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  Reserved for the Cat

  ( Elemental Masters - 6 )

  Mercedes Lackey

  Based loosely on the tale of Puss in Boots, Reserved for the Cat takes place in 1910 in an alternate London. A young dancer, penniless and desperate, is sure she is going mad when a cat begins talking to her mind-to-mind. But her feline guide, actually an Elemental Earth Spirit, helps her to impersonate a famous Russian ballerina and achieve the success she’s been dreaming of. Unfortunately she also attracts the attention of another Elemental Spirit— a far more threatening one— and the young dancer must once again turn to her mysteriously powerful four-legged furry friend.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  EPILOGUE

  Raves for Reserved for the Cat :

  “The fifth in the series involving the mysterious Elemental Masters, this story of a resourceful young dancer also delivers a new version of a classic fairy tale. Richly detailed historic backgrounds add flavor and richness to an already strong series that belongs in most fantasy collections. Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “The Paris of Degas, turn-of-the-century Blackpool, and the desperation of young girls without family or other protection come to life in a story that should interest a broad readership.”

  —Booklist

  “This most recent entry in Lackey’s series is a nicely paced, pleasant read. Nina is a sympathetic protagonist readers will root for, and the story holds together well.”

  —Romantic Times

  “A fantastic cat-and-mouse game among a shape-changing troll, Elemental Masters and a gifted dancer in Victorian England makes Lackey’s latest Elemental Masters installment a charmer. This is Lackey at her best, mixing whimsy and magic with a fast-paced plot.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  RESERVED

  FOR THE

  CAT

  NOVELS BY MERCEDES LACKEY

  available from DAW Books:

  THE HERALDS OF

  VALDEMAR

  ARROWS OF THE QUEEN

  ARROW’S FLIGHT

  ARROW’S FALL

  THE LAST HERALD-MAGE

  MAGIC’S PAWN

  MAGIC’S PROMISE

  MAGIC’S PRICE

  THE MAGE WINDS

  WINDS OF FATE

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  WINDS OF FURY

  THE MAGE STORMS

  STORM WARNING

  STORM RISING

  STORM BREAKING

  VOWS AND HONOR

  THE OATHBOUND

  OATHBREAKERS

  OATHBLOOD

  THE COLLEGIUM

  CHRONICLES

  FOUNDATION

  BY THE SWORD

  BRIGHTLY BURNING

  TAKE A THIEF

  EXILE’S HONOR

  EXILE’S VALOR

  VALDEMAR

  ANTHOLOGIES:

  SWORD OF ICE

  SUN IN GLORY

  CROSSROADS

  MOVING TARGETS

  Written with LARRY DIXON:

  THE MAGE WARS

  THE BLACK GRYPHON

  THE WHITE GRYPHON

  THE SILVER GRYPHON

  DARIAN’S TALE

  OWLFLIGHT

  OWLSIGHT

  OWLKNIGHT

  OTHER NOVELS:

  THE BLACK SWAN

  THE DRAGON JOUSTERS

  JOUST

  ALTA

  SANCTUARY

  AERIE

  THE ELEMENTAL

  MASTERS

  THE SERPENT’S SHADOW

  THE GATES OF SLEEP

  PHOENIX AND ASHES

  THE WIZARD OF LONDON

  RESERVED FOR THE CAT

  And don’t miss: THE VALDEMAR COMPANION Edited by John Helfers and Denise Little

  Copyright 2007 by Mercedes R. Lackey.

  All rights reserved.

  DAW Books Collectors No. 1417.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Paperback Printing, October 2008

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14373-5

  S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the volunteers of the Emergency Animal

  Rescue Service (EARS)

  who are selflesslty going into disaster areas to

  save our best friends.

  http://www.uan.org

  1

  NINETTE Dupond lined the toes of her pointe shoes with lambswool carefully, making sure there were no little bits of grit or near-invisible lumps that would make themselves known in the middle of the performance. Then she took surgical tape and bound her toes, so that if the inevitable blisters did break and bleed, the blood wouldn’t seep through and stain the pink silk of the shoes. It did not do for a pretty little sylph to have bleeding feet. It spoiled the illusion.

  She had already spent half an hour pounding on the toes of her shoes with a hammer to break up the glue just so. Old shoes for practice, new shoes for performance. It was a mantra, like so many other mantras of a ballet dancer. Ninette was only a sujet, a soloist, and a new-made one at that—one step up from the coryphées, and two from the quadrilles of the chorus, but not yet to the exalted status of the premier danseurs and as far from the etoiles as she was from the stars in the sky. Coryphées did not often have new shoes; one could see them backstage at rehearsal covering their old shoes with new silk, reblocking and reglueing the toes. A soloist, yes, as a soloist she got a pair of new shoes for every new production.

