“Well?” she said. “Did you find anything we could use?”

“There was some leather,” he said. “All cut out and laid out for tomorrow’s work.”

“Have you made anything for our shop this day? Any clothing we can sell?”

“No clothes,” he admitted.

“Then what were you doing all hours of the night while the giants slumbered?”

“I… I was making shoes,” he said.

“Oh, well,” his wife said, brightening. “Good shoes?”

“Very fine shoes,” he said. “Of the best leather, and not a stitch out of place.”

“That’s something,” she said. “They should fetch a decent price.”

“I hope so,” he said. “The shoemaker’s family could certainly use it.”

“The shoe… wait, do I understand you to mean that you made shoes for that cobbler and his wife, and nothing for us?”

“It wouldn’t feel right, taking from them when they have so little,” he said.

“And we have less!” she said. “You didn’t even make a hat or a jacket from the scraps?”

“There… there wasn’t time,” he said.

His wife threw up her hands.

“When my older sister’s husband traded their beans away for a lumbering beast full of milk and meat, I told her ‘You won’t catch my Alfred doing that.’ When my younger sister’s husband gave away his two best axes to a man because he ‘had an honest face’, I said ‘My Alfred’s got a better head than that!’ Now what will I tell them?”

“Now, dear… it isn’t as bad as all that,” he said. “The cobbler and his wife are very kind people… I’m sure they’ll do us a good turn if we give them a chance.”

“You can wait for a good turn when our shop is prosperous and our pocketbooks bulging,” she said. “Until that day, you’re going back through the wall every night until you have something to sell!”

“Why?” the cat asked finally. “My God, why?”

“He had it coming,” the rat said.

“For being successful?”

“For being lucky,” the rat said. “For being favored by his father.”

“Favored by his father?” the cat said. “The eldest son got the lands, the farm, the mill. Your owner got the mules. He got…”

“Don’t say he got nothing, Puss… you of all creatures know that for the lie it is,” the rat said. “The oldest brother got their father’s fortune. The youngest one got the means by which their father had won that. There’s never anything grand in store for the second born, the middle child. They never have great destinies. They never come to an impressive end. Nobody gave him a clever companion to make his way in the world for him. He found me in the barn.”

“Your master could have made a respectable living with those mules.”

“Made a living,” the rat spat. “While his older brother played lord of the manor and his younger brother became lord of the manor… land is respected, Puss. Titles are respected. A man who works for a living? With his hands? With a train of sweaty, stinking mules? Oh, and he has worked. He has worked so long and so hard. He’s crossed the country a dozen times in each direction, each time making just enough money that he can keep on doing it some more. And in that same time, what has his older brother done? What has his younger brother done?”

“Much.”

“Nothing!” the rat said. “He just sat back and let you win false praise and steal treasures and castles and love for him.”

“Well, that’s over now, isn’t it?” the cat said. “I suppose your master put you up to this.”

“No,” the rat said. “He doesn’t even know. Who is the Marquis de Carabas to him? We’ll have to flee, of course… leaving the mules behind. He’ll be devastated at the loss of his livelihood, and the land he thinks of as home… but once there’s a hundred leagues between us and this place I can start to build a better life for him, and he’ll see how his stubborn insistence in clinging on to his inheritance has held him back. I urged him to sell the mules. He could have had a fat purse to finance his ventures, ventures I would have guided but honest ones. Unlike your sainted master, mine would have been able to account for everything he had honestly.”

“Save the mules that got the purse that paid for it all,” the cat said. “Those were given to him. It’s easy to make money honestly when you have a pile of it to begin with.”

“Well! That’s all gone now,” the rat said. “This is where we part, Puss… I to my master and you to your mourning.”

“Is that what you think?”

“It is.”

“Well, I think that mourning is hungry work,” the cat said, and he smiled.

The rat gulped.

A second later, the cat did, too.

He emerged from the thicket where he’d met the rat, alone. The scene at the crossroads was just as dismal before: the twisted and battered wreck of the once-fine carriage in the center of it, the confused and frightened mules wandering around beyond it. It was the angry red teeth marks scored on the lead mule’s flank that had given the rat’s presence away.

“Captain!” the cat called to the head of the Marquis’s personal guard. “If you search a bit up the cross road, you should find the muleskinner who is responsible for this outrage. I’m sure the king, my poor master’s father-in-law, would like to speak to him.”

The men snapped to it, and the cat smiled, in spite of the tragedy. He had an idea about the second son’s ultimate destiny, and he wasn’t sure his ending would be quite as unremarkable as the rat had feared.

No sooner had she turned her back, though, when a little figure on the tray began to stir. It lifted first one arm and then the other free of the baking pan, and then used these to push itself up into a sitting position and free its legs. Pleased to be separated from the still-hot metal, the little gingerbread boy did a little dance… or maybe he was just trying to keep his feet from being burned. Either way, he hopped and he danced right off the edge of the tray and onto the clean countertop. He felt spry and springy, full of the energy of youth, full of the magic of life. He felt like he could do more than walk and dance… he could run if he wanted, run like the wind, run circles around anybody and everybody.

It was time for him to begin his life, to go out and see the world. He wasn’t going to stick around to be eaten, nor even to be cherished by an old woman who’d never had a child. He was meant for bigger things than that, better things than that. He knew it. He ran to the edge of the counter and looked for a way down. There was nothing there. It was a fair ways down to the hard tile floor, and he knew that he was brittle, but he was also smart. He looked around. A towel hung from the knob of a cabinet beneath another section of the counter where the freshly-washed implements of his creation were drying. He could use that to climb down, maybe, or grab it to slow his fall.

He raced over there, running and running as fast as he could. He stepped over the handle of a whisk and around an upturned mixing bowl. He pushed a measuring cup out of the way. He stepped over a sort of low metal wall… then something caught his eye and he looked down. The thing that he was stepping over was shaped like himself. It mirrored his form exactly… the arms, the legs, the circular head. It was him.

The implications of this stunned him. He jumped back, chipping his foot on the edge of the thing, and then clambered back past the other implements and limped back towards the tray from whence he had come with a sense of certain dread. He suspected what he would see, what he had missed in his jubilation at being alive.

The tray was full of gingerbread people, each one exactly the same as himself.

“No, no,” he squeaked. “I’m different. I’m not like them! I’m… I’m alive.”

A couple of the inert-seeming cookies lifted their heads up at the sound, looked at him, and then sank back down on the tray to wait.

The gingerbread boy let out a strangled sob.

The old woman, startled by a sudden clatter of sound from the kitchen, came racing in to find pieces of broken cookie scattered across the tile. She stared at them for several seconds before getting the broom and dust pan. Once it was all cleaned up, she turned to examine the rest of her creations. The missing one vexed her… there was no accounting for how it could have fallen… but she resolved not to let it trouble her.

She had a lot of work to do, after all. She picked up the icing bag, enjoying its weight in her hands.

“Let me see, I think I’ll make the first one a clown,” she said. “And then maybe a rock star. Oh, that’ll be something.”

She prided herself on making each of her gingerbread men special.