Chapter Text
Three dogs leapt furiously from the various couches and chairs, knocking Roche from his couch-slump onto the floor, as they all tore furiously barking toward the door. After that, the interloper didn’t really need to knock, but he did anyway.
Roche picked himself up off the floor, cursing thoroughly; of course he’d dozed off in a precarious position on the couch in front of the lovely warm embers of the fireplace which had since gone out and it was stone-cold in here, and now his fucking leg was fucking-- argh-- he’d landed badly too, and he could barely walk. The fucking nerve of someone to knock on the fucking door at this--
Wait, three dogs? Fuck.
Strega was missing.
He cracked the door open, holding Flash, Nosewise, and Dukat back as best he could, and was greeted with the unwelcome sight of a tall man with a brimmed hat overshadowing his face, awkwardly hunched over to hold Strega by her collar. “Ah shit,” Roche said. He didn’t know the guy but he’d seen him; that was the neighbor down the road, he thought, who was a reclusive hermit of some kind. He’d been warned about him when he’d bought the place, the seller had said a few elliptical things, implying various dark fearsome stories. Roche hadn’t been interested in the warnings, but when he’d seen the guy skulking through the woods he’d thought perhaps the old lady had actually been onto something there.
“If I let go,” the neighbor said, in a more nasal and resonant voice than Roche had expected, “will she run off again, or will she come to you?” He had the faintest trace of an accent, or more accurately a manner of speaking, that was distinctive-- he was Aen Seidhe, then, after all. Which explained some of the things the lady had been hinting at, which had come across as vaguely racist and now Roche could be certain that they in fact definitely had been.
“Strega,” Roche said, and she capered madly, scrabbling toward him. He had to open the door the rest of the way, holding the other dogs back with all his limbs, his bad leg screaming at him so he couldn’t think straight. “Fuck. Fuck, guys, fucking-- will you-- gods damn it--”
The neighbor, having let go of the dog so she could wiggle joyfully over to Roche, stepped back. “She ought to be on a leash,” he said.
“I didn’t think she’d go that far,” Roche said, getting a hand free to hold the door not quite shut, so he could run his hand over her with the other hand. “Are you hurt at all, girl? Where did you go?”
“I think you’ll find she doesn’t speak English,” the neighbor said. “And there is a leashing ordinance in this township, you can’t just let her roam. It’s not safe.”
“I’ll-- there’s a fence, I’ll fix the fence,” Roche said, and just then Nosewise, excitable, rammed his body into the door so that Roche lost his grip and the door slammed shut. “Fuck,” he said, and let go of the dogs. But when he looked out the window next to the door, the neighbor had vanished. No-- there he was, at the edge of the porch light, walking away. Well-- too late, opening the door to shout at him would read as hostile.
“Well,” Roche said, to the maelstrom of canine activity in his house now, “another social interaction handled masterfully, great work team.”
It had been without much enthusiasm that Iorveth had watched this dh’oine move in with his herd of dogs and boxes of possessions, as the winter had lost its grip on the land and the thaws had come. It wasn’t that he was a newcomer; Iorveth himself had only been here a year or so. But the fence behind the cabin was ramshackle, the property itself not well-kept besides the over-lavishly refurbished house itself, and Iorveth had been hoping it would remain vacant, or failing that, wind up in the hands of someone who’d only use it as a very occasional hunting lodge. He could‘ve stayed out of sight two or three times a year for a drunken guys’ weekend or something; idiot dh’oine hunters weren’t likely to disturb his wilderness garden very much, and he had been enjoying having this property unoccupied for him to tend to at will. He knew the rhythms of it now, knew where the spring ephemerals would soon be blooming, knew where the nuts had fallen in autumn and where the summer berries had ripened, knew the deer trails and where the coyotes walked and where the crows gathered in the mornings. There was a grove of alders down in the swampy area just across the property line that-- well, they weren’t the ones he’d known, but they were kin, and he could read the way the wind trembled their leaves, a haunting echo of the old ways he’d learned in his childhood. This place was dear to him, beyond the bounds of the property line.
