Runa didn’t yelp. She never yelped. Yelping was for wizards who’d set their own robes on fire.

  She bucked, flinging the attacker off her horns, and spun to face it as it landed.

  It didn’t.

  The catbird she’d seen earlier hovered in front of her, wings beating, paws curled up in front of its soft belly. It was a yellowish, orangeish, patchy colour, closer to a kitten than full-grown, with luminous green-gold eyes.

  She stared at it.

  It licked its nose, chirruped, and swooped towards her.

  Runa ducked away. She didn’t want to swat it out of the air—it was barely more than a kitten. And there was something tied to the collar around its neck. She didn’t much feel like getting on Junilla’s wrong side, if this was one of the catbirds the innkeeper had been after to get a message to her wizard.

  And besides. She fought off bog-mammoths and gar-ghosts. She didn’t beat up little cats.

  “Ouch!” she not-yelped as the catbird flipped in midair, flailing with its legs and catching her arm with one outstretched claw. It skidded onto the ground, launched itself into the air again, barely missed the corner of the nearest house, and swung around again.

  This time, she was ready for it.

  Runa grabbed the catbird out of midair as it hurtled towards her. She bundled it under one arm and held its wings against its sides like it was a chicken.

  It burrowed its head into her elbow and began to purr.

  “What,” Runa began, and stopped. The catbird began to knead her arm. “What.”

  The catbird didn’t reply.

  There hadn’t been any catbirds in the Rising Islands when she grew up. Plenty of birds, the odd cat off a passing ship, but none of the strange chimeric creatures like the one nuzzling the inside of her elbow. They were the creation of some ancient northern wizard, like the mothcows that occasionally cropped up in herds of regular cows—and possibly created by the same wizard, given that catbirds had a hint of fuzzy mothiness around their ears and the joints of their wings.

  The first time she’d seen one had been on the way to that fateful first visit to her father, when she was a teenager. They’d been—where was it? Some coastal town, all big stone fort up the hill and defensible walls jutting into the harbour and stories about how in the old days they used to have to fight off raiders from all sides, but these days you had to sail half the week to find even a half-hearted pirate, and even then they probably wouldn’t even try to board you.

  The jetties had been the stalking grounds of all sorts of normal cats. And then there were the fishing boats’ greatest enemies: not the stray moggies, not the seabirds cawing and diving at the nets, but the catbirds.

  Catbirds took things to where they were meant to be. And the colony that had made their nest in this particular village had very strong opinions about where fish were meant to be.

  Firstly, back in the ocean. That made sense.

  Secondly, the turrets of various towers around the town. Nobody had understood that.

  Thirdly, dropped directly on the head of the local lord.

  That last one, at least, had made sense to the gentle fisherfolk of the town. None of it had made sense to the local regular cat population: they’d watched their winged cousins fly away with full meals in their mouths and not eat them with looks of feline outrage.

  The captain of the ship that was taking her north had explained that the catbirds were, by their magical nature, compelled to seek out things that were where they shouldn’t be, and put them where they should be, but that nobody knew what actual criteria they used for this. It didn’t seem a great basis to use them as couriers, but people tried that as well. In this town, any message sent by catbird inevitably came with a free fish, so maybe that was why.

  He’d also said the catbirds were a famous symbol of the local nobility, and that was why even the fish-bedecked lord didn’t have them all rounded up and gotten rid of.

  This catbird wasn’t carrying a fish. But it seemed determined that Runa was its target—or at least the target for whatever message was in the small metal canister around its neck.

  Runa twisted the end off the canister and pulled out a small roll of paper.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  It was entirely blank.

  “What?” she muttered. She turned the paper over, and then back again as though words might have appeared on the other side while she wasn’t looking.

  Nothing.

  “You sure you’re in the right place?” she asked the catbird. It meowed softly and kept digging its pin-like claws into her forearm.

  It stayed like that the whole way to the tavern, a small, warm bundle of fluff happily destroying her flesh.

  Audella Tremblewood was there again. Runa handed over the bread, and then lifted her arm to show off the catbird stuck there. “Any idea what this is about?” she asked.

  Widow Tremblewood’s eyebrows rose. “Means I’ll be back to my lonely hovel in a day or two, I reckon, if Junilla found a nest of catbirds to send about her business.”

  Lonely hovel? Runa thought. She’d been to Audella’s several times to pick up eggs already, and the woman’s cottage was neither hovel-ish nor empty, with the number of grandchildren on constant rotation in and out. “There’s no message on it, though.”

  “That’s Junilla for you. Doesn’t waste time writing it all out when an intention’s all you need. Catbirds always know what we want better than what we think we do, anyway,” she said with the same untroubled calm as the locals in that far-off fishing village watching their lord be pummeled by fish.

  “What intention did she send?”

  The catbird had enough of turning her arm to mincemeat. It moved its attention to the tavern, weighing up the various benefits of the fireplace with its warm hearth and the windows with the morning sun streaming in.

