Tiger head on a calf

The autumn fires came down from the Sallow hills three nights running, and on the third the Lord Marshal's men dragged the old tiger out of the menagerie cellars. You will not believe me, so I will set it down plainly. It was not a beast at all but a painting, a great striped head that Orrin Vale daubed on oiled canvas forty years ago, when he was still drinking the queen's wine. Nobody had looked at it since. Its eyes had gone the colour of old pennies.

They carried it up to the courtyard to burn it. The men stood in a ring with their torches lit, and the smoke rolled over the cobbles. When the first flame touched the canvas edge, the orange strokes lifted off the cloth and ran up the wall like cats, dragging red and gold behind them, and the black fur beneath began to breathe. I saw the whiskers twitch. The Marshal dropped his torch and swore by three saints none of us had heard of.

The tiger turned its head toward the stable yard, where the girl Mirri was sweeping ash from the step. She had come to us in the spring with no name but the one the cook gave her. The creature looked at her for a long moment, the way you look at a stranger who has just remembered your face, and then it lay down across the threshold like a cat before a hearth. Nobody moved. Even the Marshal kept his hands to himself.

This morning the canvas is back in its cellar, dry and ordinary. But the courtyard wall still carries a scorch in the shape of a crouching tiger, orange at the edges, and the Marshal's ledger says only that the wall has been repaired. Mirri has begun to sleep on the stable step. I think she means to keep the watch.

Your brother, Ansel