Her horse whickered, and Eric turned to grin at her. “Abel, go collect those snares as I showed you. I’m going to have a little discussion with our friend here about why it isn’t wise to steal someone else’s game. When you’ve finished, come back. I want you to see how it’s done proper.”
It was quite a long trapline. She found more than twenty snares, and a total of six more rabbits and hares. It was obvious this was a man looking to turn a profit; no one could eat this much meat, no matter how big his family was. She felt a little better about her part in all this.
But when she returned, and saw Eric bending over the man with a knife, for one horrified moment she thought —
Then she saw the hank of dark, matted hair being tossed aside. And another. And another.
She rode up to see that Eric was shaving the unconscious man bald.
“What — ” she began.
“Mercy, Abel, and more than he deserves.” Another hank of hair was tossed aside. Eric was literally shaving the man bald with his hunting knife. That knife must be incredibly sharp, she thought, watching Eric continue to work with the same fascination with which she watched spiders catching flies. “The constables and I have an agreement. If they see someone who’s been shaved bare and has my sign inked on his pate, it means he’s a poacher and they can throw the weight of the law on him. Now, I could brand him, and I used to do that, but that’s a nuisance — you have to build a fire and get the iron hot, and then there’s all the screaming. And worst of all, the stink of burned hair!” He laughed. “So Sebastian made me a thing like a wax seal for sealing letters, only it makes an imprint on skin and carries its own ink.”
“So, he might not get the constables on him?” she hazarded.
“I’m a hunter at heart. I like to give the game a fair chance to escape. Everyone knows the game. Now, all our poacher here needs to do to stay out of gaol or avoid a real branding is to lie low until his hair grows again. But he won’t be going into the city or the villages to sell his catch for all that time, and he won’t be running his trap line, because why bother when he can’t sell the catch? So he gets off with a beating, and losing his livelihood, unless he’s got another besides this. If he’s smart, he’d better find one, because if I catch him a second time, it’ll be the worse for him. Depending on how I feel, I’ll either brand his face myself, or cut off his first finger.”
“He’s a butcher,” she said, instantly. “I know him.” To her surprise when Eric had turned the man’s head a bit she had recognized him as one of the butchers she occasionally bought meat from. “Alain Charpentier. He has a butcher shop near the Bell Gate.”
“Really? Well, his ’prentice is going to be tending the front of the shop for a while. Or else he’d better make himself a wig.” Eric dropped the man’s head, reached into a belt-pouch, and pulled out a wooden square about half the size of his fist. He pressed it into the skin of the man’s head and took it away. Now stamped into the skin in black ink was an E with an arrow for the upright. Eric stood up and gave the man a final kick. The man didn’t even whimper. “Hell. I didn’t hit him that hard. Soft bastard.” He bent down and shook the man roughly until he groaned and opened his eyes.
Terror crossed his pulped features. “Please, master — ” the butcher said mushily. “Please, master, don’t kill me — ”
“Oh, as soon as you start to feel those bruises, you’ll wish you were dead,” Eric said cheerfully. “You’ve been branded, coney-catcher. You know what that means. Right?”
The butcher nodded his head, water streaming from his swollen eyes. Eric stood back, arms folded over his chest. “Now, run along home and stay out of sight of the constables, and be glad I decided to not outrage my new partner’s sensibilities by knocking a few of your teeth out as an added lesson.”
Babbling as best he could with swollen and bleeding lips, the butcher scrabbled to his feet, and staggered off, swearing to never touch a snare again.
“Would you really have knocked out his teeth?” Bella asked.
“Depends on my mood,” Eric replied carelessly, swinging himself back up into the saddle. “He didn’t fight back, so my mood is generous. Now comes the question, which I will ask you to decide, Abel. There are more coneys here than we need by far. So…what to do with ’em? Sebastian won’t care if I sell ’em, but that’s tedious, though profitable — and it would be amusing to sell them right back to the bastard. He wouldn’t dare refuse to pay anything I asked, either.” Eric tilted his head to the side, watching her closely.
“Take them to Father Gentian, at Four Saints,” she said instantly.
“Oh so? And why should we be giving them away? I want to keep people terrified of me, not thinking I’m some sort of benefactor.” Eric looked at her curiously — but not angrily, so she continued.
“I’ve got good reasons that I think you’ll understand, even if you don’t want to do this. First, Four Saints feeds the poorest folk of the city. If they’re being fed, they won’t be out here poaching.” She ticked off a finger. “Second, you can go in there growling that the Duke made you bring them to the good Father instead of selling them, which keeps your reputation intact. And third, word will get around that you brought a huge number of hares to Four Saints. The butcher will hear about it, know those were his hares and be in agony all over again at losing them. You’ll have punished him twice over.”
Eric burst into surprised laughter. “And here I thought you were going to give me some sort of cant about caring for the needy and all that rot! I like the way you think. Practical, with just a touch of harshness to keep things interesting. Maybe a bit of cruelty for spice. It’s too bad you’re leaving after two months, Abel. Maybe I could use a partner, after all!” He laughed again.
