Dally was wrong: Lyle didn’t give up.

Two days after Jona arrived, Dally found himself wading through a waist-deep snow drift. His tail slashed arcs in the surface, and he panted, breathing in a lung-burning mix of cold air and wyr-oil smoke from the distant village. Beside him Jona’s horse snorted, stumbling on hidden roots. The poor thing didn’t like Dally, at all. Any time Dally so much as glanced sideways the creature twitched, eyes rolling. Jona himself clamped his fingers on the reins, cursing and kicking. The boy’s bored, pale face peered from under a thick cowl of seal fur. Behind them trailed a couple more boys on their own horses, equally cold and miserable. This was hunting.

“There,” Jona said.

Dally looked where he was pointing, and froze. Between white birch branches a huge, dark shape slowed, and stopped. The animals’ fur was caked in snow, and its breath floated in a soft cloud. It was a deer. An alive one, looking just like those on Yaral’s rug. Its horns seemed bigger, though, twisting and curling into spirals, glittering with frost at the ends. The deer watched them, its massive body tensing.

“Go,” Jona hissed, “get it.”

Dally twitched, and the deer bolted. Racing after it, through the trees, Dally stumbled, clawed at the icy trunks, snarled as he righted itself. It was so fast. Taller than the horse and more powerful, it somehow seemed to float over the snow in long bounds. In another second it was gone.

Jona reigned in the horse next to him, cursing, and snapped his riding whip on Dally’s shoulder. Dally barely glanced up. He was grinning as much as he could in this form, watching the still space where the deer had faded back into the trees.

“Useless,” Jona said, turning his horse around.

They went hunting each day for the next week, and each day Dally proved he was a city boy by failing to run down a single animal. Truth was, the woods were nearly empty in mid winter. The few deer saw were all much bigger than Dally thought deers were, though, with horns branching in wide arcs like the crowns of frozen trees.

When he finally asked Red, she laughed.

“They make ‘em like that,” she said. “So when they put the head on the wall, it looks better, y’know?”

“Oh,” Dally said, feeling stupid. Of course they’d do expensive chimery on some poor animal, just so Jona could kill it. Of course.

Each day they came back drenched with snow-melt and sweat, and Jona would stalk back to his rooms. After a couple days the boy started carrying a heavier dog-whip on him. It still barely hurt, though, and Dally figured the horse got it worse. If Lyle noticed the faint welts, he didn’t seem to care.

“He’s coming around,” Lyle told him, “don’t you think?”

“Sure, master.” Dally had already been hunting all day. His hair was stuck down to his head with sweat, and his bones felt heavy and hot inside his limbs. The more he agreed, the sooner he could go to sleep. “You were right, your boy’s got a good head for this.”

The same night, Gita sent her maid down to the barrack with a lamp, to bring Dally up. When he reached her quarters, the cigarette smoke was thicker than the incense.

She was sprawled on one of her lounges, draining the end of a glass of wine. “You’re late.”

This was how it had been, recently. Gita had always tolerated Dally, but seeing him with Jona was more than she could take. She stalked around the manor, finding scratches on door frames and un-aired closets. The thralls and servants learned to steer far around her, and to keep their eyes on the floor.

Dally stared at the floor now. “Sorry, mistress.”

“It’s bad enough you have no respect for Jona,” she said, “I won’t be made to wait for you.”

“It won’t happen again.”

A long moment passed, before she let out a stream of smoke through her nose. “The campaign dinner is tomorrow night. Do you know what that is?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the last fundraising opportunity we’ll have, and we still need Kolsch and Sorano to make public support statements. Sorano will be there, of course.”

Dally knew all that, on account of he’d been the one to tell her. He waited while she stabbed her cigarette out into the bottom of her wine glass.

“That man is a snake,” she said.

“Sorano?”

“You’ll see. You’ll watch him for me. Especially when he talks to my husband.”

