Work Text:
Goodley stands at the door to watch the slave crawl across the yard. No need, when you know how a beaten dog moves.
The pieces of Bauglir’s splint are scattered on your floorboards. Bauglir’s carved-up witch-woman, who has lived this long only because her work is half-decent, is locked behind your door.
The slave said he was Bauglir’s, too, and for once, he wasn’t lying.
“Goodley.”
“Yessir?”
“Clear this lot out. And burn it.” You fish around in your pocket for another chew. The slave isn’t done being proud, for all his begging. For all his hiding and weaseling.
This is one who’ll need watching until he’s dead. You’ve known this a while, but it’s no help.
If you were Bauglir, you’d follow him, and be there to beat him when he fell, too exhausted to drag onwards. Or you’d chain him by the neck to one of the table-legs and let him be an amusement for the guard-house traffic. A dog is a dog is a dog.
But you are not Bauglir, you never have been. Never will be.
You bite the plug in half.
There was a sweetness to the simplicity of shooting the Irishman near his heart. His round-mouthed sons dragged him out, firing off and blubbering, but you knew when you pulled the trigger:
The Irishman was dead.
So was your luck, seemingly. There’s the rub, the rage. There’s the gall that you couldn’t work out with thirty lashes, couldn’t have with a hundred lashes, even when the whole back of his red eldest was also writhing, weeping red.
You clench your fist. Goodley’s gone. The rest are at supper, likely.
You were steady in the south—steady. You killed men on your own time, with no worry of a master questioning it.
Bauglir doesn’t know how to build a mountain stronghold, how to take pleasure without ruining his object. Bauglir doesn’t know how close you come to splitting him open with the bullet the Irishman didn’t need. The next bullet.
Bauglir has money, and power, and too many troublesome servants to count. You’ve had masters before, but you ain’t had a master like him.
The money has long been enough. The climate is strange but not unreasonable. You’re not a man who needs comforts. You do need the right to keep order, though, and that’s what has slipped away, with the slave you thought would save your neck.
You gave him power, when you kept mad Mairon from killing him. You gave him power, because he was a gift.
He has never given you all that power back again, no matter how you break him down.
You know it. Bauglir knows it. What the slave knows should not matter, but it may.
You chew and spit, chew and spit. Half wish you’d dragged the ghoul-faced girl out of the cupboard to make him look at her while he lied.
This is rage, and it is his fault, but Bauglir’s gain.
It’s time for a change.