Soon Bane and Dyre were at the center of a gathering, a score of creatures all talking at once, producing a windy gibberish that babbled on until the one called Shatter thrust through the mob and drowned them out with a stentorian cry: “Good-looking girls there, Ash. So these’re the daughters, eh?”
Ashes’s lips thinned, his jaw tightened. “So, what you got, Shatter? You got some girls hid we don’t know about?”
Bane shut his eyes, reminded of Dutter’s farm, where the animals had made similar noises and the supernume farmhands had joshed at him in similar phrases, until they had learned not to. He had never suffered insults without retaliation. Here, the life around him was itself an insult, past retaliation, and the inability to voice or display his outrage left him feeling weak, as though from loss of blood. He would feel better later, he told himself, and then he would do whatever he had to do, and when he did it, this mockery, yes, mockery would be remembered, for Ashes had no right to do … whatever it was he had done.
“Boys’re bettern nothin’, I suppose!” Shatter brayed.
“That’s right, Shat. Can’t blame a man for trying.”
The one called Mooly bent himself in laughter. “No, we can’t blame old Ash for tryin’! Or us for watchin’ him try!”
The gathering split asunder. Ashes rode out of it, the boys staying close behind him as he pointed his horse toward a shack under a towering tree at the far side of the camp. There they turned the horses into a corral made of dead branches with bits of vine twisted around them, and while Ashes busied himself with unsaddling the mounts, the boys went inside. There was little in the way of furniture. A table and a chair. A low dirt mound cushioned with boughs and sheepskins to make a couch or sleeping place. They settled themselves on this, leaning forward toward the coals of the fire, piling on a stick or two as though this tending of the fire were necessary and demanding, choosing an appearance of gravity rather than acknowledge to one another the depth of their confusion and disappointment. They had not sorted out how they felt, certainly they had not sorted out what, if anything, they would do about how they felt.
When Ashes came in, they were still bent beside the fire, side by side, cross-legged and silent.
He regarded them narrowly. “Well?”
The first thing they needed, so Bane had decided, was information. “What’d you bring us here for?”
“You’re family,” said Ashes, hanging his jacket on a peg set into a tent pole. “You’ll want to be in on family business.”
“Don’t exactly see it that way,” said Bane, carefully expressionless. “Don’t see much great future here. Not exactly what you promised. No reason to have killed her, if this was all we did it for.”
“No women here,” Dyre added in sulky explanation. “No sex machines. No hot baths. No massage. I had a look at what they was roasting on the fires, walking over here, and it’s not food, it’s garbage. You promised us good stuff, all kinds of good stuff.”
“You had your good stuff with Marool,” said Ashes. “I promised you good things while you were with her, boys. I said, you get yourselves educated at House Genevois, and I’ll situate you at Mantelby Mansion. Well, you got situated there, one way or t’other, and you got good stuff, too, don’t say you didn’t.”
“A few days,” grated Bane. “And why her? Why not somebody we didn’t have to kill? Somebody we coulda stayed with?”
Ashes said angrily, “I told you why, boy. She needed killing and she’s the only one couldn’t smell you. That job’s over and that future’s gone a begging. You don’t want the good life any more than the rest of us do, but before we get it, first we got to clear the way! So, you’ve done the first part and killed one that needing killing.”
“We killed her cause you told us to!”
“Well, I’m your daddy. I got that right.”
“I been wanting to ask you, how come she couldn’t smell us?” asked Bane, eyes narrow.