  Ninette did not get the sort of pampering that the etoiles got. But as a soloist, she could, at last, do what she was here to do in the first place.

  Not to become a star performer, oh no. Her goal was more oblique. To catch the eye of a rich old gentleman.

  Her mother Marie Dupond had made no bones about it when she had enrolled her daughter in the ballet school of the Paris Opera. There were not many options open to a pretty little girl like Ninette, alone with her mother in Montmartre. She could become a washer-woman and starve, and possibly marry some poor workingman who would overlook the fact that she had no father, and bear a dozen children, bury most of them, and die young. She could work for the painters, as her mother did, and also starve. With them she would have no reputation, and go to bed with them because at least they had beds and food most of the time, and were always generous if improvident. She could simply become a whore, because no respectable m
an of any means would marry a girl with no father. Never mind that her mother had a marriage license and all; such things could be faked and when there was no live father and no grave—

  And even if one accepted the license, well, the man had deserted the woman. Likely he had a dozen wives or more, which would make Ninette a bastard. Not many respectable men with good positions would take the chance on marrying a pretty girl whose background—or relatives—might come back to haunt him.

  So Ninette could marry a poor man, who would not have such concerns. Or she could put herself where rich men would see her and become something better than a mere whore. She could become a courtesan.

  One of the places to be seen by men with money was on the stage, preferably the opera or ballet, though the Folies were marginally acceptable. And it was clear to Marie Dupond, when she saw her flower-like child dancing almost before she could walk, that the place for her was the Paris Opera Ballet. Many rich old men in large fur coats took mistresses from among the little ballerinas. And if the girls were clever, they kept their rich old men very happy and were given a tidy little something as a parting gift when another little ballerina took their place. By then they were known at Maxim’s and on the boulevards and another rich old man would quickly take the place of the former one.

  If they were not clever, of course, they ended up drinking absinthe to excess and showing their legs at the Moulin Rouge or even less desirable places, and ended up as washerwomen and starved. But along with ballet lessons, little Ninette received lessons in being clever from a very young age.

  And the very first one, repeated so often that Ninette thought if one were to take off her skull it would be engraved on her brain, was this:

  Never fall in love.

  Maman had fallen in love. She had fallen in love with an Englishman, and they had even married—she truly did have the license to prove it—and set up housekeeping in a little garret apartment and, Ninette supposed, had been very happy. Then one day shortly after Ninette was born, when she was wailing away in her cradle and Maman had been at her wits’ end to soothe her, Papa had gone out.

  And he had never come back again.

  And that was all Ninette knew of her Papa. There had, most certainly, been no trace of him whatsoever. No bodies had turned up, no one even remembered seeing him in their street. He was just—gone. And there was Maman, with no money and a tiny baby and no idea how to keep them from starving except to take in washing and take off her clothes for the artists in their quarter. So she did both. And Ninette grew up in an atmosphere where the smell of harsh soap and paint drying meant comfort. Meager comfort, but nevertheless, comfort, for soap and paint meant cabbage, beans, bread, and cheese, and perhaps even sausages sometimes.

  The artists were kinder than the people who sent them laundry to clean. The artists bounced her on their knees when she was quiet to make her laugh, sang out-of-tune songs with questionable lyrics to soothe her to sleep, and sometimes had musician friends who played music that made her dance. The artists were more generous too, which was strange considering that the people who sent them laundry had far more money than the artists did.

  Learning to dance was hard work. Dancing was even harder. Ninette had liked making up her own dances and not having to do them teetering on her burning toes, with her calves and arches aching. Ballet hurt. She ended every performance—and she had been performing since she was twelve—with cramped and blistered feet, with aching ankles and knees. She ended every rehearsal wishing she could have been anywhere else. She was not one of those few for whom the stage was a fairy-tale place where nothing bad could ever touch them. The stage for her was one thing: a show window, where she would somehow manage to catch the eye of someone with a great deal of money while, at the same time, keeping the etoiles and the premier danseurs from noticing that she had done so.

  As she wedged her feet carefully into her pink satin shoes and bound the pink ribbons just so around her ankles, the scent of the ballet filled her nostrils—rosin and sweat, chalk-dust and flowers, perfume and gaslights, the heavy makeup they all wore, the pomade on their hair to hold it in place. All the sylph-girls wore their hair in stiff little buns with wreaths of white artificial flowers around them; the Scottish girls all had the same stiff little buns but wore Scottish bonnets over them, so they didn’t need as much pomade.

