Crossroads and Other Tales of Valdemar

The human part of Ree was scared, too. How could it not be? He held onto Jem’s hand through the day, and tried to quiet his screams, his mumbles. Tried to still his panics. And hoped no one heard. No one came.

What would people think if they found a hobgoblin and a human youth?

Ree talked to him through the day. Told him silly things. Sang to him, ballads he barely remembered hearing—in his mother’s house, long ago. And Jem looked at him with wondering, blue eyes.

And never showed fear. Never fear. A twinge of fear from Jem, a twinge of horror at Ree’s strangeness, and Ree would have been free to leave, free to go in search of a new hideout. Free to become a wild creature again. To forget he’d ever been human.

But Jem looked at him with confidence and trust and, in his brief moments of lucidity, grinned at Ree’s jokes, smiled at them. Or reached for Ree’s hand for reassurance.

So Ree stayed. And when he went out at night to refill the water bucket and steal food for them both, he always came back. Perhaps he was fooling himself. Perhaps he was using Jem to make himself feel human.

But he could not possibly live knowing how Jem would feel if he didn’t come back. The idea of Jem’s betrayal and disappointment was more than Ree could bear. It would have stripped Ree’s soul bare of what humanity remained.

So he went and he came back. Sometimes, he caught rats. One good, fat rat made a meal when he skinned it and cooked it over a tiny fire.

In the past, Ree had eaten it raw. But Jem would have been shocked, scared. For the sake of Jem, Ree had to be human and eat with human manners, as he hadn’t since the night the magic had changed him.

And each time, each time out, Ree feared he would be caught. Not just for his death, but because Jem might think he’d been abandoned.

There were more patrols now, and searches. Patrols that came too close for his liking talked about the killer hobgoblin, the one who’d killed the soldier, and how Emperor Melles himself was offering a whole gold piece for the hobgoblin’s hide.

The thought made his stomach go all queasy. Not all those soldiers would make sure he was dead before they started skinning him. And there were worse things . . .

Jacona had become a rat trap. Holding Jem’s hand, as Jem slowly became stronger and more confident, Ree realized he could not stay in the city. Like his warehouse, it had become a trap.

The problem was, he did not know how he was to escape. The work gangs had not just hauled water to cisterns and replaced all the work that used to be done with magic. They had built a new wall around the city, to keep the hobgoblins out. The wall went all the way to Crag Castle, Ree had heard, and soldiers guarded it all the time. Jacona was a fortified rat trap.

No matter how busy the roads were, everyone who went through one of the gates was inspected. Ree had seen the frozen dangling corpse of a merchant who had tried to smuggle his son-turned-hobgoblin out of the city. He did not know if the man had died of the hanging or if he had frozen to death. Ree shuddered at the thought of what the patrols would do to Jem if they found them together.

He did not want to think about it. But he had to escape. It would be safer for Jem if he was just another human, with no rat boy to make him a criminal. Safer for Jem to be alone again. And safer for Ree, even though he had no idea what lay beyond the walls of Jacona.

Oh, he knew there were farms, and farmers, and roads that went to other cities. And he had heard there were wild places where a rat boy might be able to live without humans always hunting him. But he had never seen anything outside Jacona, never been beyond the tenements and warehouses of the poorest districts.

How could he escape?

The aqueducts had been broken by the winter storms after the magic began to die. The sections near the city walls had been knocked down by the work gangs who built the wall.

Ree had heard that no one knew when—or even if—magic was going to come back, so there had been no reason to keep something that would not be useful without magic. He had wondered sometimes if he would eventually change back without magic, but that did not seem likely.

As for the drains . . . Ree shuddered. The patrols would not go there. That was where the Changerats and the even weirder hobgoblins had gone. The ones that were all teeth, claws, and poison. Like the patrols, Ree did not want to know what had become of them. And yet, it might be his only chance. A slim chance at life, as opposed to the sure death that would come to him if they found him in Jacona. And to Jem if they found him sheltering Ree.

But first he had to wait for Jem to be well, for Jem to be well enough to survive on his own.

“You’re leaving?” Jem asked. He managed to look about two years old and very confused.

Ree nodded. Jem had stood up two days ago and he looked strong enough to survive, strong enough to do whatever he had done before meeting Ree. Why was it that Ree could not meet his eyes, and found himself looking at the floor as he said, “Stay away from the soldiers, Jem. You are—” He stopped short of saying that Jem was too pretty to be safe. He had not thought it, not thought it at all the whole time they had been together. Not consciously. Not with his rational mind. He had not. Jem was just . . . Jem. Ree looked up and caught a disturbing glimpse of broad blue eyes, like a summer sky. Threatening rain. “They are not . . . They do not have the restraints of the local patrols. They answer to no one.

“Jacona will be safer for you without me. You could stay here, get work, that sort of thing.”

Jem made a sound. It wasn’t quite a sigh or quite a sob, but it had a bit of both and more of frantic urgency. Ree looked up.

Don’t let Jem cry, he thought. Don’t let Jem cry. He is just young and hurt and recovering from a lingering illness. His crying meant nothing. And yet, I don’t know if I can bear to watch him cry.

Jem looked like he was trying very bravely not to cry. He was biting his lower lip, hard.

Don’t let him ask me to stay, Ree thought. I can’t stay. I can’t.

But instead of asking, Jem whispered, “My mother left me, on the street, when I was four. She gave me a sweet and said she would come back. She never—” He shook his head.

Ree started to say “Better than—” meaning to say better than have your mother sell you to a customer when you’re barely thirteen. He remembered the fear, the frantic humiliation. He remembered being told about it, being sent to the room. He remembered running away.

For months, before, he’d noticed his mother’s customers casting looks at him. There were men who didn’t seem to care if you were male or female, provided you were a young thing, whose services could be bought. Who could not complain. There were men who didn’t care what they did. Like that soldier, with Jem.

But as he was about to tell Jem this, Ree stopped. Because all through it, he’d been afraid Jem would follow him, Jem would come with him—that Jem would get caught by the patrols and hung outside the city walls to freeze to death. Or worse, now summer had come. And suddenly he wondered if his mother had been afraid of what would happen to Ree, if one of her customers found him. If one of her customers treated him as the soldier had treated Jem.

For the first time, he remembered his mother’s face that day, without flinching. And it seemed to him there was concern in her eyes, overlaid with a harshness she had put there, a false harshness. He remembered she hadn’t told him who the customer was. Or anything about him. Or how much he paid.

She’d told him just enough to make Ree run away and be safe.

Ree bit back tears, and forced harshness upon his features. He stepped close to Jem and did his best to growl, in his most threatening hobgoblin voice, “I’m tired of you. You’re human and slight and weak. I don’t want you with me. I can travel quicker alone, with my fangs and my hobgoblin senses, and my claws.” He saw Jem look startled, scared, and he felt as though his heart were bleeding, but he pressed on. “If you come with me, I’ll kill you. Like I killed the soldier.”

Without waiting to see Jem’s expression, to see the further devastation his words had brought to it, he turned around, he jumped out the window—he skittered and ran his way to the ground.

Running through the shadows to the abandoned washhouse, whose drains fed to the sewers and drains beneath the city, he wished he could remember how to cry. And he half-hoped a patrol would find him and kill him.

The washhouse was quiet, in shadows. No patrols in it, more was the pity.

Ree remembered it pretty well, from when his mother had come there with him, when he was very small. He