Chapter 1 #3
Where had the time gone? Was there any part of Caterina still left?
She and Imogene had been very talented, discreet purveyors of goods, of secrets, of spells.
They’d prided themselves on serving the downtrodden…
who could afford it. And of course, she’d always been very good at knitting.
She had to be. As far as she knew, they had been the only thieves in the world to travel by knitted magic map.
And, again as far as she knew, they still were.
No one else seemed to have had the idea…
let alone done everything required to make it happen—amass one of the largest paper map collections outside of the Cartographers’ Guild to use as reference material, find the only sorcerer in the world who could make the magic happen.
Never mind the innate knitting skill. And that was all something to be proud of, wasn’t it?
A gentle sea breeze stirred her hair, and her reverie was broken by a soft and scaly pressure rubbing against her leg.
And, of course, she’d always had a soft spot for cats. Even the dragony kind.
Katherine wrapped her quilted coat more tightly around her and eased herself onto a convenient hunk of driftwood that had been worn to a seat by her many hours of sitting by the ocean.
On a clear day like today, she could see Ipswich town from this seat, nestled as it was on the bay beyond the forested bluffs that wound away to her right.
Many of the trees had been relieved of their leaves by the sea breeze, but the rest gleamed defiantly red and gold as the shorter days drew out their hidden hues.
More often those bluffs were misty, and verdant in the spring and summer, letting her imagine she was alone out here.
The bluffs broke at the beach where she now sat, then continued again north in craggy defiance of any would-be sunbathers.
Ipswich’s sovereign lived atop one of those bluffs somewhere, but Katherine’s secluded beach was hidden from even his cliff-top palace.
Well… “palace” wasn’t quite the right word, was it?
The pirate king who ruled this coast had wrecked one of his stately galleons some years ago, then salvaged it and erected it as a summer home by the old lighthouse.
When he wasn’t at sea—and he hadn’t been to sea in a long time, come to think of it––he lived there.
The immobile galleon might not be a palace per se, but it did have a regal opulence about it.
Katherine gazed across the bay now herself, appreciating how little her view had changed in the last forty years.
Putting down roots after their wild youth had been such a pleasure, and the consistency of Ipswich was comforting.
There was the old cannery, still in operation, and the long line of slips awaiting the fishing boats that would be returning soon from their overnight catch.
A row of pretty homes bordered the pier, blocking the view of the town square, and if she squinted, Katherine thought she could make out Fergie Mayweather’s house, distinctive with its tidy white shiplap and gabled roof with pink trim.
Poor Fergie. But of course, that house was much more desirable than her own homely cottage in the woods, Katherine told herself. Undoubtedly, much more.
She sighed deeply, breathed in the refreshing salt air, and scratched her cats behind the ears. What had she been thinking about? Ah yes, the maps.
The yarn was nothing special. Imogene had usually supplied that, from her own family’s sheep, and dyed it at home.
It was the needles that really made the magic, commissioned from a sorcerer who specialized in textile work.
Back in the day, Katherine had heard of other crafters who could use enchanted tools to do extraordinary things, like weave linen fibers into flexible armor or lay rope that grew longer or shorter according to need, and she’d tracked down the sorcerer at great expense, nearly exhausting both her and Imogene’s savings.
But it was worth it. The bespoke needles she’d forged for Katherine were truly special, and difficult to make—they channeled Katherine’s imagination as well as her dexterity.
Katherine could depict places she’d never seen, and the needles would work only for her—but she’d put them away ages ago.
She’d destroyed all the destination maps too. Save one.
Tilly climbed into her lap, and Katherine absently began stroking the purring cat’s lavender fur as she ambled down memory lane.
That map. It hadn’t crossed her mind in ages.
It was the location of their last job, actually, and it lay folded in a neglected corner of her dresser, under a plank of cedar.
She should have gotten rid of it ages ago, she told herself, and she’d planned to.