But this fellow-- beyond just being a dh’oine, and having had construction workers making a terrible din up here all autumn and much of winter, the new neighbor was the square-jawed type whose every line radiated cop, and worse, his garbage bin was always full of bottles and not much else. (To his credit, the bins were properly locked up in a shed to deter wildlife; to his not-credit, the shed extravagantly had a glass window, so it was easy enough for Iorveth to keep tabs on its contents.) Saw too much in the line of duty and came out here to drink himself to death, was Iorveth’s rather well-informed conclusion after a fair amount of observation.
Observation was what Iorveth mainly did, nowadays. He took daily walks, sometimes twice-daily, relying on the signs in the forest to keep his paranoia at bay. His own mind, battered by trauma, might lie to him, but the woods wouldn’t; the birds, the bugs, the porcupine in the white oak under the crest of the hill, the deer who bedded down in the south hillside, the vixen whose nighttime screams had made the forest so eerie last spring and who’d subsequently raised three cubs in her den tucked up by the ridge. The owls-- great horned, hooting solemnly to each other before dawn in rhymed triplets, and the barred, whose calls the dh’oine transcribed as “who cooks for you?” but his people believed were asking “where have you been?” (Ca, ca raibh tu? Ca, ca, ca raibh tu?) The trees-- white and yellow birch, white pine, blue spruce, sugar maple, ash and oak, black walnut, and those beautiful alders-- the understory plants, brambles and witch hazels and little cedars-- even the funguses, the chicken-of-the woods and the giant puffballs and the oysters and in spring the elusive, delicious morels--
They took care of him, and he of them. He watched them, he tended them, he observed them, and they told him how the land was faring. And they told him of intruders, told him when they were disturbed.
But this dh’oine, Iorveth had to observe directly. His forest could not warn him about the dh’oine, beyond letting him know he was there; could not know his intentions, could not monitor his habits for signs of danger. Iorveth had to watch, and his spotting scope had come out of its dusty case, and his old sniper skills had needed to dust themselves off as well, finding him the patience to sit, all motion suspended, and observe the target for however long it took. (Irritatingly, it was too often raining for him to work on his knitting during this process. If he’d known how to knit when he was in active service, all that waiting would have gone more smoothly.)
The man mostly stayed inside, mostly sat around, mostly hollered at the dogs ineffectually. He did not walk the woods, did not do more than perhaps look at it out the windows. He burned wood inefficiently and sporadically in his decorative fireplace, and did not look outside.
Probably beat someone to death and got kicked off the force, Iorveth concluded sourly, with full retirement pay, and was out here to let nature take its course on him, without really having thought it through first.
The fence, a sad falling-down little excuse for an enclosure, likely the remnants of the previous owner’s brief foray into gardening (or more accurately the remnants of their realization that the deer made that sort of thing unrewarding), was of course completely inadequate for the dogs. They’d been over to Iorveth’s place within the first three days. He’d proofed his place for bear, so there wasn’t so much as a hint of anything interesting to them-- not a bone, not a hide, not a scrap, no unsecured bins, no bird food, nothing. So they’d gone home. Not before he’d noticed that they all had expensive leather collars with custom-engraved brass plates on them. They’d gone home, and hadn’t been back.
Except this one. This troublesome one. She came back regularly, even though there was nothing for her here. She was a young springer spaniel-- he’d looked it up, at the end of that first week, on his regular town run for supplies, stopped by the library and got on the Internet and looked up dog breeds. A field spaniel, he judged, liver markings, with the docked tail customary to the breed. She actually looked like she might be pedigreed. Well, with the expensive engraved collar, it stood to reason. This guy came from money, looked like. Made sense; the crews that had come out and fixed the roof and done all kinds of remodeling before he’d even moved in obviously cost a lot of money. There had been all kinds of huge boxes too, new appliances and things, and the power was turned back on out this far, which was a boon-- now Iorveth could steal power from the pole, if he was clever and daring, but he’d grown used to doing without in the intervening months, so it wasn’t as exciting as it might have been.
But this dog-- this dog was bored. Iorveth didn’t know dogs specifically all that well, had never cared for them much, but he’d grown up with dogs around, and generally understood animals. This one liked attention and very clearly needed a lot of exercise.
Her name also meant “witch”, according to Iorveth’s online research, which-- well Iorveth wasn’t really a superstitious sort, not with dh’oine stuff, but he figured messing with shit like that was a pretty bad idea. He didn’t know, though, maybe dh’oine thought that kind of thing was lucky. More likely, they just didn’t respect it, like they didn’t respect anything.
