Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar (26 page)

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 village 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.

“Well!” Garrad said, with an explosive sound.

Jem shook his head and said. “I’d best put some water to boil. That’s a right mess in that fur—besides, he has fleas.”

“We ought to burn that damn fur,” Garrad said turning away from the table. “I’ll go grab some rags for diapering, shall I?”

They filled the big tin bath and set it right next to the stove, so the baby wouldn’t take a chill. He held Amelie’s wrist tight while they bathed him, and sucked on his other thumb something fierce.

“We’ll have to get some food in him,” Garrad said. “The poor thing is hungry. I don’t suppose any of the women in the village will nurse him neither. It will have to be goat’s milk.” He disappeared for a while and came back with a weird contraption, shaped like a plain-glazed old-fashioned oil lamp covered in dust. He set about washing it while Jem took a towel and wrapped the baby as Ree pulled him out of the water.

“I think we’ll call him Meren,” Amelie said, as they lay the baby on the table, still in the towel. “Like . . . My dad.” Her voice trembled only a little. She’d seen her family massacred through the keyhole of the cellar where they’d locked her for her own safety. Ree didn’t know what she’d seen. Neither he nor Jem had ever thought it would do any good to ask. But these days she mentioned her dead parents with less pain, as if they were part of a beautiful dream now gone. He supposed she was young enough that eventually she’d heal altogether and perhaps even forget.

“Meren is a right good name,” Garrad said softly. “And it’s not like we can keep calling him baby. Bound to get confusing if we call him Damn Baby too. Could get him mixed up with Damn Cats. Besides, Lenar will yell at us again on account of using bad language.” He’d finished washing the clay thing and was drying it on a clean rag, as he spoke.

“What’s that, Grandad?” Ree asked.

“Oh, this? One of the extra teats for my boys.”

Ree blinked. He didn’t think you were supposed to call them teats if they were on humans, and how did anyone have an extra one?

“Boys get extra teats?” Amelie asked.

Jem just looked helpless. Some questions you really didn’t want to answer.

Garrad winked at Ree and smiled at Amelie. “Turns out we still had one. My wife, your grandmother, Jem, often went to sell cheese on Fair Days. She left me with your father and his brothers, and I had to feed them. She’d leave milk in these here jugs in the cooling room for the baby, and they all suckled from them a treat. Now what we do is we scald a cup of milk, fill this and let it cool till it feels just warm on the skin. Then we see if Damn Baby will suckle.”

“I thought we weren’t going to call him Damn Baby,” Jem said.

“Oh, right,” Garrad set milk in a small pot on the stove. “Damn Meren.”

Amelie giggled behind her hand, and Jem smiled, but Ree was thinking that maybe it would be better for everyone if Damn Baby refused to suckle. Though he couldn’t quite face the thought of watching the poor thing wasting away to nothing before his eyes. It wasn’t as if he would have the courage to put an end to the little thing’s existence. He’d already failed once.

At any rate, there wasn’t any point thinking about it. They got the baby diapered and dressed in an old shirt of Amelie’s—which Garrad said would have to be replaced with manly clothes, or Lenar would yell about that too. When they put the clay . . . well, nipple was the only word Ree could think of . . . to his lips, it had taken Meren only a few seconds to start suckling.

“I wouldn’t give him more than two teats full,” Garad said, as Ree looked at the empty-again jug in some wonder. “Bound to make him sick.”

“But he’s still hungry,” Jem said, as Meren started a thin, complaining wail. Which, quite fortunately, was stopped by a sudden—startlingly loud—burp, making Amelie stifle a giggle. A little spit-up of milk came out with the burp, making Meren look surprised, but after they’d wiped that down with a clean rag, he’d put his thumb in his mouth and looked even more surprised when his eyes started to close.

In no time at all, he was fully asleep, a warm, contented bundle in Ree’s arms. Which was when someone pounded at the door.