Well, that certainly clinched it. The Tradition was working in her favor for now — he would never, ever have said that to a woman he was trying to make sorry for him.
As they parted company, Eric to go on to the city with the hares, and she to return to the Manor, she allowed herself to feel a very tiny shred of relief.
She changed out of her horse-smelling riding clothing and into a hybrid sort of outfit; she had to admit that she really liked the freedom of breeches, that was no kind of a lie. But having her breasts squashed flat beneath the leather tunics was not very comfortable, even if it was necessary. Sapphire had been helping her bind them flat before getting into the tunics, but that had just generalized the discomfort. So over the breeches she wore one of her own bodices, and beneath that, one of Sebastian’s old linen shirts.
The way that Eric had beaten that poacher still disturbed her — and yet, what he had done was, in its way, far more merciful than what the law allowed. And this had not been someone who was poaching to feed his family. Eric had admitted that Sebastian ordered him to look the other way on quite a bit of that sort of poaching. This had been someone who was profiting — stealing from the Duke — taking rabbits to sell in his own butcher shop. The law would probably be even harsher on someone like that.
On the one hand — Eric’s casual brutality had made her feel a little sick. On the other hand…what other choice did he have?
Eric’s duty required that very brutality of him, personally, and often. Maybe cultivating indifference was the only way he could go about his business without feeling sick all the time himself.
She went down to dinner feeling very little appetite for it, but hoping that Sebastian would be there. Right now she very much wanted to have simple conversation with someone who didn’t turn a man’s face into pulp without thinking twice about it. Sebastian was there, and he looked up with an expression on his face that told her he had been hoping she would arrive. “You’re back!” he exclaimed.
“Eric went on to the city,” she told him, before he could ask. She explained what had happened without going into the gruesome details, and her solution for the disposition of the poacher’s catch. He nodded as he listened.
“Thank you for the rabbit solution.�
�� Then he sighed. “Eric almost beat the man to death, didn’t he?” he asked. “Never mind, I can tell from your expression, he did. There’s no point in telling him not to. I’ve tried. He retorts that he doesn’t tell me how to cast a spell, so I shouldn’t tell him how to be a Gamekeeper. Then he gives me very well-argued points about why this has to be done. And I have no refutation for him.”
She nodded slowly. “I thought of most of that myself. I can see it. I know that the constables are even worse, and I have no idea what his own Guild would do to him, but they are not refined men, the butchers, and they already have to work very hard to keep their reputation clean. I mean, that’s why they have a Guild and Guild rules and laws in the first place, so people will know they can trust what they buy. But I don’t like it, and it seems wrong.”
“We think too much,” Sebastian told her ruefully. “That’s what Eric would say. We keep trying to appeal to reason and finding a way to make sure punishments fit the crime. We keeping thinking that there must be a better way, while people like Eric say, ‘Breaking heads has always worked before, so there’s no reason to change.’”
She made a rude noise. “I’d be more inclined to say that everyone else thinks too little. And on that note, I’ve been reading that book about The Tradition you gave me, and it is not a comfort!”
He grimaced, and pushed his glasses up. He was always doing that, but then, they seemed to be perched on his nose with no real way to keep them in place other than the wires that wrapped around his ears. “It isn’t meant to be. Here, have some pie. Pie always makes me feel better.” Instead of waiting for the servant to do so, he reached across the table and put a generous wedge of pigeon pie on her plate.
Since she hadn’t been served anything yet, she took a forkful. It really was awfully good…
“I was wondering — is that why you’re in breeches?” he continued hesitantly. “And being all hearty and…”
“And acting like a boy… Yes,” she said. “I’m working at it very hard, in fact. Since Eric took it into his head that I need to be outside more, I’ve been in his company a lot. I admit, I like being outdoors. And the rest of the work in the stillroom will be making a few specialized things, mostly for you. I don’t embroider, I don’t need to sew, here, the servants take care of the household very nicely and being out makes me feel less like a prisoner. But…I… Eric is very fond of women…and I don’t mean in the sense of friendship.”
Sebastian’s face suddenly darkened. “If he’s offered insult to you, I’ll — ”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Since I came here, he’s been quite…reasonable.” We won’t mention what he did before I came here. “No, but I could see The Tradition setting us both up for a star-crossed piece of nonsense, you know, The Lady and the Rogue sort of thing, and this was the easiest way I could see to prevent any such thing. I’m not even sure that I like Eric, and I certainly don’t need The Tradition forcing me to fall in love with him!”
