by Bonnie Watts
I glance at Jeff, who automatically translates for me. “Welsh. Hounds of Hell.”
“He is one of that breed, but he’s still young, adolescent age.”
“Has he bonded with anyone yet?”
“Yes, with me. Yesterday.”
“I heard he killed for you last night.”
The Avalon jungle drums are alive and drumming, the way gossip flies.
“To save my life from Morgana’s witches conjuring a death curse.”
“You sent him alone against a death curse!” The shock on his face at the blasphemy of risking a dog’s life to save a human’s is what convinces me that I want this man as part of our household. That and the fact that he needs healing himself. My healer’s instinct tells me that Lord Cerwin will die without another special dog to love.
Jerrie, find out how old this elf is.
Tor’s request comes out of the blue. Puzzled but game, I answer him.
Okay.
“He was well shielded by me, Lord Cirwin. It was that or send a magic missile into the fog and risk innocent lives being hit by accident. As the White Dragon, I had to make a choice between the small risk to my Familiar versus protecting innocent lives. That was really no choice. Innocents must not suffer.”
“So the rumors are true. Another White Dragon has been made. And this one was chosen by one of the great Hounds of Hell. The last one was chosen by a griffin.”
“How many White Dragons have you lived through, if you pardon my asking?”
The blue eyes actually show some emotion for the first time since he’d come in, which my empathy picks up as irritation. “If this is a crude attempt to find out my age, I am fifteen thousand years old. I’ve lived through five of your predecessors. Do you have any more intrusive questions?”
Ignoring his prickly attitude, I ask him the big question. “Just one, I’m afraid. The biggest one, my Lord. I need to know why you lost your position as Houndmaster at court. Because Dragon has informed me, and I have also read in my Familiar’s mind, that Lucifer has been starved and possibly beaten before he broke out of his kennel and made his way to me. If you lost your position because of misusing your charges, then there is no room for you with us.”
My eyes catch those ice blue ones.
“Madame Dragon-Spears, I lost my position at court because I stopped the King from beating one of my dogs for something that was not her fault. I almost lost my life as well, except that my family is too highly placed for the King to have me executed. I chose banishment with my older hounds to avoid embarrassing my family or causing them political harm.”
I smile and offer him my hand. “Call me Jerrie, Lord Cirwin. Would you like to meet Lucifer?”
The elf didn’t quite smile, but he shakes my hand, which for elves is a biggie. They normally aren’t into touching other species.
“I would, indeed. Was it you who chose his name?”
“Yes. It seems to fit him. Though I understand that his namesake might not like it much.”
Lucifer bounds into the room in response to my mental call and comes over to us. The elf’s face lights up completely as he looks the pup over.
“He should be honored to have such a magnificent creature as a namesake. I would be. May I?” He looks up at me in question before approaching the Hellhound. Smart man.
Lucifer, here is the new Houndmaster I told you about. Be good and don’t bite, okay?
Houndmaster?
The pup starts cringing away a little, but I coax him forward a little at a time.
“This fear is what you’ll be dealing with to start. His previous kennelmaster was really cruel, from what I can see in his mind.”
The elf just puts his hand out to start, letting Lucifer smell it. A freshly baked dog cookie appears levitating next to his hand in the air. I assume Liam must have baked them. Cirwin takes it and gives it to the pup who gobbles it down like he does anything edible.
Lord Cirwin runs expert hands down the Hellhound’s flanks, feeling the signs of malnutrition that are still there despite the obvious pampering the dog is getting by the brownies. His expression hardens into displeasure as he feels the signs of abuse.
“I’ll need to conference with your brownie on his food. He is badly undernourished, as you mentioned, and as a White Dragon’s Familiar, we have to consider him a high-activity, attack-level protection dog with special abilities. That will take a different training regimen than my hunting hounds did. I need to do some research. The telepathic element has never been an issue I have had to deal with before. I understand that they learn to hunt down people using their minds as well as their noses?”
