Chapter Two: Cats

On my fifth birthday, I returned to my room at Songsmith and found a small spotted kitten on my bed. I ran to Magistra Archon's office, and she said it was a winged jaguar cub, very rare. I looked at the kitten, but it didn't appear to have wings, and said so. She laughed and said the wings would only appear in times when the owner is in grave peril, otherwise magic would be announced unnecessarily to the Muggle world. Four years later, Jakkin (as I had named him, after a dragon trainer in a favorite book) had grown until he could no longer fit into my room or the hallways of Songsmith.

I asked Magistra Archon about it, and she told me that if I asked him, he would change to any size I wanted him to be. I queried her as to why she hadn't told me this when he arrived, and she said that she hadn't known until a couple months previous, while doing research. She said that her full research had brought up some very interesting things, such as Jakkin was a sport (genetic accident), so he would be huge, even bigger than the rest of his family, which in and of itself was a tribe of giant jaguars from the Painted Cliffs of Arizona. Because he was a sport, he had a few magical abilities, such as sprouting wings and changing size. "He may develop more," she warned me. "Sport giant jaguars only happen once every couple thousand generations, and the last one was destroyed because the nearest humans (Muggles, they were) though it was a demon. We of the magic world know very little about them, as magical zoology is very imprecise and there are many gaps in the records." I thanked her for the information on my pet, and then went and asked him to please shrink, as the school wasn't built for jaguars fifteen feet tall at the shoulder. He jumped into the air, did a triple somersault, and landed on his paws the size of a housecat. I clapped and picked him up, thanking him.

I had agreed to not speak of magic to anyone but Magistra Archon, so imagine my surprise when I arrived at Songsmith for my first day of official classes and there were Cat and Try! Magistra Archon must have spoken with Mr. and Mrs. Barns when I first met the twins, and warned them that magical influences might bring back memories better left alone. (Memories of what, I didn't know then.) Anyway, we were together again at Songsmith, and that's all that mattered to us Musketeers. The three of us got into more hijinks our first year than the legendary Pingui brother, Parker and Peter, did their entire time at Songsmith. Park and Pete were attending their last year when we started, so we didn't see them much. They did have to tutor some of the beginning music and magic classes, so we saw them then, but the other times Cat, Try, and I just stayed out of their way. (Also, what twenty-one-year-old man wants to spend any time longer than necessary with three ten-year-old girls?) They were Keeper and Seeker for one of the school Quidditch teams.