Anna did not care for an explanation. She crept closer anyway and grabbed a fistful of his pant leg. Her hand was small and a little sticky. She leaned back with all her weight and tugged at him like a fisherman pulling a rope. When he did not move, she changed tactics. She took his thumb and yanked on it.
Finn hurried to translate with the gravity of a herald. “She wants to go to the kitchen.”
“The kitchen,” Neil repeated.
“Aye.” Finn nodded. “She chases us there every morning.”
She.
Neil swallowed.“She chases ye?” he asked.
The words tasted strange in his mouth.
Finn nodded again, his eyes very serious. “Ye are supposed to chase us.”
Neil stared at him. Finn stared back.
Maggie wagged her tail once and huffed as if to say the boy had made an excellent point.
In the corridor, a maid passed with a basket on her hip. Neil pointed at her as a drowning man would point to shore. “Can ye chase them instead?”
The maid opened her mouth, but Finn gasped in horror before she could get a word in. “Nay, it has to be ye.”
Neil closed his eyes for a beat. He drew air in slowly, the way he did before a blade met a throat.
This was not a blade. This was a boy with hair that stuck up like straw and a girl who had his thumb in a trap. This was a dog who had already decided where the pack would go.
“Where is yer nurse?” he tried.
“In the nursery,” Finn replied. “We daenae start there. We starthere. Then we go to the big table. Then the stairs. Then the kitchen. Ye have to pretend that ye nearly caught us. Then ye carry Anna the last stretch because she gets tired.”
Anna lifted her arms at the wordcarry. The meaning was plain in any tongue.
Neil looked down at himself. Bare feet. Shirt wrinkled from a restless night. He thought of the men in the village square and the rage that had swept over him. He thought of the woman who had left this room because wanting and not wanting had almost made her break.
He had no skill for this. He had no training for soft mornings.
“Chase,” he said, as if the word might yield sense if he turned it in his mouth.
Finn brightened. “Aye. Now ye say, ‘I am coming for ye, rascals.’ Then ye roar like a bear. But nae too loud. Anna daenae like it when it is too loud.”
Maggie sneezed. It looked like an agreement.
Neil dragged a hand through his hair, then swung his legs off the bed and put his feet on the cold floor. Anna laughed, pleased with the progress, and tugged harder on his thumb as if to test the strength of the giant she had captured. He let her win and stood.
“Right,” he said. The urge to command tried to rise and found nothing to lean on. “We will see.”
Finn frowned. “That isnae the line.”
“What is the line again?” Neil asked.
Finn squared his small shoulders and lowered his voice. “I am coming for ye, rascals.”
Neil looked at the door. He looked at the girl. He looked at the boy who waited for a game that had rules he did not know. He felt the first curl of something he could not name. It was not dread. It was not anger. It felt like a rope that took a weight and held.
He swallowed. “I am coming for ye, rascals.”
Finn grinned so hard his face might have split. “Now, roar.”