“He was able to find my spirit in the otherworld when it was split from my body. That was when the bond formed between us, I think.”
The blue eyes focus on me, then he glances over my left shoulder at Tor’s hilt, finally looking back down at Lucifer. The naked wanting on his face almost makes me smile.
“Our su sith can move between dimensions only during the spectral hunt when guided by the Master of the Hunt. That is magic specific to the wild hunt. I have served as Master of the Hunt many times, but for a dog to go through dimensional travel on his own, using his own natural magic, that is a skill that has been closely guarded by the Kennelmasters of Hell. We have been trying to breed that skill into our su sith for thousands of years, with no success.” He sounds distinctly grumpy about that fact.
“He also managed to bypass all of Avalon’s defenses to get to her in the first place, don’t forget that little fact. Cuchulainn is still annoyed about that.” Jeff mentions.
“He isn’t as annoyed with him as he was, now that Lucifer took out six dark witches while they were conjuring that horrible magic last night. You heard him praising him in Irish.”
Jeff grins. “He was certainly doing that. You don’t want to hear what he said, either.”
“Probably not. I have the feeling Lainn wishes he could recruit a few of Lucifer’s kin for evil witch hunting duties.”
“He would be in hog heaven.”
Lord Cirwin is still completely focused on Lucifer, who is completely focused on the magically appearing dog cookies.
Out of the blue, the elf speaks up and startles both of us. “Cuchulainn loves dogs. I am not surprised he admires this one. Where will I work if I come to you?”
I look at Jeff.
“Oraghuht’s setting up bigger quarters for us as we speak, with a Houndmaster quarters and dog training area and kennel, a library for me, a healing station for you and the two druids…”
“Two druids?”
“They stood up for you to their elder and got kicked out on their asses.”
“Oh no. Completely out of the druid community?”
“For now. But Head Druid Autarichul is quickly getting on the outs as leader. Morgana was his main reason for staying in power. Auralis is their best healer and is well liked, and so is Athena, vampire or not. Losing them is a big blow to the tight-knit community. Their leader is chosen by vote. I suspect things will change soon enough. Anyway, we’ll be moving to the new place later on today.”
Jeff turns to the elf. “What Jerrie didn’t mention is that Lucifer has already been taught to chase people down and eat dead bodies. Can you break him of those habits quickly? He’s too damned big to keep on a leash, really, and we need him to stop the chasing.”
Cirwin looks excited at the challenge. “Of course I can.” He looks at me. “I’ll need to work with you both on mental and verbal commands, and for a while I’ll need come with you wherever you go until he gets used to the new commands. It is going to take a while. He isn’t really that young a puppy. I looked it up, and these dogs live for over a hundred years. He was abused and mistreated for over a year and a half, maybe more.”
“I know, and I fully expect to enjoy giving his kennelmaster a piece of my mind someday when I meet him.”
Jeff laughs. “You should see your two faces, your expressions mirror each other. A high
elf and a witch agreeing on something. This must be a record. Well, I’m going to check with Oraghuht about the new digs, since it looks like we are definitely going to be needing them today.”
“Jeff, why don’t you bring him back so I can finally meet him?”
“Why don’t you come with me and leave Lord Cirwin to get to know Lucifer, and meet Oraghuht in his supply room?”
Lucifer, will you stay and be nice to the new Houndmaster?
He’s kind. Has cookies! Yum.
Find me if you get upset. Don’t bite. Okay?
Okay.
Jeff and I left the rooms with Cirwin not giving us a backwards look.
“I think he’s in love.”
“He just loves dogs. He was fading away when he came in the room. Maggie told me that his last hound had died a few decades ago. He’d lost the will to go on.”
Jeff put his arm around me. “You gave it back to him.”
“Not me. Lucifer.”
“Well, you knowing what to say to him helped. He’s a proud man. Tor spoke up during the conversation, didn’t he?”
“He did. He wanted to know how old Lord Cirwin was.”
“He’s thinking about what you were saying last night.”
“I have to think about it too. It might be the answer to how to take this guy down.”
