“Don’t look away from the traps. He’ll be watching you, anxious about his traps, and forget about me. I’ll circle around behind him, and run him down if I have to.”
She felt sick inside, knowing that he would do exactly that, but nodded, clucked to her horse and carefully steered him through the snow-covered bushes in the direction of that dead hare.
She couldn’t help it; this wasn’t just a lawbreaker to her, this was a person. Just how desperate was this poacher? Did he have half-starved children at home? Or was he purely poaching for profit?
Wait, Eric had said “trapline” — and now, as she stood up in her stirrups for a better view, she could see four more snares from the vantage of the saddle, two of them with something in them. A poor man couldn’t afford that much wire —
“Got you!” Eric shouted in triumph.
She snatched up her crossbow as the horse responded to Eric’s shout by pivoting on his heel and lurching toward the sound of Eric’s voice. There was only the sound of Eric’s voice this time, raised in altercation. The horse plunged through the snow, snorting with excitement. Evidently he was used to this sort of thing. She stuck to him like the proverbial burr, as firm in the saddle now as she had been uneasy a few days ago. As she cleared the trees that were between her and the men, she saw that Eric was still in the saddle, holding a man by the collar, and mercilessly beating him with a short, stout club as he covered his head with his arms and tried to escape, crying out with pain.
But a savage blow brought him down into the snow, and Eric leapt from the saddle to finish the job, ending with a vicious kick to the ribs. While the man lay there, only semiconscious, Eric lifted a heavy string of rabbits and hares from behind the bushes the man had been hiding in and fastened it to the back of his saddle.
Her horse whickered, and Eric turned to grin at her. “Abel, go collect those snares as I showed you. I’m going to have a little discussion with our friend here about why it isn’t wise to steal someone else’s game. When you’ve finished, come back. I want you to see how it’s done proper.”
It was quite a long trapline. She found more than twenty snares, and a total of six more rabbits and hares. It was obvious this was a man looking to turn a profit; no one could eat this much meat, no matter how big his family was. She felt a little better about her part in all this.
But when she returned, and saw Eric bending over the man with a knife, for one horrified moment she thought —
Then she saw the hank of dark, matted hair being tossed aside. And another. And another.
She rode up to see that Eric was shaving the unconscious man bald.
“What — ” she began.
“Mercy, Abel, and more than he deserves.” Another hank of hair was tossed aside. Eric was literally shaving the man bald with his hunting knife. That knife must be incredibly sharp, she thought, watching Eric continue to work with the same fascination with which she watched spiders catching flies. “The constables and I have an agreement. If they see someone who’s been shaved bare and has my sign inked on his pate, it means he’s a poacher and they can throw the weight of the law on him. Now, I could brand him, and I used to do that, but that’s a nuisance — you have to build a fire and get the iron hot, and then there’s all the screaming. And worst of all, the stink of burned hair!” He laughed. “So Sebastian made me a thing like a wax seal for sealing letters, only it makes an imprint on skin and carries its own ink.”
“So, he might not get the constables on him?” she hazarded.
“I’m a hunter at heart. I like to give the game a fair chance to escape. Everyone knows the game. Now, all our poacher here needs to do to stay out of gaol or avoid a real branding is to lie low until his hair grows again. But he won’t be going into the city or the villages to sell his catch for all that time, and he won’t be running his trap line, because why bother when he can’t sell the catch? So he gets off with a beating, and losing his livelihood, unless he’s got another besides this. If he’s smart, he’d better find one, because if I catch him a second time, it’ll be the worse for him. Depending on how I feel, I’ll either brand his face myself, or cut off his first finger.”
“He’s a butcher,” she said, instantly. “I know him.” To her surprise when Eric had turned the man’s head a bit she had recognized him as one of the butchers she occasionally bought meat from. “Alain Charpentier. He has a butcher shop near the Bell Gate.”
“Really? Well, his ’prentice is going to be tending the front of the shop for a while. Or else he’d better make himself a wig.” Eric dropped the man’s head, reached into a belt-pouch, and pulled out a wooden square about half the size of his fist. He pressed it into the skin of the man’s head and took it away. Now stamped into the skin in black ink was an E with an arrow for the upright. Eric stood up and gave the man a final kick. The man didn’t even whimper. “Hell. I didn’t hit him that hard. Soft bastard.” He bent down and shook the man roughly until he groaned and opened his eyes.
Terror crossed his pulped features. “Please, master — ” the butcher said mushily. “Please, master, don’t kill me — ”
“Oh, as soon as you start to feel those bruises, you’ll wish you were dead,” Eric said cheerfully. “You’ve been branded, coney-catcher. You know what that means. Right?”
The butcher nodded his head, water streaming from his swollen eyes. Eric stood back, arms folded over his chest. “Now, run along home and stay out of sight of the constables, and be glad I decided to not outrage my new partner’s sensibilities by knocking a few of your teeth out as an added lesson.”
Babbling as best he could with swollen and bleeding lips, the butcher scrabbled to his feet, and staggered off, swearing to never touch a snare again.
“Would you really have knocked out his teeth?” Bella asked.
“Depends on my mood,” Eric replied carelessly, swinging himself back up into the saddle. “He didn’t fight back, so my mood is generous. Now comes the question, which I will ask you to decide, Abel. There are more coneys here than we need by far. So…what to do with ’em? Sebastian won’t care if I sell ’em, but that’s tedious, though profitable — and it would be amusing to sell them right back to the bastard. He wouldn’t dare refuse to pay anything I asked, either.” Eric tilted his head to the side, watching her closely.
“Take them to Father Gentian, at Four Saints,” she said instantly.
“Oh so? And why should we be giving them away? I want to keep people terrified of me, not thinking I’m some sort of benefactor.” Eric looked at her curiously — but not angrily, so she continued.
“I’ve got good reasons that I think you’ll understand, even if you don’t want to do this. First, Four Saints feeds the poorest folk of the city. If they’re being fed, they won’t be out here poaching.” She ticked off a finger. “Second, you can go in there growling that the Duke made you bring them to the good Father instead of selling them, which keeps your reputation intact. And third, word will get around that you brought a huge number of hares to Four Saints. The butcher will hear about it, know those were his hares and be in agony all over again at losing them. You’ll have punished him twice over.”
Eric burst into surprised laughter. “And here I thought you were going to give me some sort of cant about caring for the needy and all that rot! I like the way you think. Practical, with just a touch of harshness to keep things interesting. Maybe a bit of cruelty for spice. It’s too bad you’re leaving after two months, Abel. Maybe I could use a partner, after all!” He laughed again.