Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

The human part of Ree was scared, too. How could it not be? He held onto Jem’s hand through the day, and tried to quiet his screams, his mumbles. Tried to still his panics. And hoped no one heard. No one came.

What would people think if they found a hobgoblin and a human youth?

Ree talked to him through the day. Told him silly things. Sang to him, ballads he barely remembered hearing—in his mother’s house, long ago. And Jem looked at him with wondering, blue eyes.

And never showed fear. Never fear. A twinge of fear from Jem, a twinge of horror at Ree’s strangeness, and Ree would have been free to leave, free to go in search of a new hideout. Free to become a wild creature again. To forget he’d ever been human.

But Jem looked at him with confidence and trust and, in his brief moments of lucidity, grinned at Ree’s jokes, smiled at them. Or reached for Ree’s hand for reassurance.

So Ree stayed. And when he went out at night to refill the water bucket and steal food for them both, he always came back. Perhaps he was fooling himself. Perhaps he was using Jem to make himself feel human.

But he could not possibly live knowing how Jem would feel if he didn’t come back. The idea of Jem’s betrayal and disappointment was more than Ree could bear. It would have stripped Ree’s soul bare of what humanity remained.

So he went and he came back. Sometimes, he caught rats. One good, fat rat made a meal when he skinned it and cooked it over a tiny fire.

In the past, Ree had eaten it raw. But Jem would have been shocked, scared. For the sake of Jem, Ree had to be human and eat with human manners, as he hadn’t since the night the magic had changed him.

And each time, each time out, Ree feared he would be caught. Not just for his death, but because Jem might think he’d been abandoned.

There were more patrols now, and searches. Patrols that came too close for his liking talked about the killer hobgoblin, the one who’d killed the soldier, and how Emperor Melles himself was offering a whole gold piece for the hobgoblin’s hide.

The thought made his stomach go all queasy. Not all those soldiers would make sure he was dead before they started skinning him. And there were worse things . . .

Jacona had become a rat trap. Holding Jem’s hand, as Jem slowly became stronger and more confident, Ree realized he could not stay in the city. Like his warehouse, it had become a trap.

The problem was, he did not know how he was to escape. The work gangs had not just hauled water to cisterns and replaced all the work that used to be done with magic. They had built a new wall around the city, to keep the hobgoblins out. The wall went all the way to Crag Castle, Ree had heard, and soldiers guarded it all the time. Jacona was a fortified rat trap.

No matter how busy the roads were, everyone who went through one of the gates was inspected. Ree had seen the frozen dangling corpse of a merchant who had tried to smuggle his son-turned-hobgoblin out of the city. He did not know if the man had died of the hanging or if he had frozen to death. Ree shuddered at the thought of what the patrols would do to Jem if they found them together.

He did not want to think about it. But he had to escape. It would be safer for Jem if he was just another human, with no rat boy to make him a criminal. Safer for Jem to be alone again. And safer for Ree, even though he had no idea what lay beyond the walls of Jacona.

Oh, he knew there were farms, and farmers, and roads that went to other cities. And he had heard there were wild places where a rat boy might be able to live without humans always hunting him. But he had never seen anything outside Jacona, never been beyond the tenements and warehouses of the poorest districts.

How could he escape?

The aqueducts had been broken by the winter storms after the magic began to die. The sections near the city walls had been knocked down by the work gangs who built the wall.

Ree had heard that no one knew when—or even if—magic was going to come back, so there had been no reason to keep something that would not be useful without magic. He had wondered sometimes if he would eventually change back without magic, but that did not seem likely.

As for the drains . . . Ree shuddered. The patrols would not go there. That was where the Changerats and the even weirder hobgoblins had gone. The ones that were all teeth, claws, and poison. Like the patrols, Ree did not want to know what had become of them. And yet, it might be his only chance. A slim chance at life, as opposed to the sure death that would come to him if they found him in Jacona. And to Jem if they found him sheltering Ree.

But first he had to wait for Jem to be well, for Jem to be well enough to survive on his own.

“You’re leaving?” Jem asked. He managed to look about two years old and very confused.