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The rest of the ceremony was mostly a blur. He was enlisted to carry the glass box with Snake Arms's reptiles back to her trailer.
So, Graf Stockard knew his name. He must have seen a picture through Molly, or looked him up sometime or other at headquarters. Perhaps he'd even met him at some point or other before either of them knew Molly Carlson, and Stockard remembered and Valentine didn't. Much of his life before becoming a Wolf had a vague, dreamy feel to it these days.
Stockard had whispered a few words about speaking to him in private. He'd used the word escape, at least Valentine thought so. The din of the Warmoon Festival as the sacrifices were offered to a successful summer of battle made the word difficult to pick out.
"Warmoon Festival's going to last for five days. I think they'll cut you off before then. My fertile period this month's almost over."
"Have they tried to breed you before?" Valentine said, slowly, as though thinking over every word.
"I'll let you in on a secret, my lash-worn prince. About half the guys here are bent as jackknives. It's kind of a haven for the rugged, outdoorsy ones."
"I don't understand."
"They don't like girls. They don't like them so much, fucking's about out of the question."
Valentine pretended to puzzle it over for a bit. "Ahhh," he finally said. "Men's men."
"Exactly."
She murmured something into her pillow about being like Dorothy, all the men she met were missing either heart, courage, or brain.
Valentine heard Snake Arms's door open and came into alarmed wakefulness. He sat up so quickly, he half-rolled her off the bed, where she was sleeping atop the sheet.
A flashlight shone in his face.
"Yeah, it's Scar all right," a man said.
The dazzling light made ghostly circles on his optic nerves and gave him an instant migraine.
"Whassat?" Snake Arms said.
"Baron wants to see ya, Champ."
This time it was four who escorted him, two from Snake Arms's trailer joining up with two more waiting outside. These men were neater and a good deal more alert than the Baron's usual human soldiers who supervised the labor gangs.
They let him dress completely and didn't put him in handcuffs, so perhaps the Baron was having some sort of private after-midnight celebration.
They brought him to a different part of the camp, in the wooded hills behind the church. They walked him on a pavement path big enough for a single truck up a hill and down into a hummock between two higher hills.
A glow of lights frosted the red oaks and maples. Valentine got the sense of some kind of compound. The planting of the trees did a good job of concealing it, but he suspected heavy fencing stretching off into the woods. It looked like someone had planted quick-growing, thorny trees of some sort along a double line of razor wire a few years back. The trees turned the wire into a messy tangle that was difficult to spot at night.
The ground flattened, and they came to a second line of fencing, nice-looking iron railing, gated at the trail. Valentine smelled dogs, but didn't see or hear them. His escort nodded to a sentry at a shelter and was waved in.
Valentine got his first look at the Baronial residence.
It looked like a hunting lodge or a small hotel set in the pretty wooded hills, with decorative rather than security lighting.
He passed under a threshold. The posts and lintels were covered with deep-burned Gray One markings, wedge-writing like cuneiform. Valentine recognized one for "victory" and one for "health."
The inside was just as rugged. Slabs of limestone and great, river-smoothed rocks in a sort of hunting-lodge meets prairie-style that the Gray Baron seemed to favor.
He was taken into an office-cum-game room. There was a pool table with a low electric light hanging just above it and a dartboard at one end, and a great semicircle of bookcases high enough that they needed a ladder with a desk in the middle at the other. A beautiful button-backed leather sofa sat near a massive stone fireplace, partly in the office, partly in the gaming area.
The books looked dusty and not in any sort of order. Valentine wondered if they were just for show.
"Welcome to my home, Scar, isn't it?" he said. Valentine nodded in reply. "Sorry to keep you up so late. I'm a night owl. Useless in the morning. Coffee?"
"Whiskey spirits?" Valentine asked.