Didn’t respect the needs of an innocent animal who hadn’t asked for this, Iorveth judged. After an unbroken seven days of Iorveth marching the dog back over once or twice per day, the dh’oine had gone into town and bought supplies for a new fence, and started building it. He was still working on it when Iorveth came over with the dog on the leash he’d finally cobbled together so as not to have to bend to hold her collar-- it was a bit of rope with a swivel snap clip tied on the end.
The dh’oine didn’t hear him coming; he was facing the other way, wearing a pair of earmuff-style hearing protection. Iorveth eyed them calculatingly: those were for shooting, had a brand name on them like you’d see at a gun range, they weren’t construction worker earmuffs.
Cop.
He had the hearing protection on because he was using a manual post-pounder to set the posts for the fence, the kind that was just a heavy tube you picked up by the handles and dropped on the post to drive it in. Hard work, those. It’d be futile, the ground was still frozen on the north facing slopes, but this yard faced south and had full sun exposure all day and Iorveth had to grudgingly admit he wasn’t insane for doing a building project here-- this side was thawed fine. The dh’oine had stripped down to a thin t-shirt to do it, despite the weather still being chilly. He wasn’t a big guy, but he wasn’t scrawny either-- wiry motherfucker, was probably strong as anything, and his muscled arms were littered with shitty little stick-and-poke tattoos. He was also wearing a clunky shoulder brace on one shoulder, an assemblage of Velcro and nylon. Probably didn't even get hurt on the job, Iorveth thought a little sourly, probably overdid it at the gym, but he knew that was pointless sour-grapes and cut the thought off.
Iorveth stood with the dog on the rope and watched him for a bit. Yeah, this was a dangerous type, Iorveth thought, watching the muscles flex in the dh’oine’s back as he moved to the next post and heaved the post-pounder into place. At first he thought the shirt was patterned, but as the dh’oine moved Iorveth realized the shadows on the shirt were more tattoos showing through-- big emblem over the shoulder blade, from the shape of it a heraldic crest, and more shitty little tattoos here and there-- a monarchist, likely, as well as a cop. Ugh.
The fucking monarchy had ruined Iorveth’s fucking life, and the lives of most everyone he knew, and maybe he’d won some reforms out of them but it had cost him everything and then when all was done it had broken him, just for effect, and here he was, washed-up, flotsam, a remnant. He could not manage polite conversation with a monarchist.
People always thought Iorveth was intimidating, tall and well-built, and sure he could cause some damage, had done plenty of that in his life, but in his experience you really had to look out for the wiry little motherfuckers like this, who you might overlook but who’d tear you apart on the slightest pretense. This one certainly could.
Before making this trek, Iorveth had taken the dog along with him on a brisk tour of the road side of his property, figuring if she peed in a few places she’d help keep the coyotes out a bit, and she’d obliged. Not a bad walking companion, he’d had to admit; she’d run off into the woods but would come back if he called her, most of the time, and she liked to come and check in with him and then go bounding off into the woods again. He’d accidentally discovered that if he threw a branch she’d be ecstatically delighted to retrieve it and bring it back, but wouldn’t give it back to him; he’d have to throw a second one to get her to drop the first one so he could throw it again. But it had made for an entertaining walk, if not a useful one for checking up on wildlife. (The dog made an almighty racket, crashing through underbrush. He’d barely even seen so much as a bluejay; the crows had fled shouting at their approach. But that didn’t erase the tracks; he could tell what the various critters and plants and mosses and fungi had been up to, and most importantly, could tell no humans had been by, as they oughtn’t to have been, as he constantly had to reassure himself.)
The dog was happy to sit next to him now, worn-out and panting and wagging. So he stood and waited, and it was a goodly long time before one of the other dogs, one of the old ones, noticed him and started barking. Strega leapt up and barked back, and Iorveth sighed, bent, and unfastened her leash.
The dh’oine pulled off his hearing protection and turned around in some alarm. “Flash! Dukat! Where--”
Strega bounded up to him in delight, and he saw her, and only then looked up and saw Iorveth. “Oh, hey,” he said, a little embarrassed. He knew that hadn’t been an impressive display of vigilance either. Iorveth kept his amusement off his face.
