The Urban Fantasy Anthology (Peter S. Beagle) (Kitty Norville 1.50)

But we’re not only about mad gallivanting and cartwheels and sugar.

And we’re not some single entity, either.

That’s another thing that people get wrong. They see the two of us as halves of one thing. Most of the time they don’t even recognize us when they meet us on our own. Apart, we’re just like anybody else, except we live in trees and can change into birds. But when you put the two of us together, everything changes. We get all giddy and incoherence rules. It’s like our being near each other causes a sudden chemical imbalance in our systems and it’s almost impossible to be anything but silly.

We don’t particularly mind being that way, but it does make people think they know just who and what and why we are, and they’re wrong. Well, they’re not wrong when the two of us are together. They’re just wrong for who we are when we’re on our own.

And then there are the people who only see us as who they want us to be, rather than who we really are?

?though that happens to everybody, I suppose. We all carry around other people’s expectations of who we are, and sometimes we end up growing into those expectations.

It was a spring day, late in the season, so the oaks were filled with fresh green foliage, the gardens blooming with colour and scent, and most days the weather was balmy. Today was no exception. The sun shone in a gloriously blue sky and we were all out taking in the weather. Zia and I lounged on the roof of the coach house behind the Rookery, black-winged cousins perched in the trees all around us, and up on the roof of the Rookery, we could see Lucius’s girlfriend Chlöe standing on the peak, staring off into the distance. That meant that Lucius was deep in his books again. Whenever he got lost in their pages, Chlöe came up on the roof and did her wind-vane impression. She was very good at it.

“What are you looking at?” we asked her one day.

It took her a moment to focus on us and our question.

“I’m watching a wren build a nest,” she finally said.

“Where?” Zia asked, standing on her tip toes and trying to see.

“There,” Chlöe said and pointed, “in that hedge on the edge of Dartmoor.”

Neither of us were ever particularly good with geography, but even we knew that at least half a continent and an ocean lay between us and Dartmoor.

“Um, right,” I said.

Other times she said she was watching ice melt in Greenland. Or bees swarming a new queen above a clover field somewhere in Florida. Or a tawny frogmouth sleeping in an Australian rainforest.

After a while we stopped asking. And we certainly didn’t fly over and ask her what she was looking at today. We were too busy lounging—which is harder to do on a sloped roof than you might think—until Zia suddenly sat up.

“I,” she announced, “have an astonishingly good idea.”

I’d just gotten my lounging position down to an absolute perfection of casualness, so I only lifted a questioning eyebrow.

“We should open a store,” she said.

“Selling what?”

“That’s just it. It will be a store where people bring us things and we put them in the store.”

“And when it gets all filled up?”

She grinned. “Then we open another. We just keep doing it until we have an empire of stores, all across the country.”

“We don’t have the money to buy anything,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s why they’d have to just give us the stuff. We’ll be like a thrift shop, except we wouldn’t sell anything we got.”

“That seems greedy. What do we need with things?”

“We can give everything away once we’ve established our empire. It’s just for fun.”

“It seems more like a lot of work.”

She sighed and shook her head. “You are so veryvery lazy.”

“That’s because today is a day especially made for being lazy.”