Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar (22 page)

Liah grew toward maturity seeing no one but her parents. Her father hated and feared her, her mother, shattered in spirit, retreated into a world of music. It was her mother’s gittern Liah had been playing that night.

Her Gift manifested violently, as the Great Gifts often do. One night the smoldering anger she felt against Andren boiled over. She Sang him all her hatred and despair with the life she led until he fled the cabin into the night; in the morning her mother’s screams awoke her.

She helped her mother cut her father down from the branch on which he’d hanged himself.

After that, I think Liah lost all hope. She knew she had caused her father’s death; therefore all that he said of her must be true. She knew that she had the power to impose her will upon those around her with a song, and she had used her power to kill.

Her mother followed her father into death a scant few years later, wasted away with madness and grief. Though I do not think Liah caused that death, save indirectly, she blamed herself for it as well—and she blamed the hill people who had not come to her mother’s aid, though by the time Liah had eighteen summers behind her, I do not know if many of them remembered Andren and Colmye at all, and none knew that there was a child.

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.

J
ACONA 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 building 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.