“Found your dog,” he said, instead of anything else.
The dh’oine gestured over his shoulder. “Sorry. I’m fixing the fence!”
“I see,” Iorveth said. Well, there wasn’t really anything else to say, so he shifted his weight to turn to go.
“Wait,” the dh’oine said. “I-- thanks. I meant to say thanks before. Thanks for being patient and bringing my dog back.”
“She could get hit by a car,” Iorveth said. “You know the highway’s less than a mile that way.” He tipped his head to indicate the direction. It was a mile and a half, actually, as the crow flew, and longer by the twisting mountain road that came to them here, but a dog could get there easily.
“I know,” the dh’oine said, “I know.” He set the post-pounder down and pulled off his work glove, wiping his forehead; he had a disreputable ball cap on and ugly sunglasses. Always had a hat of some kind on whenever Iorveth came by; that was kind of weird-- he knew enough dh’oine to know that wasn’t like, a cultural thing. “I didn’t think she’d be such a wanderer, she never was before.”
“Had a big yard before?” Iorveth asked.
“Well,” the dh’oine said. “Haven’t had her that long. She’s a rescue.”
“Dog like this needs a lot of exercise,” Iorveth said.
“Do you know a lot about dogs?” the dh’oine asked, not unfriendly-- kind of hopeful.
“I don’t like dogs,” Iorveth said. There shouldn’t have been anything in his face to invite that kind of hope. Was he losing his edge? He shifted his weight to turn away again.
“Wait,” the dh’oine said. “I don’t mean to be a bad neighbor. I feel like we’re off to a bad start. Listen, I’m sorry to be such a pest.” He took the other glove off, set them down, took a step toward Iorveth, extending his hand. “Can we meet properly? I’m Vernon.”
Iorveth looked at his hand for a long moment. He couldn’t spit on that, it was a fair offer of friendship, and cop or no, monarchist or no, the guy hadn’t actually done anything, not that Iorveth could prove. He steeled himself, stepped a little closer, and held his hand out as well. “Joe,” he said. That was the person he was, out here, the name he went by, the way the locals knew him. The unpleasant, unfriendly, standoffish hermit who lived in the woods and frightened the children.
Vernon’s hand was warm and grimy, and he shook firmly. Like a cop. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said. He had dark eyes, deep-set, and the grim cast to his face eased as he smiled, his skin settling easy into pleasant laugh lines that showed he’d smiled a lot.
“Mm,” Iorveth said, the best he could make himself do. “I hope your fence holds.”
This time he turned more quickly and walked away before Vernon could make him do anything else.
For fucking once Strega actually slept the night, rather than getting up a dozen times to bark at things. Roche didn’t actually think twice about it until morning, distracted enough by his own typically much-interrupted sleep. He’d been up and down half a dozen times in the night with the nightmares, shooting pains, the usual nonsense, but at least it had been only his own nonsense. As he gave up and rolled out of bed to shuffle to the kitchen, she mobbed him with the others, back to her normal energy levels.
She needed more exercise than she was getting. When he’d been adopting dogs to keep Flash and Nosewise company, he hadn’t been worried about the shelter’s reminders that she was a high-energy dog who’d been turned in for needing more than her owners could provide. He’d had the care of a rotation of high-energy hounds for years, he knew what to do. And… Adda had liked her, and had chosen her name. How could he resist that?
He hadn’t counted on these injuries not healing. Sure, they’d said they were serious injuries, sure they’d predicted a long recovery, sure they’d actually pensioned him out on it, but he’d drastically underestimated how much the pain would incapacitate him. He’d pushed through stuff before, had rehabbed after that brutal knee injury, had come back from the gunshot that’d creased his rib--
Well. He was old, now, and healing took longer. And he didn’t exactly have anything waiting for him, on the other side.
So he’d pushed through the pain a bit, trying to get the dogs enough exercise, trying to keep up with them, and then today with his ill-advised construction work, but-- he was in trouble, today, and he hadn’t finished that fence, and the fucking dog was going to bolt as soon as they went out. He ought to get his running shoes on and go out with everybody for a nice long walk along the road, but at the moment he was having trouble getting down the hall to the bathroom. And it had just rained again, and the mud would be treacherous; there was no way he’d manage.
