Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

by Mercedes Lackey

  In loss, in fear, in rage, Liah tried to become all that her father had thought she was. She found that people would believe anything that she Sang to them, and had used that single power to create a fantastic monster of herself. The men that she lured from their wives she compelled to forget their families, and even their own names, and sent them wandering through the hills; even she was not sure why.

  Perhaps Garin and the others could be Healed, and their memories restored. Healers would have to go to the hills to try to undo the damage Liah had done. Healers, and Heralds, and teachers as well. Life in the Armor Hills would change, perhaps for the better.

  Liah would need Healing as well, and Training.

  She must accept what she had done, and move beyond it.

  Sometimes Healing takes a very long time. I am not too proud to say that I am proof of that, for anger and grief take strange forms, and can be stubborn enough to defeat the strongest Healer.

  Yet if the heart is strong, Time heals all, in the end.

  In Trevale, I will buy a horse for us to ride, now that Shavanne is gone.

  A Change Of Heart

  by Sarah A. Hoyt and Kate Paulk

  Kate Paulk was born in Australia where, unable to decide what she’d be when she grew up, she took no less than three degrees. When bored with that, she married an American. She’s now residing in Texas with her husband and two bossy felines. One of her stories will come out soon in an Illuminated Manuscripts anthology and she’s working on a novel.

  Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal, a mishap she hastened to correct as soon as she came of age. She lives in Colorado with her husband, her two sons and a varying horde of cats. She has published a Shakespearean fantasy trilogy, as well as any number of short stories in magazines ranging from Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to Dreams of Decadence. She’s currently working on an adventure/ time travel novel with Eric Flint. Her Three Musketeer Mysteries are upcoming under the name Sarah D’Almeida.

  JACONA stank in the heat of a summer night. The stenches melded, mingled, and rolled onto Ree’s senses like a physical assault—a cloying staleness of dinners, the acrid bite of wood smoke, the offensive punch of middens and animals and offal, of human sweat and too many bodies living too close together.

  Ree remembered when the smell didn’t bother him. He remembered—and shook his head and tried to forget. The new talents had their uses. Right now he could smell a collection of unfamiliar scents: leather, sweat, and steel. A patrol. Approaching.

  Silently, he slipped back into the shadows of his refuge, the abandoned warehouse behind him. It had been deserted since last winter, when the magic failed. All that remained now was a maze of rotting timber and fallen stone, unfit for human life. Which did not bother Ree. He had not been human since the magic storms.

  One of the disturbances had caught him, a few days after the magic went bad. He had been stalking a sleek rat that would have given him meat for a day. The rat had found an old cat waiting to die. Ree had pounced on the rat as it gave the cat an experimental nip.

  Lurking in the shadows, he shivered, despite the heat of the night, as he remembered the blurriness and the queasy feeling—as he remembered opening his eyes to a different world. A different self. To a self equipped with cat claws and rat’s tail, with cat eyes, too sensitive to movement and keen in the darkness—to a short coat of fur over his whole body. The fur had helped him survive the winter. His keener senses helped him avoid the patrols and the soldiers who killed hobgoblins like him.

  At least he’d been lucky so far. But it was getting harder. Ever since the snow began to melt, there had been more and more patrols. Ree was the last of the street rats who sheltered in the ruined warehouse. The humans had been caught and taken off to orphanages or work gangs, and the hobgoblins had been killed. For all he knew, he was the only hobgoblin left in Jacona.

  How long could he go on surviving?

  Voices drifted to his ears. They had a strange accent, not like the regular patrol. And yet, they still smelled military. Ree tensed and breathed shallowly. The area around his refuge had been empty at night ever since Emperor Melles had declared a curfew so the hobgoblin patrols would not accidentally kill anyone’s registered Changechildren.

  Ree scrambled up through the debris until he could peer out from one of the many holes in the roof.

  Outside, in the dark night, his changed eyes could see strangers. Soldiers. Real soldiers. At least no city patrol Ree had ever seen would dress in gray. City patrols believed in bright colors as a way of showing how important they were. The army believed in efficiency. Gray clothes and actually doing their jobs.

