Chapter 69: The Hound

The water boys weren’t allowed in the great hall. They were allowed in the corridors behind it, which was where all the real work happened anyway.

Kharn had been built for war, not for guests. When two kingdoms and forty noble houses showed up in the same week, every room in the central tower had to be scrubbed, filled and fed, and somebody had to carry the water for all of it. So that same afternoon, the quartermaster’s clerk pointed at a dozen boys from the Aldermere camp, Aren among them, and sent them up the back stairs with full buckets and one order.

"Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t look at anyone. If a lord trips over you, it’s your fault."

’Just like the Academy, only colder.’

The corridors were narrow and bitterly cold and smelled of new candles. Aren took the third floor, where the Aldermere houses had their rooms, and kept his eyes on the stone. He managed four basins, two baths, and one chamber pot he firmly decided he hadn’t seen.

Then he turned a corner and saw the hound.

It was lying in the middle of the corridor, outside a heavy door with a silver crescent painted on it, chin on its paws. It was made entirely of light, soft, cold, pale light like moonlight on frost, and through its body he could see the grey stone of the floor.

It lifted its head lazily.

’Keep walking. You’re a farm boy. Farm boys have seen dogs before.’

He moved to the far side of the corridor, buckets steady, eyes down.

The hound stood up.

It didn’t growl, and it didn’t bark. It took two steps toward him with its nose low, and its eyes, two small pale moons, weren’t on his face at all. They were on his left side. On the scar under his shirt.

Under his ribs, the cold went quiet. It wasn’t hungry. It was listening, the same as it had under the dragon’s eye.

The hound whined. It was a small, thin sound, the noise a puppy makes at a door it wants opened. It took one more step, sat down a pace from his boots, stared at his ribs and whined again.

’Oh, come on! Of all the dogs in the world!’

The door with the crescent opened.

"Luna? What is it?"

He knew that voice. He would have known it at the bottom of the sea, and he had actually been there, so he was in a position to judge.

He kept his eyes stubbornly on the floor. A grey dress first, plain wool, the kind she only wore when nobody important was looking. Grey riding boots. He didn’t look any higher.

"Come here," Vivienne Ashgrave said.

The hound didn’t come. It sat there, leaning toward him with its whole body, as if he smelled of something it had lost.

"Luna."

It was sharper, that time, and the boots came closer. She bent and laid a hand on the back of the hound’s neck, and he saw her fingers. They were long and pale, with thin white scars across the knuckles that hadn’t been there in the spring.

’From the arena. From the sand.’

He could feel her looking at him. Cool and steady and very close, exactly as he remembered.

"I’m sorry. She doesn’t usually do that."

There was no warmth in it, only the polite, finished tone a lady used on a servant whose path her dog had blocked. But she had said it. In the spring, she wouldn’t have spoken to a water boy at all.

"No harm, my lady," he told the floor, in the low, rough voice of a valley boy who had never seen a city.

Another silence. He felt her gaze move over him: the dirty hair, the thin face, the pole, the buckets.

’Breathe in, breathe out. You’re boring, you’re the most boring thing in this tower!’

"Go on, then."

He went, past her and past the dog, at exactly the speed of a water boy with somewhere to be. Behind him, as he turned the corner, the hound whined once more.

[Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary). Hostility: 64%.]

His hands didn’t stop shaking until he was outside.

He tipped his buckets into the trough in the lower yard and stood there gripping the cold stone rim. She had been close enough to touch. She had looked straight at him and seen a farm boy. False Face had held, or the dirt had, or the streak in his hair, or maybe nobody ever thinks to look for a dead man in a corridor.

But the dog had known.

And of course it had. Moonlit Familiar, Grade B, the System had said on the night he fell, and then it had rewritten the thing into whatever was living under his ribs now. That cold had been her hound once. Or its shadow.

’So it recognized itself. Great! My scar has a sister, and she lives with Vivienne.’

He picked up his buckets and went grimly back to work. What else was he going to do?

At noon, his old life walked past him again.

He was crossing the lower yard when a group of young men came down the tower steps, laughing, in the colors of the lesser Aldermere houses. The loudest of them had a weak chin, very clean hands, and a short cloak pinned at the throat with a silver badge Aren could have drawn from memory: the Penrose crest.

