It was through squinting eyelids and slightly blurred vision that Leslyn witnessed Valiant’s morning greeting, the keet spinning in a circle in his cage and then hooking his wing talons on the metal bars to stare longingly. His blue eyes bulged fit to burst from his head at the sight of the feed bucket his master carried. Unlike the fuzzy yellow griffin, who popped up from sleep as fresh as if he’d been awake for hours, Leslyn was still trying to wake up after being roused at an ungodly pre-sunrise hour and unceremoniously dropped off at the Aerie while Koben went to carry out whatever private business was on the roster for the day.
Luckily for the youth’s fingers, the habit of putting on his heavy leather gloves was automatic at this point. Ears resentfully accosted by the growls and feeding cries of the entire clutch of fifteen half-grown keets, as well as the wince-inducing clanks and pings of their claws and beaks on the metal shafts that formed their pens, he fumbled with the lock until his hands got too close. Valiant impatiently nipped at his gloved fingers, pinching one so hard that Leslyn grunted and nearly slapped him—something he wouldn’t have had to do if he’d been properly alert.
“All right, you can wait a bit longer, then,” he snipped, shedding the glove and nursing his offended finger. For once, he was almost glad that the keet was a wind-egger less than half the size of the others. The finger was definitely going to bruise, and had Val been as big as his siblings, he probably would have had enough bite strength to dislocate the joint his beak had closed on.
With a sigh, Leslyn glanced around at the other keets, who’d grown enough to graduate from their crate-like cages to pens similar in size to horse stalls. They’d been built from sets of portable panels in a long row around the walls of the apartment, leaving Valiant alone in the center.
As Leslyn was putting the glove back on, Kaleit came into the room, conspicuously carrying two large buckets instead of one as the recruits were usually rationed. He didn’t see Leslyn standing in the middle, for his eyes were focused right across from the door, where Zabor was already attacking the bars of his pen in an anticipatory frenzy. The sight never failed to make Leslyn even more glad that Wrath had passed him over when she selected a master for the black keet.
Gluttonous, as well as violent, Leslyn thought, turning his attention back to Valiant. As if bribing the black with extra food would do any good. All it would do was result in him becoming overweight and even more self-entitled. It wasn’t even worth reporting. In time, Kaleit would reap what he sowed in full.
At the squeal of Valiant’s cage opening, Kaleit startled and turned. When he saw that it was Leslyn, he relaxed and went back to maneuvering the gate open with great respect for Zabor’s flailing wings.
“You’re here awfully early,” Leslyn said in a conversational tone as he let his keet out to eat from the bucket, unable to resist the chance to knock the other young man down a peg, or unbalance him a bit at the very least. “Up to your usual moral, upstanding behavior, no doubt?"
After setting one of his buckets before the ravenous Zabor and then backing to a safe distance, Kaleit turned a cold, particularly wicked-looking smile on him. “Of course.”
It was as if he’d been ready for the inquiry, the way he easily fixed Leslyn with that shark-like grin. He suddenly questioned whether the jab had been wise, though he couldn’t even begin to guess why not.
Acting as if none of this was a concern, Leslyn went back to making sure Valiant was eating well. The yellow griffin was making his way through the chunks of meat with gusto, snapping up two or three at a time and gulping them down with bird-like bobs of his head and neck. He couldn’t help but smile at the animal’s enthusiasm, remembering the days when Val could barely move at all, much less swallow even the smallest piece of solid meat. As usual when those memories cropped up, Leslyn began to smell the overwhelming rotten egg scent that had saturated Valiant’s baby fluff, and quickly came back to the present to escape it.
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As the keet finished off his morning meal, Leslyn took up a rake and scraped out the interior of Val’s cage, adding the waste to a pile in a corner of the room that was collected and carted away every couple of days. After that, he took a flake of straw from one of the stacked bales and broke it up to bed out the floor of the cage.
When he was done, Leslyn looked up to see Kaleit standing in front of Phoebe’s stall, watching the perky keet as she repeatedly chirped and puffed out her fluff and deep blue feathers, begging for some of the meat he carried in his second bucket.