He’d moved out here with his eye on some of the deer trails that went along the ridge. He’d always loved hiking, hadn’t ever gotten to do much of it. And in the weeks he’d lived out here, he’d gotten as far as the end of the driveway and no farther. Some of it was that the weather hadn’t really broken yet, it wasn’t fully spring up the mountain and the icy mud was formidable, but a lot of it was his own unexpected limitations.
Maybe once he was done moving boxes and setting up furniture and had a bit of time to rest and work out the kinks, maybe then-- but he had to get this fence up, right away, or his neighbor was going to kill him and sell the dog.
He put Strega on a leash as he let them out, and she had horrible leash manners and did her best to knock him down, but once she’d done her morning business and sniffed around a little he brought her back inside with the others-- Dukat took some hollering-at, to get inside, but the other two were so old now they were happy to come get breakfast and then lie on the couch.
He was going to have to get out there with Strega and get her some real exercise, Dukat too, but he needed the pills to dissolve first so he could move.
It wasn’t even noon when he looked over at the impromptu run he’d made, securing Strega’s leash to a tether between two trees, and saw she’d broken it and was nowhere to be found.
“Fuck,” Roche said, putting down his wire-cutters; the fence was nowhere near installed, was going to take him several more days of work, and he just couldn’t keep that dog corralled.
Joe was probably going to shoot him.
“This system,” Iorveth read aloud*, “avoids the mistake of endowing dogs with human understanding and morals.” He peered over the edge of the book, pulling down his reading glasses to regard Strega, who was lying flat-out on the grass, the stick he’d thrown for her until it had nearly fallen apart lying immediately in front of her nose where it had dropped from her mouth. “A mistake,” he went on, “which renders any real partnership between man and dog so difficult. By the methods described no demand exceeding its powers of comprehension are made on the dog.” He looked at her over his glasses again. “Do you hear that? You are an animal, beyond good or evil, living in a world without moral values.”
Strega wagged tiredly at him, then flopped her head over to find the stick again and half-heartedly chew on it. She’d shown up with a broken leash tangled around some debris, half-panicked, and he’d had to untangle her and calm her down. The poor thing. She had forgotten now, and he’d given her water and taken her on a bit of a walk and then thrown an assortment of sticks for her until she was so tired she couldn’t stand.
He thought about just waiting to see how long it took Vernon to come over here and find her, but on reflection, the dh’oine might be smart enough that he’d know better than to just come onto Iorveth’s land like that.
It was stupid to try and tie up a dog instead of just giving her enough fucking exercise. Even fencing in a dog run for her-- it was a big enclosure but it wasn’t going to be big enough. She couldn’t possibly entertain herself enough to stay out of trouble. This dh’oine was just setting himself up for misery.
In the meantime, Iorveth had gotten an old manual on dog-training from the library on that trip into town, as something to amuse himself with, and was reading the introduction to the dog. The book was by a cop, Vernon should like that. A dh’oine cop. Practically twins. Of course it had been published a century ago and in another country, but who cared about such distinctions.
“A dog’s ability to grasp an idea resembles in certain aspects that of an infant that has not yet learned to speak,” Iorveth went on, reading from the first chapter now, and Strega rolled over, playing with the stick. She still had some energy. She should be getting a long walk every day, this one, and possibly should be set to some training exercises besides.
The other dogs the dh’oine had were fancy dogs too, he’d looked them up. Hunting hounds, the pair were, very fancy ones; they’d needed a lot of exercise too, in their youth. They looked old now, but healthy; they’d been treated right. The last one was some sort of mutt, less driven and more comfortable, a companion dog. Strange mix. But either the dh’oine had rescued them all and the hunting dogs’ lifelong good treatment had been under the care of someone else, or perhaps he’d just been too busy with the move and house repairs and such to do right by this one.
“I don’t care for dogs,” Iorveth told Strega. “But it’s not your fault your dh’oine cop doesn’t care for you. It’s not fair that you should suffer. You deserve a better master.”
She snorted, now entirely on her back, the stick underneath her, flailing her limbs and trying to reach with her open jaws to retrieve it. “Yes, yes,” Iorveth said, “the entire master schtick is some dh’oine nonsense, you’re correct,” and he got to his feet, leaving the book on his picnic table.
