Pantalaimon was now an animal whose name he couldn’t quite find: like a large and powerful ferret, red-gold in colour, lithe and sinuous and full of grace. Kirjava was a cat again. But she was a cat of no ordinary size, and her fur was lustrous and rich, with a thousand different glints and shades of ink-black, shadow-grey, the blue of a deep lake under a noon sky, mist-lavender-moonlight-fog. . . To see the meaning of the word subtlety you had only to look at her fur.
