Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

He wiped his mouth and hands on a napkin, then followed

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Blanchefleur to the dance floor and joined at the end of the line,

feeling large and clumsy, trying to follow the steps and not tread

on any paws. It did not help that, just when he was beginning to

feel as though he was learning the steps, he saw Tailcatcher glaring at him from across the room. He danced several times, once with Blanchefleur, once with Mrs. Pebbles, who must have taken pity on

him, and once with Fluff, who told him it was a pleasure to dance with such a handsome young man and seemed to mean it. He managed to step on only one set of paws, belonging to a tabby tomcat who said, “Do that again, Sir, and I’ll send you my second in the morning,” but was mollified when Ivan apologized sincerely and at length. After that, he insisted on sitting down until the feast was over and he could go to bed.

The next morning, he woke and wondered if it was all a dream,

but no—there he was, lying in a curtained bed in the Lady’s castle.

And there was Blanchefleur, sitting in a nearby chair, saying, “About time you woke up. We need to get started if we’re going to make the Eastern Waste by nightfall.”

Ivan got out of bed, vaguely embarrassed to be seen in his

nightshirt, then reminded himself that she was just a cat. He put on the clothes he had been given last night, then found his satchel on a dresser. All of his old clothes were gone, replaced by new ones. In the satchel he also found a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, a flask of wine, and a shiny new knife with a horn handle.

“I should thank the Lady for all these things,” he said.

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since you got here,” said Blanchefleur. “But she’s gone to see my father, and won’t be back for three days. And we have to get going. So hurry up already!”

The Lady’s castle was located in a forest called the Wolfwald. To the north, it stretched for miles, and parts of it were so thick that almost no sunlight reached the forest floor. At the foot of the northern mountains, wolves still roamed. But around the castle it was less

dense. Ivan and Blanchefleur walked along a path strewn with oak

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leaves, through filtered sunlight. Ivan was silent, in part because he was accustomed to silence, in part because he did not know what to say to the white cat. Blanchefleur seemed much more interested in

chasing insects, and even dead leaves, than in talking to him.

They stopped to rest when the sun was directly overhead. The

forest had changed: the trees were shorter and spaced more widely

apart, mostly pines rather than the oaks and beeches around

the Lady’s castle. Ahead of him, Ivan could see a different sort of landscape: bare, except for the occasional twisted trees and clumps of grass. It was dry, rocky, strewn with boulders.

“That’s the Eastern Waste,” said Blanchefleur.

“The ground will be too hard for your paws,” said Ivan. “I can

carry you.”

“I’ll do just fine, thank you,” she said with a sniff. But after an hour of walking over the rocky ground, Ivan saw she was limping. “Come on,” he said. “If you hate the thought of me carrying you so much,

pretend I’m a horse.”

“A jackass is more like it,” she said. But she let him pick her up and carry her, with her paws on his shoulder so she could look around.

Occasionally, her whiskers tickled his ear.

The sun traveled across the sky, and hours passed, and still he

walked though the rocky landscape, until his feet hurt. But he would not admit he was in pain, not with Blanchefleur perched on his shoulder. At last, after a region of low cliffs and defiles, they came to a broad plain that was nothing but stones. In the middle of the plain rose a stone tower.

“That’s it,” said Blanchefleur. “That’s Professor Owl’s home.”

“Finally,” said Ivan under his breath. He had been feeling as