1.17. Hounds, Foxes, & Hens [and bonus chapter announcement]

Strictly speaking, his employer hadn’t told him to stop stealing. In fact, she’d encouraged it. Perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate his freelancing, but he hadn’t appreciated the goddamn charnel house she’d thrown him into.

If that bonus was still on the far horizon he wasn’t about to wait. He needed an emergency supply of cash, enough that he could cut and run; the brush with Anna had shown him that. Maybe he was sticking around, but who could blame him for devising an exit strategy?

And if picking pockets was the best way to burn off the twitchy energy he sometimes got, the itching in his hands, well, that was just a happy side effect. Some thieves talked about it like it was a high, like it was sex. The rush, the gratification. Seth couldn’t wrap his head around that.

Seth stole because stealing was when he felt normal.

A silver-plated pocketwatch. A billfold of braces. Everyone wanted lumber, and this far from the iron arteries Laramme was the only good place to get it. They were well-heeled, the people here. Satisfaction curled the corners of his mouth. He was too threadbare himself to limit his lifts to the affluent, but it was his strong preference.

“Verdugo Erheis is dead,” Annalise said. “Fallen in this past Winter War. Condolences, folks, if he was a friend. Unlikely as that is.”

Laramme, unlike Prossimo, could afford at least a pittance of a laugh, and Seth dutifully joined in its low rumble before getting back to work.

The work. The purpose, the calm. The clarity of need, the execution of expertise. Like he was doing what he’d been designed to do. Like a tangle finally being worked out of matted hair. And the risk of getting caught and hurt, yes. But Seth felt a version of that all the time, every minute. Always something over his shoulder. To have an actual reason to feel it was a balm, not a burden. It made life fall into ticking clockwork order. The world was hounds, foxes, and hens. Seth il Gutierre was a fox.

He nudged a well-dressed woman in such a way that she turned to murmur a brief apology to the man next to her, and then her pocketbook was in his sleeve. Beautiful work. The distant echo through time of a hand resting atop his head. Good job, Seth. Good lift. Good boy. That’s everyone’s supper he just earned, kids. Learn from Seth.

He moved away from the square and around the outskirts of the village, as Annalise’s voice rang indistinctly from the scaffold. He stayed out of the sturdy logbuilt interiors. He untied a pouch of tobacco from an ashwood fencepost. He unhooked a roast chicken dangling above a corpselight heating element at an abandoned butcher counter and carefully wrapped it in an unattended roll of paraffin paper. He recalled the sheer size of his boss, and unhooked another. He strolled past a humming hexis dynamo the size of Annalise’s carriage and lifted a canister of popmites and a sachet of feed from the monitor’s hut. It wasn’t quite enough outdoor thievery to warm him up for second-story work, but he knew a fine middle-ground between indoors and outdoors.

A murani hardcamp sat at the edge of the village in a stump-studded clearing. A clutch of cinnabar-colored conical yurts, decorated with beaded mosaics, mushroomed from the earth around a firepit with still-glowing embers. The camp had crept further away from the mostly human heart of Laramme since Seth’s last visit, as the murani rode the rim of the forest’s slow sacrifice.

There were all manner of kindred in the United Territories, but almost everyone Seth had ever met was human or muran. He supposed the al Ydrises didn’t count any longer, and he’d run into a kari-kine once at a taphouse who had flirted with him, but it was hard to get past the independently moving eyes. Turns out a lady gazing at your lips isn’t quite as titillating when she’s looking you in the eye simultaneously.

The murani were a regular presence in this region of the Plainlands, but they preferred to keep to themselves. There was much to admire about the Felix Folk of the Plains, despite their prickliness. Their willingness for rough living, their tight communalism, and—Seth’s favorite—their general disuse of locks.

He strolled to the center of the hardcamp and cast a look around its carpeted yurts. Empty as the streets that had led to it. Seth thanked St. Wycrest of the Scales for the law of witnesses, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He took the tobacco pouch in his palm, invoked his Fox hex, and dropped it in the dry afternoon grass.

He stuck his pinky in his ear and ducked into the flap of the largest and fanciest yurt. He squinted through the dim illumination its circle-cut windows provided and rifled through the tent’s belongings. A fine camp stove, an ornate three-stringed balaphone leaning against a carved instrument rest.

