An Exclusive Excerpt from Nottie’s Potential
Chapter 1
In which Nottie’s cat is scrutinized again
It never quite seemed fair to Nottie that she had to get up just as early on weekends as she did on weekdays. It seemed silly to even make any distinction between the days, as only a few stores closer to town seemed to pay the difference any heed at all. Her father told her that Kingston in the East was more traditional in the difference, but Nottie wasn’t sure why Kingston should affect them at all. She had never even seen the city, though her mother had shown her a postcard from there once. It had a pretty picture of a garden on the front, and well wishes on the back, and claimed to be from the Royal Palace itself.
But even if Nottie’s father and chores hadn’t woken her up at six o’clock on Saturday morning, Trixie would have. Nottie had never heard of an animal with such a consistent internal clock. Breakfast was at half-past-six in the morning, lunch at quarter-to-one, and dinner at seven, and if anything was late, the whole street got an earful. That hadn’t happened in a while though, partly because Nottie had gotten used to the schedule, and partly because Trixie had learned that if she alerted Nottie to the time fifteen minutes beforehand, things were a lot less likely to be late. After the cat had been fed, the weekend laundry started and the dry dishes from the previous night put away, Nottie made breakfast for herself and her father. She had just sat down when he walked into the house.
“Nottie? You up?” he called.
“Yes, Da!” Nottie answered through a mouthful of cereal.
“Course you are, that monster’s not mewling,” Harold Thompson said as he entered the kitchen and slumped down on the chair across from Nottie. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “Mrs. Fairlie wants to take a look at that cat later today. She stopped me on the street to tell me so.”
“Again?” Nottie asked. “What’s so interesting about my cat anyway?”
“Blast if I know. Far as I’m concerned she can have the mangy thing, but it keeps coming back to you, doesn’t it?”
“Trixie isn’t mangy! She’s very clean. And Mrs. Fairlie would never feed her on time,” Nottie retorted.
“True,” Harold sighed wearily. “Bit of a miracle that cat’s gotten you trained so well, really. But at least it’s saved me the trouble of having to wake you up anymore. Small favors and all.” Harold pulled over the plate of toast and butter Nottie had laid out, then poured some orange juice into his glass. Trixie trotted over from her food dish and sat by the table cleaning her face. Harold leaned down to pet her head absent-mindedly. Trixie ducked to dodge his hand. Nottie smiled and stood to get the coffee pot.
“Was the market busy this morning? Lots of customers?” Nottie asked.
“A fair few, about the same as a usual Saturday, but you can bet they’ll be out in full force this afternoon. I’m on an afternoon shift too, so I can take care of things here tomorrow.”
“What’s going on this afternoon?” Nottie asked.
“Nothing special, but there was a slew of gossip going around this morning, and you know how that gets people out of the house.”
“You’re just taking the extra hours so you don’t have to be here when Mrs. Fairlie comes by,” Nottie said.
“Brain like that you should get a higher education somewhere,” Harold returned. “And can you blame me? She won’t expect you to know the political nonsense and might even be gone by the time I get home.”
“But she’ll try to explain it all to me!” Nottie whined.
“And I won’t have to pay for a higher education in politics after all,” Harold grinned. “Come now, Nottie, she’ll be too distracted by your cat to talk politics at all in a few minutes. Then you let Trixie run her round in circles and you’ll be rid of her in no time. After that it’s just a quiet afternoon with books and paper and pencils and sunshine. Not such a bad deal, eh?” Nottie huffed, but Harold just grinned at her. He carried his dishes to the sink so she could wash them later, and turned back towards the hall. “If I’m not awake in an hour, send the cat in to get me. I just need a little more shut-eye to deal with the crowd this afternoon, and then I’ll be out again. I’ll be gone for lunch, so it doesn’t matter when you get to the dishes, pumpkin.”
“Alright, Da!” Nottie called back. Trixie jumped into Harold’s now empty chair, where she continued to clean her face. Nottie gave the cat a little push, which sent her leaping to the floor. Trixie gave a small mewl of displeasure from Nottie’s ankles, then jumped right back onto the chair.
“Fine,” Nottie said. “Just don’t get up on the table and don’t let Da catch you.” Trixie purred in reply. Nottie cleared off the table in a hurry, piling all the dishes beside the sink, and pulled out pencils and paper to cover the table instead. Trixie stopped cleaning her face in favor of watching Nottie intently. Nottie ignored her. It had been unnerving the first few times that Trixie had done this, but almost a year later, Nottie was used to the fact that her cat liked to watch her sketch. She had no idea why Trixie was so entranced by this, but there didn’t seem to be any way to ask her, so she had to just put it down to the strangeness of her cat.
