But when she was sleeping like that, he could see no wrong in her, no matter how bad she was when she was awake.
Such was the programmed parental response to a sleeping child that usually kept children from being murdered in their sleep.
They slipped out of her room quietly and closed the door, as the ceiling above creaked a bit as Kimmie moved about Tarrin's old room. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of bedsheets being smacked to clear them of dust, and he knew that Kimmie had to be getting ready to go to sleep. Tarrin yawned. It had been a very busy day, and he fully intended to follow suit.
He and Jesmind retired to their room, undressed, then crawled into bed. Jesmind cuddled up against him, nuzzling his shoulder with her chin as Tarrin relaxed, letting the day's worries flow out of him. "If Fae-da'Nar helps, will that make it easy for us to win?" she asked quietly.
"It'll make taking Torrian all but guaranteed," Tarrin answered her. "I don't know how much it's going to help at Suld, but there's no doubt that they'll help a great deal. I need to contact Kerri tomorrow and tell her about this, so she can include it in her plans."
"That can wait, my mate," she said absently, squeezing him just a bit. "You know, I'm very proud of you."
"How?"
"You didn't even growl at Rahnee once today."
"She was behaving," Jesmind said with a grin, looking up at him. "Besides, we're in my home range. When we leave tomorrow, we'll see how well she behaves."
"Just don't kill her," Tarrin cautioned.
"It won't be the first time I've smacked Rahnee on the nose for getting fresh with my mates," she told him bluntly.
"Really? And who was this male you fought over before?"
"Someone you'll never meet, my mate. He died about fifty years ago."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"He was a very nice male," Jesmind sighed.
"What happened?"
"He was killed in a fire," she replied. "We still don't know what happened outside of that."
Tarrin was silent, pondering that. But that ended when Jesmind threw her arm over his chest and settled in against him. "I don't want to go," she admitted quietly.
"Me either," he sighed. "But it won't be forever."
"It'll feel like it."
"We'll know when it's over, Jesmind."
"I'd rather not find out."
"I can't help that. Blame Jasana."
Jesmind chuckled, leaning her forehead against his cheek. "Let's go to sleep," she said hazily.
"I never thought you'd ask," he told her, pulling her a little closer and letting her closeness overwhelm his senses and lull him off into sleep.
No matter how peaceful he felt, the enormity of the coming day was too much to keep Tarrin asleep all night.
He awoke about midnight, and found that he couldn't go back to sleep. He laid in bed and tried, half to get rest and half to keep from disturbing Jesmind, but it became too much, and he had to get up and move around. Putting on his breeches, he wandered out into the common room and poked the fire back to life, staring into its heart and considering the day to come.
He wondered how the villagers took the Centaurs and the Were-kin. The people of Aldreth were rather steady, but that may be too much for even them. He was sure that there was some nervousness, but he also felt that as soon as Garyth and Sathon made the rounds and calmed everyone down, they would have relaxed. Aldrethers had always been careful to be nice to their Frontier neighbors, and he didn't doubt that Garyth would have urged them to be so now, when it was so obvious who it was that was camped outside the village. The fact that they couldn't enter the village would probably make them even more relaxed. Aldreth's position as the human-Woodkin trading post would make the Woodkin calm, and it gave the humans prior experience for dealing with their exotic guests.
They would be going to war tomorrow. That was a sobering thought. He'd been avoiding thinking about it, understanding the grim reality of that simple statement. Men were going to march out of here, and there was a very good chance that some of them weren't going to come back. Men with lives and families, men with friends and position in the village. They were leaving their homes and families to defend them from another Dal occupation, and they were willing to sacrifice their lives to make sure that their wives and children would be safe. It was too much to ask from them, since they'd already suffered the Dal occupation, suffered watching Dal soldiers kill almost the entire Longbranch family and the herbalist. But then again, that was the very reason they were going. Because of what happened to the Longbranch family and the herbalist. They didn't want that to happen to their families.
There was a shuffling sound, and it made Tarrin look up from the fire. Kimmie was standing in the hallway, yawning. Tarrin had always rather liked Kimmie. She was turned, like him, and as Were-cats went, she was rather unusual. She had blue eyes instead of the pattern green, and she wore dresses and acted a great deal more like a human than a Were-cat. But she was a Were-cat, and the fact that she had come out without any clothes on, carrying one of Tarrin's old robes in her paw, made that abundantly clear.
"Oh," she said mildly. "I heard you moving around, but I thought you went back to bed, Tarrin."
"I couldn't sleep," he said, looking at her. She didn't move to cover herself, because she didn't care. Just as he didn't really care that she was unclothed. Kimmie was a very soft Were-cat, without the muscular definition that most females had, and it made her body look much more human than any of the other females. It made him curious to think that Kimmie had been changed so little by her turning, where he and Jula had been changed so much. Her tabby-colored fur clashed a bit with her fair skin, another stark reminder that Kimmie lived in between her two worlds much more closely than Tarrin or the other Were-cats did.
She shrugged into the robe, which fit her rather well, then came into the room and patted him on the shoulder. "It's alot to think about," she said, as if she could read his thoughts. "What, with everything that's happened and all."
"I know," he agreed, sitting on the floor in front of the fire. Kimmie sat beside him, reaching behind her in irritation.
"Do you mind if I cut a hole in this?" she asked.
"I can't wear it anymore. It's all yours."
Nodding with a smile as Kimmie rose up on her knees, Tarrin heard her claw rip the fabric of the robe, and Kimmie's brown-striped reddish tail slid out from behind her, snaked through the hole in the robe. "Thanks. I hate sitting on my tail like that," she told him, sitting back down again.
"I know how you feel," Tarrin said with a smile. "Kimmie, I've been meaning to ask you something."
"What?"
"Why is that you're so much different from me?"
"I really don't know," she answered, seeming to understand the meaning of the question. "Rahnee and some others think I'm a mutant," she laughed. "I mean, I don't look quite like the other females. I have blue eyes, and I never really got rid of my human habits. Rahnee thinks it's a scandal that I wear a dress," she said with a grin. "Since nobody knows who bit me, nobody really knows why I turned out so different than everyone else."
"When did it happen?"
"About twenty years ago," she replied. "I lived on a farm outside Tor then. I was chasing a butterfly across a field," she said, her eyes turning distant. "I wandered into the forest, and I really don't remember what happened after that. I just remember waking up like this." She picked at the front of her robe absently. "My parents threw me out of the house, of course," she sighed. "I ended up running into the forest, and that's when the instincts started to work on me. I was half mad when Mist found me. I must have struck some kind of chord in her, because she accepted me as a bond-child and helped me regain my sanity."