CHAPTER TWENTY

  -Buckets, Teeth, Whip

  The day began again.

  Porridge. Line. Frost and breath and the weight of chains. This time, as they drove us out into the yard, I let my eyes slide toward the cookhouse.

  The door still stood shut. Smoke rose from the chimney and spread along the roof before the wind took it. The overseer waited near the step with his whip at his belt, watching the line instead of the dog yard. The dogs lay in their old places once more, pegs reset, chains driven deep. Flea’s ribs showed a little more than before. The welts on his side were gone. Everything had gone back to the way it was. Only I remembered. That me hung on to that, convinced remembering alone counted as progress.

  I carried sacks when they told me to carry sacks. I stacked them where they told me to stack them. I waited for the moment the knot of the day finally tightened around the cookhouse.

  Midday brought it. The overseer barked orders and the morning broke apart into tasks. Men shouted, grain moved, wood dragged, pots hauled from one fire to another. Whenever the work shifted, I let myself slide a little closer to where Rauk’s stool sat by the cookhouse wall. By the time the offal bucket was slopped halfway up, most of the boys had been sent off on some errand or another. I ended up a few strides away with empty hands and my chain slack.

  Rauk wiped his wrist across his nose and jerked his chin.

  “You. Rat,” he said. “Take this to the ditch. Drop it and come back. Try not to fall in with it.”

  The offal bucket sat half full by his stool at the base of the wall. The stink rose from it in a greasy wave. My stomach flipped. I let none of that reach my face as I bent and picked it up. I knew what came next. I’d done it once without meaning to. Then again with purpose. Now a third time, with a different goal.

  Rauk was already sinking back onto his stool, back against the wall, knife working over the pot in the same tired rhythm as before. He didn’t need to say more. I’d carry the bucket out past the dogs, empty it where the stink wouldn’t crawl back to the doorstep, then drag it to the ditch and let the sludge slide toward the slow water.

  “Yes, master,” I said.

  I walked. I didn’t try to change my footsteps this time. No fox walk. No careful placing of toes and heels. I let the chain at my ankle clink as much as it liked. Let my shoulders hang. A boy with a bucket, nothing more.

  When I neared the dog yard, I slowed in the same place I always did. Flea’s ears pricked. His eyes fixed on the bucket, not on me. The others shifted, chains drawing half circles in the dirt. My heart beat a little faster. Don’t watch the dogs, I told myself. Watch Rauk.

  I stole a glance back over my shoulder. The cookhouse sat open to the yard beside the dog lines, smoke crawling from its chimney before the wind tore it away. Rauk sat on his stool by the outer wall closest to the dogs, a squat shape against the boards only a few strides from where the pegs bit into the ground. The pot at his feet steamed. His attention was on the meat in his hands, for the moment. Knife, strip, tub, scrape. Knife, strip, tub, scrape. He worked in a rhythm older than my time in this place.

  I turned away before the look could linger. I didn’t want to see the overseer looking up and following my line of sight. I walked on until the stink of the bucket almost made my eyes water. The dogs whined, a low, desperate sound, chains drawing tight like bowstrings. If I want to know when he lets go of that knife, I have to make him move.

  The place where I remembered spilling the offal was just hard-packed dirt again, boots and paws having worn the same shallow paths as every morning. No dark smear, no extra stink. The knot had taken that back too. I walked past it, counting my steps.

  One. Two. Three. I stopped where I knew the dogs could smell the bucket but not quite get their noses to it. Then I tipped it. The offal slid out in a thick, heavy wave. Cold fat, congealed blood, grey scraps of gristle and organs hit the ground with a wet slap. The smell exploded. I stepped back fast, out of the reach of the nearest chain, and turned to hurry on toward the ditch, or at least make it look that way. Behind me, Flea lunged so hard his chain jerked the peg, claws tearing furrows in the dirt. The other dogs hit the ends of their chains a heartbeat later, a tangle of bodies and metal and snarling teeth.

  Now I looked. I turned my head in what I hoped passed for a flinch and dragged my gaze back toward the cookhouse. Rauk was already moving. The knife didn’t leave his hand. He pushed off the stool with his free palm, coming up in a half crouch, knife still tight in his fist. He covered the distance between his stool and the nearest dog in a few long strides, shouting at them, foot lashing out to kick Flea’s shoulder away from the other dog.

