Then Tom stood, brushed himself off, and said gruffly, “I’ll find water. Phillip, you’re coming. You need to — re-pack. Your notes.”
“My notes are fine.”
“Re-pack them anyway.”
Phillip looked at Tom. Tom looked back, very pointedly. After a moment Phillip, to his credit, said, “Oh,” and went.
Codette sat beside Smile in the grass.
It was strangely quiet. The wind was warm. In the long, gold light the Yarnwood looked again like what it was: a silent, shimmering, deceptively lovely place full of tangled color, and nothing more.
She wasn’t sure how long it was before the golden eyes opened.
“Oh,” Smile said hoarsely. “No.”
“Hi.”
He lay perfectly still for a moment, staring at the sky. Then, very slowly, he pulled his tail down over his face.
“I hugged a tree,” he said, from underneath it.
“You did.”
“I licked a tree.”
“You did a little of that, yes.”
“Did I—” His voice dropped. “Did I say anything?”
“You said it was beautiful.”
“I’m going to die.” He sounded perfectly calm. “I’ve decided. It’s fine. Please bury me under the tree. Tell my creditors I’m dead. Tell Nack I’ve been eaten by a bear.”
“Smile—”
“You saw me,” he said, and the tail slid down off his face, and he finally looked at her, and for once there was no joke in his voice at all. He looked genuinely, deeply, horribly ashamed. His ears were pressed flat against his head. “That. All of it. I was — I was out of my mind, I was wrapped around a — I was rolling, and you were standing there, and you had to — you had to—”
“Hey,” said Codette.
“I’m supposed to be the one who knows what he’s doing.”
“Smile.”
“I’m supposed to be the one who keeps it together.”
“Smile.” She reached out, and, very gently, brushed a stray thread of golden wool from his left ear. The soft fur was warm under her fingers. He went completely still. “I’m not laughing.”
He stared at her.
“You asked me to keep saying your name,” she said. “In there. When you were still — when you could still hear me. And you were trying so hard to stay. That’s — I don’t think that was the part you were ashamed of. I think you just don’t want anyone to see it.”
He looked away. His tail curled slowly around his paws. For a while, he didn’t say anything.
“You were the only one who tried,” Codette said quietly. “To stay. Tom and Phillip fell as soon as the yarn touched them. You held on until I’d said your name three times.”
“That’s not—”
“It is.”
“It’s not a brave thing,” Smile muttered. “It’s a — it’s a very small thing. It’s embarrassing.”
“I don’t think it’s small.”
He turned his head a little. He looked at her. She looked back. The meadow rippled around them. The sunset went on being gold.
“Right,” said Smile, after a long moment, in a voice that cracked a little at the edges. He cleared his throat. “Well. For the record. You’re the only one.”
“The only one what?”
“The only one who’s allowed to see me like that.” He said it fast, looking at a point somewhere over her left shoulder, as though the words might be less dangerous at a distance. “Rolling around. Making noises. Licking things. If anyone else — anyone — ever mentions it, I’ll deny it and then I’ll bite them. But you can know. It’s — it’s a special exception. One time. Don’t get used to it.”
Codette’s face felt very warm.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’ll keep it quiet.”
“Good.”
They sat there for a moment in total, excruciating silence.
“Your ear,” Smile said at last, “is — your hand’s still on my ear.”
“Oh!” Codette snatched her hand away so fast she almost knocked herself over. “Sorry. Sorry. I was — there was yarn—”
“There’s no more yarn.”
“There was a lot of yarn.”
“It’s fine,” said Smile, and rolled over to face the other direction, and she was nearly positive that the tips of his ears had turned pink again.
“We should name ourselves,” said Tom that evening.
They had made a fire in a hollow at the edge of the meadow, with the Yarnwood glowing faintly in the distance behind them like a stained-glass window. Phillip had scrubbed his glasses, re-stitched his satchel, and written several pages in his notebook, which he now kept pressed to his chest with a faint air of embarrassment. Smile had fully recovered, at least on the outside. He lay on his back with his paws behind his head, looking at the sky, and had so far responded to three separate yarn jokes with nothing but a pointed silence.
