It was then and there, at the age of sixteen, that I learned the meaning of anger. A sheet of white fire flashed through me, as I remembered the face of the Dragaeran who had pushed the other into me, killing my egg. I learned that I was capable of murder. I intended to seek out that bastard, and I was going to kill him. There was no question in my mind that he was a dead man. I stood up and headed for the door, still holding the egg—
—And stopped again.
Something was wrong. I had a feeling, which I couldn’t pin down, that was getting through the barrier of my anger. What was it? I looked down at the egg, and suddenly understood in a burst of relief.
Although not consciously aware of it, I had somehow gotten a psionic link to the being inside the egg. I was feeling something through it, on some level, and that meant that my jhereg was still alive.
Anger drained from me as quickly as it had come, leaving me trembling. I went back into the middle of the room and set the egg down on the floor, as softly as I could.
I felt along the link, and identified the emotion I was getting from it: determination. Just raw, blind purpose. I had never been in contact with such singleness of aim. It was startling that a thing that small could produce such high-powered emotion.
I stepped away from it, I suppose from some unreasoning desire to “give it air,” and watched. There was an almost inaudible “tap, tap,” and the crack widened. Then, suddenly, the egg split apart, and this ugly little reptile was lying amid broken shell fragments. Its wings were tightly drawn up against it, and its eyes were closed. The wings were no larger than my thumb.
It—It? He, I suddenly knew. He tried to move; failed. Tried to move again, and got nowhere. I felt that I should be doing something, although I had no idea what. His eyes opened, but didn’t seem to focus on anything. His head lay on the floor, then moved—pitifully.
I felt along my link to him, and now felt confusion and a little fear. I tried to send back feelings of warmth, protection, and all that good stuff. Slowly, I walked up and reached for him.
Surprisingly, he must have seen my motion. He obviously didn’t connect the movement with the thoughts he was getting from me, however, for I felt a quick burst of fear, and he tried to move away. He failed and I picked him up—gingerly. I got two things for this: my first clear message from him and my first jhereg bite. The bite was too small, and the poison still too weak for it to affect me, but he was certainly in possession of his fangs. The message was amazingly distinct.
“Mamma?” he said.
Right. Mamma. I thought that over for a while, then tried to send a message back.
“No, Daddy,” I told him.
“Mamma,” he agreed.
He stopped struggling and seemed to settle down in my hand. I realized that he was exhausted and then realized that I was, too. Also, we were both hungry. At that point it hit me—What the hell was I going to feed him? All the time I’d been carrying him, I’d known that he was going to hatch someday, but it had never really sunk in that there was actually going to be a real, live jhereg there.
I carried him into the kitchen and started hunting around. Let’s see . . . milk. We’ll start with that.
I managed to get out a saucer and pour a little milk into it. I set it down on the counter and set the jhereg down next to it, his head actually in the saucer.
He lapped up a little and didn’t seem to be having any trouble, so I scouted around a little more and finally came up with a small piece of hawk wing. I placed it in the saucer; he found it almost at once. He tore a piece off (he had teeth already—good) and began chewing. He chewed it for close to three minutes before swallowing, but when he did, it went down with no trouble. I relaxed.
After that, he seemed more tired than hungry, so I picked him up and carried him over to the couch. I lay down and placed him on my stomach. I dozed off shortly thereafter. We shared pleasant dreams.
The next day, someone came to my door and clapped, around mid-afternoon. When I opened the door, I recognized the fellow immediately. He was the one who’d been running the game the day before and had told me not to come back—with a knife held against the back of my neck for added emphasis.
I invited him in, being the curious type.
“Thank you,” he said. “I am called Nielar.”
“Please sit down, my lord. I’m Vlad Taltos. Wine?”
“Thank you, but no. I don’t expect to be staying very long.”
“As you wish.”
I showed him to a seat and sat down on the couch. I picked up my jhereg and held him. Nielar arched his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.
“What can I do for you, then?” I asked.
“It has come to my attention,” he said, “that I was, perhaps, in the wrong when I faulted you for the events of yesterday.”
What? A Dragaeran apologizing to an Easterner? I wondered if the world was coming to an end. This was, to say the least, unprecedented in my experience. I mean, I was a 16-year-old human, and he was a Dragaeran who was probably close to a thousand.
“It’s very kind of you to say so, my lord,” I managed.
He brushed it off. “I will also add that I liked the way you handled yourself.”
He did? I didn’t. What was going on here?
“What I’m getting at,” he continued, “is that I could use someone like you, if you have a mind to work for me. I understand that you don’t have a job at the moment, and—” He finished with a shrug.
There were several thousand questions I wanted to ask him, starting with, “How did you find out so much about me and why do you care?” But I didn’t know how to go about asking them, so I said, “With all respect, my lord, I can’t see what kind of things I can do for you.”
He shrugged again. “For one thing, preventing the kind of problems we had last night. Also, I need help from time to time collecting debts. That sort of thing. I normally have two people who assist me in running the place, but one of them had an accident last week, so I’m shorthanded just at the moment.”
Something about the way he said “accident” struck me as strange, but I didn’t take any time out to guess at what he meant.
“Again with all respect, my lord, it doesn’t seem to me that an Easterner is going to look very imposing when standing up to a Dragaeran. I don’t know that I—”
“I’m convinced that it won’t be any problem,” he said. “We have a friend in common, and she assured me that you’d be able to handle this kind of thing. As it happened, I owe her a favor or two, and she asked me to consider taking you on.”
She? There wasn’t any doubt, of course. Kiera was looking out for me again, bless her heart. Suddenly things were a lot clearer.
“Your pay,” he continued, “would be four Imperials a week, plus ten percent of any outstanding debts you are sent to collect. Or, actually, half of that, since you’ll be working with my other assistant.”
Sheesh! Four gold a week? That was already more than I usually made while I was running the restaurant! And the commission, even if it were split with—
“Are you sure that this assistant of yours isn’t going to object to working with a hum—an Easterner?”
His eyes narrowed. “That’s my problem,” he said. “And, as a matter of fact, I’ve already discussed it with Kragar, and he doesn’t mind at all.”
I nodded. “I’ll have to think it over,” I said.
“That’s fine. You know where to reach me.”
I nodded and showed him to the door, with pleasant words on all sides. I looked down at my jhereg as the door snicked shut. “Well,” I asked him, “what do you think?”
The jhereg didn’t answer, but then, I hadn’t expected him to. I sat down to think and to wonder if the question of my future were being settled, or just put off. Then I put it aside. I had a more important question to settle—what was I going to name my jhereg?