Eyes Like Sky And Coal And Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

the circus to pass me, wagon after wagon. Even for such a small outfit, we had a lot of wagons.
    Preddi was Rik’s father, a small, stooped man given to carelessness with his dress. He was a kindly man, I think, but difficult to get to know because his deafness distanced him.
    We pulled the wagon over to the side of the road, in a margined sward thick with yellow loosestrife and dandelions. A narrow deer path led through blackberry tangles and further into the pines, a stream coming through the thick pine needles to chuckle along the rocks. I tied Bupus to the wagon, and brought out a sack of hams and loaves of bread before making several trips to bring him buckets of water.
    Preddi settled himself on the grass and extracted a deck of greasy cards from the front pocket of his flannel shirt. While I worked, he laid out hand after hand, playing poker with himself.
    The day wore on.
    And on. I cleaned the wagon tack, and repacked the bundles in it, mainly my training gear. Someone else would be tending my cages of beasts when they pitched camp, and truth be told, anyone could, but I still preferred to be the one who feed the crocodiles, for example, and watched for mouth rot or the white lesions that signal pox virus and clean their cage thoroughly enough to make sure no infection could creep in under their scales or into the tender areas around their vents.
    Bupus gorged himself and then slept, but roused enough to want to play. I threw the heavy leather ball and each time his tail whipped out with frightening speed and batted it aside. Fat and lazy, he may be, but Bupus has many years left in him. They live four or five decades, and I’d raised him from the shell ten years earlier, before I’d even bought the flimsy paper ticket that led me to meet Rik.
    I hadn’t known what I had at first. A sailor swapped me the egg in return for me covering his bar tab, and who knows who got the best of that bargain? I was a beast trainer for the Duke, and mainly I worked with little animals, trained squirrels and ferrets and marmosets. They juggled and danced, shot tiny plaster pistols, and engaged in duels as exquisite as any courtier’s.
    The egg was bigger than my doubled fists laid knuckle and palm to knuckle and palm. It was coarse to the touch, as though threads or hairy roots had been laid over the shell and grown into it, and it was a deep yellow, the same yellow that Bupus’s eyes would open into, honey depths around clover-petaled pupils.
    I kept it warm, near the hearth, but could not figure out what it might contain. Months later it hatched—lucky that I was there that day to feed the mewling, squawling hatchling chopped meat and warm milk. I wrapped the sting in padding and leather. Even then it struck out with surprising speed and strength. A Manticore is a vulnerable creature, lacking human hands to defend the softness of its face, and the sting compensates for that vulnerability.
    He talked a moon, perhaps a moon and a half later. I took him with me at first, when I was training the Duke’s creatures, but a marmoset decided to investigate, and I learned then that a Manticore’s bite is a death grip, particularly with a marmoset’s delicate bones between its teeth.
    Some Beast trainers dull their more intelligent Beasts. It’s an easy enough procedure, if you can drug or spell them unconscious. The knife is thin, more like a flattened awl than a blade, and you insert it at the corner of the eye, going behind the eyeball itself. Once you’ve pushed it in to the right depth, perforating the plate of the skull lying behind the eye, you swing back and forth holding it between thumb and forefinger, two cutting arcs. It bruises the eye, leaves it black and tender in the socket for days afterward, but it heals in time.
    It doesn’t kill their intelligence entirely, but they become simpler. More docile, easier to manage. They don’t scheme or plot escape, and they’re less likely to lash out. Done right, even a Dragon