The big man’s choking scream died to a horrible gurgling noise, and he pitched forward.

Ree scrambled to pull away from him and bit back a yelp when he found the man’s sword the hard way. His feet might be tougher than a human’s, but they weren’t horn.

He stumbled away from the wall and loose stone and collapsed, gasping. His foot stung.

“There he is!”

Ree half-scrambled upright before he realized it was Jem’s voice. A moment later, boys—or maybe young men, Ree wasn’t sure—surrounded him, caring nothing for his fur or for anything but that he was hurt and that he’d freed them. The chatter while they unshielded the lamp and bandaged him made him want to be sick. He hadn’t thought it would be that bad.

“They’ll come back,” he said when the young men quieted down a little. “Maybe not those ones, but others.”

“Those won’t be back.” Jem sounded grimly amused. “They dropped all their weapons.”

People gathered now, women and children and some older men who Ree guessed weren’t fit enough to be put into the army. They weren’t scared of him, and they weren’t treating him like some kind of wild animal.

“What happens when others come, then?” Ree demanded. “More of them, because of the terrible army of hobgoblins that chased those away.” It didn’t matter that the “terrible army” was a handful of youngsters making noises. That wasn’t what the Grand Duke would hear.

Instead of fixing things, he’d made them worse.

Jem frowned, but he looked stubborn and determined, not angry. “We’ve got their stuff. All of it. We can fix things so we can keep them away.” He smiled. “You’ll help, Ree, right? You’ll be the fearsome hobgoblin king for us?”

“I’ll help.” He couldn’t say anything else, really, not when he’d made sure there’d be trouble. “Granddad’s going to complain, but I guess we can feed everyone until stuff can be rebuilt.” Ree bit his lip. “Maybe make walls out of the places they burned, and traps and things.”

“We’ll manage.” Jem said with a nod. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

It wouldn’t be easy, Ree thought. Boys who were just about old enough to be men, frightened women and children who’d lost everything they knew . . . No one was complaining, though. Maybe they were just glad to be alive, as he and Jem had been that first night after escaping Jacona. It hadn’t mattered then that they had nothing except each other.

Now they had something to protect, something to fight for, but they still had each other. Ree caught Jem’s determined look, and Jem smiled. “We’ll look after them, Ree. Like we look after each other.”

Jem looked like a man. Like a young Garrad. Men protected and helped those in need. Men cleaved to their friends and their promises.

“Yeah,” Ree said, his heart suddenly easy despite the danger ahead. “Yeah, we will.”

Matters of the Heart

by Sarah A. Hoyt

Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal, a mishap she hastened to correct as soon as she came of age. She lives in Colorado with her husband, her two sons, and a varying horde of cats. She has published a Shakespearean fantasy trilogy, Three Musketeers mystery novels, as well as any number of short stories in magazines ranging from

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

to

Dreams of Decadence

. Forthcoming novels include

Darkship Thieves

and more Three Musketeers mystery novels. She currently lives with her family in Colorado.

“Hello the house!”

Ree jumped when the unfamiliar voice bellowed outside the farm gates. As a hobgoblin, having got himself mixed up with a cat and a rat during Change Circle, he was proscribed in most places. Here, too, though the people who lived near Garrad’s farm had gotten used to him and didn’t fear him. In fact, since he’d helped them escape the soldiers who had come last summer and burned most of the farms around here, Ree had no fear of being seen. Except by strangers.

He dropped the shovel he’d been using to muck out the goat stalls and, pushing aside the goats, walked out of the stall, locked it, then walked out of the barn and across the farmyard, to where he could get a view of the gate.

Last week’s snow coated the ground in a thin, brittle shell that crackled under the new boots that hid Ree’s nonhuman feet. The air had a cold, dry taste tinged with the smell of wood fires; that meant it was going to stay below freezing even if the sun was out. Ree’s breath steamed, and he wrapped his arms close around his body.

The new wall protecting the farm was about seven feet tall, too tall to see past—it was taller than Jem and topped with sharp bits of stone and metal—but the iron gate the village ironmonger had done for them, in gratitude, was big enough to let the donkey and cart through, and they didn’t go outside the farm or the forest without weapons or on their own any more. It was also made of vertical shafts, like spears, and you could see between them. And if you took care to stay kind of to the side of the wall as you looked, no one could see you.

The three men outside the gate were definitely strangers, all of them on horses. Good horses too, which to Ree were horses no one in the region could possibly afford—tall of leg and sturdy. The man at the front wore fancy armor, the kind Ree remembered Imperial officers wearing, and had what looked like a brand new red cloak over his shoulders. He looked about forty, blond and bearded, with that hardened look all soldiers got sooner or later, and he looked angry.

“Who is it, Ree?” Jem whispered. He’d come running from where he’d been, near the chicken coop, and skidded to a stop near Ree. He’d gotten a bit taller since last summer, but mostly he’d put on muscle, filling out to match his height. Sometimes Ree felt like a child beside him, even though Ree was older.

But then, no one knew how Ree was supposed to grow. He was a hobgoblin after all, part cat, part rat and part human, changed by the magic storms. Jem might treat him like a human, and Garrad, the old man whose farm this was and who’d become a kind of grandfather to both of them and who looked enough like Jem to be his real grandfather. Even little Amelie, whom Ree had found after soldiers burned Three Rivers last summer and whose parents had been killed treated Ree like a human, but no one else did.

They accepted him, even were grateful for the way he’d scared off the soldiers, but his fur, and the tail he kept tucked in his pants, and his claws and cat-eyes made him different. Too different to be one of them.

“Three soldiers. They don’t look like the other ones that came last year.” Ree whispered back as Jem leaned into him, partly trying to see around him and partly probably instinctive protection against the bitter cold. He indicated the gate. “But they’re not happy, and blondie out there is getting ready to break things if he doesn’t get an answer soon.”

Jem nodded. He narrowed his eyes at the gate, listened to the way the big man was bellowing and got what Ree thought of as his Garrad look. It was the stubborn, no one makes me do anything look, and it usually meant trouble. Ree had seen it a lot while they helped keep people fed and rebuilt Three Rivers and put a wall around the village so soldiers couldn’t easily burn it out again.

Jem had been a scared little thing when Ree had saved his life on the streets of Jacona, just about three years ago, but he was almost a man now, and while he would help those who needed it, he did it on his own terms and refused to be pushed around no matter how much bigger or older those doing the pushing might be.

“Granddad’s plucking the old rooster,” Jem said his voice slightly louder. “He’ll be out as soon as he’s done. Meanwhile, I’ll deal with them.” He walked up to the gate as calm as if he were going to talk to young men from the village.

The blond fellow didn’t wait for Jem to speak. The moment he could see someone, he demanded, “Where is Garrad? And who are you?”

Jem folded his arms on his chest, tilted his head up, and gave the blond a frosty look. “Until you tell me who you are, it’s none of your damn business who I am or where he is, stranger.”

Ree heard the sharp catch of breath and the creak of leather that meant the man’s massive fists were clenched tight enough to strain his gloves. “Get this thing open now, before I break it down.”

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