Young Anders was the mayor’s nephew, if Ree remembered right. No wonder the man looked worried and upset. “Is he—”
“He’s all right,” the mayor said, too quickly for it to be true. “We sent to the manor for the Healer, and the Healer says as he’ll be all right.”
So why did you call me?
Ree wanted to ask.
To show me what might happen if I go bad?
He tamped down the thought. They wouldn’t do that. They were just worried for Anders, more than they wanted to admit. He wished he could believe it, believe that if hobgoblins so like him wounded—maybe badly enough to kill, no matter what the mayor said—one of the villagers they wouldn’t turn on him. At least he knew they wouldn’t turn on Jem.
He
was all human.
Besides, the Manor Lord was Jem’s father, Lenar. He’d come back to the region last winter with his guards. He’d retired from the Imperial army with enough gold to buy himself a manor house and be a lord. With all the big farms burned out and abandoned, Lenar built a manor house instead. The rest of his gold brought a Healer and a Mage to the valley to work for him. Nothing formal ever happened, but everyone treated Lenar like the lord of this valley. Except, when anything was really bad, they came to the farm up by the forest and asked for Jem or Ree.
Right on cue, Jem’s voice boomed behind him. “What’s going on here? Ree?” Jem had grown tall and broad shouldered, and fought a losing battle against the blond beard that he shaved off every morning. As always, the sight made Ree’s heart lurch in his chest: he remembered the frail child he’d found in a Jacona alley and nursed to health. This young giant—a full head taller than Ree—surprised him every time.
“They killed two hobgoblins,” Ree rushed to explain, before Jem blurted things no one should mention, like,
But they’re like you.
“They hurt young Anders.”
“And killed a cow,” the mayor said. “It took four of the young men to bring them down,” he said. “There was . . . Young Tam got clawed too, but he don’t need the healer. He’ll do all right with a poultice. But he said they fought like devils, clawing and spitting, like . . . like cats.”
Jem squatted by the corpses, looked at them, then turned his head to talk to Ree, “Strange we didn’t find them before,” he said. His voice, which had grown deep, sounded businesslike. Ree and Jem patrolled the forest regularly—warning off the smarter hobgoblins, and killing those that were truly dangerous. “Odd for them to come out of nowhere and right into the village’s pastures. They don’t do that till winter.”
“That’s what we was thinking.” The mayor said. “Then the farrier ups and says the queen was nursing, and there must be cubs hereabouts.”
It took Ree a moment to realize he didn’t mean royalty, and merely used the name for a mother cat, which he supposed fit.
Ree swallowed. Both hobgoblins were painfully thin, so thin you could see the ribs through the skin and the fur. But the female’s breasts were huge and heavy and unnaturally rounded.
Damn.
Unaccountably, he felt his eyes fill with tears, and was grateful when Jem stood and laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
The mayor blinked up at Jem, then glanced at Ree and ducked his head. “You see,” he said. “It’s that we don’t know if there might not be a whole litter of them. And we don’t know how old or big, either. Who knows how these things grow? And if they start hunting . . . Well . . . no dogs or children will be safe. No,” he shook his head. “Mayhap no cows neither.”
Ree bit back the response that came to his tongue—that no one could possibly nurse something large enough to bring down a cow. Perhaps it wasn’t true. There were strange things in the woods that grew quite large while still nursing.
He felt his tail twitch in his pants. He tried to control it, but it was hard when he was this nervous. It tensed and whipped against his right leg, where he had it confined. He pretended he didn’t notice, and hoped no one else would either. “I’ll take a look,” he said. “Later.”
“
We’ll
take a look,” Jem corrected. No one argued. The mayor’s hands stopped twisting his hat. He looked at Ree half in awe and half in fear, then bobbed his head at Jem.
“As soon as we can,” Jem said, turning responsibility and focus away from Ree. Ree felt a surge of gratitude. At the same time he would have laughed if it weren’t so serious. It wasn’t as though Jem could turn attention away from Ree completely.
Those are my kind,
Ree thought.
They’re like me. Not as though the village won’t notice.
