The yard was quiet for a moment.
The horses in the stable.
The inn sounds.
The capital glow on the horizon.
Santora lay on the ground in his yard and looked at the young man standing over him and thought about his wife and the four months and the physicians who had taken his money and returned nothing useful.
"I understand," he said.
Viktor nodded once.
The nod of a man closing a ledger entry.
He turned toward the inn door.
His eyes moved — not to the door, past it, through the wall of it, toward the common room on the other side where the fireplace was still working and the inn was settling into its late-evening register.
His tail, under his coat, moved once. Slow. The curl of something that had identified an interest and was noting it.
'Wrinkled or not,' he thought, the thought carrying the particular, private, completely unfiltered quality of a man thinking to himself with no audience, 'that blood control is worth getting close to. Hundred times over.'