She immediately rolled upright, watching him with eager alertness. “Oh,” he said, “you’re not nearly tired enough, sweetheart.”
She bounded to her feet, excited at having been spoken to, and came wiggling over to him with her tail going furiously. She remembered about the stick and doubled back for it, then brought it over to him, but of course would not relinquish it to him.
“Hmm,” he said, and looked over at the dog training manual. It was old-fashioned and intended for police dogs, but possibly there were some things they could try, to give this poor bored creature something to do with her mind.
Iorveth didn’t really need another fucking hobby, but it was this or endlessly pry this poor creature out of various predicaments. “We could certainly make fetch more interesting,” he said.
Roche was not entirely resigned to being the kind of guy who could tell the weather by what parts of him ached, but the looming rain finally starting had come as an unexpected relief. The weather had been shifting, the last grip of winter letting go, he’d dared to hope, and the breeze had been shockingly warmer, but there had for almost two days now been this heavy looming weather front threatening, and finally it had broken and was pouring rain-- but warm rain, no hail or ice. It was spring, finally, and the pressure had eased.
Partly, he had to admit to himself, his relief was because it took the pressure off to work on the fucking fence. But it didn’t make the dogs able to hold it any longer, so he finally took his sudden increase in mobility in both hands, and got all the dogs into their leashes, and everybody went out for a walk. It was rain, but it was warm rain, and he could be out in that.
Dukat and Flash didn’t like the rain but put up with it. Nosewise didn’t care, and Strega was delighted. They didn’t go far, and Roche knew Strega needed more, but he pushed himself to the extent he thought he could manage and then brought them back. He was going to be responsible, he was going to be sensible, he was going to-- well, he was getting wet and chilled, and it was disgusting out here, so he turned back.
He managed not to fall in the mud, despite severe provocation-- he let everyone but Strega off their leashes, and by herself she wasn’t so hard to manage, though there were some close calls. But his raincoat, it turned out, wasn’t as waterproof as it might have been, and leaked at the shoulder seams. By the time he got back to the house, he was soaked through, and so was everyone else.
He toweled the dogs off on the porch, and one by one released them into the house, keeping Strega on her leash for last. She kept staring out into the woods and wagging her tail, as if she thought someone was going to come out of this teeming mass of water to visit them. “There’s no one out there,” he told her. She shook all over him, and he put her into the house, and was about to follow her when he looked down at himself.
No, he hadn’t fallen in the mud, but he was speckled with the stuff from the dogs, and took a moment to congratulate himself for having already pre-emptively covered every chair in the house with towels as soon as he heard the rain start. He’d learned that on one of the trips to the hunting lodge with-- well, in his old life, years ago-- you let the dogs on the couch, you have to be prepared for the dogs to interact with both the weather and the couch.
But here he was, about to interact with the weather and the house, and he wasn’t going to feel like mopping later. And yes, he was outdoors, but wasn’t the point of being in the woods with no close neighbors that no one was going to be watching him? There was no gossip here, no disapproving peerage, no advisers waiting to spin any misstep into fuel for their agendas. He shucked his boots and set them next to the mat to dry, stripped off his leaking raincoat and hung it on the peg he hadn’t yet used, took off his wet overshirt and wrung it out, then took off his mud-speckled, soaked jeans. They were too thick to wring out but he bundled them into the overshirt.
His undershirt was wet too. He’d just have to do a load of laundry. He had to take his hat off, so he hung it on the peg next to the raincoat. Then he stripped off the undershirt, adding it to the pile, and then picked up the whole works and went inside in his socks and underwear.
The dogs were milling around, and Strega was still excited enough to greet him as though she hadn’t just been with him. “Yes,” he said, “I was gone so long,” and continued into the kitchen. This house didn’t have many rooms, but he’d managed to get a washer and dryer into the kitchen, and it was absolutely worth it not to have to go all the way to town for a laundromat. He hadn’t been to a laundromat since he was a child, and he wasn’t up to it at this stage of his life either.
He pulled a towel from the closet to dry his hair with, leaving it draped on his head as he crossed the room and dumped his bundle of clothing and wet muddy towels into the washer. He thought again, and bent down carefully to get his wet socks off before dumping them into the washer as well.
