Fool's Assassin - Страница 118

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Ahead of us, someone shouted angrily as my father bowled him over to get past. The man’s knife fell and the crowd chorused a deep-throated shout. “Is this the blood I dreamed?” I asked Riddle, but he did not hear me. Something swirled wild around me. The feeling of the blood-mad crowd was like a smell I could not clear from my nostrils. I felt it would tear me loose from my body. Riddle held me to his left shoulder and with his right hand set hard he forced his way in my father’s wake.

I knew when my father reached the dog butcher. I heard a loud crack, as if bone had hit bone, and then the crowd roared a different note. Riddle shouldered his way to the edge of an open space where my father held a man up. One of my father’s hands clutched the man’s throat. His other hand was drawn back and I saw it shoot forward like an arrow leaving a bow. His fist hit the man’s face and ruined it with a single blow. Then he flung the man aside, threw him into the crowd with a snap like a wolf breaking a rabbit’s neck. I had never guessed my father’s strength.

Riddle tried to hold my face against his shoulder but I twisted free to stare. The bitch still hung from the bull’s nose, but her entrails dangled in streamers of gray and white and red that steamed in the winter air. My father had his knife in his hand. He put an arm around her and tenderly sliced her throat. As her heart pumped the last of her life and her jaws let go, he eased her body to the ground. He didn’t speak, but I heard him as he promised her that her pups would know a kinder life than she had. Not my pups, she told him. Then, I never knew there were masters like you, she told him, amazed beyond wonder that such a man could exist.

Then she was gone. There was only the dead bull’s head hanging from the oak, a monstrous ornament to Winterfest, and the dog butcher rolling on the bloodied ground, clutching at his face and snorting blood and cursing. The bloodied thing in my father’s arms wasn’t a dog anymore. My father let the body fall and stood up slowly. When he did, the circle of men widened. Men stepped back from my father and the black look in his eyes. He walked up to the man on the ground, lifted his foot, and set it on the man’s chest, pinning him to the ground. The dog butcher ceased his mewling and grew still. He looked up at my father as if he looked at Death himself.

My father said nothing. When the silence had lasted long, the man on the ground lifted his hands from his smashed nose. “You had no right,” he began.

My father thrust his hands into his purse. He dropped a single coin on the man’s chest. It was a large one, an uncut silver. His voice was like the sound of a sword being drawn. “For the pups.” He looked at them, and then at the poor bony creature hitched to the cart. “And the cart and donkey.” The circle of watchers had grown still. He looked slowly around at them, and then he pointed at a youngster almost a man tall. “You. Jeruby. You drive the cart with those pups out to Withywoods. Take them to the stables and give them to a man named Hunter. Then go to my house steward, Revel, and tell him he’s to give you two silver pieces.”

There was a small intake of breath at that. Two silver pieces for an afternoon’s work?

He turned and pointed next at an oldster. “Rube? A silver if you get that bloody bull’s head out of here, and shovel clean snow over this mess. It’s not a fit part of Winterfest. Are we Chalcedeans here? Do we long to have a King’s circle brought back to Oaksbywater?”

Perhaps some of them did, but in the face of my father’s condemnation they would not admit it. The hooting, cheering crowd had been reminded they were men and capable of better. The spectators were already starting to disperse when the man on the ground complained hoarsely, “You’re cheating me! Those pups are worth a lot more than what you flung down here!” He clutched the single coin my father had dumped on him and held it up in both hands.

My father rounded on him. “She didn’t whelp those pups! She was too old. She couldn’t last out a fight anymore. All she had left was the strength in her jaws. And her heart. You just thought to get money out of her death.”

The man on the ground gaped at him. Then, “You can’t prove that!” he cried out in a voice that proclaimed him a liar.

My father had already forgotten him. He had suddenly realized that Riddle was standing there and that I was staring at him. The old bitch’s blood had drenched his cloak. He saw me staring at it, and without a word he undid the clasp and let it fall to the ground, the heavy gray wool given up without a thought save that he did not want to bloody me as he came to take me into his arms. But Riddle did not give me up. I looked at my father wordlessly. He lifted his gaze to meet Riddle’s.

“I thought you would take her away from here.”

“And I thought you might have a mob turn on you, and might need someone at your back.”

