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There is silver in the water.
You rest your snout on your paws and watch the fish flicker and shimmer, watch the moonlight change its pace, and do not leap and splash as you would usually do. The boy beside you is not your master, but you love him.
He sits with his hands on his knees, the long tails of his coat fanned out behind him on the cool ground. He smells like blood and fear, and you lift your head from your paws and nudge it against his shin.
Silver in the water; no fish.
His fingers grasp your fur and he is shaking, he is afraid, his chest rises and falls beneath a sick sheen of sweat. If he was your master, he would tear at his hair and kick at the earth and weep, but he does none of these things—
Your master told you to follow him, because your master loves him, too. He is the one who looks after them, and you would never hurt him, would never doubt him, even when he smelled like ash and mud and other men’s blood.
So did they all. So did your master.
When your master was young and you were still a pup, both of you all misplaced limbs, you found a rabbit hiding in the flowerbeds. You could have killed it, but there was something shining from the creature’s round eye that made you nose against it instead, already sated on the scraps of meat you had eaten that morning.
You lift your head a little higher, and you try to see his eyes.
He is breathing hard. You yawn, your eyes snap shut and slide open, you are hungry, and he is still shaking against you.
He should weep and get it over with, but he will not.
The night is crawling by, but you do not leave him. Down by the creek he led you, where they wash their clothes and their faces, and fill their kettles for boiling.
You are patient, and you will not leave the ones they love when they smell like blood and fear. You curl your whole length around him, your belly against his boots, and as the hours pass he mutters many words like wind snapping through new branches.
Words of hate, none of them to you. Then he is silent.
There is a mouse three leaps from you in the grass. You do not budge. There are birds in the trees; they wake, and dawn will come soon.
He is no longer trembling—his hands hang over his knees as if he sleeps, but you lift your head to look at him and his eyes are open.
His eyes are open, and unseeing, and so deeply, blackly hollow—
The rabbit, you understand, was stiff with the knowledge of its own death.