Feeding the Hooks

A care-note for the crew's ash-hounds pinned in the kennel — and, in its last line, the crew's standing joke about the one place their fearless chief will not go: near the water.

Whoever's on the hounds after me, read it or lose a finger.

The Hooks feed at dusk, not before — a fed hound sleeps through a watch and that's no use to anyone. Slack the near chains when Pell's runners come through so they don't take a leg off our own; the split's bad enough without the dogs picking a side. The grey bitch is the one to mind. She minds only the chief.

And since the new lads keep asking why we den the dogs up dry and never down by the cistern where there's room: it's not the dogs. It's Herself. Vera Redhook will walk onto a road full of the watch's spears and grin, but she will not bed the hold anywhere she can hear water moving. Took that hooked axe off a drowned man, they say, and left something of herself in the wet doing it. Don't say it to her face. Do keep the dogs away from the deep pools — a hound that learns to swim learns to leave.