“You don’t think you’ll be able to do it yourself?”
“No. I think I’ve known that for a while now. For my gifts to work, I have to get so close he’ll just suck me dry like he did the others. But a Singer doesn’t have to get close. They only have to be within line of sight. Jeff, I don’t think killing this enemy is why I was made a White Dragon. I think it’s just the start. I think I was made this way just so I could revive Tor, and possibly Sir Frederick as well. Something bad is coming, something that is going to take all of us to fight. I don’t think it was a coincidence that it was a Hellhound who became my Familiar. I think that even the demons are going to be brought in on the fight.”
“If Hell gets into it, then that means angels and archangels will get involved too. They can be as bad as demons for stepping on people who get in their way. You think elves are arrogant, archangels have the elves beat on that.”
I sigh. “Oh well, one step at a time is all our feet can carry us, as my mom used to say. The first step is that I can finally meet our supply angel Oraghuht and his boyfriend Rog.”
It turns out our angel is three and a half feet tall, four feet wide, all grizzled muscle and bone, has grey hair and a beard longer than he is that he keeps intricately braided in knots and whorls. He wears granny glasses hung on a chain around his neck. He is gruff with intelligent brown eyes twinkling under a huge bristly grey unibrow and blushes pink when he finally meets me. Grabbing my hand, he practically runs me over to the guard shack to meet with his partner of the last two thousand years, the hobgoblin Roc, who is seven feet tall, has horns, is brownish green and looks like he can bench press Lucifer. Roc begs me to give him a step-by-step description about the Boston patriot ghost family and how I exorcised them, then gets me to autograph a piece of paper for him.
After that, Oraghuht takes us to our new quarters and shows us around. As we walk through room after room of the mansion-sized house, I am amazed at how much more space we’re going to have. I thank Oraghuht profusely until he’s blushing like a new bride on her wedding night. The brownies had already moved our stuff in, with Liam overseeing everything like the logistics expert he obviously is.
Cirwin takes control of the kennel and his new quarters, directing the brownies with the imperiousness you would expect from a high lord of the seeley court.
Later when I peek in on the kennel area, Lucifer is watching the Houndmaster, his emotions filled with confused hopefulness as the elf instructed the brownies in setting up an obstacle course in the large kennel training area. I watch the elf for a few minutes, both with my eyes and my empathy. Finally I turn and go find my Knight Protector.
“Jeff?”
I have interrupted him in setting up his library. “Hmmm?” He looks at two large leather tomes thoughtfully.
“I want Dragon to steal some fairy hounds for me, you know, those su sith things.”
“WHAT?” BANG!
He reaches down and picks up the books he dropped and carefully places them on a conference table.
“I’m serious.”
“We can’t steal any hounds from the seeley court, Jerrie. That would start a war.”
“What would start a war?”
Jeff throws up his hands, and answers Dragon, who has just walked in the door behind me. “Jerrie wants you to steal some su sith from the seeley court.”
“Why? One annoying slobbering mutt is enough to have getting underfoot. Why would I want to bring in more from the elf court?”
“Excuse me? What did you call the royal su sith and the bytheiaid uffern?”
Lord Cirwin is probably the only person other than Jerrie in Avalon who is even near Dragon’s level magically. He is certainly older. A lot older.
Dragon turns and bows, his cheeks turning red with getting caught in a faux pas. “Lord Cirwin. I heard you were going to be asked to help train Lucifer.”
“Yes, the White Dragon has asked me to train her Familiar. She is the first to be chosen by a bytheiaid uffern, and despite your insulting the breed, that fact is actually an important one. I’ve lived through six White Dragons now, and each time, the choice of Familiars always had something to do with the type of crisis the world would be dealing with. The last White Dragon was chosen by a griffin. That one was born a dragon, so she became a complete White Dragon quickly, within 50 years. We dealt with an invasion of air elementals from one of the outer dimensions that time. One that normally did not conjoin our world at all. For some reason, the veil between the worlds went through some shifting and those elementals came through and tried to take our world after they had ruined their own. Griffins are clever in the air and extremely resistant to air magic. They became our shock troops in the battles. The White Dragon’s Familiar acted as liaison between her and them.”
