helped him to sit near a hearth large enough to stand in. Someone, presumably the old man, had piled wood in the center and topped the wood with a collection of twigs and fluffy stuff Ree didn’t recognize.
Ree looked at the old man. He vaguely remembered his mother telling him how old people always expected you to be polite. “Sir?” His voice trembled. “If you could tell me ... Is there a fire starter around here? My friend is sick. He needs warmth.”
The old man’s blue eyes softened. The hatred—Ree wondered if it had been hatred or fear—abated. “There on your right side, on the mantel,” he said in a raspy voice, as if he were holding back pain.
It took Ree several tries and some colorful curses to get enough of a spark from the flint to light the fire. First the fluffy stuff caught and burned in the blink of an eye, but by then the twigs were burning and the bigger logs were starting to catch.
Ree breathed in slowly, almost a hiss. An echoing hiss came from the fireplace, followed by a gray cat twice the size of any cats he had ever seen in Jacona. The animal sniffed, meowed. “Sorry,” Ree found himself saying. “I didn’t see you in there.”
The cat made a sound that could have been a complaint, then walked up to the old man’s face and rubbed its forehead against his cheek, meowing. Ree stared in amazement. Crazy animals inside and out. All he wanted was food and warm clothes for Jem.
But the old man wasn’t screaming or anything, and he clearly needed help, too. “Sir,” he said again, hesitating. “You ... are hurt?”
“Caught my feet in the hearthrug three days ago,” he said. “I ain’t been able to get up since, and the livestock to look to, and the snow coming down, and no way to light the fire.”
Ree hesitated. It went through his mind like lightning that the old man couldn’t even get up to light the fire. That meant he couldn’t chase them away or hurt them, or denounce them. He couldn’t defend clothes or food, and Ree could look after Jem and they could leave.
He looked at the old man, but the man was studying Jem, with an intent, concentrated frown. Not as if he disapproved of Jem, but more as if he were trying to add something together. And perhaps trying not to show his own pain. By the flickering light of the fire, it hit Ree that boy and man had the same profile. The man’s face was just aged and weathered and seemed to have frozen in that expression Jem only got when he was riding high on stubborn.
Jem looked back at the man, his eyes wide and guileless. “We’ll help,” he said, softly. “Won’t we Ree? We’ll stay till you’re back on your feet.”
What could Ree say to that? They could leave, could take clothes and food, enough to survive the winter, but in Jem’s eyes he’d never be the same. And perhaps not in his own eyes either, if he knew he’d left an old man to die. Much less an old man who looked like Jem. He’d killed a man once, but that was different.
So he crossed his arms and tried to look strong. “Of course. But first you need some warmth. He needs a blanket, sir. He’s got something that makes him cough. Cold too long and not enough food.”
The old man looked from Jem to Ree. “I lost two boys to consumption,” he said, and shrugged. “No healers for miles.” He pointed. “There’s beds with quilts in that there room. It was my boys’ room.”
Ree found a cold, empty-smelling bedroom with quilts piled high on two large beds. It looked like a metal stove had been added, probably to replace the magic ones that Ree remembered being sold at marketplaces. The hole in the wall where the stove chimney let out had been plastered over, but it looked crude and rough beside the faded paint on the rest of the walls.
Ree peeled two quilts off the bed and carried them back into the middle room. Now that his heart had stopped trying to leap out of his chest, and with firelight warm and buttery in the room, it looked almost cozy.
Jem huddled by the fire, with his ragged clothes and bones showing under his skin, wasn’t so good. Ree dropped one quilt around the younger boy’s shoulders; then he laid the other one over the old man. “Sir? You need food, too.” He was asking the old man’s permission to feed him as much as stating fact.
The old man sighed. “There’s stew in there.” He pointed into the hearth, where a pot of something hung on an hinge. “It’s been so cold, it’s probably still good. You can swing it over the fire and it will be bubbling nicely in no time. My wife’s recipe.” He cast a look at Jem. “He needs to eat. But you and I have something to do, before we eat.”
“We do?” Ree swung the pot over the fire. His stomach growled when he smelled it. He and Jem had tried to roast things over camp fires, but they hadn’t had real cooked food in ... much too long.
The man gave a cackle like a whiplash, and Ree wondered if it was just the pain making him mean. How could he look so much like Jem and act like he hated the entire world?
“This is a working farm,” he said. “Ain’t no one been working at it for days. The cattle will be starved, and the cows’ll need milking.”
Ree had a vague memory of going to a fair with his mother once, and a pretty lady who milked a cow and for a coin poured some milk in people’s cups for drinking. Ree’s mother had bought him some milk, and it was the best thing he’d ever tasted. But he was hungry now and stew would do. “Why do we need to milk them? We have stew.”
The old man looked at him, disbelieving, as if he thought that Ree was addled. Then he made a croaking sound that alarmed Ree until he realized it was laughter, or at least the laughter of someone who must be dying of thirst. “The cows need the milk out, boy, or they get infected teats, and eventually they die. You ain’t going to set there and eat while the animals starve.”
Ree remembered the gigantic creatures outside. Sitting here eating while they starved seemed like a good idea, but something warned him he shouldn’t say so. “I’m not?”
“No, you’re not,” the old man said, and continued studying Ree with an evaluating look that implied that, as far as his sums were concerned, Ree came up short. “I don’t suppose you know one end of a cow from the other?”
Ree shook his head, unable to speak. To make things worse, Jem had wandered away, still wrapped in the quilt, and now there was a creaking sound from the kitchen.
“Don’t you worry none. It’s the water pump. I guess he was thirsty,” the old man said, and rasped in a slightly louder tone, “I could use a cup of water meself.”
When Jem came back into the room carrying a water cup, the old man was giving Ree very odd instructions. They started with: “You get yourself out there and around the side of the house. The lean-to has ... a lot of stuff. There’s a wheelbarrow there. Bring it in.”
Ree left the old man sipping water and went to the lean-to—trying to ignore the desperate animals that surrounded him—and got the wheelbarrow, a sturdy thing with a big wheel, back into the room.
The old man was talking to Jem in almost confidential tones. “Brothers, are you?” Ree heard him say, as he pushed the door open.
“Uh, no. We’re ... friends,” Jem said, and that clear skin of his betrayed a raging flush.
Ree’s stomach tightened, but the old man only said, “Ah. My brother—” Then he saw Ree and said, “Ah, you got the wheelbarrow. Good.”
Thus started the strangest few hours of Ree’s life. Outside it was snowing hard, but the old man, wrapped in the quilt, sitting as comfortably in the wheelbarrow as the combined efforts of the three of them could make him, only said, “You might as well get snow on your fur now as later. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better this winter.”
“Go to the barn there,” he said. “That’s where their food is.” He gestured at the animals who surrounded them as soon as they were outside. Although he ignored the cows and the goat, he patted the horse’s head with his gnarled fingers, and his eyes looked almost wistful.
Ree pushed the wheelbarrow to the barn, where he opened a door that ran on some sort of track and required much less effort than he expected. Then he pushed the old man in.
Like a king on a throne, the man barked out despotic orders.
“Pump water for them now, then hit them on the nose if they drink too much.”
Ree pumped water from the biggest water pump he’d ever seen, which poured clear, cool liquid onto a trough. “Now, hit them on the nose. A cow will drink till it bursts, boy.”
So Ree hit them on the nose, all of them, even the maybe-goat, It tried to bump him back, causing the old man to unleash his cackle once more. But the respite didn’t hold. “Now up that ladder. Can those paws of yours climb ladders?”
Ree, whose arms already felt like they would fall off their sockets from pumping the water, could only nod.
