'I-I am sorry, your greatness,' she said, catching herself too late. 'They're your pups; you have the naming of them. It is only that I-I am so accustomed to them.'
Ossin shook his head. 'No; they are yours, as they would tell you if we asked them. I am sure you have chosen good names for them.' After a moment he added:
'I am sure you are hearing their names aright.'
She knew that he did not mean that the pups belonged to her, but she was more relieved than she liked to admit that he would let her names for them stand; she feared a little her own tendency to think of names as safety-charms, helping to anchor them more securely to their small tender lives. And the names did fit them; not entirely unlike, she thought, she was 'hearing' them, in the prince's odd quaint phrase. 'Thank you,' she said.
He was smiling, reading in her face that she was not taking him as seriously as he meant what he was saying. 'I have wondered a little that you have not named them before; pups around here have names sometimes before their eyes are open-although I admit the ones likePigface' and `Chaos' are changed later on. And I think you're imagining things about Harefoot, but that's your privilege; a good bit of money-and favors-pass from hand to hand here on just such questions.
'Mind you,' he added, 'the pups are yours, and if you win races with Harefoot the purses are yours, although I will think it a waste of a good hunting dog. But I shall want a litter or two out of the bitches, and some stud service from at least one of the dogs-Ob, isn't it?-I have plans for that line, depending on how they grow up.'
If they grow up, she thought, but she did not say it aloud; she knew in her heart that she was no longer willing even to consider that she might lose so much as one of them, and she kept reminding herself 'if they grow up' as if the gods might be listening, and take pity on her humility, and let her keep them. 'Of course, your greatness,' she said, humoring his teasing.
'And stop calling me 'your greatness.' '
'I'm sorry, y-Ossin.'
'Thank you.'
A day or so later, watching puppies wading through a shallow platter of milk with a little cereal mixed in, and offering a dripping finger to the ones who were slow to catch on (this was becoming dangerous, or at least painful, as their first, needlelike teeth were sprouting), she heard a brief conversation between the prince and Jobe, standing outside the common-room door. This was at some little distance from the puppies' pen, but conversations in the big central aisle carried.
'Tell them none of that litter is available.'
'But it looks like they're all going to live,' Jobe said, obviously surprised. 'You can always change your mind if something knocks most of them off after all.'
'You're not listening,' said Ossin patiently. 'Yes, they are all going to live, barring plague or famine. They are going to live. That's not the issue. He can offer me half his kingdom and his daughter's hand in marriage for all I care. None of Ilgi's last litter is available. Offer him one of Milli's; that line is just as strong, maybe stronger.'
There was a pause, while Jobe digested his master's curious obstinacy-or was it sentimentality? Lissar wondered too. 'I've heard the daughter isn't much anyway,'
said Jobe at last.
The prince's splendid laughter rang out. 'Just so,' he said. 'She neither rides nor keeps hounds.'
When did I start finding his laughter splendid? Lissar thought, as her fingers were half-kneaded, half- punctured by little gums that were developing thorns.
When she went to the bathhouse now, upon her return the puppies all fell on her, wagging their long tails, clambering up her ankles, scaling her lap as soon as she knelt among them. Even Ash now lowered her nose to them and occasionally waved her tail laconically while they greeted her. Her lack of enthusiasm for them never cured them of greeting her eagerly. She would still spring up, dramatically shedding small bodies, if they tried to play with her when she lay down; but if one or three curled up for a nap between her forelegs or against her side, she permitted this.
Lissar saw her lick them once or twice, absently, as if her mind were not on what she was doing; but then for all her reserve her restraint was also perfect, and she never, ever offered to bite or even looked like she was thinking about it, however tiresomely the puppies were behaving.
Lissar was deeply grateful for this; she could not exile her best friend for objecting to her new job. Perhaps Ash understood this. Perhaps she didn't mind puppies so much, it was more that she didn't know what to do with them.
The puppies grew older; now they looked like what they were, fleethounds, among the most beautiful creatures in the world; perhaps the most graceful even among all the sighthound breeds. Though they were puppies still, they lost the awkwardness, the loose-limbedness, of most puppies while they were still very, young. They seemed to dance as they played with each other, they seemed to walk on the ground only because they chose to. When they flattened their ears and wagged their tails at her, it was like a gift.
She loved them all. She tried not to think about Ossin's teasing about their being hers; she tried not to think of how they must leave her soon, or she them. She knew they would be old enough soon to need her no longer-indeed they no longer needed her now, but she supposed that the prince would let her remain with them to the end of their childhood, and she was glad of the reprieve: to enjoy them for a little while, after worrying about them for so long.
During the days now they wandered through the meadows beyond the kennels, she and Ash and a low silky pool of puppies that flowed and murmured around them. Even on most wet days they went out, for by the time the puppies were two months old, getting soaked to the skin was preferable to trying to cope with six young fleethounds' pent-up energy indoors. Even worrying that they might catch cold was better than settling the civil wars that broke out if they stayed in their pen all day.
Lissar could by now leave them as she needed to, although the tumultuousness with which they greeted her reappearance was a discouragement to going away in the first place. She no longer slept every night in the pen; but then neither did they. Her room was up two flights of stairs, and even long-legged fleethound puppies need a little time to learn to climb (and, more important, descend) stairs; and she had assumed that as weaning progressed she ought to wean them of her presence as well. But the little bare room felt hollow, with just her and Ash in it, and it recalled strongly to her mind her lingering dislike of
