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breakfasts, although he rather doubted it. If the
shed and garden were any indication, they weren't the industrious sort.
    "You're a cat now!"
exclaimed a voice behind him, and Seylin bounded into the air. A thin girl
emerged from a bush and pushed back straggly fair hair, her pale cheeks flushed
with excitement. "You're under an enchantment, aren't you?" she
demanded breathlessly.
    Seylin twitched
his bottle brush tail as he considered what to do. The child, only about nine or ten, didn't look dangerous,
and she was talking about things he understood. His
tail died back to a soft fluff again, and he sat down in the garden weeds.
    "Yes, I am
under an enchantment," he confirmed in his high cat, voice.
    The skinny little wraith before him
didn't even blink at this extraordinary
news, and she didn't look surprised to hear him speak, either. She just
clasped her hands together and walked up to him, her face ecstatic.
    "Oh, I just knew it!" she
cried. "I'll help you if you like. You could marry me when I grow up, and
then you would have to leave me and be locked away in the farthest castle, and
I would wander looking for you for seven
years, over mountain and valley, and finally find you about to marry the troll princess, and I would trade my ring to
talk to you, but you would be in a magical sleep, and I'd sit by you and cry and say,
"I've sought you for seven years,' and a tear would fall on your cheek and wake you up, and then the
enchantment would be broken."
    Seylin stared
at the excited little girl with his golden eyes. "That sounds
like a lot of trouble," he said politely. "I think I'll just stay a
cat, if it's all the same to you."
    "Well, you do make a nice
cat," she went on enthusiastically. "May
I pet you?" "And she sat down beside him and tickled him under the chin. Seylin started to purr. Usually
he tried not to do this because it struck him as undignified, but he
couldn't help himself. After an entire
fruitless month of roaming through the woods, it was nice to be tickled
under the chin.
    "Who enchanted you?" she
asked. "Was it an evil witch disguised as a beautiful red haired woman, or
was it some fairy who hated your family?
Are you really a prince? Where's your kingdom?"
    Seylin puzzled
over this. It was obvious to him that they had both
studied magic, but from very different books.
    "No, I'm not a prince," he
told her. "I enchanted myself I can't change back right now because the
light would hurt my eyes."
    "Oh," she said, a little
disappointed. "Most people under enchantments
are handsome princes." She told him several stories to prove her point. Seylin listened with interest.
He supposed that they were possible, but a lot of the magic seemed
terribly impractical.
    "How do you know all this?"
he asked. "Where did you learn about magic?"
    "My father
told me some of them, and I've read some of them in books," she said. "My father knows everything.
He used to be almost a prince himself and lived in a richly appointed house
filled with ser vants
who obeyed his every command. But then he met my mother, and
even though they weren't supposed to speak to each other, she won his heart
with her enchanting beauty. His evil mother tried to separate them, and she cast my mother out of doors to starve, but my wise
and handsome father rescued her and took her away to marry. They should have
lived happily ever after," the thin little girl said seriously, "but when I was a baby, my mother
wasted away and died, and my father wandered about with me, penniless
and in terrible distress. Sometimes he gives
lessons to the little boys in the town, but most of the time he's too
sick with a broken heart to get out of bed, so I have to tell them to go
away."
    ∗ ∗ ∗
    The two unlikely
companions spent a happy morning together. The little girl talked, and Seylin
listened. Her name was Jane, and she confessed that she was unhappy about this
because she had never read a single story about a beautiful maiden named Jane.
Seylin decided