  Ree held his breath. Soldiers were bad news. He ducked back into the dark before he reminded himself that only his changed sight allowed him to see them. And to hear them, as they drew nearer.

  “. . . can’t believe no one’s torn this dump down, even for firewood.”

  One of the soldiers laughed. Ree could not see which one. There were five, all burly and looking well-fed.

  “Ever’thing round here’s Army property now, anyhow. Ain’t no one was gonna go through all that crap last winter just to steal a bit of firewood off of Army land.”

  An icy fist clenched around Ree’s gut. He bit his lip, to avoid calling out. The army was efficient. Efficient . . . at killing hobgoblins and undesirables. At rounding up street rats for the work gangs. “More like they didn’t want to meet the rats,” said another man. “Every brat that’s been picked up in this sector knows the rat hole.”

  They moved in close enough to be hidden by the walls of the building. Only the sound of their breathing, the sound of their movements told Ree they were still there and coming closer. And closer.

  Ree stayed where he was, frozen. His hands reached back, to find support against a wall that was mostly crumbling rubble. He felt the dryness of plaster against his palms. Surely they would not enter his refuge. This place wasn’t safe. For humans.

  For him, and for the rest of the city’s discards, it was home.

  “Gah! Filthy vermin!” Squeaks and skittering joined the soldier’s curse as rats fled the noise. A boot scraped in the rubble.

  They had come in. Ree’s chest hurt. His mind became a blank space filled with fear. Part of him—the part of him at the back of the mind, the part of him that was not fully human, not fully himself, wanted to run, to hide. But his working mind, his memories, knew better. To run meant to call attention to himself. It meant death.

  The soldiers came closer. A spot of light danced erratically on the skewed beams near Ree’s head. One of the soldiers had unshielded a night lantern. Though Ree knew he could not be seen from the ground, he had to fight the urge to run, to escape. To hide in a hole and be safe.

  Heart pounding, he waited until the lantern was lowered and its light aimed away from his hiding place. Slowly, he crept out of his hiding place. Balancing his feet on crossed beams, he shifted quickly, feeling the slight shift of the wood beneath him, and leaping before the minimal movement turned to a rolling fall. He skipped and tiptoed and leaped till he reached a hole, barely big enough to let a slim rat-boy through.

  Stretching his arms up to the hole, he balanced on one foot. As he lifted himself by the strength of his arms, the log rolled beneath him, and a shower of rubble trickled beneath.

  “Up there!” The light of the lantern hit Ree.

  Ree pulled himself up, pushing his head through the hole. He had to escape, to get away from the light, away from discovery.

  “Outside, quick! It can’t get far!”

  Ree squirmed through the gap, pulling himself on his aching arms, feeling the jagged edges of the hole scrape his fur-covered body.

  “Quick,” a soldier shouted beneath.

  Ree skidded down the sloping roof, twisting around to get his feet under him. A second from a precipitous fall, he managed to jump onto the next building. For a heart-stopping moment, he hung in the air, then his fingers latched onto the wooden eaves of the bu
ilding across the lane.

  His claws extended, instinctively, and dug into the wood. His feet scrabbled for a hold.

  He heard shouts behind him. Strength he didn’t know he possessed infused him. He pulled himself onto the steepsloped roof. Scrabbling up it, he panted. His heart hammered in his chest. His throat ached with dryness.

  At the top, he held on, his claws fully extended, biting into the age-softened wood. He eased himself down the shingled roof. His chest hurt. He swallowed. Once. Twice, trying to summon moisture onto his panic-parched tongue.

  He’d survived. He was alive. But he was alone and unprotected. Where would he go now? The abandoned warehouse had been the closest thing he had ever had to a home. Well, the closest thing since his mother’s home.. . . .