  Widow Tremblewood shrugged. “Same one as usual, I expect. A strong nudge in the ribs to the one who can come and keep Pothollow from sliding into the Cauldron. Oh, no, don’t look like that, I’m joking. She just wants that bloke back to fix up the spellwork. Someone to help the village.”

  To help the village, Runa thought. “Why’d it come to me?”

  “Well, you’ve been a help as well, haven’t you? Easy to see why the poor thing got confused.” She reached out to scratch the catbird behind the ears and it leaned into her touch, purring manically.

  There was a difference between doing some baking and refreshing the spells that kept the water fresh and illness out of people’s homes, though. Runa frowned.

  “Silly goose,” Widow Tremblewood continued, cooing at the catbird. “You’d better be off and try again. She meant for you to find the fellow who raised you—yes, that’s right, I remember you from last summer. Couldn’t even walk straight, could you? Let alone use those wings. Though if you don’t have any luck finding him, you might have a look for—no, I shouldn’t confuse you any more than you already are, should I? Come over here and have a nice egg before you fly off and try again.”

  The catbird got confused. That must be it. It took on board Junilla’s need for a particular person to help the village in a particular way, and took a wrong turn. Runa folded the sacks she’d brought the bread in and tucked them under her arm. “The wizard raised them?”

  “Ooh, yes. So you should be able to find him easily enough, shouldn’t you, little puss? Or did you decide to take the easy route and wait for one of the others to find him first while you get cozy here. Clever, clever.”

  Runa left the catbird to what promised to be a morning of being spoiled by the temporary tavernkeeper, and headed back out into the sunshine.

  By mid-afternoon, the catbird was back outside the bakery.

  Runa had left baskets of scones and several loaves of bread on the windowsill for passersby, and was collecting the coins they’d left in exchange, a motley selection of odd coppers and the occasional silver. There wasn’t a coinmaster in Pothollow the way there was in Sollus Gate, whose job was to ensure the exchange rate between the various currencies adventurers used. She just had to guess her neighbors knew what they were about. She was in the middle of sorting the coins by what she hoped was their value when a small, orange-yellow cat’s head with green eyes and soft mothy antennae next to its ears appeared over the side of the roof.

  She stared at it.

  It stared back. “Mew!”

  Runa shook her head. “You’re still in the wrong place,” she told it.

  “Hm? Whassat?” Severine pushed in through the garden door.

  “That catbird keeps trying to get in,” Runa told her.

  “The little one from earlier? What’s it want?”

  Runa explained Audella’s theory on it mistaking her for the wizard Junilla had actually meant to aim the catbird at.

  “Mm, well, you are helpful. Too helpful, as previously discussed. Maybe it thinks it can con you into being the hero Pothollow needs to save its spells.”

  “Should’ve set me up to save its life somehow first, then.”

  “Ooh, ouch. Bit close to the bone there, Runa.” Severine grinned unrepentantly. She leaned on the windowsill beside Runa and looked up at the catbird. “Still, it’s nice, isn’t it? A catbird thinking you’re a suitable target to keep the village safe—oh, where’s it gone?”

  The moment Severine set her elbows on the windowsill, the catbird yowled and streaked into the sky.

  Runa snorted. “Guess it changed its mind. Hey—about that missing bread earlier—are you all right?”

  Severine was staring after the catbird, her face ashen. “What? Oh—the bread—no, that’s—” She blinked hard and grinned, but it wobbled. “Forget the bread, we need to get back to the fact you still don’t have a bedr0om. I’ve talked to Tam, and we were thinking it shouldn’t be too hard to turn the woodshed into something you could actually sleep in, we just need to find the stone. Rather than wood.”

  “Because we all saw how well the wood worked out.”

  “Less chance it’ll catch on fire, as well. But! No stonemasons in Pothollow. Which, you know, I guess our choices are either buy in town and haul it up the hill—”

  “And you’re volunteering to pay for that, too?” Runa folded her arms. She didn’t think her handful of coins from selling bread would cover a stonecutter’s bill.

  And she would have had to be an idiot not to notice how quickly and clumsily Severine had changed the subject.

  “Not even slightly. Nor am I volunteering to drag solid rock up the mountain. I thought we could steal some from the Cauldron, instead.”

  “Did you.”

  “It’s less of a walk from over the Rim than up from Dawdledale.”

  “If a curseland with suitable ruins crops up where the Sweetmeadow is now, sure.”

  “And if the stones themselves aren’t cursed, I suppose.”

  Runa let Severine natter on about the obviously ridiculous notion of scavenging old stonework from the Cauldron, but kept a careful eye on her. The color returned to her face, but there was a strain at the corners of her eyes and mouth that didn’t leave no matter how ridiculous her plans got.

  Was she upset about scaring the catbird off, or was it something else?

  https://www.lazydragonbooks.com/hearthcon-2025