Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

Amelie clutched Ree’s hand until they were out in the main room, and she needed both hands to climb up the ladder to the loft. Her room was up there, tucked in under the eaves, but Ree figured he’d make up the other bed in the room he shared with Jem anyway. Amelie would feel safer downstairs with Lenar and his guards in the house.

He pulled out quilts and sheets and blankets from the chests in the bedrooms, enough to make up three beds, and tossed them up to Amelie, then climbed up after her. “What do you think, Mama ’Melie? Should we give them straw beds or make them sleep on the floor?”

She brightened a little, showing the prettiness her mother had tried to protect when she’d shoved her in the cellar to escape the raid of the soldiers. At six she should have been too young to be in danger, but they’d learned no one was too young. “They should have proper beds, Ree.” Amelie wagged a finger at him. “It wouldn’t be right to make them sleep cold.”

He grinned and winked. “ ’Sides, if we make them nice, comfy beds, they’ll sleep all night, and they’ll only wake you up when they curse about having to go to the outhouse.”

She covered her mouth with her hands, almost as if she were scared to smile. “Don’t we have a spare pot?”

“For three of them? We don’t have one big enough.”

There was always fresh straw up here; keeping it fresh was one of the jobs that was never finished. The straw in the loft kept winter cold from seeping in through the roof and stuffed the mattresses and cushions. It got used for kindling as well. They kept what they weren’t using at either end of the house, farthest from the chimney in the middle of the loft, and since Amelie’s arrival Ree and Garrad had partitioned off a room for her near the chimney.

Ree saw no reason not to put the men’s beds as far from Amelie’s room as they could, even if Amelie wouldn’t be sleeping there, though it meant bringing a lantern around so they could see to pull the straw together and tuck sheets around it so each man had a more or less comfortable bed. The thick sheets would stop any straw poking through, and with blankets and quilts they should sleep warm. The room was Amelie’s, and he didn’t want them wandering into it by accident. Not that she had much there. Just a couple of cloth dolls and the few shifts they’d found in the ruins of her once prosperous home.

“Good enough, do you think?” he asked when he and Amelie were done. She nodded, but she looked scared, and her hands were plaiting her little pinafore.

“Tell you what,” Ree said. “You sleep in our room tonight, all right? In the other bed. I’ll make it up for you.” With strangers in the house and the way Jem was looking, nothing untoward was going to happen in that room tonight, anyway. Ree saw the relief in her eyes and wondered. She had told him she spied through the cellar lock onto the destruction of her home, but he didn’t know what had happened. Her father and brothers had been killed. Her mother had been killed too . . . but it probably hadn’t been that simple.

Amelie might carry the scars her whole life. He felt toward her as to a little sister or perhaps a daughter, though that was an abomination, of course, as he could never have children and certainly not human children.

Hobgoblins didn’t. They lived wild until someone or something killed them. Most of the ones Ree had seen were alone, the only things like them. Except for the snow bears, of course. Maybe several bears got caught in the same magic circle and then bred, but there seemed to be lots of those.

There was a kind of wolf creature that bred, too and hunted in packs. Ree hoped they’d never see any of those again. They were nastier than the snow bears, and there were more of them. But most of the hobgoblins were the only ones and couldn’t breed with anything even if they wanted to. He didn’t want to. All he wanted was Jem. And they already had Amelie to look after.

After a dinner eaten in silence, while Garrad, Lenar, and Jem traded cold looks, Ree excused himself and left to put Amelie to bed. He made up the spare bed with fresh sheets and obligingly turned his back while she changed out of her day clothes into a nightdress of soft wool that Jem had bought her. Once she was tucked in, he folded her clothes for her and set her boots at the foot of the bed, then blew out the lantern. He and Jem knew the room well enough to come in here without any light at all, and it wasn’t that dark. Ree’s cat-eyes could see everything from the patched plaster to the chests of bedding.

He closed the door softly and padded toward the kitchen. He’d just tell Garrad good night and go to bed.

But halfway through the great room he heard Jem’s voice. “Not going to ‘put it down.’ ‘It’ is Ree, and he’s saved all our lives.”

Ree froze as Lenar growled back—sounding like Garrad when he was angry or hurt. “That thing isn’t safe, damn it! None of them are. They turn on their owners, or you find dead men in alleys with their throats torn out.”