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herself. So, while she couldn't finish The Moon in a Silver Cup, at least not yet, there was nothing stopping her from beginning a new novel. Nothing except a lack of something to write about in the first place. The novel had to have a reason to exist. Just following a story from A to B wasn't enough. At least not for her.
    Where do you get your ideas?
    Well, you see…

    * * *

    Cat was eleven when she decided she wanted to be a writer. It was one of those nebulous decisions that children are prone to, and came hard on the heels of her umpteenth rereading of The Wind in the Willows. Her head was aswirl with the adventures of Ratty and Mole and the incorrigible Mr. Toad, when the realization came to her all in a flash. This was what she wanted to do.
    Her first attempts continued the adventures of Grahame's famous characters, but she soon enjoyed writing more about the new characters that she'd added to the Wild Wood's population than the ones that were rightly Kenneth Grahame's private domain. She filled a number of school notebooks with her own tales of Mouse and Sparrow, and still had a file folder full of those embarrassing efforts hidden away in a drawer somewhere.
    It wasn't until a month or so later, in early winter, when she was walking with Kothlen in the Otherworld, that she shared her ambition with another person. She tried to explain it to him as they ambled through the hills that lay between the great oak and apple wood which was the domain of antlered Mynfel and the gray seas where the selchies and merrows could be seen sporting in the waves most nights.
    Kothlen's father was Morer, the silver-haired harper of Gwyn ap Nudd's court, but his mother was a mortal, and it was from her that he got the blue in his blue-green eyes and the light-brown streaks in his own silvery hair. His features were not so sharp edged as the other elfin folk, and he always had time for the tangle-haired moppet who came night-visiting to his world. Next to Tiddy Mun, and for all the age difference between them, Kothlen was her best friend.
    Unlike his father, he was not a harper. But he was a bard all the same, and the stories that he knew…
    He listened to Cat prattle on with a smile on his lips, well pleased that she should choose to follow his own profession.
    "There are few joys to compare with the telling of a well-told tale," he remarked when Cat finally ran out of words.
    Cat nodded. Though she was only eleven, she was already a voracious reader.
    "I just know it's what I want to do," she said, "but…"
    Her voice trailed off, and for a time they walked in silence. The tang of the sea was in the air. The Otherworld stars wheeled and spun in constellations unfamiliar to Cat's home-world, but well known to her.
    "But what?" Kothlen prompted.
    "I don't know what to write about."
    "Sit with me a moment," he said.
    He led her to an outcrop of stone that pushed its granite surface out of the heather nearby. Kothlen made himself comfortable while Cat perched like one of her namesakes beside him. Her parents called her Katie, but she was already thinking of herself as Cat. And as a cat, an outsider, an observer more than a participant, just like the cats she always had around her. It was a romantic notion that made up for the fact that she was the one who alienated herself from her peers. It would be another year before Kothlen gave her her own secret name.
    "The tales I tell are old," he said. "When I relate them to you, I am merely retelling some ancient story or history in my own voice."
    "You don't make them up?"
    Kothlen laughed. "Oh, some of them. But mostly I just fill out the details. The tales themselves are what they always were. I think of them as the bones of some ancient beast that I must add flesh to so that it can live again. But while the tale itself, its truth, is of the utmost importance, it is the telling that allows it to be remembered or forgotten. The trueness of the telling is what makes up a storyteller's