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 sleeping under roofs. She thought about the fact that the prince's two favorite dogs went almost everywhere with him (they slept by the door of the puppies' pen on the nights he spent there), and that Jobe and Hela and the others usually had a dog or three sleeping with them.
No one but Lissar had seven. She had crept up very late the first night out of the pen, puppies padding and tumbling and occasionally yelping behind her. She'd been practicing for this with some outside steps conveniently located for such a purpose.
The puppies were ready-they were always ready-for anything that looked like a game; Climbing Stairs was fine with them. Harefoot was the cleverest at it straight away; she and Pur were the two tallest, but she carried her size the more easily. At first they only spent half the night upstairs; two flights were simply too many to have to go up and down more than once, and the puppies were learning that there was a difference between under-a-roof and out-of-doors in terms of where they were allowed to relieve themselves. Fleethounds were tidy dogs, and quick to catch on; but infant muscular control can do only so much. By the end of the first week of the new system, they were waking Lissar up at midnight, and going to stand by the pen door in an expectant manner; although Meadowsweet and Fen took turns needing to be carried upstairs, and occasionally Ferntongue forgot as well. But there were only one or two accidents on the bare, easily cleaned floor of the bedroom, neatly deposited in some corner, well away from the mattress Lissar had dragged off the bed so they could all sleep on it more comfortably.
Her puppies were sleeping through the night by the time they were three months old.
"That's extraordinary," Hela said, when, at three and a half months, Lissar told her this. "That's extraordinary," was also what Hela had said the first time she saw the puppy waterfall pouring down the stairs.
"They're extraordinary puppies," said Lissar proudly, trying not to grin foolishly, at the same time reaching over to pry Fen's teeth out of Pur's rump. But she looked up, smiling, at Hela's face, and there was that look again; the look at Lilac's breakfast table, the look the kennel staff had given her the first evening in the common-room.