“Tor wants to know what you think the significance is of a Hellhound becoming my Familiar.”
“Who is Tor?”
I pull the sword and make introductions.
“The ability to find people beyond dimensions may be a key, but it is too early yet to determine. The fact that you were born a healer with necromancer skills is also significant, I think. For those skills to be able to exist in a person without insanity is remarkable.”
“Thanks, I think. My family support helped me through the worst of it, and it was a close call when my gifts first peaked as a child. The man who murdered my family, the witch who can steal other witches’ powers, I think his original powers were mind healing and necromancy and he was driven insane with it. To me, it seems the only way he could access and drain other’s magic like that.”
“That makes a lot of sense.”
Jeff glances at me, then addresses the elf. “Lord Cirwin, would your people be at all disposed to selling our White Dragon some of your su sith hounds, if we approached the Ambassador as a formal request? After all, you did mention that you Houndmasters have been trying to breed those dimension-crossing characteristics into your own hounds for thousands of years, didn’t you? Well, it strikes me that Avalon would be the perfect place for you to try to see if you can locate where that gene is isolated in our own Hellhound, and start breeding it into a new type of su sith, don’t you think so?”
The seeley Lord’s mouth drops in shock, then it quickly returns to stoic political immobility again. Only his blue eyes twinkle with excitement.
“Actually, Dr. Siniocor, I don’t think we even need to bother the Ambassador at all about the issue. I’ll contact my sister, and she can suggest that the King make a gift of, say, six breeding pairs of royal su sith to the new dog-loving White Dragon.”
Six breeding pairs? What the hell are you going to do with six pair
s of fairy hounds, Jerrie?
Hell if I know. Let’s hear him out, I think he has an idea.
Jeff plays the fall guy to a tee. “And what is the White Dragon going to do with all those hounds, Lord Cirwin? Remember, she still has to save the world somewhere in there.”
“I believe Lord Cuchulainn has some questions about how Lucifer managed to get through Avalon’s borders undetected. I know he loves dogs. I propose that we start a kennel of our own called Avalon Kennels. We can situate it bordering this place, so that Lucifer can still be close to you. I’ll train su sith guard and patrol dogs with volunteer staff from the seeley court as assistants. I’m sure that once I put out the word about what I am trying to do, there will be many volunteers. We’ll train Cuchulainn’s guards if he should wish it to handle dogs if any of them are suitable. We’ll breed the hounds here, with a laboratory like I had at court. We shall make sure there are no points of access even for Lucifer by using him to test it when we are done.”
Jeff, Dragon and I look at each other.
Dragon finally says, “It will make Avalon more secure. The Council has to approve it, of course. They were pretty upset that the Hellhound got in here in the first place. Blocking that weakness should be a plus. There is one large negative that I must remind all of you, even you, Lord Cerwin.” Dragon looks sternly at all of them. “A Hellhound choosing the White Dragon as a Familiar might, I say might, have been ignored by the ruling Demon hierarchy as a fluke. Jerrie naming him after the head Demon is a grave insult that he won’t ignore, but causing trouble over it until he finds out why a White Dragon has been made would be stupid, and Lucifer isn’t a stupid demon. But stealing the Hellhounds’ closely guarded dimensional jumping secret and passing this on to their rivals? That’ll surely bring the demons to Avalon, and I can assure you, people, that they will not be happy with you.”
We all look at each other, then I speak up.
“I have a few questions. Lord Cirwin, why would the King do that for your sister? Also, what if we kept the kennels completely separate from us, and Lord Cirwin can still train both, but someone else like Cuchulainn could be nominally in charge of the kennel? Then it will look as if we are bringing in additional protection for Avalon because of Lucifer’s skill that has nothing to do with cross genetics. Legally the demons can have nothing to say, will they?”