Halfway home, in the shadowed lane where they walked side by side, Jem touched his shoulder cautiously. “Ree, don’t worry. No one is going to think you are . . . ” He paused for a moment and frowned, and his lips twitched. “Unless of course, you start eating a live cow. Mind you, you’re bad enough with the milking, that . . . ” He trailed off as though realizing his attempted joke would fall flat. “Ree. They weren’t like you. Did you see their knuckles, all callused? They’d been running on those paws of theirs.”
“They died holding hands.”
Jem shrugged. “Ree. Animals do things that . . . ”
Ree turned his head away. “Which part of me is animal and which human? What makes me human but them animals?”
The laugh like a thunderclap startled him. Jem looked as surprised at his own laugh as Ree felt. “Sorry,” Jem said, sheepishly. “But why is that different from the rest of us? We’re all a little human and a little animal, no? It’s all in how you use it.”
“But you don’t just kill humans for acting like animals!” Ree said.
“I bet you if a human had eaten half a living cow and attacked Anders bad enough to need the Manor’s Healer, he’d have been killed too. It’s self defense, Ree.”
“Yeah,” Ree tried to tell himself that Jem was right. Villagers hadn’t killed the couple for being hobgoblins. They’d killed the couple for attacking a human. But they’d been so painfully thin. And if the female were nursing . . . They couldn’t have come to the village begging for food. They couldn’t have asked for help for their litter.
He found Jem’s gaze trained on him, grave, but all too understanding. Understanding far more than Ree intended him to, Ree realized. Jem said, in the tone of voice that reminded Ree of Jem’s grandfather, “And don’t go getting your head all tied in knots when you think of their plight out there. Yeah, I saw how thin they were. And yeah, I remember what that winter was like that we spent living off the land. But Ree, when you thought I was dying of hunger and cold, you didn’t try to kill a cow and bring me the chunks. Hells, Ree, you didn’t try to kill Grandad when you stumbled into the farm, even though he couldn’t walk, and you could have killed him and taken everything.”
“But he was hurt and scared,” Ree protested, unnerved at the thought that he might have killed Garrad, who had provided them with shelter and warmth and protection for years. “And he’s . . . Grandad.”
Jem grinned, as if he’d won a game. “Exactly. And that means that you thought of him as a human. Like us. I don’t think they did, Ree. I think they were dangerous. Just because they had some human in them . . .
“Some human in animals makes animals worse. Grandad says so. Like all those things in the forest. The most dangerous ones have a bit of human. Look . . . I’m not going to say I wouldn’t have liked it better if the changes hadn’t been made. For one I’m sure you’d have liked it better and found it easier to be all human. But for me, you’re as human as anyone else. You’re just Ree.”
“Papa! Da!” The shout made them both jump. It came from around the turn in the road, and approached at speed. Amelie stopped when she saw them, and made an attempt at looking like a proper young lady. At eight, she was starting to grow past the little-girl phase. Lately Jem had insisted that she learn decorum. Ree would have been puzzled by that if he didn’t know all too well why Jem did it. Lenar had just married Loylla, a well-bred and wealthy young woman from Karelshill, the nearest city.
She
insisted it was unnatural for “two bachelors to be bringing up
that poor child.
” That they weren’t bachelors, or that Amelie—whom they’d rescued from the ruins of her former home after raiders had killed her family—started crying whenever anyone talked of finding her a nice family with a mommy didn’t help.
To Ree she looked just fine—a little girl just starting to get a feeling she would someday be a woman—with her fine blond hair, escaped from its ponytail, making a tendriled frame for her pretty oval face and rosy cheeks. Her pinafore had grown too short over the summer. New winter clothes had been ordered but the seamstress hadn’t finished them yet. So the little skirt left a lot of suddenly long legs exposed. To compensate in the cooling autumn air, she wore leggings that Garrad, Jem’s grandfather, had improvised by cutting the legs from last year’s pants.
Ree supposed—or rather, he didn’t have to suppose, because he’d heard Lenar expound on it—that she looked like a village urchin and would be laughed at in the better circles of even the small cities. But Ree knew nothing about the better circles of anywhere. Nor did Jem. Lenar could fulminate all he wanted that it was unnatural, and that she couldn’t call them “Papa” and “Da,” but everyone in the valley treated Amelie as Ree and Jem’s daughter.