Now barefoot, he added soap to the machine, then pondered the settings for a moment before deciding on one and setting it.
Nosewise stuck his nose in the back of Roche’s knee, startling him slightly, and he turned to see the dog’s mournful expression. “What,” he said. “What could you possibly want.”
Excited for no particular reason, Strega capered over and jumped up, and he grabbed her by the forepaws and pretended to waltz her around. “Oh, dogs, dogs,” he said, and she hopped and wiggled, and Dukat got underfoot so he had to let go and flail a bit for balance. Oh, he should go and stretch, carefully, because he wasn’t in too much pain now, but he was going to be if he wasn’t careful. He did another playful lap of the room, stirring the participating dogs into a frenzy of leaping and wriggling.
At last he had to go and collapse onto the couch in the other room, next to Flash, who was watching the proceedings with mild disgust. “I know,” he said to the elderly borzoi, tousling his ears. “I know, everyone in this house is ridiculous.”
Strega and Dukat ran around a little more, bonking into things as they play-wrestled. “It’s so nice,” Roche said to Flash, lying on the couch in his underwear, “not to worry about what anybody thinks, isn’t it? Nobody’s watching us. We can do what we want.”
Iorveth set the spotting scope on its tripod, readjusting his heavy-duty poncho where it had water pooling in a crevice. He hadn’t expected the man to go out in this weather, had thought it an opportune time to do routine surveillance, and had needed to backtrack hastily when the man had come out with the dogs, but now he’d had a chance to get himself up into this blind, so he was well-situated for when they all returned from their outing.
Sure enough, within five minutes of him having situated himself properly they came back, passing at a little distance, none of them aware of his presence. The rain hid his scent and obscured his tracks, even if it hadn’t discouraged the traffic in the first place.
The assemblage trouped up onto the porch, and Iorveth steeled himself, expecting for the whole muddy mess to go tornadoing into the astonishingly-nice house. But, no, the dh’oine had a collection of old towels on the porch, and he carefully dried the paws and belly of each muddy dog before releasing them. He started with that borzoi, and then the pit bull mix, putting each of them separately in the door.
Strega had scented him, Iorveth thought. She was straining at her leash, looking for him. Hold that leash, Iorveth thought nervously. If she came running over here-- he was concealed, but not that well concealed. It wasn’t possible to be that well concealed. If she pointed him up this tree, his presence was going to be impossible to explain.
But, for once, the dh’oine kept control of the spaniel, and in a moment, he was toweling her and she was distracted enough to stop looking for Iorveth. Iorveth reflexively offered up a silent prayer of thanksgiving, and had already mostly shaped it before he remembered he didn’t do that shit anymore. The gods were dead, his connection to them severed; they were part of the everything he’d lost.
Well, whatever, and he let it go into the beyond, wherever those things went. Instead he focused the spotting scope to see if he couldn’t make out more of the man’s expression, only to be greeted with wild movement. The man was-- he pulled his eye away from the scope to frown. He was disrobing. What--
He peered through the scope just in time to see the man dropping his trousers. Iorveth almost dropped the spotting scope, but he was nothing if not a professional: he kept his grip, and was rewarded with the view of a pair of long lean legs, pale and muscled like a distance runner’s, with a couple of little tattoos dotting their length.
Of course; he had dried off the dogs, and was now shedding his wet clothes. This was a sensible thing to do. He was moving so much it was hard to keep him in focus, but Iorveth got a good view of bare chest as the man stripped off his undershirt.
Temerian lilies tattooed over his heart, stylized ones right off the coat of arms, and that was a good punch in the eye-- absolutely and unsubtly a monarchist. Oh, also crossed swords over his collarbones. Fuck, he might not be a cop, he might be ex-military, which was worse, Iorveth himself was ex-military and he knew damned well what those fuckers were like.
He was jolted out of his reverie by the man bending again, and Iorveth had a moment of suspense where he thought the underpants were coming off too, but no-- no, the man was going into the house now, and Iorveth had quite a good view of somewhat more ass than he’d expected, clad in black stretch fabric. Either the underwear was wet, or the fabric was very clingy. A runner’s ass, really, and Iorveth shook himself as the man stepped through the door and closed it.
He was here to do reconnaissance and figure out how much of a threat this man was, not ogle his skinny ass. Which was less skinny than he’d expected.
