On the third morning, the miller brought a hook.
Ysabet saw it coming through the water before she saw his boots: a black curve passing over the pale stones, large enough for a sheep’s leg. She put her left hand across the mouth of the culvert.
“No.”
“You haven’t seen what it’s for.”
“Neither has the hound. Let’s disappoint you both.”
Vennick stopped on the plank above her. His boots creaked. All morning she had been trying to persuade the animal that sounds above its head did not mean another man was going to climb into the drainage ditch and pull.
The sound inside the culvert stopped.
It had been a small sound. Four quick breaths, a pause, four more. Now Ysabet could hear only the millstream moving around her knees.
“Move back,” she said.
“It’s my mill.”
“Then you’ll know where the path is.”
For a moment she thought he would make her explain again. Instead the boots retreated, carrying the hook. She waited until the plank had stopped trembling before she leaned toward the opening.
“There,” she said softly. “Gone.”
Nothing answered.
The culvert ran beneath the mill’s delivery yard and emptied into the old eel ditch. Somewhere under two cartloads of flour and a perfectly ordinary collection of men who had work to do, Brindle had folded his skeleton to follow an eel. He had gone in easily. Coming out, he had met a delivery cart crossing the stone cover. The wheels had slammed over a loose slab. Fear had locked him broadside in a passage scarcely wider than Ysabet’s shoulders.
Sluice hounds could get into almost anything. That was why people bought them. The same people grew indignant when getting out proved to be a separate skill.
She had spent the first day finding which end faced her. Vennick had spent most of it insisting she should pull the tail protruding from the upstream grate. On the second day she had persuaded him to stop the mill long enough to lower the water. He had allowed an hour. An hour had taught Brindle to expect a rising stream whenever he began to relax.
Today Ysabet had arrived before the apprentices and fastened the sluice lever herself.
Behind her, a flour sack rustled. Vennick’s youngest apprentice, a girl with a scattering of damp white spots across her cheeks, crouched beside the ditch.
“He dropped it by the gate,” the girl whispered.
“The hook?”
She nodded.
“Thank you.”
“I could take it back to the shed.”
“Could you?”
The girl left. A moment later iron scraped along gravel, receding.
Ysabet eased her hand away from the culvert. Cold had swollen the fingers of her right hand inside their glove. She pulled the glove off with her teeth, then removed the left. The smallest two fingers would not straighten fully; the middle one had begun aching before dawn. She rested them on her knee, above the water, and lowered her good hand into the stream.
Four breaths came from the dark. Then four more.
“That’s better.”
She could not see the animal. There was a trace of yellow eye when she moved the little mirror she had propped against a stone, but the light disturbed him. She left the mirror face down. A hound with its ribs caught against stone had enough to attend to without a sunrise following it underground.
She settled lower until her coat soaked through at the elbows. Water entered the loose cuff and traveled toward her armpit.
For a while she breathed.
The breaths in the culvert did not match hers. People paid tamers to do things that sounded impressive when described afterward. Breathing in a ditch was a difficult service to list on an invoice.
Farther upstream, the apprentice coughed.
“Mistress?”
Ysabet turned her head a little.
“The wheel’s stopped all the way now.”
The miller’s hour would already be running in his head. She had persuaded him to agree to two today. More water seeped from the passage, and the brown stain against its roof began to show.
“Would you fetch the broken door from behind the shed?” Ysabet asked. “And some sacks. Empty ones.”
The girl looked at the culvert.
“For him to stand on when he’s out,” Ysabet said.
She did not know whether Brindle heard the voice or the words. He breathed faster. She waited before moving again.
The lower rim of the culvert was biting into her forearm. She withdrew her hand and laid a strip of wet cloth along the edge. Seven years ago she would have used a little pain to make a creature move away from a greater danger. She still did, when she had to. There was a burned carriage lizard in her yard because she’d held it down to cut a wheel strap away from its leg.
The trouble was knowing when she had to.
She looked toward the grate. A dark rope ran from it to the hitching post beside the mill. Vennick’s first attempt. She had cut the noose off Brindle’s tail yesterday, working two fingers through the bars while the animal shook hard enough to bloody himself against the stone. The rope remained because she wanted the miller to look at it.
He had been stepping over it instead.
Ysabet picked up a narrow willow switch, slipped it into the water, and let go. It drifted away from the culvert and lodged against her boot. The current was low enough now. If she reached inside, she could touch the hound’s nose. She didn’t.
Behind her the girl dragged the broken door across the grass.
