“An impressive sight, eh, Chronicler?”
The Chronicler turned around, startled, and saw Eanrin sitting in cat form at the far end of the tall chamber. “Rivals your own library, doesn’t it?”
Paling, the Chronicler stepped away from the desk. He glanced at the trove surrounding him. “I never thought to see so much captured in writing,” he said. “How many scribes did it take to document all that I see here?”
“One,” said the cat. “But she’s an industrious little bee.”
“It must have taken . . .” The Chronicler shook his head, staggered at the enormity of work surrounding him. “It must have taken decades!”
The cat shrugged, twitching both his tail and ears. “I couldn’t say. We don’t keep track of Time as such here in the Between. It might have been decades. It might have been minutes. Really, does it matter?”
“Perhaps not,” the Chronicler said, glancing again at the wonders around him: the tall trees, the piled scrolls. He looked at the parchment on the desk, the rhyme with which he had become so familiar over the years, as though it haunted him. “Smallman,” he whispered. A shudder passed through his frame. “So that is supposed to be . . . me.”
“How should I know?” said the cat. “I didn’t write that one. I’ve written much fine poetry in my day, I’ll have you know, mostly romantic verse, all excellent quality, bound to make my name even in the Near World one day. But I don’t write nursery rhymes.”
“I don’t believe in any of this,” the Chronicler said, staring at the words on the page. As the speech of Faerie made itself understood, so did this fey writing. The characters seemed to rise off the page as he looked at them, rearranging themselves and playing through his mind like images, like tastes, like smells. It was the way music speaks without language but communicates more than words.
Yet the end result was the same. The end result was the nursery rhyme of his childhood.
The Chronicler drew a long breath. “I don’t believe in chosen ones. In prophecies. In destinies.”
Eanrin padded into the room. “Neither do I,” he said mildly. “On principle, I’m against them. Inconvenient, nonsensical things, and a cat does like to be master of his own fate, you know?” Then he put his ears back and gave the Chronicler a pointed look. “But what I believe or don’t believe has little to do with the truth of the matter.”
The Chronicler ground his teeth. “I’ve fought against believing things I could not understand, and I laughed at those who clung to Faerie stories.” His voice was bitter as black tea. “Faerie stories are the last thing the likes of me needs to believe.”
“Likes of you?” said the cat. “You mean, mortal?”
“I mean like me,” the Chronicler snarled, fixing a glare upon the cat. “Malformed. Disfigured. An accident.” His face was like the old earl’s in that moment, the face of a warrior, but a defeated warrior who had fought a long, losing battle. A face all the more terrible for its youth.
The cat sat silent, his eyes slits, his ears quirked back as though he was offended. When at last he spoke, his voice was silky soft. “What is it with you mortals and your fixation on size? Do you think your stature has anything to do with anything?” Then he spoke like a knife. “Look at me!”
Suddenly he stood up, and his cat form dropped away into that of a man. The Chronicler, though he had seen the transformation once before, fell back against the desk, clutching at its legs for support.
“Take a good look at me!” the cat-man said, indicating his tall, straight, golden self, clad in brilliant red. But when he turned his head, he was a cat, small and furry. Just as the Haven was both a structure built of stone and mortar and a woodland glade of trees and moss, the cat was all cat, the man was all man, and both were simultaneously Eanrin.
“Look closer still,” said the cat-man. “Do you know what I am? I am Eanrin of Rudiobus, Bard of Iubdan, one of the little people, one of the Merry Folk. Do you see?”
And the Chronicler saw what he had not seen before. Even as a man, Eanrin was unbound by size. He could be small enough to stand in the palm of a mortal’s hand; he could be tall enough to speak eye to eye with the great centaurs. But he was still, no matter his size, Eanrin.
“Do you understand, mortal?” Eanrin said. “We Faerie know it’s the spirit that counts, and all else is malleable. Beauty or ugliness; brawn or frailty; height or lack thereof—these appearances can be exchanged with scarcely a thought! But the truth . . . now, that’s another issue. The truth of the thing, the person behind what you perceive with any of your paltry five senses . . . Creature of dust, it’s the truth that counts! And you’ll rarely find more truth than in Faerie tales.”