"And your name really is Feliks?"
Darius and Justyna had returned home, and now all four of them sat around the table discussing the strange situation.
"Yes," said their guest, "I honestly don't remember much else at all. But I know that's my name, and when Toris called me Lucky, I thought it was like... a sign, and you'd be able to help me!"
"B-but," put in Toris, "help you? I can't even do elementary magic..."
"You turned me back! Well, the pie did. Your pie. It must be magic."
Feliks had relapsed twice back into a cat, and turned back into a human only after eating another bite of pie, although no subsequent transformation had been as dramatic as the first. He was now wearing some of Toris' clothes and had washed his face and combed his hair and, especially as the rate of sneezes decreased, he looked not only presentable but handsome.
"Maybe the spell was wearing off anyway, or it was... weak against ham, or something," Toris suggested.
"Well, whatever, I'm just totally glad it works."
"And do you think you can hold this form now?" Darius asked.
"Um." Feliks wrinkled his nose. "No. No, I don't think so or like... You know when you have hiccups? Or like you're going to sneeze. And you can just feel the next one coming along. It's like that. If I stop concentrating I feel BAM! Cat."
"I thought you were a weird cat," said Toris.
"It was a nightmare! I'm suddenly like a foot tall, and running through the streets, and then you rescue me—but then everyone expects me to eat raw meat and face up to rats who, by the way, are nearly as big as I am!"
"And all you can say is mroooow," said Justyna, in an uncannily good imitation of Feliks' most piteous mewling.
The mood became serious again.
"Since we can't turn Feliks back, Toris," she continued, "you need to get him to someone who can."
"Me?"
"He can't go alone."
"Can't we wait until..."
"Until after the play?" Darius interrupted. "No I don't think that would be wise. None of us knows anything about magic, this sort of spell, we don't know how it works, if it works over time... What if he gets stuck as cat forever?"
"Alright alright I'll go!" Toris yelled. "I mean—Feliks, not that I don't want to help you, of course I do! But, the play..."
"Will be just fine," Darius assured him. "Be back by lunch the day after tomorrow. You've got everything set up and we'll just have to muddle through, like we always do. We've had main cast members take sick days before curtain after all."
"Not this week," said Justyna, her blue eyes steely, "they wouldn't dare. Toris, Feliks, you can start tomorrow morning."
The difficult was who to go to for help. They only really knew the technical people who made theatrical effects—these were certainly expert, for all outsiders looked down their noses—but specialised. And on stage you never did anything like transforming people into animals or taking away their memories.
"The Fantastic François!" said Feliks sudddenly. Toris looked at him in surprise. "The name just came into my head."
"Of course!" said Justyna.
"Would he see us?" asked Toris. Everyone had heard of the Fantastic François, either the best or the second-best magician in the realm. The other contender for the title was Madame Marianne, and their rivalry was reputedly so fierce that the palace dared not appoint either one as royal wizard for fear of offending the other. "He'll be for rich folks, surely."
"We're not poor, Toris," Justyna said.
"And I'll pay you back for anything you spend!" Feliks volunteered.
"Besides which," Darius said thoughtfully, "well, if this is a serious spell, he should be interested."
"How come you remembered that name?" Toris asked. "Are you a magician?"
Feliks frowned. "I don't think so," he said. "Doesn't ring any bells. Uh..." He pointed a finger at his own chest. "Recall memories!" he commanded. "Nope."
"Anyway," said Justyna, "you can walk to the Western woods in a few hours—you know, where we pick mushrooms, shame they're not for a month yet. And if this Fantastic fellow can't help, you should have time to reach Madame Marianne by nightfall."
That seemed to be settled.
Feliks let out a sigh of relief and collapsed back into a cat again.
Darius looked at him. "I think you had better wrap up the rest of this pie to take with you on the journey."
They reached the woods before midday. Toris carried a knapsack full of essentials, food, including a good quarter of the pie—and Feliks. After less than a mile Feliks had announced that he couldn't hold his human shape all morning and didn't want to waste the pie with extra transformations. Toris had a sneaking suspicion he just preferred to be carried. He wasn't especially heavy in cat form, but Toris found he missed him as someone to talk to.
The Fantastic François' residence was not at all what he had expected. It comprised a two-storey building with pink walls and green shutters, almost entirely grown about with roses. It looked much more like something out a picture book portrayal of a witch or wizard than any of the sleek and sophisticated towers of modern spell-singers or even the smart brass-plated city places of even the moderately well-to-do magician. Toris thought that his brothers would probably advise him to return to the city and try one of these instead, but personally he felt very warmly towards the little house.
"Well," he said, as Feliks scrambled out of the knapsack onto his shoulders. "This is it."
He knocked.
A bell echoed somewhere in the depths of the house, which was confusing both because the house couldn't be large enough to contain such an echo, and because he hadn't run a bell.
A moment later the door opened and the most splendid person Toris had ever seen stood in the door way. The effect was easily the equal of anything seen upon the Fortune's stage. He wondered if royalty dressed this way, but suspected they would be rather more restrained. This person was fully and formally dressed in a changeable fabric he suspected was silk which looked blue from one angle and purple from another. His honey-coloured hair fell in elegant waves past his shoulders and he wore a plumed hat and a half-mask of royal blue and gold. The visible side of the face was beautiful: pale and stern, except for his laughing blue eyes.
