That was the Cat, and he knew it, but in a way, he welcomed it. He hoped that this closer communion with what was inside him would let them co-exist peacefully together. Introducing each other, as it were. And maybe stop the dreams that haunted and terrorized him, the dreams that were the reason he didn't want to fall asleep, no matter how desperately his body and mind cried out for it.
Jesmind yawned and stirred against him. He was a bit surprised when she raised her head and licked his cheek, then kept at it. He closed his eyes and put his head down, letting her groom him, accepting her attention completely.
She groomed his cheek and neck, then put her head back down against his shoulder. "Now go to sleep," she ordered in a gentle tone. "I'm here to watch over you."
Tarrin closed his eyes, and soon he was fast asleep.
Sunrise poured a stream of rosy light right into the log, and into Tarrin's eyes. He opened them blearily, letting them adjust to the light, and he wondered at it.
He'd slept through the night, without a single dream.
Jesmind was sleeping beside him, with her head resting against his shoulder. And there was a strange smell in the air. It was a musky smell, an unwashed one, and from the smell of it there were several of them. Whatever they were. Leaving Jesmind asleep, Tarrin inched out of the hollow log, testing the air with his nose. They were very close, whatever they were, almost within earshot. When he heard the first rustling, he backed well into the log, back beside Jesmind, who was still asleep.
After a few moments, he could hear voices, and they weren't human. They were canoid sounds, full of yips and barks, and Tarrin had been taught by his father about them. That meant that the smell was of Dargu, the dog-faced, goat-horned Goblinoids. He saw one padded, dog-like foot come down right outside the log's opening. He didn't know their language, only knew how to identify it.
"Jesmind," he called in the unspoken manner of the cat.
"I know," she replied calmly. "Just leave them be, Tarrin. They're not looking for us, and I hate killing anything before breakfast. That isn't breakfast, that is," she added absently.
"But-"
"Just lay back down, Tarrin," she told him.
There was a cry from outside, and Tarrin saw the edge of his trousers as they were picked up. "They know we're nearby," he said sourly, "and they know I'm not alone."
She seemed to consider that. "Maybe we should do something about it," she decided. "If they're with those Trolls, I don't think that we want them knowing where we are. Besides, I'm not giving up my clothes. But if we do this, they all have to die, Tarrin," she told him. "All of them. Even the wounded. Are you capable of it?"
He was quiet a moment. "I am," he said grimly.
"Alright then. Let's crawl out of here. You go one way, I'll go the other. We'll get them between us, change, and attack. Remember, no mercy. We can't let them know we have alternate forms."
"Alright," he said.
The black and white cats slithered unnoticed from the hollow log and split up. Tarrin hunkered down and darted from bush to tree, working himself out to the edge of the Dargu pack as he took stock of them. There were about eight, armed with spears, clubs, and one with a rusty sword. They were snuffling and checking out their clothes, putting their dirty hands all over them. He'd have to wash them after that. The sword was no danger to him; it was the clubs that were the real threat. Weapons of nature, the rough treestumps could deal real damage to him. Besides, the raw impact of a club could knock him out just as easily as a human, and then he would be helpless.
Once he was in position, Tarrin waited a few seconds for Jesmind to get into position, then changed form. It was so easy to him, he didn't even think about it. He struck from behind, without warning, and his clawed paw reached around the Dargu and cut its throat with a single claw just as quickly as any assassin's knife. The Dargu died without a sound, slumping to the ground, and the others had yet to notice. Tarrin picked up the already dead Dargu and hefted him over his head, feeling hot blood pour on his shoulder, then he threw the dead creature into the backs of his companions. They fell to the ground in a bloody pile, grunting in surprise and the shock of the impact.