  Ree banished memories of a beautiful woman dressed in silks—of perfumed rooms—of her laughing. Her laughter had never been for him. Nor had there been any true joy in it. It had been a sham deployed in the service of the men who paid her. And more often than not Ree was locked out of her rooms while she entertained clients. Until . . .

  Ree blinked to clear his burning eyes. His mother’s home had never been home. His mother had never been a true mother. And besides, that was all done and over with. That was the other Ree, the human—the boy. The clawless, furless creature who was as nothing to this Ree. . . .

  He swallowed hard, wishing moisture away from his cheeks. He was no weak human. Not anymore. He would not cry. He would think. The warehouse could not be the only available shelter in this town. He had to lose the soldiers, and then he could think about what to do next. At least climbing down to the ground was easy.

  Streets here were swept at least once each day by one of the work gangs. With his night vision, Ree could scamper through them as if it were full daylight. He hardly thought about where he was going. And perhaps that was for the best. If he had nothing in mind and just turned on whim, the soldiers would find it harder to follow him. It would be harder to anticipate random movements.

  Their voices grew fainter till even his enhanced hearing could hardly pick them at all. Ree breathed deeply. It was working.

  As he came to a narrow lane between overarching buildings, he slowed down and looked around. His mad turnings had brought him to one of the tenement districts, where the shabby buildings leaned so close to each other they almost touched above the lane. Black alleys barely wide enough for a hand cart separated the buildings. The sun never reached the mud beneath.

  He lifted his feet off the dismal muck and sighed. He needed to pick his way more carefully now. He had already trodden in more than enough to leave a scent trail even a human could follow.

  Lifting his foot, he shook off the worst of the filth. These lanes had never been paved. They went from ice in winter to mud in summer, and since the magic died they had more than just mud and ice in them. He had been born somewhere like this. He’d played in these streets—or walked forlornly along them—when his mother locked him out of her rooms.

  Ree crept slowly through the darkness, listening, listening. His enhanced hearing picked up the sounds of people in their houses—whispers, conversations, a sleeper turning in bed, a child crying forlornly.

  Smells seeped over the ever-present stink of waste. A hint of stew that made his stomach growl, reminding him that he had not eaten since last night. Old beer, rancid as it mingled with older straw in the closed alehouses. Unwashed humans, ripe with sweat from days of work in the summer heat. Acrid smoke from cooking fires. The smells were signs of life in the darkness.

  But the streets themselves were almost deserted. This area had once bustled day and night. But since the curfew, no one wanted to risk a crossbow. A shadowed figure in darkness could be mistaken for a hobgoblin, and who was going to say the soldier who fired the crossbow hadn’t thought he was killing a monster? Certainly not the dead person.

  The quiet felt wrong to Ree. Ominous. Even though he could never go out among humans again, Ree wanted to know people were still out there on the streets—feasting, fighting, flirting. People on the streets meant things were normal again, and normal meant that people would fear hobgoblins less. And not hunt a young street rat, constantly making his life a living hell.

  He walked down the street, listening, listening for the sounds that told him at least people were still living in their houses, still safe. He felt a nostalgia for that life he’d never had, for that life that would never be his—for a family and a quiet snug home, where he could turn in his bed, pull the covers over his head, and be safe.

  His ears, reaching for the sounds of normalcy picked up marching. Marching feet. His fur rose in hackles on his neck. Marching footsteps came from farther up the lane. He stopped. Then darted into the nearest alley.

  “What the—” someone said, near him.

  Panicked, Ree spun to the unexpected voice. A hulking shape loomed out of the blackness as the marching feet grew closer.

  A hand closed around his neck. Ree’s claws came out. He squirmed, scratching out with hands and feet to make the human in the army uniform let go. He had to. He had to defend himself, to force the human to leave him be. He somehow wrapped his body around an arm that seemed thicker than his chest, his feet kicking at the man’s neck.

  The hand let go. Ree tumbled to the ground, gasping. The dead weight of his attacker fell on him. Almost flattened him. Was the man dead? Had Ree killed him? There was a trickle of something warm-soft onto his neck, some liquid.

