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“Having Gifts is all on how you use it. This one saved you and Garrad tonight. That makes it good.”

Finally, Meren relaxed. “Fank you, Papa.” The words were mumbled around a fiercely sucked thumb.

Damncat strutted over. He gave Meren a headbutt, then rubbed against Ree’s leg.

“Yes, you and yours did well, too.” Ree scratched the cat behind the ears, and smiled. Everything would be all right. These vessels he’d put his heart into would break it again and again and again, but somehow, it would emerge stronger from each break.

Human hearts did.

Chapter 13 - Heart’s Place - Sarah A. Hoyt

Ree watched, and tried to keep his stomach from knotting up, while Lenar’s Mage examined Meren.

The Mage was a decent enough fellow, and he wasn’t going to do anything like denounce the boy, not here. It was just . . . after the magic circles, Ree had never really trusted magic.

Magic had made him a hobgoblin, after all, complete with a coat of sleek brown fur and claws that retracted like a cat’s. And a ratlike tail, which was wrapped around one leg inside his pants.

That same magic had given Meren a coat of sparse tabby fur in addition to his white-blond curls, and who knew what else. And that, Ree reminded himself forcefully, was why the Mage was here.

You couldn’t pretend that something like being able to broadcast what you were feeling to all the damncats was just a coincidence, and with the controlled hobgoblins attacking more often . . .

It was better to have Lenar’s Mage make sure that his Lord’s adopted grandson couldn’t possibly be controlling the hobgoblins, and never mind that those same controlled hobgoblins had attacked the child last summer.

Scared people didn’t think about things like that. They got themselves worked up and went after anything that was different. That was one of the reasons Ree didn’t go down to Three Rivers village much—while people respected him, and knew he’d help them whenever they needed, and get hurt for them, too, it was better not to remind them just how different he was.

The Mage leaned back with a sigh, and his eyes focused again.

Meren drooped; whatever the Mage had been doing had tired him out.

“I’ll just get Meren to bed, then I’ll be with you,” Ree said. With Jem walking Amelie to the manor to spend the night there—ostensibly to keep little Garrad company, but more because Lenar’s wife was near to term and not really able to keep up with her son—and old Garrad barely able to move, Ree was the only able-bodied person on the farm right now.

The Mage nodded. “Thank you.”

A little later, with Meren not even protesting about being put to bed for a daytime nap, and asleep before Ree had pulled the covers over, Ree returned to the kitchen and filled a bowl with the stew that was always warming on the stove.

“Here.” He handed the bowl to the Mage. “I heard tell you get hungry after magic.”

“Thank you again.” The Mage—Ree could never remember his name—was one of those people who looked so ordinary you forgot them as soon as you met them.

Not that Ree would have been surprised to find that the Mage “helped” that impression a bit with magic; it had to be a powerful advantage to a Mage to be overlooked and even forgotten.

“Well,” the Mage said after he’d eaten some. “Your son isn’t a Mage, nor will he be. He does have an unusual Gift, something I’ve seen only once before.”

If the man had seen it before, that was better than completely weird. Ree told his stomach to untie itself, and he made himself ask, “When was that?”

The Mage smiled faintly. “Oh, that was long ago, in the army. I was posted down south a way, and the tribes there had these people they called ‘beastmasters’ who they claimed could speak with any animal without words.” He shrugged. “The way our horses behaved around them, I got to thinking it wasn’t just one of those myths that grow up when someone knows animals really well.”

Ree nodded. He knew about those, since he was at the center of a fair few of them, him and the damncats—who maybe weren’t quite as ordinary as he’d thought.

“After I’d got friendly with one of their beastmasters, we each looked at the other with our Gifts—it’s a sort of compliment, to actually open yourself to someone else’s probing that way—and . . . well. What he had was just like what your son has.”

“So it’s a human Gift, just very rare?” Now Ree had to throttle hope. Something human, something a Mage had seen before . . . that meant that Meren was human enough to maybe be accepted that way, even if he didn’t look it.

The Mage finished eating before he nodded. “Exactly. It’s probably not fully developed yet; these things usually don’t start showing up until puberty, although they can manifest early under enough stress.”

Meren had seen enough stress in his short life for something like that to happen, what with being born to parents who couldn’t keep themselves fed much less their baby—and had gotten desperate and raided the village fields, getting themselves killed in the process—not to mention two near-death encounters with hobgoblins.

“Is there any way to teach him how to . . . well, not get caught in it?” Teaching a little boy to use something he couldn’t feel wasn’t exactly Ree’s idea of fun, but it had to be done. Meren needed to be able to tell what was inside his head and what wasn’t.

Even if Meren didn’t want to learn.

The Mage smiled. “Oh, that’s part of why he’s so tired. I took the liberty of giving him some basic shielding and showing him how to use it. It’s close enough to the way magic works that it should keep him out of trouble—well, out of too much trouble—for a while.”

Ree couldn’t help smiling. You couldn’t keep a child Meren’s age completely out of trouble. At that age, they attracted it like flies to honey. “Thank you. I appreciate that.” What the Mage had left unsaid—that Meren would need to learn more about his strange Gift when he got older—was something Ree figured could wait for a while. There was no point borrowing trouble when trouble came to visit regularly anyhow.

“Oh, it’s my pleasure.” The Mage stood, and extended his right hand. “I’ll be happy to testify for you or your son, if there’s ever a need.”

That offer was enough to make Ree blink so his eyes wouldn’t blur. Hobgoblins were killed on sight, unless they had a license and were properly controlled—which usually meant a cage or a leash. Here, he and Meren were exceptions, but that was mostly because of Lenar. Lenar being old Garrad’s son, the local Lord, and Jem’s father meant that Ree was family, and he’d made it clear he considered Ree and Meren equal members of that family.

What would happen without that in the future . . . Ree didn’t want to think about it. “I really appreciate that,” he said softly. “Thank you.”

If it came to a court, him not being human meant he couldn’t say anything to defend himself. Meren, too. It was something Ree mostly pushed to a dark corner of his mind, even forgot about for a while, but sometimes, especially with Garrad the way he was . . . His and Meren’s situation was so precarious, so different from anything else, anywhere in the world, that any major change in the arrangement of their life could be a disaster.

No one dared defy Garrad, and Garrad had Lenar’s ear. But if that were to change . . .

This farm, and the valley, were home now. Ree didn’t think he could bear it if he had to leave.

With the shorter days of winter, Lenar had taken to making his weekly visit around the middle of the day, so he need not ride home in the dark. That suited Ree just fine; the chores were mostly morning and evening work this time of year, with the days he wasn’t patrolling the forest spent either repairing things that had been set aside to be fixed when there was time, or helping Garrad move from bed to chair or chair to pot.