and go limp, to show submission, and hope that would be enough. When he went in for the bones, Darid took the latter route, and Barr and the others laughed heartily, seeing him down on his back like a puppy. As they’d laughed, the three biggest males sniffed and nipped at Darid, their muzzles still spotted with their pack mate’s blood. One put its jaws around his neck and shook its head—lightly, almost experimentally, but it was enough to make Darid’s heart pound in his sore chest. With one grunt from Barr, he knew, the jaws would clamp down, the nips and buffets turn brutal. In a few days, another kennel boy would creep in to get his bones.
One night, Darid, asleep in the corner under a blanket, heard voices out in the kennel yard. The noise in itself wasn’t enough to wake him; Lady Clorin’s birthing time had come, and the House and grounds were full of strange people come inside to see if she’d finally have a baby that lived. People he’d never seen the likes of, even in Highfall: people who teetered on high wooden heels carved like flowers and whose arms were so thickly hung with gold bracelets that it was a wonder they could move their arms. And some of these people came to peek at the hounds through the fence, to squeal and laugh and exclaim about the stink. They often came late at night, when they were drunk. Over the last few weeks of Lady Clorin’s lying-in, Darid had grown used to ignoring them.
These voices were different. There was laughter, but there was also crying and pleading. That combination didn’t mean anything good. Sometimes Barr and his men would catch an unlucky staff girl, a dairymaid or even a House girl running an errand, and tease and threaten her with the hounds until she promised to do whatever they wanted. Sometimes it was a boy they caught, which made Darid very grateful—and very ashamed at being grateful—for his broad, plain face that nobody seemed to think much of. The older kennel boy, Jon, was pretty. Darid knew he had it worse.
Darid closed his eyes tight, trying to will himself back to sleep. But he couldn’t close his ears. The hounds snarled. He could hear excitement in their voices, and in the voices of the kennelmen, too. When the screams started he gave up pretending to be asleep and tried, instead, to pretend he was in his mother’s kitchen with his sisters. It was the baby who was screaming, he told himself, with hunger or tiredness or who even knew with babies, and anyway the baby would not be hungry now because he was here, and a messenger would bring his mother a shiny coin every month. He did not want to but he could pick out two screaming voices, one female and one male. That was Nell, then; Frederick from next door had taken her doll again, her one and only doll, her most special special. Darid had trounced Fred for that, the last time he’d done it, and then he’d shown Nellie how to do a little trouncing of her own. That was all he was hearing. Nell and Fred.
But the screams rose. They were beyond pain now. They were beyond anything Darid had ever heard. His imagination snapped and broke on that terrifying animal noise. He could only clutch his hands over his ears and wait for it to be over. Eventually it was. The screams trailed away, became whimpers. Then they stopped.
Jon came in and dropped down next to Darid, breathing hard and ragged.
“What’s happening?” Darid said.
“Two people snuck in past the Wall. Man and a woman. Lord Elban said to feed them to the hounds. So we did. Awful. Awful.” Darid felt Jon move up close against him. The other boy’s skin was clammy and he, too, was shaking. Jon’s thin arms slid around Darid’s middle and his nose pressed to the back of Darid’s neck. “Awful.”
Darid stayed quiet and still. Some people adapted to life inside better than others, an undercook had told him. Jon—who, to tell the truth, had probably always been a bit simple—had not adjusted well, for all that he’d been here three years longer than Darid. Living at the mercy of Barr and the others probably hadn’t helped. During the day Jon was all bluster but at night, sometimes, he was like this: clingy, needy. His hands wandered. Out in Marketside, where survival in