Total chaos erupted at that instant, as Jesmind struck from her position of concealment. Jesmind fought with an elemental style that Tarrin could see was self-learned, but it was no less deadly. She ripped the throat from her initial victim, then darted in and did the same to the nearest enemy before it could react. Tarrin drove right into the heart of the Dargu concentration, wreaking havoc with his clawed paws and feet, fighting in the forms of the Ungardt hand style, modifying them as he went to take advantage of his claws. Fighting in the familiar forms seemed to calm him, help him control the bloodlust that raged through his soul, dying to be released, and it allowed him to maintain himself. He caught the wrist of a club, yanked the creature forward, and then broke the arm. Then he whipped it around by that broken arm, and it spun over onto its back as it howled in agony. Tarrin finished it with a stomp right to the neck, crushing the windpipe. The Dargu at first fell back, then pressed in, and then fell back as their weapons were batted aside or evaded, and Dargu fell by the second to the clawed Were-cats' devastating attack. The last few turned to flee, but Tarrin knew that there could be no mercy in this battle. His life depended on it. He grabbed one by the ponytail on its head and yanked back hard enough to snap its neck as Jesmind rushed forward and tackled another, her claws flaying it alive before they hit the ground. That left one, and it had a few steps on Tarrin. Tarrin simply picked up a fallen club, sized up his target, and hurled it at its back with his unnatural strength driving it. It hit the Dargu squarely in the back of the head, and it hit with sufficient force to spray the surrounding trees with red gore. The dead creature tumbled to the ground, and was very still.
Jesmind blew out her breath, carefully sizing up the bloody mess. "Good," she told him. "You know how to fight. That's something I won't have to teach you."
"I know how to fight," he said tightly, looking away from the bloody carnage they had wrought in a surprisingly short time.
They washed themselves of the blood in the nearby stream, and Tarrin dunked his clothes and beat most of the dirt out of them, and wrung them out as best he could. They were still wet when he put them on, but there was little else he could do. Wet leather chafed and itched, but he wasn't about to go nude.
"Much better," Jesmind approved as she donned her own wet shirt. She'd taken his idea and done the same thing.
"You think there are any more of them out there?"
"Thousands," she replied, "but they usually live farther north. They'd only come down here for a reason, and with those Trolls that were chasing you, I'd say that you were that reason."
"I don't see why," he complained. "I'm just a farmboy from a secluded village."
"I don't know either, and I don't really care," she said. "We'll have to make for a city. We need humans around us, with their steel to scare off the Goblinoids." He saw nothing wrong with that idea. Until he could continue on in safety, heading for the Tower was out of the question. It was too far away, and these creatures had obviously been placed previously…as if the placer had known which way he would go.
Of course he did, Tarrin realized. There was only way to get to Suld from Marta's Ford.
One way for a human.
"Darsa is on the coast," Jesmind thought aloud. "It's actually pretty close. About four days' travel. And they're expecting us to go south, towards Ultern, not west."
"So we should go west," Tarrin said.
"But my home range is east," she fretted. "I hate going the wrong way."
"If you want to walk through them, then go right ahead," Tarrin told her.
"Hush," she said absently, billowing out her wet hair to help dry it. Tarrin was struck again quickly by Jesmind's raw beauty and physical perfection at that moment, as she scrubbed her hair to and fro to get air through it, the move accenting those breasts that Tarrin couldn't help but stare at wh
en he thought she wasn't looking. He didn't understand why or how he could look at her as a guardian in one way, and as a partner with the same eyes. She was almost like his mother, and he wouldn't even dare to think of his mother the same way he caught himself thinking about Jesmind. He thought that maybe it was because she was a female of his own kind that made him think that way, the only one that he knew. But it could be anything, and he knew that. He still wasn't familiar enough with this new life to understand the nuances.
She gave him an intent look, then put her arms down casually. "I guess that we will go west for a time, then turn south again," she acceded. "We may not have to go all the way to Darsa. It'll depend on whether or not we're followed."
"I guess that'll work," Tarrin acquiesed.
