His meeting with Jem had led them to leave Jacona and head out to the countryside in which they imagined they’d be safer. Which just went to show how young they’d been.
As it turned out, it had been safer, but never in the way he expected. Jem had almost died of the coughing illness that winter, as they stayed out of towns where people would kill them. It was Jem’s illness that had forced Ree to come to the farm, to look for help. By blind luck, or perhaps blind destiny, they’d blundered into a farm that belonged to Jem’s grandfather. And here they’d been since. Ree and Jem and Jem’s grandfather, and later Amelie and Meren, Jem’s and Ree’s adopted children.
No one asked embarrassing questions about Jem’s and Ree’s relationship. Or rather, the only one who asked was Garrad, Jem’s grandfather, and only to tease them. And got a great deal of laughter out of their embarrassment. And if the children called Jem Da and Ree Papa, no one thought there was anything wrong with that either.
Anywhere else, their odd little family might be remarked, but the people of Three Rivers Valley had gotten to know the people at the farm for who they were–for their bravery and kindness and courage. Ree and Jem had helped the village too many times for anyone to remark two young men, much less a man and a hobgoblin, shouldn’t be raising children together, even if one of those children was also a hobgoblin. The village saw that they clearly could and were raising happy, sweet children out of waifs no one else wanted.
Ree sighed again. Sometimes he thought the only reason they’d taken the children on was that they had no idea how hard it could be. They were good children, and Ree would miss them when they left for houses of their own, but it was like living with your heart in someone else’s body. He worried every time Amelie went to the village and was late returning. And his heart about stopped when Meren took a fall from a tree.
With an effort, he focused on the work in front of him. That one looks like it’s starting to go. Ree bent closer to the shingle, close enough to sniff the wood. The scent of decay was faint, but there. It might not be obvious now, but in a month that shingle would be starting to crumble, and by the time winter set in, it would no longer be weatherproof.
He sat beside the shingle and started prying the nails loose, taking care not to bend them too much. Good nails were expensive; it was better to reuse them if you could. Getting them straightened by the smith down in Three Rivers village cost less than new nails, but it was still a cost Ree preferred not to pay.
He chuckled to himself. Like Jem, he’d learned farmer thrift from old Garrad, the owner of this farm and Jem’s grandfather. If he was going to be honest with himself, Ree had learned a lot more than thrift from the old man: Garrad had taught him the value of work, and to see himself as a man, not a street child and not a Change Circle freak.
Everywhere he looked, Ree could see the result of his work and Jem’s. The ever-growing herd of cattle, goats, and donkeys, the fields they hired men to plough and harvest, the walls of the home fields, and even the prolific damncats. Oh, they were ordinary cats, but somehow the name had stuck for cats raised on this farm.
Mostly, Ree suspected, because the Three Rivers folk were convinced he could talk to them and trained them. The things people would believe. Grown men and women, talking of training cats! It was the other way around: He observed them, recognized their calls and body language, and they knew he’d respond to something urgent.
Well, except for Damncat, the gray-and-white troublemaker with a fondness for Ree’s shoulder. That cat was smarter than most and knew it, too.
“Can I help, Papa?”
Ree about jumped out of his fur. Meren might be all of four years old and part cat, but he could creep up on a body like nothing else on earth. Not that he meant to, it was just . . . Meren walked softly, especially when he discarded his shoes—which was most of the time—and he seemed to instinctively know to stay downwind.
The boy giggled, his greeny-hazel eyes lit with mischief. He was an odd sight, with his white-blond curls and sparse tabby fur. Without the fur and the pointed ears, Meren could have been taken for human, but as it was he was as much a hobgoblin as Ree, although Meren had been born that way. The child of two hobgoblins who’d been killed by the villagers, he’d been taken in by Ree and Jem as a baby and raised to be more human than animal—unlike his parents, who’d gone to the animal.
“Bored, are you?” Ree asked. Like Ree, Meren didn’t like being confined to the house. At least since the dire wolf had got through the fences two years back, he’d stopped trying to explore the forest on his own. Or— and Ree wasn’t entirely sure this wasn’t the case—stopped getting caught at it.
Meren nodded. “Da and Melie are cooking, an’ Granddad said to get out from underfoot.” His thumb hovered near his mouth, ready to go in.
Ree eased a nail out and set it beside the others. If Meren was upset, he sucked his thumb. It happened less as the little boy got older, but if something really bothered him . . .
“Granddad got mad, didn’t he?” Ree collected the nails and handed them to his son—maybe not the son of his body, but Meren was his son, just as Amelie, an all-human orphan he and Jem had taken in, was his daughter. “Hold these for me, please? They’re valuable, and I don’t want to lose them.”
That diverted the threatened thumb and gave Meren something to feel important about while Ree eased the shingle free.
“Granddad gets mad lots.” Meren didn’t sound entirely sure of himself.
Ree nodded. With his claws digging into the shingle, it was a lot easier to pull it loose without disturbing any of the others.
“Can you keep a secret, a proper secret?”
He had his suspicions about what Garrad had said to upset the little boy, but more to the point, he knew why. This last winter had been hard on the old man; he didn’t walk much now, and when he did, he truly needed the walking stick Jem had made him years ago.
Meren sat straighter, trying to look taller and older than he was. “Yes, Papa.”
“It hurts Granddad to move,” Ree said quietly.
The shingle came free; he set it aside and reached into the pack on his back for a fresh one, started to ease it into place. “When Granddad is hurting, he gets grouchy.”
Meren tilted his head to one side, chewing his bottom lip. “Then he wasn’t really mad at me?”
“Nope. Granddad yells at everyone.” As Ree well knew, having been the recipient of Garrad’s temper more than a few times. “You know that.”
The thumb—complete with nails clutched in that hand—threatened to enter Meren’s mouth again. “But . . . Granddad said I was . . .”
Ree chuckled. “He told you to go play with the damncats because you’re just like them? He tells me that too, when he’s grouchy. He tells Jem just about the same, too.” It was an exaggeration, but not much of one.
“Not Melie, though.”
“No, but Melie is never wild, is she?”
“No,” Meren said, then paused and wrinkled his forehead. “On count of being a girl.”
“Probably,” Ree conceded amiably, though it was more likely on account of Amelie having seen her whole family massacred when she was very young. “Could you pass me a nail, please?”
Meren stared for a moment, then carefully took a nail and handed it to Ree. “Oh.”
Ree wasn’t sure when it had become a weekly event to have Lenar and his family to dinner at the farm, but sometime between the time they’d adopted Meren and the time he’d saved Amelie from a dire wolf, it had started. And then by the time Meren was on his feet again after the dire wolf attack, it was simply accepted as something that happened like clockwork.