Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  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.

  The cub was covered too—wrapped in an uncured fur which smelled a bit, but would protect a young creature from the cold mornings and bitter nights. Another sign its parents had been intelligent. The face above the improvised blanket was thin and pinched, dark greeny-hazel eyes filled with tears. Snot and drool were dried around the mouth, as it would be with any baby that had cried for a long time. Its swollen, reddened face was obvious even under fur more sparse than that of its parents.

  Seeing Ree, it shrieked once, louder than before, then seemed to go mute with terror, its arms flailing and legs kicking at the blanket. Ree reached for the all-work knife at his belt. He kept it sharp to kill rabbits that had been caught in traps, so they wouldn’t suffer for longer than needed. He set a not-unkind hand on the back of the cub’s head, intending to pull it back and expose the neck—only he couldn’t make himself draw the knife, not fully. Not with those eyes looking at him and seeming to understand exactly what he should do. What he couldn’t do.

  Jem’s voice startled him from his frozen indecision. “Ree? What are you doing?”

  “The villagers—” Ree started to say, then realized that wasn’t right. Or maybe it was and he wanted to protect himself from the villagers thinking he was like the hobgoblins they’d killed. “What if it grows up and it—” Ree said, but he looked down at the cub, whose scalp was warm and rounded against his hand, who stared up at him with something that might even have been trust. “Oh, hells.” How could he convince Jem that the cub should be killed—put down—when he couldn’t convince himself?

  “It’s just a baby.” Jem picked the cub up and matter-of-factly pulled back the stinking blanket, revealing that it was healthy, male, and reeking for more reasons than one. “No idea how old,” he said. “But just a baby.”

  “Yeah, but we should . . . I mean the hobgoblins—”

  “He won’t go bad,” Jem said. His voice had that strangely affectionate-gruff tone that he got when he talked to or about Amelie. “He just won’t. We’ll teach him better.” Jem rocked the boy in his arms as he spoke. “Won’t we? We’ll teach you better.”

  Ree knew he’d lost the argument before it started. Not that Jem wasn’t capable of an argument. Oh, he was. He could out-stubborn Garrad and Lenar both, and when those three got to yelling, Ree was fairly sure the mountain peaks all around rang with their outrage. This, though—this wasn’t something Ree was going to argue about. What was the point? He couldn’t kill the little one, not when he knew its parents were intelligent. The question was, what kind of a creature was it? Was it really a baby? Or a dangerous wild cub?

  The way he screamed and kicked and flailed in Jem’s arms, all the way to the farm, Ree couldn’t help thinking dangerous, and Garrad who came running at the sound of the yells looked like he was leaning to dangerous beast as well. He didn’t look comforted by their explanation, either.

  Garrad walked ahead of them—catch him following someone, even with the stick he had to use to help him walk—to the spacious kitchen warmed by the fancy iron stove they’d installed over the summer with the proceeds of the furs from last year’s hunting. Amelie was adding cut vegetables to the soup simmering on the back burner. That was another point of contention for Lenar. He said she was too young to work, and should be in school.

  That might be true for the children of minor lordlings, but it wasn’t true of vil
lage children. Little girls younger than Amelie got apprenticed to the big houses down in Karelshill as scullery maids, and ended up working much harder than Amelie did. Besides, Amelie learned her letters too, before dinner, sitting at the table and writing them painfully on a slate tablet. She didn’t like it much, but she learned.

  Jem swept aside the slate tablet and the chalk, and set the cub right on the table—ignoring Garrad’s protest about vermin and filth—and unwrapped him. Jem didn’t answer when Garrad said something about catching fleas, although it was nearly too cold for that.

  Here, in the cozy warmth of the kitchen, with the familiar light of the lantern above, the cub looked more like a human baby and more out of place. He really had very little fur—tabby like his mother’s—and his tail was only a little stump about the size of his thumb. Looking closer, Ree thought he could see marks as if rats had eaten the rest. Which they might have: they did eat the tails off barn kittens, sometimes. And there were marks aplenty from flea bites and stings on the scrawny little body, easy to see even when he started pumping arms and legs full force again.

  “The question is,” Garrad said, “what is he?”

  “He’s a baby,” Amelie said, in puzzled disdain, as though wondering how they’d failed to spot it. She’d come around the table, wooden spoon still in hand after stirring the soup pot, and looked at the baby with a fascinated, wondering expression. “He’s like a baby Papa,” she said, and dimpled suddenly. “Aw.” She put her free hand forward, till it was just in reach of the little—clawed—fist.

  “Amelie, no!” Ree said. But before the words were out of his mouth, the baby grabbed Amelie’s hand and stopped crying. He hadn’t clawed her or attacked her, just grabbed onto her index finger and held. He was looking at her with the curiously confident look of babies everywhere.