They turned west and started at a very brisk pace that was almost a run. Jesmind urged him into a loping, jog-like pace that ate up the ground, and he was shocked at how easily he could maintain it. They ran for most of the morning, farther and faster than a horse could manage it. The trees flew by as they ran along game trails, and the whole world seemed to center down to the sharp watch for tree limbs and turns in the trail, or picking out a path when they had to travel through virgin forest. Their clothes dried relatively quickly with their speed blowing air over it. About midmorning, Tarrin started to get tired. "Can we stop for a while?" he asked her.
"I guess," she said sourly. They both slowed to a walk. "We'll find a stream and fish out some lunch. We'll rest while we eat."
They found one, a pretty little stream with a waterfall that was twice Tarrin's height feeding a large pool. Silvery shapes darted to and fro in the water, which was decidedly icy to the touch. Tarrin guessed that the stream was fed right from the Skydancer Mountains, with their ice and glaciers in the higher elevations. Jesmind had him fish out some lunch as she drank farther down, and when she returned, he had three large trout sitting on the leaf-strewn bank. "Only one more," she told him, cleaning and paring them as Tarrin took five minutes to snag the last one. She handed him a flank of fish as he sat down.
He gave her a curious look, a question coming to mind that he'd been meaning to ask her for a while. "What do you do?"
"Do? What do you mean, what do I do?"
"Well, what do you do? When you're not here with me, anyway." He took another bite. "You know, do you make things? Or sew, or what?"
"Ah," she said. "I don't work for a living, Tarrin. Unless you want to call hunting and gathering work. I do have a little garden behind my house, but I admit I'm not there too often. I like to roam around alot. I guess as we get older, just sitting at home isn't quite as sedate as it used to be." She pulled a bone from her mouth and tossed it aside. "It's bloody boring, truth be told. I've never had a child, so I've never really had the urge to stay in one place too long. Mother really gets after me over that," she grunted.
"Over not being married?"
"Tarrin, we don't marry," she told him tersely. "My three sisters all have their own children, and I think my brother Jarlin has sired about twelve. I'm the oldest, but I don't have any children to present to my mother. Well, except for you, but you're not the kind of child she wants. Mother's a busybody, and she probably won't let off of it until I hand her a baby. She tracks me down about every twenty years or so just to see if I'm pregnant or already have a baby, and if I don't, why I'm not trying to track down a male." She made a face. "Last time, I just went home around the time she started looking for me, just to save myself the trouble. That's where she always starts to look."
"Well, how do you earn money?" he asked curiously.
"Money? I've been around a while, Tarrin," she told him with a grin. "I have money. I keep most of it at home, buried in a safe place. But I don't really use it too often. I can provide my own needs. About the only things I ever buy are clothes, and the occasional steel tool." She finished her last bit of fish, and leaned back. "Why all these questions about me, anyway?" she demanded.
"I don't know," he said. "You're a Were-cat, so maybe if if I learn about what you do, then I'll know what I'm supposed to do."
She laughed. "Cub, do whatever you want. If staying in your den all your life is what you want, do it. If you want to spend your life travelling, do it. The only things you can't do are what's proscribed by Fae-da'Nar."
"What are those?"
"It gets involved, but the core of it is not to give the humans reason to hate us," she told him. "Butchering villages, preying on humans, killing people for no reason. That kind of thing. What would give us a bad reputation."
"Oh."
"The real mess is when you have to learn about the other Fae-da'Nar," she grunted. "You have to learn the basic customs of the others, and things like that. It's so we don't have misunderstandings and start fighting among ourselves." The wind had blown a strand of hair up inside her ear, and it was flicking reflexively to clear it. Tarrin reached up and pulled it free for her. "Thank you," she said absently. "I see your hair is still growing," she remarked.
Tarrin made a face as he swung his head back and forth, feeling it sway behind him. "I hate it," he complained.
"I'll braid it for you," she offered. "That keeps it more or less under control" She got up and knelt behind him, taking his hair into her hands. Hands, he realized. There was no way she could put her Were-cat paws into his hair like that without him noticing the difference. But a look down showed him that her tail was still there. "You can change only your hands?" he asked.
