Read Online Mastiff by Tamora Pierce - Free Book Online

total.”

    Mistress Orielle buried her face in her hands. Tunstall looked at us, having said all he meant to say.

    “Perhaps it’s time to let Achoo go to work?” Master Farmer asked. “Set her to track the prince, now that she has something to give her the scent?”

    Mistress Orielle got to her feet with Tunstall’s help and let Pounce and me squeeze by as he climbed the last step to stand with Master Farmer. “I’ll take good care of the clothes, don’t you worry,” she told me, patting the bag. She looked beyond us. Master Ironwood was approaching. I’d thought he looked bad when he greeted my lord at the front door. Now he looked worse. “We have the prince’s dirty clothes to care for,” she told him.

    “What do I care for dirty clothes, you idiot female?” he snapped at her as he passed us by. I bristled and stepped onto the ground floor. Achoo came with me, growling, her head down.

    Mistress Orielle set her hand on my arm. “I’m used to it,” she said, her soft voice matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t bother me.”

    I would have said, “It bothers me,” but it wasn’t my place. If this quiet little mot was the queen’s personal mage, she was far better able to defend herself than I could.

    I knelt beside Achoo, telling her,
“Mudah.”
Achoo looked at me, as if to ask if I was sure, then relaxed. Master Ironwood was gone down the hall in any event. Tunstall and Master Farmer were waiting. I held a stained and smelly loincloth under Achoo’s nose. She gave it a good sniff before she began to sneeze.
“Maji,”
I said. Get to work. I looked around for Pounce, but he had disappeared again. I hoped he was going to drop a wall on Master Ironwood for his meanness, but knew it wasn’t likely. He would call it interference and tell me to drop the wall on the mage myself.

    Off went Achoo. I cleared my thoughts and followed. In the years I have been running with her, I have found that I make my own contributions, keeping my eyes and ears open as I follow. Up the stairs she took me, stopping often to turn, sniffing. On she would go. I was fairly certain that she smelled the raiders as they carried the lad back along the hall from the nursery, but Achoo had to work in her own way. She could be chasing the prince as he came in from play, sweating and leaving his scent in the air where a hound with an uncanny nose would find it hours, even days, after. She had to breathe in all of the scents and then unravel them.

    Achoo halted at last, thwarted by the end of the wooden floor and the gaping hole where the roof, attic, nursery, and whatever lay below had dropped into the cellars. Three charred boards, held by whatever remained of the magic that reinforced this wing of the palace, jutted out over that gaping pit. I had the strange fancy the hole was a giant’s mouth, the boards rotted teeth.

    “Achoo,” I called softly. I didn’t want to command her when she had the scent, but she was making me very nervous. She circled on those boards, blowing smoke and the scents of charred wood, paint, and flesh out of her nose. The spells were lace. What if the threads that held those boards up snapped under her?

    I offered the loincloth silently, about to call her a second time, when she straightened and trotted back past me, her plumed tail in the air. She was on the move again. I followed her back down the hallway. We passed the waiting stairwell. Achoo ignored it. The prince’s captors had not taken him downstairs here. We passed an open linen closet where a noble lady sobbed into a pile of folded sheets and a maidservant awkwardly patted her on the back. The maid glanced at us, but the noblewoman never looked up. Next I looked into a room where Master Ironwood sat in a window, a bowl between his hands. He stared into its contents as a lilac glow shone on its surface.

    Then Achoo found a stairwell she liked. She ran swiftly down, but I had to go more carefully. Pooled blood made the marble steps