“Hello, Stog,” Wistala said in the beast-tongue the mule had used in his calumnies. “Welcome to Mossbell.”
“Drop all the two-leggeds,” Stog said to no one in particular. “Left to rot again.”
Rainfall worked long into the night on the mule’s hooves, gathering plants and then mixing them with a white powder he kept in a clay jar. Then he filled four leather-bottomed canvas bags with the sharp-smelling mix and tied them to the mule’s hooves, after fixing a wooden gate around his neck that kept him from lowering his head to chew the poultices free.
“Bug me! That stings,” Stog said, and tried to bite Rainfall as he worked.
Too stupid to recognize a kind turn, Wistala thought, and settled down in her old spot to sleep.
Rainfall was still at work when she awoke. He’d cleaned, brushed, and clipped every inch of the mule, who looked immeasurably better but still angry.
“Ah, there you are,” Rainfall said as she drank from the central cistern. “Could you watch him for a few hours? He’s trying to kick the bags off. I hobbled him”—he pointed at a line between stable and the horse’s rear leg—“but I wonder if he’s out of tricks.”
“I’d be happy to.”
Rainfall extended a hand to Stog’s nose, but he just tried to bite again.
“As you like,” Rainfall said. He left, shoulders sagging.
“You should be grateful,” Wistala said from a high perch in the almost-empty loft.
“Gut-kick gratitude,” Stog said. “Torturing two-leg. He’s burning my hooves right off, I’ll signify.”
Stog spoke the beast-tongue better than Avalanche. Perhaps he was a well-traveled mule.
“He’s kind beyond my ability to tell. It may hurt now, but your feet will feel better soon, I’m sure.”
“So speaks the drakka with her claws all clean and cool.”
This was strange. Not only had the mule identified her as a female, but he’d correctly guessed that she was no longer a hatchling.
“You know about dragons,” she said.
“I know about killing them. I was in the Dragonblade’s mule train.” The long brown face told her nothing, but the ears twitching this way and that suggested that Stog would welcome a fight.
“The last time I saw the Dragonblade, it was just him and his dogs. No mules.”
“You saw the Dragonblade and lived?”
Wistala tried to remain as calm as the mule. His ears were forward with interest. “Big broad man? Black armor like dragonscale?”
“Not like, it is. I’ve borne many a dragon-hoof or hide-scraping on my back.”
“Then why aren’t you still carrying pieces of slaughtered dragon?”
Stog tried to stamp, but the hobble prevented his moving. “The Dragonblade was hurrying north, and I came up lame. I was traded for a shaggy-faced pony and left in the blackest hole of an old stable.
“I waited days and days for him to return. How could he forget his stoutest mule?”
Wistala saw the mule’s ears droop at the memory. Finally his tail swished, and he looked at her afresh as he spoke: “I pulled a trash-sled in snow up to my fetlocks now and then. The stablehands beat me like a muddy rug. Until the hooves started to go. The hostler tried to sell me off, but the clodclutters took one look at my hooves and wised up.”
“So you know the lay of the land around the thane’s hold?”
“Some of it.”
“Tell me more.”
“Why should I do that?”
“To take your mind off your hooves,” Wistala said. “Besides, there might be a way for you to give them a bite back for their mistreatment.”
“I wouldn’t mind catching the hostler bending over with his back turned. I’d send him through the wall. But even a good stomp would fix me. If you hit hominids on the inside of their hoof just right, they hop about shouting. Most gratifying.”
The moon changed all the way round once, and then to half so fast Wistala hardly knew time passed, save for the changes for the better to Stog’s hooves, healing under Rainfall’s constant attention.She took to exploring outside Mossbell’s grounds, particularly to a high ridge to the northeast. From the trees on its top, she could see an even higher ridge with a single line of trees and an old broken watchtower that marked the edge of Galahall’s lands, according to Stog. The ground between was little used, as it was poor in soil and water.