  The orchestra was tuning up on the other side of the red velvet curtain, and the house was filling. She could hear the murmur of voices out there, a kind of dull rumble in which individual voices were submerged into an oddly slumberous whole.

  Ninette, of course, was a Sylph. This was a very long ballet, and it often seemed to Ninette that it got longer every year, with more and more solos, duets, trios, pas de quatres and Variations added to satisfy—

  Who?

  Presumably the rich old men in fur coats in the boxes, who delighted in seeing their kept darlings flitting across the stage. Each of them watched with proprietary pride, knowing—or at least thinking—that their pretty little thing was being ogled by all, but like the white doe in the legend was not to be touched by any save the one whose collar they wore so prettily.

  Well, Ninette was going to be one of those kept darlings, and when she was, she was going to stop dancing. Or at least, she was going to dance only what and as she wanted to. Perhaps . . . she thought longingly . . . perhaps in the style of La Belle Isadora, Isadora Duncan, with her bare feet and little Greek tunics, bare arms and freedom . . . perhaps like Loie Fuller, who had only to swirl enormous draperies around in colored lights.

  But that day was not yet, and this day was another skirmish in the war to win what her mother never had.

  She missed her mother; every night going home to the now-empty apartment, every Sunday visiting the unmarked pauper’s grave, she missed Maman dreadfully. That might seem strange to someone who only saw the Maria Dupond who lectured and scolded her daughter, always pushing, pushing her. But Ninette knew the desperation that had been behind the scolding, and felt that same desperation watching the pleasant spring and languid summer march towards fall, towards winter, when the little garret would have little or no heat and the wind would whistle through the cracks till the water would freeze solid in the pitcher and washbasin. It had been hard enough to sustain life with both Marie’s income and hers. With the meager salary of a soloist . . .

  Ninette rose to her feet and began her warming up exercises. She never put these off. She had seen far too many girls hurt because they scanted their warm-ups—and an injured dancer is not a dancer at all, and there were plenty more waiting to take her place if she faltered and fell.

  Stretches first; toe-touches, plies in all five positions, back and leg stretches along the backstage barre followed by similar exercises en pointe, and limbering exercises for the arches—

  This was only a matinee, and the audience would mostly be children and their governesses, old people who could not afford the evening prices—but some of those rich old men still liked to fill the box stalls even at a matinee. For some, the reason was because the matinee was where the fresh, young talent was trotted out and seasoned, like young horses running local races before attempting the Grand Prix. For others, it was because their constitutions no longer permitted the late hours of a long production. And who knew? There might even be some ballet lovers among them, as opposed to lovers of little ballerinas.

  Since it was only a matinee, Ninette had not even thought much about the fact that the Sylphide herself, Mademoiselle Jeanmarie Augustine, was nowhere to be seen. The etoile was possessed by one of those rich old men, performed her warm-ups in the privacy of her own little ballet studio in her luxurious flat, and was rushed to the theater in her paramour’s own motorcar. But an uncharacteristic stir backstage caught her attention, as did the sound of raised voices signaling something was wrong, and she looked up from her stretching among all the other little sylphs to see the ballet master, the wardrobe mistress, and the company manager hurrying towards her own
little knot of girls carrying, respectively, a wreath of artificial orange blossoms of the sort that winter brides wore, the slightly larger and more elaborate wings of La Sylphide herself, and a sheaf of papers. . . .

  And they were looking straight at her.

  A thrill of excitement together with a chill of anxiety sent blood rushing to her cheeks and gooseflesh to crawl on her arms. Something must have happened to La Augustine. But surely they weren’t—

  They were.

  The other girls scampered awkwardly out of the way as the three approached, the portly, be-suited manager, with his little fringe of hair combed hopelessly over his bald pate, looking particularly red-faced and out-of-sorts. When they reached hearing distance, they all started talking at once.

  “Of all the wretched inconveniences—”

  “Ma belle, we haven’t time to change—”

  “Petite, I know you can—”

  “Enough!” roared the company manager, getting complete silence. “Look here, girl—” he scanned the papers in his hand. “Ninette. La Augustine managed to trip on the curb and sprained her ankle. Her understudy didn’t come in.” The look on his face told what he thought was the reason—a man, too much wine, and a big head after. “The second understudy is already in the harness—”