  He’d done this once before. A knot or three ago, I’d carried the offal bucket a little too close, poured it just out of reach between the chains and the ditch, then walked on with my eyes fixed on the slow water and the gap in the yard. Behind me the yard had turned into teeth and fur and blood, wardens swearing and swinging clubs while dogs and chains crashed together, but I’d kept going, pretending it was none of my business. Later, I’d heard Rauk telling the overseer they’d gone mad over something, maybe a rat, maybe a scent, that there was nothing left but blood. No one had looked twice at the boy with the empty bucket. My ribs had been whole. My back had been clean.

  That knot had left me with one truth that didn’t shift on waking. Offal could move the dogs. Today gave me a second. It couldn’t make Rauk drop his knife. Two problems, and neither of them had changed. Watching it now, it’s obvious how stubborn I was, treating “true” and “useful” like they were the same thing.

  I lay awake long after the others had sunk into the deep, heavy sleep of the exhausted. The thought that finally came to me was small, hard, ugly. If I couldn’t make Rauk drop the knife by accident, I’d have to take it from him on purpose. That was what I thought at first.

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  Then another memory rose, not of the dogs but of a smaller, quicker moment. The first morning I’d gone to the cookhouse, when Rauk had only been the kitchen warden in my head and I’d been thinking more about the peg than the blade. My heel clipping the stool. The sudden curse. The bright sting of blood. Rauk lifting his thumb to his mouth and, for one heartbeat, letting the knife clatter to the ground. He hadn’t seen it as a gift then. I’d used the chaos it started to rip the peg loose and run. The knife had been nothing but part of the noise.

  Now, lying in the dark with the chain heavy on my ankle and the taste of offal still in my throat, I turned that heartbeat over and over in my mind. I couldn’t wrestle the knife away from Rauk. I couldn’t trust the dogs to tear it free. I could, however, make that moment happen again. I’d already made Rauk drop the knife once, but the blade had only been caught on the edge of the chaos. This time the knife had to be the point. Make him move wrong. Make him slip, or stagger, or flinch hard enough that his hand opened.

  Outside, the dogs lay in their pens, unseen but not entirely unheard, a low shuffle and the occasional huff of breath drifting through the walls.

  If I could spill the right thing in the right place, at the right time, and put Rauk’s feet and the dogs’ teeth too close together… The thought that took shape from that was foolish. Reckless. It had already killed me once in another form. But the knot didn’t care how I felt about it. It only cared whether I tried. I slept. The bell rang.

  The day began again.

  Porridge. Line. Cold. I let the morning run as it had before. Grain from the river barges to the granary, whips and breath and frost. Near the granary door I made sure I walked the same line. One sack brushed the same splintered board; the canvas caught on the nail and tore, spilling a thin trail of grain behind me. Good, I thought. Let that part be the same.

  When midday came and the horn blew for rest, I dragged the sagging sack toward the cookhouse, shoulders hunched in what I hoped looked like shame.

  Rauk sat where he always did now, on his stool by the outer wall, pot steaming at his feet, knife working in a slow, steady rhythm. The dogs lifted their heads as I approached. Their chains weren’t long. Each iron collar ran to a peg sunk just far enough from the wall that a man could sit with his back to it and stay out of reach if he was careful. Rauk liked to sit there anyway, close enough that the dogs could smell the meat on his hands, not close enough to touch him.

  “What d’you want now, rat?” he asked, not even looking up.

  I dropped my eyes, the way I always had.

  “Sack is torn, master,” I said in border dialect. “Need needle. Thread.”

  Rauk snorted. “Don’t need no sack to pull grain.” He jerked his chin toward the yard. “Take the split one. Carry half loads. More trips’ll teach you not to tear it.”

  The dogs sniffed the air and stared at the pot. Saliva dripped from Flea’s muzzle.

  I let my shoulders sag, the answer settling on me like weight. “Yes, master,” I murmured.

  I turned as though to go. My heel clipped the leg of the stool. The wood jolted. Rauk’s hand jerked with it. The knife skated off the meat block and nicked his thumb before it bounced from his grip. A bright bead of blood welled up.

  “Watch it, you little shit,” he snapped, lifting his hand toward his mouth.