She worked on her Parl by asking Jessup about the woods, ostensibly with an eye toward the hunting prospects of the Thickets, as that part of the thanedom was known.
Jessup was working the roadside near the river, sinking a well. He’d laid out a few stones in what Rainfall’s study-books called a rectangle on a flat, firm piece of land. Every now and then he would fell a few trees and place them on the rocks so they could dry without touching the ground, whistling more loudly through his teeth as the pile of lumber grew.
He quit working as she nosed around, and took off his ear-flapped cap to scratch his head. “Hunting? Some pheasant, a gobbler or two. No wild boar or deer left—the thane has hunted them all.”
“I’d like to avoid notice.”
“Then keep to the thorn hollows. Not a problem for you. Your skin should keep them out.” He looked doubtful, then took a step closer. “May I touch?”
Wistala raised her head and turned sideways. “The ones on my back are the thickest.”
He ran his hand over her scales. “Like . . . like cast iron, only rougher.”
Wistala used a saa to scritch at the back of her shoulder, where a few of her hatchling scales still clung. One dropped off, and she flipped it to him with her nose. “One of your own.”
“I may keep this?”
“You may.”
He bowed in gratitude.
“Could I ask a favor of you?” Wistala asked.
“I’ve more wealth than my father saw in his lifetime, thanks to you. I’d do my best.”
“I’d like to start bringing home game to Mossbell. Rainfall has been feeding me for so long, I’d like to do the same for him.”
“The master gives too much. He’s . . . he’s noble that way. Go on.”
“I need a sort of harness that will allow me to carry a few birds or a quartered deer. Can you manage it?”
“I’ll see the hidesman and blacksmith a-morrow.” He scratched his close-cropped head again, circling her and cocking his head this way and that in thought.
Wistala bowed. “Thank you. Anything I can do to help—”
“Stand still.”
He took a ball of string from his pocket and measured her, along the back, around her neck, across her shoulders, making little marks on the string with a bit of charcoal. “I expect I’ll have it done by blueberry day.”
“Which is?” The profusion of hominid holidays were all jumbled in Wistala’s head; they celebrated everything from turns of the stars and moon to hop-picking to the ripening of the first plum.
“Eight days.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m the one obliged, Wisssakle.”
“Wistala.”
Jessup did better on the second try. When Wistala nuzzled him and gave a bit of a prrum to congratulate him, his face broke into a grin. “Me conversing with a dragon in its own tongue. Like something out of a bedtime story.”
With the air warm and spring in full bloom, Stog came outdoors. His hooves had been turned flaky and white by Rainfall’s applications, but strong and healthy hoof lived beneath, revealed as the diseased parts fell away.
Wistala took Stog to see Avalanche’s grave, as a final proof of Rainfall’s goodness and the turn of his fortune marked by the mule’s arrival at Mossbell.
Stog snorted. According to the mule, horses got all the glory, and mules did all the work. “We can go twice as far, carrying twice the load, on half the feed as a horse. Up hills they’d break a leg on and down valleys that would mean their necks, too. But where’s the poetry, the statuary?”
“Just wait. I’ll give you a chance to show a pack of horses a trick or two.”
Jessup came through on his harness. It was a clever bit of craft, looping around her neck, tail, and forelimbs. There were eyes here and there in the leather straps, where she could hook game nets (or bags, or waterskins, she thought). She had room in the buckles for her to almost double in size. He took it away almost as soon as she tried it on, insisting on improvements, and returned it with twin linked straps running ladderlike down her back. She found some game nets in Mossbell’s dry attic and learned to fix them on herself.
With that, she told Rainfall she’d be gone a few days and plunged into the Thickets. She did hunt, but her real purpose was a trek to Galahall.
Know your hunting ground, Mother always used to say. As hatchlings, Auron had always ignored that advice and plunged straight into the center of the home cave as if expecting a slug to pop up and ask to be eaten. Hunting took patience, knowledge of game trails and habits, and above all, a feel for terrain, weather, and wind.