He’d only just found his trophy—a well-balanced stiletto dagger he’d stuck in his boot, safely away from the discovery of his employers—when the crisp crunch of the underbrush filtered from the tobacco pouch, through his pinky, and into his brain. He hurriedly folded and packed the yurt’s contents back into place. The tent flap was just falling shut behind him as he scrambled from the entrance.

A sun-dappled muran woman stalked into visibility from the forest outskirts with a bloody faun draped across her shoulders. She halted by the farthest tent; the tension on her bowstring went taut as she drew it a few lethal inches back.

“Who’s there, then?” she called.

“Who’s there?” He puffed his chest out. “Didn’t you know the Verdugo was on the way?”

The woman’s whiskers twitched. She dropped the faun before the yurt he’d stepped from; it landed with a heavy thud and left a streak of blood down her shoulder. “My travel companion neglected to inform me.”

Her clothes were fine, despite the twigs and the deer blood. Here was the owner of the yurt, and the stiletto he’d put in his boot.

“You’re able-bodied, you should be at the square.” He jerked a thumb in that direction. “Law of witnesses.”

“You should be at the square, too.” She squinted at him. “What are you doing here?”

“Scraping for stragglers like you,” he said. “I’m part of the Verdugo’s retinue.”

She sniffed and looked him up and down. “You work for the Verdugo?”

And here was the best feeling in the world. Someone high and mighty, sneering down their nose at you, with the contents of their coin purse in your back pocket.

“That’s right,” he said. “For your own good, you want to see her before I do.”

“Her?” She tucked her thumbs into her belt loop. “What happened to Erheis?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“The Verdugo is dead,” he said. “Long live the Verdugo.”

“Two heads for the Deathspell. Not a bad haul.” Annalise unfolded the first bundle of waxy paper; the grease glistened from the roasted chicken cocooned in it. “And this smells lovely, Seth. What’s this other yoke?”

“That one’s yours,” Seth said. “Figured you’d polish off a full one.”

She chuckled and adjusted her pipe with her teeth. “I will, yeah,” she said, which he’d learned was Annalise for I won’t. “The cheek of you. We’ll do halves.”

They’d parked by the roadhouse and gathered for a late lunch, and the scent of paprika and fragrant garlic filled the crowded carriage interior. Seth took a deep, grateful breath. “What’d the dead people do?”

“One was a rapist,” Tiago said. He’d managed not to cover himself in quite so much sword-blood today. “And the other was his accomplice.”

“Good riddance,” Seth said, with feeling.

“Yep.” Annalise sawed the chicken in half with the crack of a wishbone. She parceled a breast onto a plate and held it out to Seth. “Tits guy, right?”

He snorted and took the portion from her.

“I like to hope the condemned remember a piece of it.” Annalise took a final pull from her long-stemmed pipe and tapped its contents out over the edge of the carriage roof. “The taste of the steel. And on their next turn through the wheel they do better, as whatever they return as.”

“Doubt it,” Tiago said. “Forgetting is what the wheel is for.”

“Ah, sure.” Annalise tsked. “How’d my cub get so unsentimental, Feeli?”

Ofelia daintily cut into her chicken thigh and shrugged. She was the only al Ydris bothering with cutlery.

“Tell you, though,” Annalise said. “Seraphs remember it all. They slip the wheel on reincarnation. That’s why Sik-Ersetim wailed my name like that. For all the marks they’ve given me, it’s nice to think I’ve given a few right back.”

“They come back different, too. Physically.” Ofelia’s knife scraped against her tin plate. “The Necropolis has old editions of the Serapharium in its library that describe Sik-Ersetim as two-headed. At some point, she got a third.”

“Goddamn,” Seth said. “How had she changed this time?”

“Dunno,” Annalise said. “Killed her too quick. But they come back uglier and uglier, tell you that.”

“Is it like scar tissue? Do they come back stronger?”

“Maybe.” She smirked. “Not strong enough.”

Seth wagged a wingbone at her. “Well, you had help.”

There was obvious relief in Annalise’s grin to hear him joke about it. “That I certainly did, il Gutierre.”