Dally only knew about Leon Sorano from Lyle, who talked about him all soft-smiling and misty-eyed. In a way it made Dally feel sorry for the guy. Sorano was a Wesend council member, the nephew of some second-tier prince.

“What am I watching for?” he asked.

“If I knew that,” Gita said, “I wouldn’t need you. Pay attention.”

The next day, Dally killed a deer.

He wasn’t faster, or trying harder. He’d just learned the woods, and he knew where there was a steep gully. Instead of blindly chasing, Dally drove the deer on and on through the trees, with the sound of Jona’s horse fading behind him. The deer stumbled on the snow-covered rock slope, and silently struggling back upright. It was too slow, though. Dally caught one of the glittering antlers in his fist. Then he dragged the deer closing, biting the massive neck, tearing, until the animal slowed down and then it stopped, turning heavy and soft in his grip.

Apart from Seth, Dally only ever killed rats and pigeons before. He stared in confusion at the deer’s blank, dark eye, feeling nothing except cold adrenaline. This wasn’t like Seth, but his heart was still pounding far too hard. Finally he swallowed the blood in his mouth, and looked up to see Jona standing over him.

“You ruined the pelt,” the boy said, but he didn’t raise his whip. “I suppose you can carry it back, now.”

Dally did, and hung it up outside the kitchen shed like the human cooks told him. Finally he smiled, then, hearing them talk about how big the deer was, and look at those antlers, and maybe they could eat some themselves. One man hacked off the bony part of the deer’s hind leg, and handed it to Dally like a great prize.

The piece was mostly fur and hoof, but Dally cracked the bone enough to lick the marrow out, scraping with the serrated edge of his tongue. The cooks laughed, and let him sit in the shelter of the stoop to finish it. Then Dally took one of his cigarettes out, and appreciated the cooks stares while he smoked it.

It was the night of the campaign dinner, and everyone not already on duty got herded to the bath. They sat in there for a full hour. Dally sank himself up to his eyes, scrubbing away the deer blood while everyone else politely pretended not to see him. That felt good. For a while after that he cut Red’s hair, and snapped the few spines off her scalp. It was weirdly quiet - no one was looking forward to hanging around drunk humans for a whole night.

An hour later, Dally was trailing Lyle through a crowd getting thicker every second. The band was just starting to drone with their tight-wound human music. Five minutes after that, Lyle was showing him to a young lady dripping diamonds. She squealed in fake terror as Lyle put Dally’s arm around her, and then laughed as she skipped away. Though they had only just got here, all the women were already acting drunk. It let them gather in small, giggling clusters, well away from the men.

The governor was in a good mood. Soon after, he put his champagne flute in Dally’s hand, and then left it there while he went to talk to a baron. When he was sure no-one was looking, Dally tipped back half of it in a long gulp. Then he passed the rest to Marsh, the nearest thrall.

“I can’t,” Marsh said.

“Blame it on me.” Dally grinned, and pressed the glass into Marsh’s hands. His cheeks were hot, though there was no way he was drunk yet.

Marsh took the drink, and then another one when Lyle did the same thing half an hour later. Dally got shown to an opera singer, two counts and the CEO of Omai Mercantile. None of them had intel worth remembering, and the CEO tried to snap off one of the bone-spines behind Dally's ear. It didn't hurt anything except the man's pride - those were stuck on pretty good. Dally was starting to itch under the heavy wool dress uniform. Where the hell was Sorano? Gita would blame Dally if he came back without anything useful.

Near midnight, he'd managed to get actually tipsy from stolen booze. Lyle took him to see a army guy, maybe a general. At least, he had some bars on his collar and a chest full of gleaming medals.

Lyle pointed Dally at a spot in front of the two of them, and smiled when Dally obediently went to stand there. "You see?" he asked the general.

"Mine aren’t made like that," the general said, "you should see them; the dregs they send us. You can't teach that type discipline. They don’t have the sense for it, and anyway there's too many of them."

Too many? Dally's blank stare finally locked on the man’s face. How could there be too many thralls on the front?

