Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

It didn’t matter. Either would kill him, just as they’d kill the wild hobgoblins that haunted the forest. That was the law, and maybe it was right. After all, who knew what would happen to Ree when Jem grew up and moved into the world of men and left Ree behind, alone with the beasts?

If there were soldiers coming, Garrad had to know. He was the farmer here—an irritable old man whose temper protected a heart big enough to take in a city waif and a hobgoblin when Ree and Jem had arrived two winters ago.

If they hadn’t found Garrad just in time and if he hadn’t been willing to shelter them on his farm, Jem would have died of a horrible persistent cough he’d caught after they’d left Jacona. To be sure, Garrad would probably have died too, as he’d injured himself in a fall and been unable to get up and look after himself. But all the same, even in that situation, Ree knew most humans would have turned him out. Garrad taking to Jem was easy. Jem looked enough like him he might have been his grandson. Taking to Ree, though . . . what human in his right mind would want to offer shelter to a creature part rat, part cat and part human?

Now Ree and Jem ran to find him. Jem had the advantage over Ree, his legs having gotten much longer, loping over a cluck of chicks pecking at the dirt and barely avoiding a head on collision with one of the goats. Ree followed behind, his claws digging into the dirt, the farm animals scampering away from his path.

Garrad was in the barn with the cows. When the boys had come, there had been two cows and an old horse and not much else. But Ree and Jem had had to kill some of the wild hobgoblins to defend the farm. It wasn’t something they talked about. They just did it. They patrolled the forest and kept the bad or stupid hobgoblins away and killed the ones who wouldn’t obey.

The hobgoblin furs fetched handsome prices, as did the herbs and mushrooms they gathered in the forest where villagers from the nearby hamlet of Three Rivers were afraid to go. Now they had four milk cows, an unruly herd of goats, and a donkey. The donkey had come straying in from the forest, arrived from who knew where. She was a yearling, wounded and weak. Perhaps Jem had thought she was like him, because he’d nursed her to health, and now he harnessed her to the cart he took down to the village once a week to sell milk and cheese and herbs.

Garrad looked like a prosperous farmer, in clothes they’d had made from bought cloth and not homespun. And they looked like a prosperous farmer’s grandsons. In all except Ree’s unfortunate modifications.

“Granddad,” Jem shouted as he came into the dim, cooler barn, which smelled of clean animals and fresh milk.

Garrad was sitting on the milking stool, milking one of the cows. White liquid splashed into a tin bucket. He looked up and frowned at them. He always frowned, but Ree had learned to read the expressions, and this one was alarm. “What is it?” His hand reached for the stick that rested near him. Jem had carved it to help Garrad walk when they’d arrived, but now it was used mostly as a pointing tool and a weapon. “What happened?”

They told him. The smoke. Soldiers. Garrad’s thin, hawkish face grew grim. “Well, then,” he said. “If they’re coming they will come. There ain’t much we can do, is there? Not like we can pack up the farm, the animals, and those damn cats and all and hide out of their way.”

“I can go to the forest,” Ree said. He’d deliberately hung back, in the shadows of the barn, behind Jem a bit and out of Garrad’s line of sight. “And stay there, you know? It might make it easier for you.” Easier surely, if the soldiers didn’t think they were harboring a wild hobgoblin, which was as much a capital crime as being a hobgoblin. Not that Ree had ever quite understood how it could be a crime when he’d had no control over it.

Garrad snorted and turned back to his milking, his movement so jerky that the cow shifted her back leg and gave a low, surprised moo. “You cutting out on your family, boy?” Garrad said, as he gentled the cow. “Yeah, you might have to hide when the soldiers come, but not in the forest. Stay nearby, boy, we might need you. Or don’t you care?”

There were no words to say how much Ree cared, so he simply said, “All right,” and went to muck out the goats.

Peering through the narrow air slits high up in the barn let Ree see Garrad leaning on his walking stick so he looked as helpless and inoffensive as a cranky old man could, and Jem pretended to support him all the way across the field. Ree didn’t think it would help.