“Lay it there. From the lip to the bank. Flat.”
“He could climb that.”
“I hope so.”
Together they covered the door with the sacks. A wet hound might slip on wood; claws caught better in sacking. The girl fetched a stone to hold the bottom end down. Ysabet shifted to one side, leaving the ditch open ahead of the passage.
Brindle stopped breathing again when her shadow crossed the opening.
“Still here,” she said.
She drew one finger through the water. Once, then again. A small movement away from him. His owners called sluice hounds stupid because they would follow the smallest fish past a full feeding pan. Ysabet had spent the previous afternoon watching the eye that sometimes appeared in her mirror. It had followed every passing leaf.
Water moved against her fingertip.
She kept her hand still.
A nose appeared, black and narrow, with pale grit dried in the nostrils. It came forward until it touched the fold of cloth. The animal sucked air so fiercely that a little bubble of snot trembled at one nostril.
“Yes,” Ysabet whispered.
His head emerged sideways. One long ear lay across his eye. Behind it, the first ribs stood too wide against the stone.
The apprentice drew a quick breath.
Ysabet held up her damaged hand, asking her to wait. She let her left drift farther down the ditch.
Brindle reached after it.
There was a clicking sound under his skin. His ribs shifted, caught, shifted again. He made a low noise and tried to retreat.
“All right.”
She moved her finger closer. He could withdraw without losing the little disturbance in the water. He did. His head disappeared except for the nose.
From the mill came Vennick’s voice. “Has it moved?”
The girl stood quickly and went to him.
Ysabet did not hear what she said. She heard Brindle’s claws finding the bottom of the passage.
This time he turned before he moved forward. One shoulder slid under the other. His head rolled upright, the folded ribs clicking in a long, uneven sequence, and a remarkable quantity of mud-colored hound spilled into the ditch.
Ysabet kept her hands low.
He scrambled up the covered door. Halfway, his back legs failed. The girl started toward him and stopped when Ysabet shook her head.
Brindle lay panting on the sacks. One front paw flexed. The other pulled. He hauled himself the remaining length and collapsed on the grass.
Then he was up, barking at the door.
The apprentice laughed. It burst out of her before she could put a hand over her mouth.
Vennick came around the corner carrying the hound’s collar.
“Brindle. Here.”
The hound ran behind Ysabet.
His owner stopped.
Ysabet found the food she had kept wrapped in her coat, broke off a little piece, and put it on the grass. Brindle swallowed it without chewing.
“Small amounts today,” she said. “Water where he can stand clear of the bowl. Check him for blood when he passes stool. If he’s still panting this evening, send for me.”
“Brindle.”
The collar jingled.
Brindle pressed his wet length against her boots.
“Give him a minute.”
Vennick looked from his hound to the empty ditch. Water was beginning to overflow a bucket someone had left beneath the mill’s roof drain. Behind him, sacks of unmilled grain stood under a tarpaulin.
“Three days,” he said. “And now it won’t come when I call.”
“He came out alive.”
“After you taught it it needn’t listen.”
She was too cold to mistake the direction of the conversation.
“Six silver,” she said. “As agreed.”
“For getting my own hound to hide from me?”
“For getting your hound out from under your yard.”
He worked the collar through his hands. It was a good one, thick oiled leather, worn smooth where his thumb rested.
“I’ll give you two. I’ve lost milling. I’ve had to feed the apprentices while they stand about.”
The girl stared at her boots.
Ysabet’s right hand had begun to shake. She tucked it under her left arm.
“Pay the six.”
Vennick’s mouth tightened. He put the collar in his pocket.
“Come back when it does what it’s told.”
She could argue. She could go up to the guild room and explain three days of work to a clerk whose windows looked out over the miller’s warehouse. She could sit in her wet clothes while someone fetched the register of oral agreements.
Brindle nosed at her empty fingers.
She crouched, broke another piece of food small, and put it on the grass between the hound and Vennick. A second piece went farther on. She gave the rest to the apprentice.
“You can offer him this. Don’t make him put his head through anything for it.”
The girl nodded.
Ysabet collected her mirror and gloves. She left the wet sacks; they belonged to the mill.
“That’s the end of it, then?” Vennick asked as she reached the path.
“No. I’ll send you the bill.”
She walked back toward Bent Reed with water making a small, reliable noise in both boots. Behind her, the girl said Brindle’s name once. After a pause, the hound’s feet pattered across the yard.
Ysabet kept walking. She had enough money put away for winter, provided winter stayed the length it was supposed to be and nothing else needed her.