“I’ve been thinking of you as if you were. Courtiers can do whatever they please, but—” He took her hand. “I know what I’m risking. Do you?”
“I’m risking nothing. They can make my life unpleasant, but they won’t take it away.”
“Why not?”
He looked so open, so unguarded, that she almost told him. Instead she said, “I have a skill that’s too valuable to lose. At least, Elban thinks so.”
The openness slammed shut. Disgust, resentment, righteous anger—at least, he probably felt it was righteous—all flipped across his face like pages in a book. “Of course you do. Nothing around here gets kept without a purpose.” His voice was bitter. “Elban takes staff girls sometimes, you know. They don’t come back.”
“It’s not like that,” Judah said.
“Good,” he said. “Because you’re meant for more than that.”
And the staff girls aren’t? she almost said, but didn’t. “None of us are meant for anything. We’re tools in a box, that’s all. Pieces of wood carved like stablemen and courtiers and—and foundlings.” She heard the words come out of her mouth and was grimly satisfied to realize that she believed them. It was easier to feel that way, to think that the course of her life couldn’t be changed. Elban would have figured out how to use the connection anyway, eventually. Or—and this realization came so clear that she knew it must be true—Gavin himself would have, the first time he lost a regiment or a province because there was no way to deliver messages as quickly as he needed them.
But Darid was shaking his head vehemently. “Maybe most of us are tools in a box—for sure, I am—but not you.”
She tried not to roll her eyes. “Why, because you like me?”
“No.” He dropped her hands, afraid he’d said something he shouldn’t have. A pained expression came over him.
She was suddenly angry. “Fine.” She stood up.
“I was there when you were born,” he said.
“When I was brought in, you mean,” she said. “I wasn’t born here.”
His eyes closed, and then opened again. Still scared, but there was something determined in the set of his jaw now. “Yes, you were. I was there. I saw it happen.”
Judah’s lips and her chest and her fingers all went numb. Suddenly, she felt afraid, too. “You saw my mother,” she said.
“I was there,” he said again.
* * *
He told her.
He’d been new, and barely ten. The Seneschal—younger himself, then, but not new; he’d risen early on talent and ambition—had looked him over, deemed him too rough for the House and sent him to the outbuildings, where he’d been assigned to the kennels. He’d been relieved at first, because he liked dogs, but then he met the hounds and they weren’t dogs. They were enormous slavering beasts, coats as thick and coarse as the wolf pelt he’d once seen a trader wearing in the Beggar’s Market. Cold eyes, flat faces. Flapless ears to provide small targets, not much more than bare holes in their skulls. Standing, the biggest of the hounds could look him in the eye. One glimpse of those dead yellow eyes, and Darid knew he was less than nothing to an animal like that.
Barr, the kennelmaster, spoke to them in grunts and growls that were almost barks, themselves. He carried a knobbed length of wood as big around as Darid’s arm and used it to beat the hounds when they didn’t obey immediately; he beat Darid with it, too, and for the same reason. Once he’d beaten Darid so badly that the boy thought his ribs would never stop hurting. (One of them never did; even when he was an adult, he could still feel the place where the stick had landed.) Another time, Barr had beaten one of the hounds to death, right there in the kennel. A young male, an upstart. It had snapped at Barr’s leg. Ten minutes later it was dead. The other hounds lolled, and panted and watched.
“Why don’t they attack him?” Darid asked the older kennel boy, Jon, afterward.
“Because Barr runs the pack,” Jon had said.
Barr left the dead hound in the kennel yard for the others to eat. When the meat was gone, he told Darid to throw the bones in the midden yard, but leave the skull. There were two ways to be with the hounds, Jon had told him: you could take Barr’s route, and try to brutalize them into obedience, or you could cower, let them tackle you and bite at your neck