Lyle blinked. "I thought there weren't enough?”

"Hm. Well. The real problem is there aren't enough men to keep the damn thralls working. We're down to less than a thousand officers over the whole effort, did you know that? Young men these days are too soft for the Front. They’d rather hunt, eh? Girls or game."

“I wouldn’t know,” Lyle said. “My son served. Mariel served at Ostenlied.”

“Of course I didn’t mean your boy.” The general smiled. “Just most young men, you see? Gambling and whoring, shopping for earrings while the Brairi push north...”

The General’s ‘coddled youth’ speech trundled on, like a tram-car running on a worn track. Dally stared into space, trying to think through the buzz of liquor. One thousand humans on the front couldn’t be right. That must mean a few hundred thralls for every human.

Dally almost didn’t notice a young man coming up, not until Lyle’s focus snapped away from the general.

“Leon,” Lyle said.

Leon Sorano smiled.

Dally thought he got it, then; why Lyle fawned over this man. Sorano had bright teeth, slightly crooked, and a small birthmark on his upper lip. A heavy brow shadowed dark eyes, against his dark northerner skin. He wasn’t exactly pretty, not until he looked at you. But he was doing that now, looking right at Dally.

Lyle led the two of them off, abandoning the General to a plate of canapes. “So?” he asked Sorano, waving at Dally. “What do you think?”

“Isn’t that Dally Harper?”

Lyle beamed. “I knew you would like him. You liked the fight, of course.”

“I did.” The smile Sorano flashed at Dally didn’t reach his eyes. “Commendable work.”

“Thank you,” Dally said.

Sorano turned back to Lyle. “I didn’t know you’d buy him, though. It’s a risk, isn’t it? Buying thralls? The Requisition Act comes in next week."

Lyle's face stiffened. “You the one who told me I ought to,” he said. “You said I ought to, if I wanted.”

“Ah...” Sorano waved it off, apologetic, “maybe I was drunk. Well, I’m sure it’ll be alright.”

Dally opened his mouth before he knew what he was doing. “Requisition? Like in the fifties?”

“Shh, Dally,” Lyle said. “He’s talkative, this one. Isn’t he sweet, though?”

“Yes.” Sorano was watching Dally’s face, unreadable. He smiled back at Lyle. “Forgive me, of course you’ll find a way to keep them.”

They started on some human politics, and Dally stopped listening. There was a sound in his head like distant thunder, and the words Requisition Act played over and over. That and Gita’s voice, telling him she’d found a buyer. She’d even smiled while she said it.

Humans thought thralls didn’t know any history, but that was only because they couldn’t understand the songs. In the last Requisition, almost all the privately owned thralls in Savos got taken by the Corps, and packed into rail cars to the South Front. They went untrained, used to working construction and living in thrall houses. Most of them never came back. The ones that did brought songs to remember it, the kind that cut in your throat when you sang them.

Humans remembered the Requisition, too; they remembered never getting paid for their stolen property. Which meant, after everything, that there was no buyer. No sane man would buy Dally now.

Lyle’s hand clamped on his arm, jolted him back to the real world. “Listen,” he was telling Sorano, “it’s late. Stay the night with us.”

It sounded like a natural offer, but Lyle was reeling Dally in, clawing drunkenly at his sleeve. ‘Us’ didn’t mean Gita. Dally’s fingers clenched on the pommel of his saber.

Sorano smiled, faint and diplomatic. “That’s very kind,” he said, “but I have to be in Nirov tomorrow morning.”

“They’ll hold the railcar for you.”

“I have to be sober in Nirov, I should say, and rested.” He was already backing away. “There’s always the election ball?”

Lyle trailed after him, helplessly swaying a few steps behind. “I suppose.”

On his way past, Sorano put a hand on Dally’s shoulder, gripping a little too tight. “Nice to meet you.”

Dally glanced up, but Sorano was already gone.

“Ah, well,” Lyle said, “just us.”