“Ah. I’m glad to — I mean, it’s a good thing I gave you that book, then, so you can make up your own mind about things and not be forced into them by The Tradition. Especially that sort of thing. The Tradition really seems to favor putting people into…ah…romantic situations that are just not very wise.” Sebastian’s expression lightened, then darkened again. “Maybe I had better ask you to do the same with me,” he added sadly. “Push me into treating you like a little brother, or the Wizard’s Apprentice. Isn’t there a girl-in-breeches model for the Wizard’s Apprentice? I mean, there are some rather awful Traditions regarding werewolves. And I — ”
“Oh, stop that,” she snapped. He did stop, looking at her owlishly from behind those thick lenses. “Really. The next thing you are going to do is start dressing in black and writing terrible poetry about your tormented soul, and if you do that, I will run off from here without the King’s leave. I scarcely think you are going to leap up from the table and tear my throat out before the cheese is served. There are only three nights in the month that you are a danger to anyone. And besides, I’ve found at least a couple Traditional tales in that book of yours where the werewolf protected the people he cared for.”
He looked up at that, startled. “You did? I never finished that part of the book. The other stories just made me feel so sick inside that I came close to throwing myself out of my window.”
“Yes, I did,” she said firmly. “And you know just as well as I do that since we know about The Tradition, we can make it work for us, instead of against us. As for throwing yourself out a window, you are not allowed to. The only way you go out a window is if you start writing bad poetry. Then I will pitch it out the window, and you to follow.”
She managed to startle a chuckle out of him.
“Obviously there is a Tradition, however small, of helpful were-beasts. So, since I know absolutely nothing about transformative magic and am going to be no help there, I propose that I ask the Godmother to find us all the Traditional tales of protective or guardian were-beasts and I’ll figure out what they all have in common. And as for you…” She eyed him critically. “You need to stop moping alone out here and go back to the society of other people. If you had other people around here, there wouldn’t be any talk of windows and going out them in a terminal fashion.”
His head came up like an alarmed horse. “But I can’t!” he exclaimed. “I’m — ”
“A danger three nights a month. Yes, I know,” she retorted. “There are twenty-seven nights a month when you are not. Not to mention all the days. So why don’t you make use of them? You could use some sun! And don’t tell me that you get all the sun you need up there in your workroom. You need to get out. You need to see people. You need intelligent conversation! You need to remind people at Court that you still exist. And you need to do that so that the King can’t one day decide you are an inconvenience and make you vanish. And you know he would, if he thought he had to.”
Before he could answer, she went on. “Now, if you are just using this as an excuse because you really would rather be a hermit, that’s one thing. But otherwise, you are depriving yourself of a great deal of pleasure for no reason at all. And if all I had to depend on for conversation and company was Eric? I think I’d throw myself out of a window. He isn’t stupid, but his interests are so narrow I doubt I could slip a sheet of paper in between them.”
He stared at her in astonishment for a moment, then broke into laughter.
“All right,” he said, finally, wiping his eyes with his napkin. “You win. I’ll consult with the Godmother and the King and see what can be done. Bella, I am horribly sorry that I did this to you, but I can’t tell you how happy I have been since you arrived. You just keep looking at things and seeing answers where I couldn’t. I haven’t heard music in so long — ”
“Oh, now that I can remedy!” she exclaimed. “Some of the Spirit Elementals actually are musicians, as you suggested. You can listen to them anytime you like. Just ask them.”
“I — Well.” He shook his head. “Do you have any idea of the amount of change you’ve made here for me in just the last month?”
She raised her chin. “Of course I do. I’ve stopped the waste in the kitchen, I’ve organized your stillroom, I’ve replenished many of your herbal supplies, I found out that some of the servants are quite intelligent and can talk, and that some of them are musicians — ”
“All of that and more,” he replied, raising his hand to stop the flood of words. “That wasn’t what I meant. I meant, to me.”
She blinked at him. “Well, how can I?” she replied. “I don’t know what things were like before I came here, so I have nothing to compare now to.”
He laughed. “Bring logic into it, will you?”
She rolled her eyes. “Why not? No one else seems to.”
“Oh. Bah. There you go again. All right, let’s go continue your lessons. And as you probably guessed, yes, I have a mirror I can speak to the Godmother with, so we’ll go call her green-faced majordomo an
d tell him what we have discovered and deduced.” He stood up, and the servants swooped on the table, eager to take everything away. She moved quickly, to avoid being in a collision with a platter or bowl.
“For all we know, he does all her research and can tell us right away what Traditional Paths there are for protective were-beasts,” she said, as she followed him out into the hall.
“True enough.” He paused. “I would like to think I was being your protector instead of your predator…”
She got the oddest feeling when he said that. A sort of quivery feeling in her stomach, and a shiver on the back of her neck. But it wasn’t a bad feeling, as if her instincts were trying to warn her against something. And it wasn’t the feeling of pressure that The Tradition had given her over Eric.
But she shook her head a little, and brushed the feelings aside. There were more important things to deal with right now.
And for all she knew, it was just a draft.
“I told you that when you came here, no quarters I could give you were going to be worthy of you,” he continued. “It wasn’t just being gallant. I already knew you were brave. I didn’t know that you were kind and clever, I didn’t know how considerate you were of others, even those who are literally invisible. Now I know all that, and if I had the King’s suite, it wouldn’t be worthy of you.”
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