Aldous Penrose strolled past an arm’s length away, telling everyone a story about a horse. He didn’t even glance at the water boy. Why would he? He had never looked at the Servant either, right up until the moment he put his boot on his fingers.

[Aldous Penrose. Hostility: 74%.]

The cold in Aren’s side turned toward that laughing voice, slow and very interested.

’Not now, and not here. Later, maybe, with witnesses.’

He pressed his hand firmly against his ribs and kept walking until the voice was gone.

That night, he skipped the woodpile.

He went down the ridge instead, with Roderick ahead of him in his black cloak, east along the hills toward the valley neither army was allowed to enter.

The Grey Ford lay at the bottom of it: a wide, shallow river running fast and silver over stones. Aldermere lanterns burned along the near slope, Imperial ones along the far one, and between them there was nothing but water, dark grass and, on the far bank, a single tall pine.

"Patrols every hour," Roderick murmured. "Both sides. They never come down to the water. They just stand up there watching each other watch it."

"Sounds like a marriage."

"How would you know?"

"I read a lot."

They crossed carefully upstream, where the river bent and the banks were steep enough to hide them, in water so cold Aren’s teeth hurt. Roderick went first. Twice he dropped flat without a word, and twice a lantern drifted along the ridge above them, slow and bored, and moved on.

The pine was older than it had looked. Its roots ran out over the ground like the fingers of a huge hand. Aren circled it once, then again, studying the earth closely.

"Well?" Roderick whispered.

"Give me a second."

"You’ve had a lot of seconds."

"Varro said under the lone pine. He didn’t say which side."

He found it on the river side, between two big roots, where the ground sat a finger’s width lower than everywhere else, as if something under it had settled. He knelt and started digging quietly with his hands.

Roderick stood over him with the bone blade out, turning slowly, watching the dark.

"You know this is grave robbing, right?"

"It’s a withdrawal."

"From a dead man."

"He’s not using it."

An arm’s length down, his fingers met cloth. Old, rotten cloth that came apart at a touch. Under it, bone. And on the bone, lying where a heart had been, a chain black with age, and something heavy hanging from it.

He lifted it into the starlight.

Black iron, the size of his palm, shaped like a closed heart. A deep crack ran straight through the middle, where a sword had gone in ten years ago and stopped. It was cold, but not with the cold of wet earth. It felt like something asleep.

[Iron Guard (Grade S).][Bound to the blood of the Iron Throne.][Dormant. It answers only to its own blood.]

’Only its own blood. Of course. So the only person in the world who can use this is the one person in the world who wants to cut my eyes out.’

Under his ribs, the cold woke up all at once. Interested. Leaning toward the iron the same way it had leaned toward the warm thing at the bottom of the Pools.

"No," Aren said out loud.

Roderick looked at him. "I didn’t say anything!"

"Not you."

He shut his fist around the iron heart and pressed his other hand hard against his side until the cold gave up and lay back down. It didn’t go far. He could feel it under his palm, sulking like a child sent to bed early.

He wrapped the Guard carefully in his scarf and tucked it inside his coat, on the side away from the scar. Then he pushed the earth back, laid the grass over it as well as he could, and stayed kneeling between the roots.

What were you supposed to say to a prince you’d just robbed? He had no idea. So he said nothing, and only stayed long enough that leaving wouldn’t feel like running.

Nobody saw them on the way back.

The sky was going grey when they reached the hollow under the rock, and Roderick stopped so suddenly that Aren walked into his back.

"What?"

Roderick didn’t answer. He just pointed.

On the rock above their hollow, in the first grey light, sat a hound made of moonlight.

It ignored Roderick completely. It was looking at Aren, at his left side.

It sat there, perfectly calm, as if it had been waiting all night and didn’t mind at all. Then it stood, turned, and trotted off down the ridge toward the fortress, its pale shape thinning into the morning mist until there was nothing left.

Roderick let out a long breath.

"Ghost. Whose dog was that?"

Aren stared at the empty slope.

"The girl who buried me. And her dog just dug me up."