A Mankind Witch Read Online Free PDF Page A

hall before the queen could have Signy beaten. But it appeared that other than dogs and horses, the shabby little princess had no friends in this house.

    By gradual degrees Cair became a backstairs magician and the master of cheap tricks. In a similar fashion, the Barbary corsair found that somehow he'd moved from his original plan to use the princess as a stepping stone, to being her loyalist.

    It was the old dog that finally did it.

    Signy came down late in the afternoon, after the other stable-thralls had gone, her hand on the old dog's neck. Cair was standing in a dark corner of the stable, next to the feed store, carefully loosening a rock, which would give him a hiding place for the things he needed to steal for his escape. Now he stood dead still. It was dark back here.

    Cair had noticed, over the last week, that this, her most faithful companion, had abruptly stopped coming down here with her. Now he could see it was only loyalty that had made it make the effort to walk. Something was plainly very wrong with the old dog. The beast shivered slightly as it leaned against her, pausing. Then she led it to an empty stall, and it lay down with a little whine.

    Cair could swear that he'd made no sound, but somehow the princess knew that he was there. Princesses did not belong in stables. They did not wear old—if once good—garments. They did not walk around unaccompanied by anyone but their dogs. She used to sneak out in the predawn and ride alone, too, Cair knew—something she was almost certainly not supposed to do, by the care she took to have the tack back in place when the thralls came to work. A princess wasn't even supposed to touch tack! She was, by any definition, odd—a breaker of the rules of her society. And Princess Signy added to her oddness by an almost inhuman ability to know where people were. She called him.

    She was kneeling next to the dog, her face oddly white—she was always a little too sun-browned for a noblewoman, and her eyes glittered strangely.

    "Will you hold her still? I can't miss and I don't want her to know what I intend to do," she said in a dead-flat voice.

    So Cair sat with the old bitch, gently stroking her. He had had an old grazehound back on Lesbos when was growing up that had been a bit like this old girl. She'd also followed him everywhere. He'd spoiled her, or so his brother had said.

    "It has to be done," she said in that same voice, lifting the ear to expose the ear hole.

    Horrified and fascinated he watched as she drew the knife from her sleeve and stabbed hard, pushing the blade in through the ear hole.

    The old bitch never even whimpered.

    But Signy did. And then, as she pulled the knife out, tears were streaming down her face. "She couldn't swallow anymore . . . a canker in her throat," she said hoarsely.

    The hand that didn't hold the knife stroked the white-flecked muzzle. "I grew up with her. I . . ." She choked and let the shaking hand on the dead dog's flank say it all. She bent over and kissed the dog's nose, ignoring the blood.

    "But couldn't someone else do this for you?" he asked. No noblewoman would do such a thing!

    She stared blindly at him, not seeing past the tears. "She gave me all of her love and loyalty. How could I give her anything less? How could I let someone else kill her? It had to be done as quickly and cleanly as possible. How could I not be with her?"

    He nodded. It was an attitude he simply had to respect. He sought for words of comfort, without any thought but to ease her distress, speaking not as a thrall to his noble mistress, but as one dog lover comforting another. "She is young now, free from pain, chasing down the deer in the eternal fields," he said quietly.

    "Are there dogs in Odin's host?" she asked, obviously desperately seeking reassurance—even from a thrall.

    That was a hard one. One he had debated and decided on long before, at the death of his own childhood hound. He gave her as honest an answer as