Nottie’s mother, when she had been alive, had loved to draw. Olivia Thompson had been a gifted artist. Harold often boasted that some of his wife’s art had traveled across the kingdom, once making it all the way to Kingston. He could not be sure which pieces had gone so far, as the merchants who took them that way never specified, and Harold had never been to Kingston himself to look, but some of her work might have even been seen by the royal family, or at least the Advisor to History. But what Nottie remembered most about her mother’s art was not what it looked like or where it went, but what her mother could do with it. Olivia Thompson had been gifted enough at magic to make her drawings live. Not much, really. They could not speak or leave the confines of their paper, but they could wink, they could walk, and they could sometimes mime out jokes and at least pretend to listen to you. Nottie knew that it was a trick more than real magic. She still had one sketch of her mother’s tucked under her bed, which she sometimes pulled out and talked to in order to watch it make the same gestures of listening that Olivia herself had once made. It was a very good trick, and her mother had used it effectively. Olivia would watch people for hours before deciding to sketch them, sometimes even longer, and the sketch was almost never done with the subject’s knowledge. This way, Olivia did not only capture the physical likeness, but committed to memory the tics and habits that her subject would demonstrate, and later gave them to the portrait as well. So her picture of a fine lady might occasionally look around furtively and pick her nose, or a young boy seated beside his cheerful family would suddenly fall asleep and have to be prodded awake again. Nottie loved this dearly and had taken up sketching too at a very young age in hopes that her mother would show her how it was done.
But Olivia Thompson had fallen victim to the epidemic that had ravaged the country four years before, and Nottie, who was not yet able to learn the smallest bit of magic, had never learned the secret. Still, she sketched, and drew, and thought of her mother often, and sometimes winked at her drawings in the hope that, one day, she could figure out how to get them to wink back.
Nottie drew for nearly an hour without interruption. She could have gone much longer if Trixie hadn’t suddenly jumped onto the table and broken her concentration. Nottie sighed and nudged her off again.
“It’s not going to take me fifteen minutes to wake up Da, you know,” she told the cat.
“Besides, he said that you should go get him, and that will take even less time. No! Let him get all the rest he can. He’s already done a lot today.” Trixie whined a bit, but returned to the chair and settled herself down to keep watching. Nottie was about to begin again when the window beside her head banged open.
“Oh sorry dear I didn’t see you there, silly me!”
“It’s alright, Mrs. Fairlie,” Nottie sighed as politely as she could. “Da said you might come by. Would you like to come inside? I’ll put on some tea.”
“Such a lovely girl you’re turning into, Notburga,” Mrs. Fairlie chirped. “Tea would be most welcome, yes. Your mother would be so proud of what a fine hostess you’re becoming.”
This had been Marjory Fairlie’s customary greeting to Nottie for as far back as Nottie could remember. When Olivia Thompson had been alive, she would often reply ‘not as proud as I am of her other attributes, Marjory’, and Nottie still let those words fill her head every time Mrs. Fairlie came by for anything. Nottie had no ambitions to be a hostess, however complimentary Mrs. Fairlie thought she was being.
“Now first thing, did your father tell you the latest news from town?” Nottie shook her head. “Oh, that man! You should really be kept better informed, dear. You’re going to be of age soon, and you should be taking lessons in magic to see if that’s where your talent lies, but your father won’t hear of it—”
“What news?” Nottie cut in. She wanted to keep this visit as short as possible, even though she probably wouldn’t get Mrs. Fairlie to leave before her father needed to go back to work.
“Right, of course, well they’re saying all over that Pickett Randolph really has vanished after all, same way as Eleanor Muggeridge last year!” Mrs. Fairlie punctuated this pronouncement by bringing her fist down hard on the table, which made Trixie hiss and jump off the chair. Mrs. Fairlie mistook this as a gasp of surprise from Nottie.
“Yes! Of course word from the palace for the last three weeks has been that she’s out doing research with the northern towns to quell the disquiet up there. Been lots of magical accidents in those parts recently, but without an Advisor to Magic, the Advisor to History gets sent to see what she can do—” It finally occurred to Nottie why she felt like she should know those names “—which turns out not to be much, of course. Pickett’s got a good mind but isn’t much for magic. Should have sent out Smedley, but I suppose they felt that would leave the palace too unguarded.”