Movement at the window brought his attention back, and he brought the scope up, slightly less zoomed-in. The man had surely taken his hat off, but he had a towel over his head now and was wandering around the kitchen, talking and looking down-- the dogs, ah, of course he was talking to the dogs. Iorveth didn’t have sound-surveillance equipment; he’d never done that kind of work. Only visual, and he didn’t have night-vision gear here.
He’d been a sniper. He was very, very good at sitting still and watching and waiting.
He didn’t have a gun now. Well, he did, but not here; it was at the house, in a box, for hunting deer. He wasn’t crazy, he wasn’t here to kill this guy. He just wanted to know.
The man was-- ah, the appliance there was a washing machine, Iorveth’s earlier reconnaissance had been correct. The man dumped clothes into the washer, and then bent out of view, and in a moment came back up and threw more garments into the wash-- either he’d had more clothes lying on the floor in front of the washer, or he’d-- oh he’d just-- taken off-- something black. Were those the underpants?
Don’t be a ninny, Iorveth thought crossly at himself; so what if the man was nude now? He was in his own house. It didn’t make a difference and didn’t change any of the data Iorveth had gathered today.
He could stop watching now, actually. At the moment he was just sort of absently cataloguing the visible tattoos on the man’s torso and arms, all in a simple black-line technique in keeping with the sorts of tattoos the dh’oine soldiers Iorveth had served with tended to favor, in recognizably the same iconography-- some stripes around his arm, a candle that Iorveth vaguely thought had something to do with a troubled history, and he caught a glimpse of some chain links around the upper arm on one side. Suddenly the man’s body jolted forward, and Iorveth went tense all over, half-expecting to see that another sniper had taken his target, but the man only took half a step and turned to look down.
A dog, clearly, had nosed him, and he cracked a surprisingly amused smile, eyes crinkled-- he had very good teeth, even but not artificially white--
He bent, and in a moment reappeared with-- he was dancing with the dog, the spaniel had her forepaws in his hands, Iorveth could just see her ears flopping over the top of the window in his angle of view. He was laughing, and was playing with the dogs, and had a towel over his head and looked ridiculous and happy.
On another lap of the kitchen Iorveth could see he was in fact still wearing his underwear, which was very tight and clinging but must not be wet or surely he would have taken it off. Some kinda fancy performance knit like athletes wore. Body like that, he’d been a distance runner a long time. Tiny waist, skinny, but muscled all through.
He looked-- disarmingly normal, laughing at the dogs, and he moved out of the kitchen and walked toward the room earlier reconnaissance had made out to be the living room, and that was that, he must have sat down, or possibly walked along the far side of that room to get to the hallway back to the bedroom, to put dry clothes on.
Iorveth waited a little while, but the man did not reappear, and there was no significant activity. As the rain began to ease up, Iorveth carefully dumped water off of his rain cape, and then climbed down the tree and went back to his house.
He had a little more information, but nothing conclusive. Monarchist, still uncertain whether cop or soldier. Runner’s physique, though that was obvious with clothes on. None of the tattoos were explicitly recognizable, but he hadn’t gotten more than a fleeting glimpse that there was ink on the man’s back with some color in it, more elaborate than the simple lines on his limbs; he’d suspected a coat of arms, and still suspected that, but couldn’t tell any more. Somehow whenever the man had turned his back all Iorveth had seen was ass.
Knowing in pretty good detail what his ass looked like wasn’t useful information and Iorveth wasn’t sure why he kept thinking about it. He surely couldn’t be sexually attracted to a monarchist. Surely not.
Well, he conceded, as he shook out his rain poncho on his porch and spread it out to dry over the back of a chair, it was a very long time since he’d looked at anyone’s ass really, it was only to be expected that he’d be distracted by it.
Thighs too.
Stop that.
Iorveth made himself re-focus as he wrote down his observations. Confirmation of laundry machine, probably a tumble dryer too if he was unconcerned about starting a load of wash in this rain. Run of the mill luxuries, but data was data.
What he was going to do with all this data, Iorveth didn’t know, but he had collected it, which was a first step. The rest remained to be seen.
* quotation from Training Dogs, A Manual, by Col. Konrad Most, c 1954, courtesy of Google Books' preview