Really. But she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
That final job, the one at 1402A Merchants Lane in Burnt Umberland, the last one they’d agreed to do before Imogene’s wedding and ultimately their retirement—it should have been the biggest of their careers.
They would have gone out on top, secured a legacy as legends, or whatever.
It should have been a cinch. But that map had led only to disappointment.
The details came back in a rush. The Burnt Umberland job had required a lot of planning, as jobs always did, but the task itself had been relatively simple: A group of nuns had approached Imogene and Caterina to steal…
er, liberate, ah, reclaim, a very large sum of money and a signed contract from a businessman named Edward Splint.
Said Mr. Splint had swindled from under their well-meaning, and apparently overly trusting, nunly noses a sizeable piece of land on which he intended to build the Eagle Heights Active Adult Living Community.
To add insult to injury, he planned to steal his clients from the nun-run Saint Percival’s Home for Moribund Old People.
Or something like that. The pay would be twenty percent. A piece of cake, they’d thought.
But at the last minute Imogene and Caterina had been unexpectedly, and unprofessionally to boot, out-thieved.
Some rakish felon had managed to lift the money and the contract before they could, mere moments after they’d broken into Mr. Splint’s office.
To make matters worse, the usurper’s work had alerted the troll security to the break-in. They’d barely escaped.
Tilly fidgeted on her lap, and Katherine ran a soothing hand down her back.
The little cat had been Caterina’s shadow in those days too, her faithful lookout, and that night, in all the chaos, she’d been pinned in the muddy gutter under a slab of fallen plaster.
Caterina had only just managed to rescue her.
Already a cautious animal, Tilly had never been quite the same after.
And to top it all off, Caterina and Imogene had had to go back to the nuns afterward and explain what had happened.
The nuns. A shudder ran down Katherine’s spine.
Saint Percival’s Sisters had not been angry.
Merely… Disappointed. Which was unequivocally worse.
Nuns, it seemed to Katherine, universally shared a remarkable ability to conjure a lifetime’s worth of guilt at will, with merely a single look or word.
It wasn’t magic, she knew, but it certainly felt like it, as every embarrassment flooded back under their gaze, from that one time you’d lied to your parents about brushing your teeth to your biggest, or at least latest, failure.
Katherine heaved a sigh. How could she ever forget that night?
Dodging bits of debris strewn about by reckless troll clubs, clutching a muddy, half-drowned Tilly under her arm, glancing over her shoulder as she ran through the rain to get away, and spying one last time the roguish stranger who had cost her so much money and dignity.
That face. They had exchanged glances, she recalled.
And he’d smiled. Smiled! Well, of course he’d smiled; he’d just gotten away with a sack full of gold, something she and Imogene had been planning for weeks to steal.
He needn’t have winked, though. That was bad manners.
For a long time afterward, that wink had kept her up at night.
“Cheeky,” she said aloud. Mr. Scruffles hopped up and drove Tilly off of Katherine’s lap, feverishly swatting at a beetle that had been crawling across the now-invisible cat’s coat.
“Cheeky. Like you,” Katherine said. “Now stop that.” Mr. Scruffles halted his exertions, looked up into her eyes, and slow-blinked.
She blinked back. Then his attention was suddenly drawn to the ocean, and she followed his gaze.
Along the bluffs to her right, she spotted a rowboat with three men in it.
One was doggedly manning the oars against the surf while the other two talked animatedly, eagerly, and took turns holding up a spyglass shared between them, sweeping it along the waterfront and nodding vigorously.
The men looked a little clean-cut for Ipswich, Katherine thought, and she squinted to see them better.
One of the men cast his arms wide to take in the top of the bluffs.
The second waved at Katherine. She did not wave back.
Instead, she shielded her face with an arm as he trained the spyglass directly on her and kept it there as he sketched feverishly.
Who were these people? Snooping around her beach?
And gawking at her? Perhaps she was not as far off the beaten path as she thought.
“All right, my loves,” she said to the cats. “Time to go home.”