“Has done so for thirty years.”
“And when he retires or dies? A generation of breeding knowledge will be lost because no one thought to write it down.” She tapped the spine of the book against her knee. “I’ve been making notes for him.”
“Have you?” I laughed.
She nodded. “I have.”
“And how does he feel about this little undertaking of yours?”
She cocked her head to the side. “He tolerates it and me because I bring the horses apples.”
I looked at her. “You’re reorganizing my stables.”
She looked back at me. “Someone should.”
No apology. No request for permission. Just the same directness that had dismantled something in me years ago in another garden. Something in my chest loosened.
We talked.
Not about anything that mattered to Logres. The northern raids didn’t come up. The alliance negotiations that were the official reason for her visit didn’t come up. The prisoner in Galahad’s quarters, the weakening wards, the candles that had died all at once last night: none of it came up.
Instead, she told me about Corbenic’s apple harvest and the late frost that had worried everyone and then the extraordinary yield that had surprised them all. Then she described the cider-pressing and the way the estate smelled for weeks afterward, sweet and fermented and particular to that season.
I told her about a dog.
I hadn’t planned to tell her about the dog, but the story surfaced the way certain things surface when the dragon is quiet and no one is asking the king for anything, when there is briefly enough silence that the man underneath can get a word in.
“His name was Cavall,” I said. “He was a gray lurcher, and his ears were too large for his head.” We both laughed. “He could outrun anything in the county, but he couldn’t figure out doors.”
“What do you mean he couldn’t figure out doors?”
“I mean he’d stand in front of a slightly open door and he’d bark at it. Never once did he try pushing it.”
Isolde laughed as she listened, and I liked the way she listened because she had a particular way of doing it: she did so with her whole body angled toward me, her attention a weight I could feel.
When I finished my story and told her Cavall had died a few years ago after he’d lived to become old and gray, she didn’t say she was sorry. She didn’t offer condolences or make the expression people make when they want you to know they were moved by something.
She asked, “What kind was he?”
I stopped. “What?”
“A lurcher: that’s a cross. What was he crossed with?”
“Greyhound dam,” I answered, surprised that she would even care enough to ask. “And Deerhound sire. My father’s kennel master bred the pair and regretted it immediately because the litter was completely unmanageable. Cavall was the smallest, and Ector wanted to drown him.”
“What a horrid man!”
“He means well enough.”
She nodded. “I had a hound like that once. Brilliant in the field, but completely defeated by stairs. My father used to carry her up to bed every night because she’d stand at the bottom and howl until someone came to get her. He’d go down in his nightgown, in the dark, every single night, this man who’d faced down two border wars and a tax revolt.” She shook her head. “She would sleep in a chair beside his bed.”
“What happened to her?”
“She lived to be fourteen years old and died in my father’s lap by the fire. He didn’t eat for two days.” She said the words with the particular combination of grief and fondness that meant the memory had been lived with long enough to settle. “He still calls that chair hers. Won’t let anyone sit in it.”
The sun climbed. The river moved below, and our conversation drifted. The silence between topics became comfortable in the way silence only becomes comfortable when you’ve stopped managing it. I stopped noticing what I was saying before I said it. The king in me, the part that calculated every word for its strategic value and its potential to expose, went quiet.
“Why did you never marry?”