  Oh, he could smell well enough the sharp, metallic tang of blood. But he didn’t want it to be blood. He didn’t want to have killed someone.

  Oh, not the first time. Never the first time. But Ree didn’t want to kill. He didn’t want . . . Every time he killed someone, every time his instincts—no, the rat’s instincts, or the cat’s, took over and killed a human, Ree felt that he’d become a little less human. Eventually, his humanity would be all gone. Drained away.

  He had lost too much humanity already.

  Blood trickled onto his neck, draining away the man’s life, and Ree wanted to stand, to squirm, to flee. But the marching steps approached and he held his breath and hoped, hoped they would pass without pausing.

  Closer, he could hear their breaths, and smell the individual men. Not moving, Ree felt blood fall on him, felt the man shudder, stop breathing.

  Along the main alley, the marching steps passed away. Slowly, slowly. Ree remained still. Holding his breath.

  When the silence had lasted long enough, Ree dug his claws into the mud of the alley and pulled himself from beneath his attacker. His muscles seemed to have gone to water. His movement was too slow. Too slow.

  I’m just tired. That’s all. Tired. Give it a little while.

  Pulling away from beneath the dead weight, he took deep breaths. His nostrils filled with the smell of blood and filth. He stared at the man he had killed, shaking as he realized what it meant.

  Dangerous hobgoblin. They’ll hunt me down and kill me. There could be no doubt the dead man had been killed by a hobgoblin. Human murderers did not leave claw marks clear across their victims’ throats.

  He heard a sound. A breath. It came from behind him.

  He paused, shocked. He was not alone.

  Ree froze, terror rising to choke him. Someone had seen him kill the man. He felt as if his lungs filled with freezing air.

  Someone. There was someone. The person would call for help, and he would be killed like an animal. Like the animal he was. He’d killed someone with his claws, with his . . . He’d killed out of sheer panic.

  The soft, muffled sound came from deeper in the alley.

  For a moment, Ree trembled on the edge of fleeing, then he recognized the smell that lurked beneath the blood and worse. Aw, crap. Not that. He turned slowly, half dreading what he would see, half expecting it.

  He stumbled in the direction of the breathing, in the direction of the smell.

  The boy lay in the muck. It was hard to say how old he would be: younger tha
n Ree, but not by much. He was all human, but he had the hollow, young-old look all the street rats got sooner or later.

  Seen too much, Ree thought. Felt too much.

  It was the gag and the way he had been tied up with his ragged pants that made Ree’s gut churn. Aw, crap. You poor thing.

  He fell to his knees besides the boy. He saw the momentary panic in the youth’s eyes, and then an odd sort of relaxation, resignation, as if he’d given up the fight and consigned himself to anything fate wished to throw at him. As if the worst possible thing the boy could imagine had happened—and now something worse loomed.

  Ree could well imagine what he looked like to this stranger, this shocked stranger. How would he have felt, in the old days, if a monstrosity with rat fur and broad, green cat’s eyes knelt by him . . . touched him.

  Gently, Ree reached for the knots. Just the knots, every movement deliberate and slow. Still, the boy closed his eyes and tensed.

  The knots were so tight it hurt Ree’s hands to work them free. He would not use his claws to tear through the thin fabric: likely these were the only pants the boy owned. The gag was a little easier, although when Ree’s eyes adjusted and he saw the bloody marks from a beating—probably administered with a rough-edged belt—etched on the boy’s shoulders and face his claws nearly came out anyway. He stifled a hiss.

  The boy opened his eyes. They were very large and sky blue, and looked at Ree with startled surprise. Slowly, the boy reached down and gingerly touched his wrist with his other hand.

  He blinked at Ree. “What—” he started and swallowed and his expression changed to one of gratitude.

  Ree felt queasy. He hadn’t killed the man to rescue the boy. He had killed in an animal panic.

  Gently, Ree held out the boy’s clothes. But the boy was swaying on his feet and looked dazed, and Ree sighed. He dressed the boy as if he were a small child. And the boy let him.