Fool’s Assassin

Then Riddle was turning and taking long strides away. “Come away, Fitz!” he called in a low rough voice, as firmly as if he ordered a dog. But no command could control Wolf-Father. A moment longer he stood still and I saw his shoulders bunch under his winter cloak as the man’s knife rose, fell and rose bloodied again. No more than that could I see, but the crowd of onlookers roared and screamed and so I knew that still the bitch gripped the bull’s nose in her teeth. “Only the three pups for sale!” the man shouted. “Only the three, whelps of a bitch who will let me gut her and die hanging from her teeth! Last chance to bid on these pups!”

But he was not waiting for anyone to offer money. He knew he would have his pick of the offers once he had delivered the bloodbath they craved. Riddle held me, and I knew he longed to carry me far away and feared to leave my father alone. “Damn, where is Shun or FitzVigilant when they might be more useful than annoying!” he demanded of no one. He looked at me, his dark eyes wild. “If I set you down, Bee, will you stay … no. A fair chance you’d be trampled. Oh, child, what will your sister say to me?” And then my father suddenly lunged forward, as if a chain that had held him back had snapped, and Riddle surged after him trying to catch hold of his cloak. The man’s bloodied knife rose; I saw it over the heads of the onlookers as Riddle pushed and cursed his way through the crowd that had gathered to watch the dog’s end.

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?