"It's all I have left," Wylan said flintily. "If you men would pay for what you drink, I'd have the money to buy better ale to replace what's gone." Wylan crossed his arms. "And when that's gone, I'll have to close the inn. I'll have nothing left."

"Stinking backwater," the soldier snorted. "Why don't they garrison us in Torrian? They have lots of ale there."

"Let's just confiscate the goods to run down to Torrian and buy it ourselves," one of the other soldiers suggested with an evil glint in his eye.

"We get nothing but local slop since the army moved the supply lines from here to moving through Torrian," another soldier complained. "I'm getting tired of wearing boots with holes in them."

Tarrin picked up at that. Moved the supply lines? Not getting anything? It sounded like the Dals had written off Aldreth as another conquered village, and its remoteness had caused them to more or less forget about it. That was something he very much liked to know. He could very well kill off the Dals and leave Aldreth free, without worrying about them suffering reprisals.

"If you hadn't have threatened the cobbler, he wouldn't have run off with his family into the forest, Kag," one man told the complainer sourly. "Then we'd all have new boots."

Garyth the cobbler, hiding in the forest? He was the village mayor!

A plan formed in Tarrin's mind. Right here, in this room, he had a large block of the Dal occupying force. If he killed them off, it would be a simple matter to finish off the remainders without too much danger to the village. Aldreth's remote location had caused the Dals to more or less forget about it, and that would give Tarrin enough time to ensure that they couldn't retake the village, no matter how meny men they had.

Wylan returned behind the bar and sat back down across from Tarrin. "I'm surprised you came here first, Tarrin," he said in a low tone. "Why, we all thought you'd have gone home first, and seen your wife."

"Wife?" Tarrin said with a scoff. "Wylan, I doubt I'm ever going to get married."

"Well, who's that woman that lives out on your old farm, then?" he asked curiously. "Garyth used to talk to her all the time before he started hiding. He said that you and her were-well, you were married."

"Wylan, I seriously doubt that any woman would marry me," Tarrin said with a chuckle.

"She's-well, she looks alot more like you than you do at the moment," he said delicately, looking at the Dal soldiers again.

Tarrin's eyes bored into Wylan. "What do you mean?"

Giving the soldiers a furtive look, Wylan put his hands on either side of his head and raised two fingers in a crude imitation of cat's ears.

"She is? She's living on the farm?"

Wylan nodded. "Garyth said she was waiting there for you. She's been living on the farm, raising her baby. The soldiers never go out there, and we villagers keep her a secret to make sure she's not hassled."

Mist? Could it be Mist? Mist knew where he had lived beforehand. "Why would she come out here?" Tarrin said in confusion, mainly to himself. "She wouldn't bring her son anywhere near a human settlement."

"Son? Garyth said she had a girl, not a boy."

"What?" Tarrin asked, his voice rising a bit higher than was good for him. "A girl?" he asked in a hissing tone. "The only woman I know with a child has a boy."

"She certainly knows you, Tarrin."

"What does she look like?"

"She's taller than me, with red hair and white-uh, white hair. She-"

Tarrin turned away from him so quickly that he nearly fell over. Jesmind! That was Jesmind! And Jesmind had a daughter! Why was she here? What possessed her to go get frisky with another Were-cat and then bring that child onto his farm? His mother would have an absolute fit! And that didn't count how it made him feel!

A whirlwind of emotions rose up in him, memories of Jesmind, of their fights and their intimacy, the longings and the anger he'd felt towards her after they separated. It all seemed to come crashing down over his head, because now, not three longspans from where he was standing, Jesmind was in his old house, on his old land, raising a baby in a place where it-and she-did not belong. Tarrin clenched a hand into a fist, so hard that his knuckles turned white, as the anger of feeling betrayed by the woman he once loved nearly overwhelmed his sense of logic, logic that told him to go see Jesmind and find out what was going on before flying off the handle.

He knew that Jesmind was her own woman, and had the right to dally with any male she chose, but how dare she bring that child back to his home! It was an outrage!

"Here now, the young man here looks a tad miffed," one of the Dal soldiers laughed evilly. "Did your girlfriend throw you out?"

The gaze Tarrin levelled on that soldier was very nearly inhuman, a look of absolute, utter disregard for the man's life that would have even done Tarrin's Were-cat form proud.

"It looks like this one has an attitude problem, Gart," another soldier said with an ugly laugh. "Think we should teach him some manners?"

"Gentlemen, please," Wylan said quickly. Wylan fully understood the incredible danger those men were now in, if his father had written anything about Tarrin's change of personality. "I beg you, not here, not now. Leave the lad be, he's just received some bad news."

"Aww, poor little backwater sop," the man that had first spoken to him, a narrow-faced man with pockmarks and a missing front tooth, said with a nasty grin. "What, your chicken just died? Or maybe your woman found out what it was like to get it from a real man, eh?"

That was one remark too many. With an outraged howl, Tarrin burst through his human clothing as he changed form, returning to his towering, menacing Were-cat body, and then immediately hooked his claws into the offendor before the man could even register that his life was about to end. With a grasping paw and a quick twist, Tarrin literally tore the man's head off, sending a showering geyser of blood flying from the wrenched neck. The other men in the inn began screaming in terror and jumping to their feet, but their shock and surprise spelled the end of their lives as the enraged Were-cat tossed the dead body aside and waded into their midst, claws sending blood, flesh, cloth, bits of armor, even wood from tables and chairs flying as he entered a frenzy of absolute destruction. The terrified screams became wails of the mortally wounded and the dying as Tarrin savaged the entire common room, killing anything he could reach, heading off every man that tried to flee for the door. The few that did manage to draw weapons and feverishly fight for their lives found that they did absolutely nothing to this nightmare before them, that stabbing the monster only made it that much more angry.

It was over in a surprisingly short time. Tarrin stood in the middle of the destroyed common room, standing in the middle of the destruction he had wrought. He stood on shards of table and chair, on the eviscerated flesh and exposed bone of piles of meat that could no longer be identified as human. The floor and walls, even the ceiling, were covered in spattered blood and the occasional morsel of flesh that had managed to stick to the whitewashed walls or timber-beamed ceiling. Panting heavily to regain control of himself, to ease himself out of the rage, the blood-streaked Were-cat closed bloody paws into fists and forced the Cat back into its place within his mind.

"By Karas!" Wylan managed to squeal, rising up from behind the bar and looking at the destruction wrought in his common room. "Tarrin, are you alright?"

"I'm fine, Wylan," Tarrin said in an emotionless tone. "Sorry about the mess. I'll clean it up. I promise."

"Eron said you-he never said anything about this!"

"Does it surprise you that he didn't?" Tarrin asked calmly, standing fully erect and feeling himself fully in control. "I can see it now. 'By the way, Wylan, did I mention that my son is now a homicidal maniac?'"