When Garrad opened it, Ree could see past him to the worried, cold-looking face of the mayor. “Young Anders died,” he said. “Not all that the Healer could do would save him. We were wondering if you’d found—” He stopped, staring at Ree and the baby in his arms. Even from that distance it would be impossible to miss that the baby had fur.

“You can’t mean to keep the little beast,” the mayor said. “You were supposed to kill it!”

Garrad made a sound in his throat and started to say, “There now, what has . . . ”

“It’s the get of those monsters as killed my nephew!” the mayor yelled.

Ree wanted to hide. He wanted to stay quiet. He wanted to take the baby a long way away and never come back. Just the two of them, monsters, and no one to judge them. But instead, and much to his own shock, he found he was on his feet, holding Meren so tight that he woke up and let out a thin, surprised cry.

“My mother,” Ree shouted, hearing the words come out of his mouth, and not quite believing them, “Was a prostitute on the streets of Jacona. Does that make me a prostitute? My father was likely a mercenary, does that make me a mercenary? Does it mean the families of people my father killed get to kill me?” Meren’s thin wail made a counterpoint to Ree’s shouting but couldn’t overshadow it.

“Now, there, son,” Garrad said in calming tones. He was the only one who spoke. Both Jem and the mayor looked shocked that Ree would actually yell—since Ree had kept himself quiet ever since Garrad took them in, hoping no one would hurt him. For all the good it did. “There’s no need—”

“No, Grandad,” Ree said. “Not this time. This little one’s parents died for their crimes. He’s not them, no more than I’m my parents, or I’m his parents for that matter. What are you scared of? He hasn’t even got milk teeth yet. If you catch him gumming a cow to death, you can kill him, but not before.”

Carried forward by his sudden fury he slammed the door shut in the mayor’s face. He half expected that the man would pound on it again, but he didn’t.

As they heard the crunch of his steps on the gravel, walking away, Jem said, “I wonder if he’s going to summon a party with pitchforks . . . ”

“What, and risk Ree tearing him apart?” Garrad said. “Not damn likely.”

Amelie giggled, as if she thought the idea of Ree tearing someone apart was funny, but Ree had scared ßhimself.

He didn’t want to tear anyone apart. “Meren’s just young,” Ree said. “And . . . and defenseless.”

“That he is, son,” Garrad said, looking at Ree, who instinctively had started rocking the baby back to sleep. “You know, if he grows up . . . that is . . . if he turns out not to be fit for human company . . . ”

“I’ll do what I have to,” Ree said, wishing he were sure he wasn’t lying. He knew his duty. He hoped he could do it.

“I think we still have the old crib,” Garrad said. “Jem, come with me to get it from the attic.” There might have been just a hint of mischief in the old man’s voice as he added. “It will have to go in your room.”

Ree and Jem exchanged a look of sudden shock at the idea of that pair of greeny-hazel eyes watching their every move.

“What’s a pros-titute?” Amelie asked, looking up from her slate and chalk.

“A word you shouldn’t say,” Garrad said. “Unless you want Grandad Lenar at us about your manners again.”

“Oh.” Amelie turned back to her slate as Jem and Garrad walked away bickering, and the baby stopped crying.

And then the little hand grabbed onto Ree’s finger and held it tight.

Heart’s Own

 

 

 

This being the first warm week in six months, Ree sat milking the goats in the farmyard. Meren, the hobgoblin baby he and Jem had rescued almost a year and a half ago, was past being fed with a nurser, but he still liked goat milk. Besides, Ree had heard goat cheeses were selling well to the itinerant traders—now that peace was returning to the region.

The flock of six nanny goats pressed close, bleating softly. It was Ree’s considered opinion they were doing their best to jostle him and the goat being milked at that moment, so that they could all scamper away without being milked.

But just as they had learned not to be scared of Ree—a human who had acquired cat eyes and rat fur and tail in the magic storms—he had learned not to fall for their tricks. He kept a firm hand on the nanny being milked. “You’re almost finished now,” he said. “Stop fussing.”

The goat turned an evil yellow eye upon him and tried to head butt him in a not-unfriendly way.