“Stop teasing her,” he said sourly, unable to stop his lip from warping in disgust. “It’s cruel. Erin won’t be in for a few hours yet, and she’s already had to watch two of her siblings gorge themselves.”
That unsettling grin abruptly reappeared on Kaleit’s face. He held up a gloved hand, waved it mockingly at Leslyn, then took a piece of meat and offered it to Phoebe, who snatched it up in a blink.
Oh, that sent Leslyn right through the roof. He managed to keep his expression believably neutral, but wasn’t able to hide the angry color of his ears. Kaleit didn’t even try to hold back the burst of derisive laughter at the sight when Leslyn placed himself in front of Phoebe’s pen, blocking any further breach of the keet’s strict feeding schedule.
“You’ve fed Zabor, so you can go now, or else I’ll be forced to report you to Gunu.”
“I’m terrified,” the much taller Kaleit projected down to him, looking and sounding bored to death. “Look at yourself, Leslyn. It’s pathetic. You’re wasting your chivalry on that stupid girl.”
“This isn’t chivalry. It’s called ‘being a decent person.’” He gestured at Erin’s griffin. “You’re well aware of the issues that can arise when keets are fed off-schedule, yet you’re all too willing to risk someone else’s animal just to get a rise out of me.”
“Somehow, I doubt you’d have reacted in such an entertaining manner if I’d fed a keet that didn’t belong to your lover. Or is that former lover? She certainly fell away from you to follow the merling’s siren lure in a decidedly whole-hearted fashion, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I—excuse me?” Leslyn could hardly believe what he’d just heard. “Is that what you think is going on, here?”
Showing his teeth in a mocking grin, Kaleit bit down on a clean finger of his glove and slipped his hand out of it. He held the contemptuous look for a moment before a more thoughtful one replaced it, and he took the glove into his now-bare hand and tapped it against his chin. “Ah, wait—now that you’ve questioned it, I do seem to recall an alternate account of things. One in which you are the uncle of a certain Guardsman’s illegitimate daughter?”
Warning bells instantly resounded in Leslyn’s head. “How—?
“How do I know about that?” Kaleit glanced around, as if making sure there was no one else to listen in, then bent to bring that ever-smirking mouth closer to Leslyn’s ear. “You can learn quite a bit about someone when you spend a night in the stables together.”
Leslyn saw red, and the next thing he knew, he was standing over Kaleit, his fist clenched and smarting and the other youth’s lip raw and leaking blood. The bucket of meat he’d been carrying was knocked over, its contents spilled across the floor in a gory mess. “Choose your next words very carefully,” he said in a halting, tenuously-controlled tone, not trusting himself to say any more than that and still be so civil.
Completely unfazed, Kaleit got up, wiped his lip with the back of his hand, and smirked at Leslyn again before going to work on the spilled bucket. He pulled up his sleeve and swept a good deal of the meat back in with one stroke of his bare forearm.
Staring at the newly-revealed bite scars on the tall youth’s arm, Leslyn was momentarily at a loss as to what to do next. Kaleit’s blasé attitude in spite of what had just occurred was rankling in the worst kind of way, but punching him again would accomplish little, if anything.
Kaleit hoisted the bucket and suddenly stepped toward Phoebe’s pen a second time. Leslyn automatically started to move to block him, but Kaleit held up his hand, bidding him to stop. “Break time’s over. I’m at work, now,” he said, and opened the gate for Phoebe.
Leslyn gaped in disbelief as he put down the bucket and the blue keet plunged her beak into the recovered meat. “I don’t understand. What is going on? Why are you feeding Erin’s keet?”
“Because she’s gone,” Kaleit spat, and went to get straw to spread over the meat juices that remained on the floor where the bucket had spilled.
Feeling suddenly cold, Leslyn watched him calmly scrub the straw across the mess with his heel, apparently completely unmoved by the news he’d just given.
“Gone… where?”
“Ask your precious prince.”
The floor felt as though it had fallen away beneath Leslyn’s feet. He looked to Kaleit, expecting to see that mocking smile, or else a triumphant light in his gaze that would offer some small hope that he was just continuing on with his games.
Kaleit looked back, eyes narrowing. There was no humor in them whatsoever.