They strode past the row of stalls and through a doorway. This area also contained stalls, but these were for the hunting hounds.
The air here was metallic, like old blood, and was musky with the scent of unwashed hounds. The animals shifted, restless, inside their kennels. Some pawed at the dirt, while others watched the men pass with sharp, assessing eyes.
They came to the stall in question, where discarded bones lay in haphazard piles, gnawed white by hungry teeth. The young boy inside couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, his dark brown hair lying heavy and thick across his forehead. He stood like a soldier before battle, chin high, feet planted, facing down a man twice his size with nothing but stubborn defiance.
Dimitrios had seen men break under a lesser glare. But this boy? He didn’t flinch.
Someone should probably inform the boy that sheer determination was no match for the knife clutched at the stablemaster’s side, however.
“Haris!” Dimitrios darted forward with a sharp eye on that weapon. “What’s going on here?”
The boy and Haris startled, and the boy shifted just enough to reveal a hound lying on its side in the old hay.
“He’s going to kill them,” the boy shouted, nostrils flaring. “I won’t let him.”
Something about the kid—his sharp anger, his refusal to look away—pressed against a long-quiet part of Dimitrios’s chest. He’d known children like this once. Brave in the way only the young can be, before the world teaches them fear. His nieces and nephews had hearts like this, fierce and unyielding.
Nikolas strode around Dimitrios, asking, “Kill who, exactly?” He looked past the boy, then nodded. “Ah. I see.”
“See what?” Dimitrios asked.
Haris sheathed his blade. “The hound bred with a stray. Supreme Commander Tassatos has strict rules regarding pups that aren’t pure.”
The hound in question was, at present, feeding three black puppies. They must have been born recently because their eyes weren’t open. And since every pureblood hound in the stables was solid gray, these pups were indeed from a stray coupling.
“What’s your name, son?” Nikolas asked the boy.
“Caius.”
“Haris is right. Our hounds are a special breed. The best and purest on the entire continent. This female isn’t the first to stray and won’t be the last. And we can’t keep every pup that comes along, or we risk diluting the bloodlines.”
“I’ll find them a home,” Caius said.
This boy would grow to be a man who led others, whether he meant to or not.
And yet, it wasn’t just defiance that held the boy in place. It was something softer—a desperate, reckless love for something small and helpless. The same instinct that had Dimitrios charging into a room full of courtiers to speak his true name aloud for the first time.
“Please, Commander Contas,” Caius added, a chink appearing in his armor.
Nikolas glanced over his shoulder with a very pointed look in his eyes. This decision was up to Dimitrios, the “king.” Dimitrios, the man, however,had nieces and nephews with identical bleeding hearts, and there was a reason he’d been their favorite uncle.
“Let me have a look,” Dimitrios said.
He knelt beside the boy just as he would one of his nephews, and the two of them watched the puppies nurse. How could anyone put a knife to them without remorse?
Bloodlines be damned. What kind of kingdom killed its own before they had a chance to stand?
“Let them live,” he told Haris. “I’ll take responsibility for them.”
Caius beamed with unrestrained joy.
“Now, listen here—” the stablemaster began.
“You heard your king,” Nikolas interrupted with a commander’s natural tenor.
Haris pulled his shoulders back and lifted his chin in a manner Dimitrios was all too familiar with. Some weren’t as obvious, but this was a man who took his orders from men with official titles, like the Supreme Commander and Councilman, Theseus Tassatos. He wouldn’t be caught on his back foot taking suggestions from a man who was still under investigation.
Unfortunately for Haris, Dimitrios was in a mood. “Every day I’m here, I remember the names, faces, positions, and actions of everyone I meet.” He flashed his teeth in a semblance of a smile. “I remember them for later. And I have a very good memory.”