"I can," she said. "But I can't get rid of my tail or put on human ears without going full human. Some of us can, some of us can't. It depends." She pulled his hair back and started separating it. "It's alot easier just changing your hands, I think. It's not as much of a strain." Tarrin looked down at his paws. "Don't even think of trying," she warned. "When you're as young as you are, you could only do it for a few minutes, and even then it would be excruciatingly painful. Save it for when the gain is worth the pain."
"Alright," he said, bowing his head and letting her braid his hair.
"Tarrin," she said.
"What?"
"If you don't get your tail out from between my legs, we're going to have a disagreement."
"Sorry," he said sincerely, blushing somewhat. "It does what it wants most of the time." He took control of his rebellious limb, snaking out out from under Jesmind and curling it around himself.
After she finished, they started off again on that same ground-eating pace. They held it as the land began to get flat, and the trees slowly began to get larger and larger, with less underbrush, which allowed them to go faster. Tarrin began to see faint signs of human activity, but it was very sparse. It also let him think and he had reached a very simple conclusion.
He had to leave Jesmind.
Not because she was cruel, or mean, or he was afraid of her…it was because he liked her too much. He was getting more and more intrigued by her, and more than once he'd entertained the idea of going with her to her den. He'd already made a promise to go to the Tower, and he meant to uphold it. And the memory of Jenna almost burning Dolanna with fire instilled enough fear into him to make him want to go there. He never wanted that to happen with him. The thought of accidentally burning Jesmind made him even more horrified. He knew that there was nothing he could say to her to make her stop doing what she was doing…because he knew that for one, Jesmind wouldn't change, and the other, that it was who she was that was quickly charming him, not what. Jesmind had a unique, direct approach to life, and a vibrant liveliness and manner about her that was quickly putting him under its spell. She was much like his own mother, and Tarrin wasn't the only boy alive that found the ideal woman to be something like his own mother. She was intelligent, wise, strong, willful, and honest, and those were qualities that he found to be very attractive.
The only question that remained to him was how he was going to do it. He was fairly certain that she could easily track him down, and she seemed to be in much better condition than him, so he was fairly
sure that a lead wouldn't matter all that much. He had to fix it so that they were physically separated, or do it in a manner that would make her not want to follow him. But he had no idea how he was going to manage that.
He thought about it the rest of the day, until Jesmind called him to a stop. She looked up worriedly. "We have to find shelter," she told him. Tarrin felt the cold wind, and he knew what she meant. There was a summer storm blowing in. "You go that way, I'll go this way. Look for anything dry."
He followed a small ridgeline for a few moments, but Jesmind called out to him over a rumble of thunder. He followed her scent-trail back to her. There was a fairly large hole in the side of the small rise, leading up rather than down, and from the smell of it she'd already crawled in. "Jesmind!" he called into the small cave as the first drops of rain started to fall.
"It's large enough," she called back. "Come on in."
It was an abandoned den of some kind, but the smells were too faint to identify. It was rather cramped with two people in it, but it was more than long enough for both of them to stretch out. It just didn't have any headroom. "No, go on the other side," she ordered as he tried to crawl in beside her. The den entrance was set so that it would be to the side of them when they laid out, and she obviously wanted to be closer to it. He obligingly crawled over her, trying not to put too much weight down on her, and laid down in the space between her and the den's curled wall.
"Good," she said calmly. "I didn't want to sleep in fur tonight. This is soft enough, dry, warm, and large enough for us to sleep like this."
There was a brilliant flash and then a blasting crash of thunder that shook the whole den. "That was close," Jesmind remarked as she rolled over on her back and put her paws behind her head.
"Sounds like it's going to go on for a while," Tarrin said as the hammer of the rain became suddenly loud.
"Probably," she agreed, her eyes almost glowing in the darkness of the den. They were gathering in the light, like a dog's eyes in the dark, only the color that reflected back was the same green as they were in the light. It was an eerie look, with her eyes glowing in that manner, and Tarrin fully understood how his gaze could instill fear. If his did what hers do, then they would be frightening to look at. "I'm going to sleep. Unless you had other ideas?"
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