“Don’t they have royal guardsmen at the palace?” Nottie asked. She felt her curiosity growing in spite of herself.
“Of course they do, child, but you’ve got to have someone to command the guards, and there you can’t do better than Nehemiah Smedley. Certainly, there was that controversy over his initial appointment, personal friend of the king and all, but he’s proven himself a hundred times since then. Might be the best Advisor to Tactics that the country’s ever seen, but they sent Pickett, and now she’s missing too—”
“Too?” Nottie asked.
“Muggeridge!” Mrs. Fairlie cried out in an overdramatic whisper, “the Advisor to Magic went missing by those cliffs near our very docks last year, remember, girl?”
“Oh, right,” Nottie said, though she only remembered even that much as Mrs. Fairlie said it.
“Really, I know Harold doesn’t want you to worry about what’s going on in Kingston, but sometimes these things are important to be aware of—”
“And sometimes they are gossip to be ignored,” Harold said as he suddenly stepped back into the room. Trixie trotted out past his ankles to sit by Nottie’s chair.
“Really Harold, Notburga is old enough to be aware of events concerning the country as a whole. To not even recognize the names of the Royal Advisors—”
“Nottie asks questions when she’s curious about something. I see no reason to bombard her with things that may not even be true,” Harold said.
“Eleanor Muggeridge has been missing for a year!”
“And King Tordault hasn’t replaced her yet, so they must have a plan,” said Harold coolly. “Weren’t you the one who told us all those years ago that they have ways to detect whether the Advisors are still living?” Mrs. Fairlie’s face screwed up unpleasantly. “When the palace sends out a call to the people, then it will be our business and we will work to associate ourselves with the facts. Until then, it’s just idle gossip and it doesn’t affect us.”
“But don’t you see, Harold! The three are separated! We must all be on alert in case our pro—”
Trixie let out an enormous MRAOW! that stopped Mrs. Fairlie short and startled Nottie halfway to Trixie’s food dish before she realized what she was doing. She changed course midway to hug her father.
“Have a good time back at the docks, Da,” she said pointedly. Harold mouthed ‘thank you’ at her and hurried to the front door.
“You have a good day, too, sweetheart. Good day to you, Marjory,” he called over his shoulder. Mrs. Fairlie “mmhmm”ed in reply, but Trixie had succeeded in fully distracting her from her argument.
“You are an interesting one, aren’t you. I do wish there were a more appropriate spell…” Mrs. Fairlie was saying to herself. Nottie re-gathered her sketching supplies at the other end of the table and hunched over them again. Trixie tilted her head so she could see both Nottie and Mrs. Fairlie at the same time. Nottie felt that she needn’t have bothered. She was having a hard time concentrating as Mrs. Fairlie muttered to herself, sometimes tracing out little designs on the table, sometimes prodding Trixie, much to the cat’s annoyance. Nottie tried sketching the two of them there, focusing on Mrs. Fairlie’s pointed nose and frizzy hair. Over the years Nottie had met several professional casters, and they all seemed to have the same frizz to their hair, as though the magic they practiced made it stand on end somehow. Her mother’s bangs had done that, too. Nottie’s hair sometimes fluffed out at the ends, but usually only after she had bathed or when it had just rained outside, and then everyone’s hair was unusually pouffy.
Trixie took advantage of Nottie’s concentration to leap onto the table again. She slinked to the stack of paper and, ignoring Nottie’s protests, stepped on the pile. Her paw flicked one sheet so that it slid across the table to just beside Mrs. Fairlie, who had stopped mid-spell in surprise.
“Get off!” Nottie cried. She gave Trixie a light shove, and Trixie hopped off the table again. The cat walked on the floor back to the chair she had been sitting in and jumped on that again, resuming her previous position. Only then did Nottie notice the faint singe that Mrs. Fairlie’s spell was leaving on the table. She reached over and pushed the nearby paper directly under Mrs. Fairlie’s hand. Trixie blinked at her. Mrs. Fairlie muttered “oh yes, thank you, dear,” and resumed whatever she was casting. “Quite the smart creature, yes. Human-like intelligence. Must be magically based, but what spell?”