  Last time, I’d already been turning away, mind on the peg. This time I leaned into the stumble. My shoulder crashed into the offal bucket beside the stool. The thing was nearly full. It went over in a thick, heavy wave. Cold fat and congealed blood and grey scraps of gristle poured across the packed dirt, sliding in a slick smear straight toward the nearest dog.

  The smell hit me in the face. Flea lunged. The chain snapped tight. The peg groaned in the earth. The second dog went for the spill too, teeth snapping close, more interested in the meat than in whose space it was. Chains tangled. Bodies slammed together. One link slipped free. The yard exploded into shouting and movement.

  “Dogs loose!” someone yelled.

  Men shouted. Clubs swung. Dogs roared. The yard turned into a knot of fur and iron and boots.

  I didn’t run for the gap in the fence this time. I twisted where I’d fallen, eyes locked on the knife. It lay on the ground for a heartbeat, streaked with blood and offal, almost close enough to reach if I stretched my arm and forgot about my fingers. Rauk’s boot came down beside it. He snatched the handle up without looking, thumb still in his mouth, and waded into the mess, cursing everyone in reach.

  “Hold them! Shorten those chains! Grab that bastard’s collar!”

  One of the dogs slammed into his side, all ribs and chain and hot breath. Rauk stumbled, then drove his knee into its chest and shoved it away. The knife never left his hand.

  “Let go,” I whispered, though no one heard me.

  I didn’t get the chance to see if the man ever would. The overseer’s voice cut through the noise like a whip.

  “What in all hells is this?”

  A hand fisted in the back of my shirt and hauled me up so fast my feet left the ground.

  Rauk’s voice came from the mess of dogs and men, breathless and angry.

  “That one,” he said. “He fell. Spooked them. Knocked the slop right under their noses.”

  The overseer’s face loomed close, stale drink sour on his breath.

  “Did you,” he said softly, “forget how to walk, rat?”

  I didn’t answer. The overseer hauled me higher for a heartbeat before flinging me down. The ground slammed into my knees and palms. I’d just started to push myself up when the first lash of the whip stole my breath. Leather cracked across my back, hot and sharp, driving me flat again.

  By the third stroke my back was on fire. By the fifth I couldn’t tell where one line of pain ended and the next began. By the seventh my arms had given out and I lay with my cheek in the mud, breath coming in short, wet gasps while the whip rose and fell. It didn’t stop until the overseer’s arm tired before his temper did.

  The whip went still at last. I lay where I’d fallen, cheek pressed to the cold dirt, breath shuddering in and out. I couldn’t feel my hands. My back felt flayed. Every inhale scraped over something raw inside my chest.

  I didn’t die. That was the worst of it. I didn’t even pass out. My body had stopped giving me that mercy. The pain still came, bright, sharp-edged, but something inside me had gone flat, stubborn under it, the same way the cold no longer bit as deep as it once had. Whatever the gray place and its knots had done to me, it held me awake inside my own skin and made sure I felt every jolt when someone kicked me once more in the ribs for being in the way. Even watching it now, I can see how proud I was of that stubbornness. I hadn’t yet learned how much more it could end up costing me.

  By the time I crawled back to my feet, the worst of the chaos had passed. The dogs were back in their pens again, chains hooked short to the rough plank rails, eyes rolling, tongues lolling, sides heaving. Flea’s muzzle was pink with someone’s blood. Rauk’s knife was back in his hand.

  That did nothing, I thought, swaying. Not nothing. My back was a ruin. My breath rasped. My legs shook. If there’d been a gap in the yard big enough to crawl through, I couldn’t have taken two running steps before my knees buckled.

  I wouldn’t make it to the door tonight even if I got the bar to move. In this state, taking the knife would be worse than useless. It’d only slow me and get me killed where I stood. I spat dirt and blood into the ground and straightened as far as my back allowed. It felt ruined, but I could still stand. That meant it wasn’t enough yet. Not this way. Not like this.

  I worked. I endured. When night came, I lay on my stomach because it hurt less than my back touching the straw. Forty-eight whispered that I should’ve watched my feet. Eleven muttered that the overseer had spent his anger for the day at least.

  I listened to the dogs in their pens, the faint clink of chain against rough boards. I listened to my own breath and the slow thud of my heart.

  If I was going to take the knife, it couldn’t be from the middle of a fight. Not from close enough to feel the man’s breath. If I couldn’t take the blade from his hand, I’d have to take its work from far.

  I slept. The bell rang.

  The day began again.