The Unwilling - Kelly Braffet Page 0,119

waiting outside, no home to find. Nobody like her.

In the kennel, the hounds bayed and howled at her presence, as they always did. Did they know? Did they smell her mother’s blood in her? (She’d had a mother, her mother was dead, she stood in the place where her mother had died as she was born.) She stepped up to the fence. There were gaps between the wide wooden slats. She hooked her fingers into one of them, and on the other side a hound rammed against it, slavering. Its single visible eye was enraged, as cold and yellow as Darid had described.

How long do you live? she thought coldly at the beast. Did your mother eat my mother? Did you?

She’d had a mother. This is where her mother died.

Two people had climbed the Wall. Man and woman. Who was the man? Was it her father? Had both of her parents died here in this terrible place?

The kennel door slammed open. It had to be the kennelmaster; nobody else would have the nerve to approach her so directly. People feared her.

“I’d step back if I were you, girl. Anything you stick through that fence you’re likely to lose.” His voice was nasty. Of course it was. Nastiness would be a requirement for the job. She didn’t know why the Seneschal had ever thought Darid suited for it. Then, if possible, the kennelmaster’s voice got even nastier. “Now, if you want to pet a puppy, come on inside. We got lots of puppies for you to pet.”

The hounds howled. Judah wasn’t afraid. She turned toward the man.

He was older than Darid: solid and balding, an oozing pustule on his chin. Whatever he saw in her made him go pale. He stepped backward, slashing at the air frantically, almost compulsively. “Witch, slut witch,” he said, stumbling in his haste to get back inside. Behind him, she caught a glimpse of a thin, dirty body with a thin, dirty face, one cheek badly bruised. The current kennel boy: wary, fearful. Warmth surged in her for the boy, as brief and searing as Elban’s poker. She found that she forgave the boy (who darted away almost as soon as she saw him). She found that she loved the boy. It was a strange love but she was strange, she had been born in the dust of a kennel doorstep, cut from the body of her dying mother by a midwife who should not have been there to help.

She realized: the first kindness she had ever known had been Darid.

The fence shook again. She gripped the slat harder and felt the scar on her arm tug and pull.

He will chain you like a dog.

Maybe that’s just the world.

From inside the kennel, she heard a thud and a muffled cry; then another thud, and the soft sound of a child weeping.

Chapter Nine

There were more guards on the streets of Highfall than Nate had ever seen before. Bindy said they were just City Guards, not the Lord’s Guard; the Lord’s Guard, she said, would have marched with the army. Nate asked what the difference was. “The City Guards have a white thing on their uniform. The Lord’s Guard has red,” she said, so he knew that what she called the City Guard was what he thought of as the House Guard. “None of them are what you’d want to meet on a dark street, but the Lord’s Guard is the worst.”

“Why?”

“City Guards take people all the time. Beat them up a bit, throw them in the cells for a while, then let them go. The Lord’s Guard hardly ever takes people, but when they do, nobody ever sees them again. It’s bad luck to talk about them,” she said with an air of finality. “Where am I off to today?”

Nate sent her to Lady Maryle’s with a health tonic and his compliments—exactly the sort of thing Arkady had encouraged him to do, before the old man died. It was one of the few situations when Nate had come to agree with Arkady; the deliveries kept him on the courtiers’ minds, and the bit of opium syrup Nate slipped into his tonics ensured that at least some of them would seek him out again. They paid him in coins, which were nice to have, and—unknowingly—in gossip, which he filed away carefully in his memory. Sometimes he thought he was stepping into Arkady’s shoes in more ways than one. Sometimes it worried him.

But the tonic for Lady Maryle was

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