My lady was asleep already, her golden hair fanned out across the satin pillow, her fingers curled against her cheek. I leapt onto her chest and roared my battle cry, so that she would know I required her immediate and undivided attention. Nevertheless, the effect was somewhat more dramatic than I anticipated. She sat bolt upright, flinging me away from her so that I hit the bedcurtains, where I clung to avoid tumbling off the bed.
At that moment a loud knock thudded against the timbers of the door.
"Good heavens," my lady yawned, "what on earth is all this commotion about? Who on earth can that be? And what in heaven's name can have gotten into you, Gray Jane?"
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and I did the unforgivable, had it not been for the dire circumstances. I grabbed her feet with my front claws and would not let go until she picked me up by the scruff of the neck and flung me away again.
"Who is it?" she called. "What's the matter? Is the palace on fire? Is there a dragon in the courtyard? This had better not be a false alarm."
"C'est moi, madame la reine. C'est Lancelot. I have a matter of the utmost urgency on which I must speak to you."
"Oh, very well. But it had better be a matter of an invading army at the very least or I shall never forgive you."
I heard all this human chitchat through a bit of a daze since my lady, in her drowsy state, had tossed me against the stone wall and my head was somewhat the worse for wear. I rose on trembling paws and watched helplessly as she trudged on bleeding feet to the door and opened it. Lancelot stood there with his hand on his sword, the wretched tortoiseshell smirking on the floor beside him.
"Oh, my. It must be at least one invading army for you to come to my chamber armed," the queen said. "You'd better step inside to make your report.
The tortoiseshell came in, too, glancing around the chamber. I scuttled up the bed curtains and peered down at them from the canopy.
Lancelot drew his sword. "Madame, my regrets-" he began, and I sprang for his head, landing on his shoulder when he moved to raise the sword. He threw back his head and sneezed six times, during which the sword clattered harmlessly to the floor-harmlessly, that is, except that the heavy hilt landed on Morgan La Chat's tail and she let out a hideous yowl and sprinted back out the cat door, her tail dragging after her in a rather dashing forked lightning shape.
"Mon dieu!" Lancelot exclaimed. "My Lady, my apologies. The hour-my sword-what am I contemplat-Ahhhchoo!" He was breaking out in spots already and I was twining desperately around his face. The spell was well and truly broken, I was convinced, but I did not want to take any chances.
At that moment, the door banged open and a throng of Camelot's finest flooded in, brandishing weapons and perfuming the chamber with the stench of a cheap tavern. I jumped clear of Lancelot to let him retrieve his sword as Mordred yelled. "You see! You see! They're conspiring." I sprang for Mordred's face, at great personal peril to myself, and jumped from pate to pate of the bareheaded and in some cases balding knights, giving them something to think about besides harassing innocent queens and their hapless cat-enchanted champions.
The queen huddled against the bed curtains, but Lancelot sneezed, scratched, swelled and sneezed again, then fled to the window, gasping for air, in his pain casting only a cursory glance through red-pillowed eyes at the scene in the room. At last he was realizing that Mordred had turned his friends against him. I sprang from a shiny head, belonging, I believe, to Sir Lionel, freshly incised with a random pattern of scarlet ribbons, courtesy of my claws. In one light leap I pounced upon Lancelot's back, giving him one more good sneeze which sent the two of us out the window and, I am sorry to say, into the moat.
He swam manfully out and jumped onto the back of a golden horse conveniently saddled and tethered and let out into the outer paddock for grazing. I, on the other hand, had to crawl and climb, sopping wet, onto the shore and sit out in the freezing rain, hearing my lady's indignant cries.
After a very long interval, the drawbridge thudded down and a black and red streak ran across the bridge and stopped, no doubt wondering where that grazing horse could have gone. She was bleeding about the tail-wand and bedraggled and I was mad as-as a wet cat. I jumped on her and throttled her, giving no quarter to that injured tail, so that when she changed back into human form, she limped away from me, still kicking me off, while trying to protect her eyes and her bleeding nose while I clung to her knee.
We had barely entered the woods when she changed into a giant raven and I crashed to the ground. She dove for me, dripping feathers and gore, but thudding hooves distracted us both and in a heartbeat, I saw the horse and rider and heard the baying of hounds.
I jumped into the nearest tree as she flew away, and as the rider approached, I saw it was the king. With a last mad leap I landed upon his shoulders. Startled, he swore and shook himself, then I meowed plaintively in his face.
"God's blood, 'tis wee Gray Jane! Whatever has happened to you, you poor puss?"
Of course, he was to find out soon enough and even his wisdom could not convince the knights that Lancelot's apparent treachery with the queen had all been a great misunderstanding. He was forced to try the queen in his new courts of justice, where she was found by the jury of knights to be guilty of treason. I could never tell him about Mordred's treachery with Morgan La Chat and could do nothing but sneak into my lady's cell to comfort her as she waited to die.
The morning of her execution they led her outdoors into a chill and drizzling halflight, the dawn so troubled it was black and blue as a bruise and gray as cold iron.
I followed, jumping from one muddy footprint to the other behind the former friends who were now my lady's guards. More than once I was almost squashed or kicked by heavy boots as I looked up past robes and tunics and into grim faces, searching for allies, all the while listening for hoofbeats.
Arthur's face was averted and wet with more than mist and rain, his hair gone silver-white in the week since the queen's trial, his carriage that of a broken man. Lady Elaine, in her usual useful fashion, cried and cried and cried. The knights looked both truculent and shamefaced and more than one would have called the execution off if he could have, I think. Only Mordred glowed and gloated, though without his magical accomplice, he seemed skittish as a kitten in a kennel. Like all of us, he seemed to be listening, waiting.
My ears swiveling to the west, where Lancelot had ridden. I watched as they bound my lady to the stake with the cross in her hands. Mordred himself lit the pyre. It was slow to catch in the wind and damp and the first lit piece blew away. I squatted over it, warming my tail as I wet the flame into oblivion.
The toe of Mordred's boot caught me in the stomach and flung me onto the pyre, at my lady's feet. Mordred poked the torch at me and I sprang for the well-loved safety of my lady's shoulder as he set afire the straw at her soles.
But from there I saw them, Lancelot and his men, soldiers who loved and trusted him and would believe of him no wickedness. They battled the halfhearted knights of the Round Table, who got no leadership from Arthur or from Mordred, who fled before Lancelot's men. Lancelot rescued us with a slash of his sword that broke my Lady's bonds and set her free to jump on behind him.
Of course, he couldn't ride far with us, because of me. But when he would have flung me down, my Lady cried, "No. I will not go without Jane. She would have given her life for me and I will not let her die out here to save myself."
"Oh, very well," Lancelot said, dismounting. "There is a convent some eight miles away."
"I know," she said. "I endowed it."