“Hurting or not, it needs attention,” Morwen said firmly. “Come inside, and I’ll see to it while Kazul tells me why you’re here. You’ll have to go around back this time,” she added, turning to Kazul. “The front steps won’t take the weight. A gnome stole one of the supports, and I haven’t had time to get it fixed yet. Pesky creatures—they’re worse than mice.”

“Don’t the cats keep the mice away?” Cimorene asked, mildly puzzled.

“Yes, but they don’t do a thing about gnomes, which is why gnomes are worse. Mind the step.”

Kazul started walking while Morwen shooed Cim­orene up the wooden steps and into the house. Several of the cats eyed Cimorene curiously as she passed, and a tortoiseshell kitten got up and followed her in.

The front door led into a large, airy room with an iron stove in one corner. There was a good deal of furniture, but everything except the table and the stove had at least one cat on top of it. Morwen frowned at a fat and fluffy Persian that was sitting on one of the chairs. The cat stood up, yawned, gave its front paws a cursory lick or two just to show that this was all his own idea, and jumped down onto the floor. As Cimorene sat down in the vacated chair, there was a knock at the wooden door on the opposite side of the room.

“That’ll be Kazul,” Morwen said. She crossed to the door and opened it. “Come in. I’ll get you some cider as soon as I’ve seen to Cimorene’s hand.”

Morwen’s back door did not seem to get any larger, and Kazul certainly did not get any smaller, but when she put her head through the doorway, her scales did not even scrape the sides. The rest of her followed with no apparent difficulty, and somehow there was plenty of room in the kitchen even after she got inside.

Kazul settled down along the far wall, where she would be out of the way, and as soon as she stopped moving, six cats jumped onto various portions of her tail, back, and shoulders. Neither Kazul nor Morwen seemed to notice. Morwen took a small tin box from a shelf beside the stove and sat down at the table beside Cimorene. “Now, tell me what you’re here for,” she said, taking a roll of linen and two jars of ointment out of the box. “Apart from my cider, I mean.”

“Cimorene had some interesting visitors yesterday,” Kazul said.

“If they were interesting, they can’t have been knights,” Morwen commented.

“They weren’t,” Kazul said. “They were wizards, and they went to a lot of trouble to get a look at my copy of the Historia Dracorum. The part that describes the Caves of Fire and Night.”