“Name ourselves?” said Phillip.
“A party’s got to have a name. It’s tradition.” Tom poked the fire with a stick, importantly. “The Fearless Four. The Banana Brigade. The — the—”
“The Four Who Got Stuck In Things,” Smile offered.
“I’ll bite you.”
“I’m just saying. It’s accurate.”
“I think,” said Phillip, “that the name should reflect the strengths of the group. We have one fighter, one scholar, one—” He glanced at Smile. “—one negotiator. And one—”
He looked at Codette. She looked back.
“Sergeant Sensible,” said Tom.
“What?”
“Sergeant Sensible. That’s you. That’s what I’m calling you. You walked into a forest that made three grown cats lose their minds, and you handled us like a — like a schoolteacher with a basket of kittens.” He nodded, decided. “Sergeant Sensible. The Voice of Reason. Our anchor.”
“The Anchor,” Phillip repeated, delighted. “That’s very good. That’s very thematic.”
“I don’t think—” Codette began.
“Seconded,” said Smile, from the grass, without opening his eyes.
She stared at him. One golden eye cracked open, found hers, and — very briefly, very quietly — crinkled at the corner. Then it closed again.
“Fine,” said Codette, helplessly. “Fine. But I’m not wearing a hat.”
“No one said anything about a hat,” said Phillip.
“Someone will.”
“I won’t,” said Tom, sincerely. “I promise. I only think about the hat.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. It came out of her all at once, bright and surprised, and the sound of it startled her — it had been three days since she’d really laughed. Three days, and a whole world away. Tom grinned. Phillip beamed. And Smile, lying in the grass with his eyes closed and his tail flicking slowly over his stomach, smiled to himself in the dark, where nobody could see.
Later, when the others had settled and the fire had burned low and the night insects had begun their chorus, Phillip sat by himself on the edge of the hollow, gazing at the stars. They were strange stars, thick and silver and a great deal closer than they ought to have been. He had drawn something in the dirt with a stick. A little brass compass lay in his paws, its needle turning slowly, steadily, always in the same direction.
North. Toward the mountain.
Codette sat down beside him.
“It points to the nearest magic,” Phillip said, without looking up. “Or so the book says. It’s been pointing at Mount Banana since the day I left home. Four hundred miles, and it hasn’t wavered once.” His voice dropped. “I keep hoping it’ll be wrong.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’s right, then she’s real, and I’ll have to learn something. And I’m terrified I’m not good enough.”
Codette considered this. She thought about a teaspoon, and a small black-and-white cat with a very large satchel, and the way he had held his notebook against his chest after the Yarnwood, as if it were the only thing keeping him from falling apart.
“You counted,” she said.
He glanced at her.
“In the forest. Before the yarn got you. You counted your steps out loud. It’s the only reason you made it as far as you did. You held on, Phillip.” She nudged his shoulder, gently. “That’s not nothing. That’s not a teaspoon. That’s — that’s a start.”
Phillip was quiet for a very long time.
“Thank you,” he said, finally, in a tiny voice.
“You’re welcome.”
He tucked the compass back into his satchel. Codette lay back in the grass. The stars wheeled slowly overhead. Far off, beyond the meadow and the Yarnwood and the long, dark rim of the northern hills, something huge and pale and shimmering lay along the horizon like a sheet of beaten gold.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
Phillip squinted. His ears went flat.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, dear. That’s — that would be the Sand Desert. It’s not on my map.” He pulled out the scroll, unrolled it, and frowned. “I was fairly sure it was supposed to be further east.”
“Phillip.”
“Yes?”
“What’s wrong with the desert?”
“Nothing,” said Phillip, a little too quickly. “Nothing at all. Except that the accounts all agree it moves.”
From the far side of the fire, Smile’s voice, very quietly, in the dark: “Of course it does.”
And somewhere beyond the Yarnwood, in the shimmering, shifting, endless gold, the sands began to stir.