The man bowed silently, knowing better than to laugh; it wasn't a joke. He added the teal to his game-bag. Two hares, a pheasant, and a duck: not a bad afternoon. Dougal had been delighted when the peregrine showed she would take hares. Birds were her natural prey. She would eat well, back at the mews, and sleep.
"Yes, my love. You will eat well, but not as well as you might wish." The falcon's eyes relaxed, lulled by the sound of his voice and the power of his Blood behind it. He didn't need to hood her.
"Yes, my precious killer. Just like Maureen, I must keep you sharp. A well-fed hunter is a lazy hunter. If you fed on that teal, you would gorge yourself, and I could not hunt you again tomorrow. Just like Maureen, you must always want that little something more which only I can give you."
Her eyelids drooped, and she dozed on his wrist, bathing in the joy of killing and the calm warmth of his presence. Food, and sleep, and the fierce exultation of deadly flight: these were her world.
He gave them to her. She had forgotten that he had first taken them away. He was her god.
Soon Maureen would see him the same way. Then he could use her to attack those keeps of renegade slaves and the traitors of the Blood who sheltered them, carve the human cancer from the belly of the Summer Country. Then he could quit twitching every time Fiona looked up from her cottage and her nasty little games.
He frowned and shook his head. Balance Maureen against the loss of the dragon, and he still came out ahead. However, he would have preferred not to pay so high a price for her, no matter how great her power and beauty.
The dragon, too, had been beautiful.
Dougal turned and took one last glance over the fields, breathed deep of the rotting marshes. Again he spoke to the falcon, and himself. "Those are Fiona's fields you flew, my darling. In human terms, you and I were poaching her preserves. Our truth is a little deeper than that, isn't it, more like a reconnaissance? Testing an enemy's defenses? I'm sure she felt my footsteps on her grass, knows each time we probe and where. It's all part of the game we play."
Fiona being who she was, he needed to check the edges on a regular basis, see what plants she might have sent creeping along as advance scouts of an invasion. The marsh was one way he fought back, wild land conquering her pasture. In Scots terms, they were border lairds, never truly controlling any ground their troops did not stand on with weapons bared.
One of his troops materialized out of the brush, licking his paws. Blood spotted Shadow's nose and cheeks, and the fastidious cat groomed it out of his charcoal fur. Dougal saw a rabbit in the leopard's thoughts, and Sean creeping through the forest, and Maureen's sister by a pool. He thought about setting the cat to hunt down one or both of them, and shook his head. He never discarded tools before their usefulness was done.
Instead, he told the cat to prowl, and started the climb back to his keep. I need more guards, he thought. Losing the dragon leaves a hole in my defenses. Shadow should stay in the keep, with me.
Perhaps Liu Chen would discuss the cost of importing another worm from the Celestial Temple. Chinese myth holds such exquisitely dangerous animals. No one else would have exactly what I need, the hunger and the cunning and the beauty.
Or maybe the dead dragon's mate would succeed with that clutch of eggs. Only time would tell.
He climbed through the tangled, dangerous wildness of his forest, testing his eyes and ears and Blood against the defenses he'd set. Finally, grassland opened out around his keep--the open hilltop that provided a clear view of anyone approaching, a clear shot at anyone approaching.
Padric waited, summoned by guards who knew better than to let anyone approach the keep unnoticed and un-met. The master falconer took the peregrine gently on his arm and smiled as if the bird was his, the training of it was his, the pride of mastery was his. Sometimes Padric stepped above his station. Dougal didn't think he was a harsh master, but he insisted that humans know their place.
"She missed one stoop on the pheasant, and was slow to come back for the second. Have you been feeding her too much?" The accusations were half-true, at best, but they would serve to remind Padric of who ruled the keep and mews.
Padric's smile vanished. "No, master. Only the standard working ration." He quickly ran experienced fingers over her legs, her crop, through her flight feathers, down her back and tail. If she had a flaw or injury, those fingers would know. The peregrine studied him in return, as if she questioned his fitness for the hunt.
"And how is the woman doing?"
"Not well, master. She wastes away. She loses weight much faster than she should."
Dougal nodded. "That's her magic wrestling with mine. Make sure she gets no meat, no fats, no sweets--nothing with energy or blood in it, nothing to feed her powers. You've only given her the skimmed-milk cheese?" Starvation was a two-pronged weapon in his strategy, weakening both her will and the power flowing in her veins.
"Exactly as you said."
"Good. And the rest?"
"She mutters. She talks to people who are not there, sees things that are not there. Now that we've unchained her, she sits and rocks back and forth, staring at the walls. The last time I checked on her, she didn't even see me. Her eyes were open, but her mind was far away."
"Good."
"I was happier when she tried to hit me." Padric raised one
