“I’M sorry for the wait.”
“Grah!”
I finally finished petting the Gardener Cats and returned to Wintelle. Purr, perhaps tired of waiting for me, was curled up in a deep sleep.
My plan was to take the two of them to the Bureau of Magic that day. Snow Cats were extremely rare Mythical Beasts who rarely showed their faces in areas populated by humans. That was why the bureau had requested my help in researching Wintelle’s powers. This came as good news, since I also wanted to understand what she was capable of. We’d already visited the bureau a few times together.
I returned to my room, quickly changed into a clean dress, and hopped into my carriage to depart the villa. Since there was still a bit of time before my scheduled visit, we took the carriage to get a look at the second Gardener Cat field along the road.
Gardener Cats had come to the villa one after another, and we’d now amassed over one hundred of them. The single field behind my villa didn’t offer enough space for them to share, but I didn’t want to cut into the woods any more than I already had. I ended up getting permission from King Glenreed to borrow a corner of the palace territory that wasn’t being used by anyone else.
Unlike the first field, which was surrounded by trees, this field allowed for ventilation, so many Gardener Cats chose to grow their crops in the secondary location. It was a bit far away from the villa, where they slept at night, so the Gardener Cats had to trot down the road as a group every morning to reach the second field. Their commute had become a famous attraction on the palace grounds. Lady Natalie was one of their biggest fans, of course.
The Gardener Cats once lived out of sight from human eyes, but now that their great results were being acknowledged by everyone, they were turning into splendid little palace workers themselves.
“Yep, they’re doing a great job with this field too.”
I exited the carriage and observed the Gardener Cats as they worked. Some of them spotted me, so they raised their free paws and waved in my direction. I waved back, looked around the field, and searched for anything out of the ordinary.
“Hmm…? There’s nothing growing in that one spot.”
A patch of soil, about fifteen feet long and wide, was left completely empty.
Are they preparing to plant something else there?
Curious, I asked the cats for the answer. They exchanged looks before shaking their heads from side to side.
“What? It’s a secret…?”
This was unusual. The Gardener Cats hardly ever kept secrets about their fields.
Humans and Gardener Cats had different norms and understandings of things, which sometimes resulted in disagreements or information leaks that weren’t supposed to happen. But they rarely refused to answer when I asked them a question.
“I’m supposed to be surprised when I see what you’ve grown?”
This time, they nodded their little heads at me. As interested as I was, I didn’t want to force it out of them. I decided to let it go and leave it for a future surprise.
I said goodbye to the Gardener Cats and got back inside the carriage with Wintelle and Purr.