"François the magician," he announced in a low melodious voice, as if there could be any doubt, "at your service."
Feliks was suddenly scrabbling madly around Toris' shoulders, trying to get back inside the pack. "Alright!" Toris hissed, "just hold still a second!"
He dumped Feliks on the ground, swung the knapsack around to his front and broke off a piece of pie.
In another second, Feliks was dusting himself off and standing tall, or at least as tall as he could, which put him a good few inches below Toris and a clear half-foot shorter than François.
"Can I just say," he panted, "I love your outfit."
François clapped his hands delightedly. "Oh, that's very good! A full transfiguration, I had really no idea! Which of your magics is it? And thank you so much darling, I have them specially made and so many patrons, it's as if they don't even notice."
"It's neither of our magic," Toris said. "He's under a curse, at least we think so. We hoped you might be able to help."
"A curse to fix him in feline form until he eats spinach and ham pie?" François asked. "That I admit is a new one on me."
"No, I made the pie but, you see he keeps turning back!"
"Yeah, it's sort of like hiccups?" Feliks tried to explain. "You know how you try to hold them back but sometimes they just—"
"Hiccups? Pie? I think you two had better come in and tell me the whole story from the beginning."
The parlour François ushered them into, and the fine tea and petit fours he served them while they talked, were just as perfectly elegant as the house front and the magician's clothes.
François had them tell the story from the beginning and Feliks demonstrate turning into a cat and back again, before announcing that he was unable to help.
"It's a different kind of magic," he said. "Quite criminally under-valued and under-appreciated by the College, and we now see quite the damage this attitude causes! Alas even I am still ham-stringed by the education I received at that backwards institution." He shook his head sadly, rippling the golden locks of his hair. "You're very much along the right lines with that pie though, I can see that."
"I am?" Toris asked.
"Yes. You'll probably figure it in a little while. And if it's not too much trouble, you could come back and update me once you've managed it. This magic something we're very interested in studying.."
"We?" said Toris weakly, unable to process the rest of this where François seemed to be suggesting that he, Toris, was responsible for turning Feliks right again...
"Myself and my assistant," François explained, just as someone else came into the parlour from a hallway.
"His librarian," said this young man with a wry smile. This seemed to be some private joke between them.
"Arthur: Toris, and his friend Feliks who has a transfiguration issue. Toris, Feliks: Arthur." François indicated each with an elegant wave of his long sleeves.
"Are you a magician too?" Feliks asked.
"I dabble," said Arthur, and again it seemed like this was some kind of joke; François rolled his eyes behind his half-mask.
You could hardly imagine a greater contrast in appearance and style between two young men in the same profession. Arthur was dressed clothes that probably had once been black but were now grey with dust and wear; the sleeves were rolled up but the trousers were too short and exposed an inch of ankle above each scruffy work-boot. He had messy sandy hair and fierce dark eyebrows.
"As I was saying," François explained, partly for the benefit of the newcomer, "embarrassing as this is, I find myself unable to materially help."
"O-oh," said Toris, not knowing what else to say. Are you sure? Thank you for trying? "Do, do you know anyone who might?" he asked. "A city practitioner perhaps, or, we thought Madame Marianne...?"
"Not she!" François laughed. "All flash and show and no substance. Oh she knows her stuff alright, and her brewing is second-to-none, and she does a lot of very original work in general..." he seemed to lose his thread. "But you won't get help from her."
"I bet she can do it," said Toris stubbornly, as they trudged out through the woods again. "He was just saying because they're rivals."
"Hmm. I think this "rivalry"'s a pretty good deal for François," said Feliks. "Marianne too I shouldn't be surprised. It keeps them both top of the tree."
"That's a good point."
"What was that about different kinds of magic?" Feliks asked. "He seemed to think you could, like... do it."
"I can't," said Toris shortly. He hadn't quite been able to explain it to François: I'm not a magician! And he'd forgotten to ask all the important questions: would the spell become permanent? and what about Feliks' memory?
For all that though, Toris felt strangely good, walking with Feliks on a crisp September day, skirting the edge of the woods. Maybe it was the woods, where he always felt good, or simply not being in the theatre for a whole day. Maybe it was Feliks, who seemed to have settled in human form at least for the time being. It was another few hours to Madame Marianne's and after the tea and cakes in François' parlour, they walked half the distance before breaking for a late lunch.
The house of Madame Marianne was white, edged about with a lot of black eaves and gables for its size. It was climbed all over by jasmine and honeysuckle, smelling already of evening. Set in a natural clearing, it was lit by lancing shafts of sunlight through the trees, as pretty an effect as any conjured by grilles and lighting on the stage. The whole effect was definitely magical, dramatic and slightly mysterious.
Madame Marianne herself when she appeared was equally impressive, dressed in a swirling red cloak over a modish peacock dress that fitted her figure closely, with chestnut hair in elaborate ringlets piled atop her head.
"I am Marianne, seer of things unseen and knower of things unknown. What is the aid and truth you seek?"
Almost before the words were out of her mouth, Feliks, in cat form once more, was scrabbling at Toris' knapsack for pie. Toris couldn't see what was so urgent, but complied.
Feliks brushed himself off and sneezed.
"This outfit is legitimate gorgeous too and all," he said, "but... you're Fantastic François, aren't you?"