She brushed back her hair and pulled at her pinafore skirt, trying to make it longer than it could possibly be. Jem asked, laughter in his voice showing he was amused at these efforts, “What is it, Smidge? You need us?”
“Yes. I heard your voices, and I came . . . ” She frowned. “It’s Damn Young Cat.”
That had been another fight. Lenar objected to Amelie calling the cats “damn.” But that was what Garrad called the first stray tom who came cadging for meals around the farm. That Damn Cat brought home Another Damn Cat and they got busy making litter after litter of Damn Kittens—who grew up to be Damn Young Cats, who in turn had more Damn Kittens. It seemed every time they turned around there was a litter in the kitchen by the wood stove, and another litter playing on the kitchen floor. They’d have been overrun, except that people hereabouts, even from farms as far as a day’s walk away, thought the Damn Cats were special.
The villagers said Ree trained the Damn Cats—talked to them and made them smarter than any other cat could be. Which was nonsense. Oh, Ree understood them, but any other person might. He could hear their meows in a range beyond humans. He could smell them more—so he knew when they were sick or distressed. But other than that, it was just paying attention. As for training them—it was all he could do not to burst into laughter when he heard that one. Grown men talking of anyone training cats!
But Damn Young Cat—he didn’t need to ask which one—did seem slightly more intelligent than the others. It was an intelligence which the gray and white cat used to get into ten times as much trouble as any other Damn Cat. “What has Damn Young Cat done now?” Ree extended his hand to be grasped in Amelie’s pink, sweaty one, and Amelie gazed up at him, anxiously.
“Don’t know,” she said. “I thought he was hurt, but Granddad says he’s not. But he keeps walking up to the edge of the forest, with his legs all stiff. And crying, you know, like he did when the snow bear got Other Damn Cat? Grandad says he’s gone crazy or has the rabs, but he doesn’t look sick. And I don’t know what the rabs is. And Damn Young Cat won’t let us get anything done.”
“I think Grandad means rabies, and that’s not right for rabies,” Jem said, frowning. He picked up Amelie and carried her, with her clinging to his neck. “Well, show us.”
She showed them. Or rather Damn Young Cat did. Before they entered the farm gates that Amelie had left ajar, he came running out of them and jumped in a single leap onto Ree’s shoulder. It was this habit that had caused Ree to sew leather on the shoulders of all his shirts and pads underneath. He looked like a falconer, only no falconer had ever been subjected to the dubious pleasures of having a four pawed creature perch uneasily on his shoulder while yelling indignantly in his ear. Damn Young Cat didn’t smell wounded. Or frightened. He smelled . . . distressed.
Another bleat-meow of complaint almost deafened Ree. He sighed, reached for Damn Young Cat and scratched under its chin. “All right, all right, but we don’t know what’s wrong. You have to show us.”
It wasn’t so much that he had trained the cats. It was that Damn Young Cat had trained Ree. He knew if there was something that needed Ree’s attention, Ree would follow him.
He jumped down onto the path, raced away from the gate in the wall that enclosed the main parts of the farm: the barn, the house proper, the chicken house and the stable for the cows and goats. The other way lay fields and pastures—part of the farm though they only had rough fences around them.
“I’d better go with him,” Ree said with a sigh.
“Not alone, you don’t,” Jem said, setting the little girl down. “You go to Grandad, Melie.”
It was only as Damn Young Cat led them into the forest—stopping every few feet to stare over his shoulder at Ree, to make sure he was following—that Jem asked, “Should we have brought weapons?”
But Damn Young Cat yowled his displeasure, and Ree said, “No. We’ll probably be all right. The snow bears can’t hide in fall. It’s only in winter they’re invisible or close to it.”
Nonetheless, he grabbed a large piece of a tree branch and Jem did the same, as they followed Damn Young Cat. The woods had been dangerous ever since the magic storms. You never knew what you might find.
What they found Ree smelled before he heard, and heard long before he saw. The smell was the musk of a young and frightened animal. The sound was a thin, high wail, the sort of cry a young creature in distress might make. And the look . . .
It was the cub of the couple in the village. It couldn’t be anything else. The way it was nestled—in the crook of a tree, far enough off the ground to be inaccessible to anything but the most agile of the climbing animals—spoke of them having retained some of their original human intelligence.