“And bring my daughter into the middle of it?”

“From the time you decided to interfere, all my choices were bad ones. Sorry if you don’t like the one I chose.”

I had never heard Riddle’s voice so cold, nor seen him and my father staring at each other like angry strangers. I had to do something, say something. “I’m cold,” I said to the air. “And I’m hungry.”

Riddle looked over at me. A tight, hard moment passed. The world breathed again. “I’m starving,” he said quietly.

My father looked at his feet. “So am I,” he muttered. He stooped suddenly, scooped up clean snow, and used it to wipe blood from his hands. Riddle watched him.

“On your left cheek, too,” he said, and there was no anger left in his voice. Only a strange weariness. My father nodded, still not looking at anyone. He walked a few paces to where clean snow still clung to the top of a bush. He gathered two handfuls and washed his face with snow. When he was finished, I wriggled out of Riddle’s arms. I took my father’s cold wet hand. I didn’t say anything. I just looked up at him. I wanted to tell him that what I had seen hadn’t hurt me. Well, it had, but not the things he had done.

“Let’s get some hot food,” he said to me.

We walked to a tavern, past the man in the alley who still gleamed with a light that made it hard to see. Farther down the street, sitting on a corner, there was a gray beggar. I turned to look at him as we passed. He stared at me, not seeing me, for his eyes were as blank and gray as the ragged cloak he wore. He had no begging bowl, just his hand held up on top of his knee. It was empty. He wasn’t begging me for money. I knew that. I could see him and he couldn’t see me. That was not how it was supposed to be. I turned sharply, hugging my face to my father’s arm as he pushed open the door.

Inside the tavern, all was noise and warmth and smells. When my father walked in, the talk died suddenly. He stood, looking around the room as if he were Wolf-Father thinking about a trap. Slowly the voices took up their talk again, and we followed Riddle to a table. We were scarcely seated before a boy appeared with a tray and three heavy mugs of warmed spiced cider. He set them down, thud, thud, thud, and then smiled at my father. “On the house,” he told him, and sketched him a bow.

My father leaned back on the bench and the landlord, who was standing by the fire with several other men, lifted his own mug to him. My father nodded back gravely. He looked at the serving boy. “What is that savory smell?”

“It’s a beef shoulder, simmered until the meat fell off the bones with three yellow onions and half a bushel of carrots, and two full measures of this year’s barley. If you order the soup here, sir, you will not get a bowl of brown water with a potato bit at the bottom! And the bread has just come from the oven, and we have summer butter, kept in the cold cellar and yellow as a daisy’s heart. But if you prefer mutton, there are mutton pies likewise stuffed with barley and carrot and onion, in brown crusts so flaky that we must put a plate under them, for they are so tender that otherwise you may end up wearing one! We have sliced pumpkin baked with apples and butter and cream, and …”

“Stop, stop,” my father begged him, “or my belly will burst just listening to you. What shall we have?” He turned to Riddle and me with the question. Somehow my father was smiling and I thanked the jolly serving boy with all my heart.

I chose the beef soup and bread and butter, as did Riddle and my father. No one spoke while we waited but it was not an awkward quiet. Rather it was a careful one. It was better to leave the space empty of words than to choose the wrong ones. When the food came, it was every bit as good as the boy had said it would be. We ate, and somehow, not talking made things better between Riddle and my father. The fire on the big hearth sparked and spit when someone added a big log. The door opened and closed as people came and went, and the conversations reminded me of bees buzzing in a hive. I had not known that a chill day and buying things and watching my father save a dog’s death could make me so hungry. When I could almost see the bottom of my bowl, I found the words I needed.

“Thank you, Papa. For doing what you did. It was right.”

He looked at me and spoke carefully. “It is what fathers are supposed to do. We are supposed to get our children what they need. Boots and scarves, yes, but bracelets and chestnuts, too, when we can.”

He didn’t want to recall what he had done in the town square. But I had to make him understand that I understood. “Yes. Fathers do that. And some go right into the middle of a mob and save a poor dog from a slow death. And send puppies and a donkey to a safe place.” I turned to look at Riddle. It was hard. I’d never looked directly into his face. I put my eyes on his and kept them there. “Remind my sister that our father is a very brave man, when you see her. Tell her I am learning to be brave, too.”

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