By now, Nottie was too distracted to sketch anymore, though Trixie did not stop watching her, just in case she should do more than fidget with her pencil. Although Nottie had watched this very scene play out dozens of times over the past year, magic was entrancing. Mrs. Fairlie was a well-renowned caster for spells she had invented in her youth (Nottie rather believed she had done so by accident), and her magic itself was beautiful. She drew spells with her fingertips, as magic gathered like lime green chalk dust on her fingers and below where they passed, a strange and lovely cross between calligraphy and finger-painting that could burn what it touched if left alone too long. Helpfully, Mrs. Fairlie habitually muttered to herself as she went along, so Nottie had a full commentary on the bits she didn’t understand.
“What about a spell of revealing?” Mrs. Fairlie murmured, drawing a circle on the paper with her finger, then dropping little lines outside it, like a child’s drawing of the sun. The magic poofed, like a chalkboard eraser being dropped, and faded. “No, the results are inconclusive again. A spell at work, but what spell. Hmm, we don’t want to disturb it, just in case, what about…” Mrs. Fairlie’s fingers flitted across the paper again, wiping the sheet clean, and then she began drawing once more, this time a triangle, then a sort of rough octagon aground it, with symbols that Nottie did not recognize around that. Trixie now gave the spell her full attention however, and for the first time in a year, Nottie suddenly got the feeling that Mrs. Fairlie was actually onto something. Mrs. Fairlie evidently thought so too, as she smiled at Trixie and her fingers moved a little faster, adding tiny flourishes to the ends of her gestures. But just as she pulled her hand away, Trixie suddenly leapt on the table again.
Mrs. Fairlie called out, “That’s right, into the spell you go!” as Nottie reached forward to stop the cat getting on the table again, but Trixie dodged them both. In doing so, she stepped on the corner of the paper, and it slid back toward Nottie again. It landed just off-center under her outstretched hand. Mrs. Fairlie started to sigh “Oh no,” when there was a flash of brilliant green light that filled the whole room. It was gone as quickly as it had come, and Nottie and Mrs. Fairlie were both left blinking while Trixie stumbled her way off the table and into the chair again. Nottie pulled her hand back to her chest.
“You won’t be hurt from that, child,” Mrs. Fairlie said. She was having trouble focusing her eyes. “Interesting. I wouldn’t have… very interesting,” she muttered, blinking back and forth from Trixie, to Nottie, to the blank-again paper, and back to Nottie.
“What… was that?” Nottie breathed.
“That was an unusual little spell that never has terribly conclusive results, but can show you if you’re going in the right direction. You have quite a lot of potential,” Mrs. Fairlie said, answering nothing. “Your cat knows something that I don’t, putting it where she did. Clever thing.”
“You think Trixie did that on purpose?” Nottie said. “She’s just been trying to get up on the table all morning.”
“Oh, you don’t think that was deliberate? Giving me paper to lay the spell on and then putting the spell where it would do something extraordinary?” Mrs. Fairlie asked.
“She’s a cat,” Nottie pointed out.
“And a dead smart one that’s right full of magic if my spells have been telling me anything. There’s something odd about that cat, if only I could work out what it is, the things she could tell us I’m sure…” Mrs. Fairlie’s gaze snapped back to Nottie with such unusual sharpness that Nottie flinched. “But she has told us something. Tell me, child, have you any inclination towards magic? You’re that age by now. Have you had any schooling?”
“Not in magic, no,” Nottie answered.
“But surely, your mother’s talent inspired…?” Mrs. Fairlie pressed.
“I mean, I’d be interested in learning, but…” Nottie glanced at her stack of paper, “Well, I haven’t had the chance yet.”
Mrs. Fairlie looked Nottie over as though she’d never really seen her before. Her face scrunched up to one side as her eyes traveled up and down and up again. Nottie felt oddly inclined to run away, but thought it might be considered rude, so she looked at Trixie instead, and was startled to see Trixie inspecting Mrs. Fairlie in roughly the same way Mrs. Fairlie was inspecting her. Then Mrs. Fairlie nodded decisively and stood up all in one movement.
“It shouldn’t be wasted. I’m no teacher, mind, I learned that lesson long ago, but I’ll make sure to find one. And in the meantime, that cat will look after you. Knock at my door before you go into town next. I’m going to go whip something up for you.” Mrs. Fairlie did not wait for an answer before letting herself back out the kitchen door, even as Nottie called after her.
“What shouldn’t be wasted?!”
More information on Nottie’s Potential is available here. The book is available for purchase through Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions. For further stories from Ampany, please visit the Snippets page, and check back for updates often!