Snow ✓

The Watchdog

"Even dogs don't keep their masters waiting."

Rath stood in the doorway, watching Elsie dressed as a predator of the sky in all her silks and feathers sashay around his room, touching everything not his. Oh, how she loved to remind him none of these things were his, from the empty dresser to the closet with five shirts, all stripped from dead men.

"What does that make you?" she asked, eyes glinting in his direction.

"Still spotty with the accidents?"

"Don't jest," she said sharply.

"Sorry, I get snarky when given orders and no time to execute them."

"You must have something. Visiting that girl has kept you from me."

The guards buzz back to their queen like lusty worker bees.

"Well," she spat, "on with it, what have you learned?"

How he liked to watch her squirm. "Not a hell of a lot."

"The little, then."

"She knows she's here because of her brother and that he's dead."

Elsie started to slow clap, "Oh, bravo."

"And she told me to give Elsie her regards."

A subtle grimace ruined her smug visage, that permanent crinkle on her brow deepening into a crevice. No one aboard the ship called Elsie by name, in fact, many of the newer recruits didn't know it. The prospect that Elsie's father was still alive and that Eliwood had found him during his three days of freedom was enough to curdle her from the inside. Rath could see the war waging behind her eyes. Still, Highness was a great pretender, and as quick as the tell had wrinkled her pretty face, it was gone.

"And how could she possibly know my name?"

"I don't know," he said, each word clipped with impatience, "because Highness doesn't like to be kept waiting."

Elsie crossed the room to stand uncomfortably close. Itching to press into that slender neck until it gave, he locked his arms at his side.

"I blame you for the delays. For ten orbits we have bumbled about Helithica far and wide, searching for this mysterious miscreant, jetting across the heavens at every report of a peculiar girl with an old crone's hair and eyes the color of the sun like a dog in heat only to find she was right were you swore to me she wasn't the whole time.

"Don't be fooled by your special circumstances. A dog that gets to shit within porcelain walls must always return to the hand that feeds."

How queenly.

"What about the mutt in the cell beside hers?" she asked with a wave of her hand. "What's she told him?"

"Hurgo won't talk, not to me. Had he been extracted instead of his masochist companion—the dog would have been an easier string to pluck."

Elsie shot him a pointed look, then issued a hefty sigh. "Right now, you're starting to feel like a thorn that's too much trouble to keep in my side. You have until the second sunrise from today to tell me more than that she knows my name. I have waited too long for this one."