Valorous King visits the Lashton Animal Rescue.
Cecil Hobbes, an ex-PE teacher disgraced and looked down on in his hometown, has a new partner: Sir Valorous King, a knight of the realm, once a child of prophecy, and Cecil’s stalker.
A few months into their relationship, Cecil finally convinces Valorous to see a therapist, on the condition that Cecil attend one himself.
Valorous had spent a lot of time in his life on public transport.
Trains, buses, trams, subways, coaches, carts and rickshaws, walking caravans. It was an easy way to tail someone whilst remaining invisible, to blend in with the crowd around them, other travellers, and it was an easy way to get a feel for a city too, for the people in it, to just ride around, listen to people, watch them.
He knew all the bus and train routes in and out of Lashton and Camelot respectively, and he could draw a lot of the magical and mundie train lines in Loegr from memory, knew the line numbers and most of the times. Most trains and buses he was on, he did the same thing he did in cinemas and theatres, although the urge to do it wasn’t quite as intense or ingrained – he did a quick onceover, took in details, faces, committed them to memory.
His memory for timetables and maps wasn’t the same. He tended to remember those just from looking at them a few times, and they ended up stamped in his head, like a lot of things ended up stamped in his head.
He liked buses.
The train was easier when he wanted to actually rest, ‘cause a lot of the time he could get a private compartment, but he liked how buses felt. He liked the rumble of the wheels under his feet, especially on buses and coaches that went through fae land, so you could feel how fucking shitty and uneven the roads were. Most fae were fucking libertarians, basically, got mad at the idea about paying money towards the maintenance of a public road, so a lot of fae roads were fucked.
He used to enjoy it when he was younger, still enjoyed it now, riding on a bus and feeling the change in territory underneath the wheels, where you went from land ruled by the king to land from this fae group or that fae family, where most were potholed and shitty, and then some were beautifully paved.
Valorous had tried a few months ago to ride the bus with headphones in the way that people talked about doing, listening to music and just zoning out – whatever the fuck that meant when you were out in public – but it had just made his skin buzz, made him feel anxious and sick and nervous and freaked out.
He couldn’t do that, it turned out, just fucking dull some of his senses and act like things were normal, feel comfortable, be able to relax.
What he’d been doing a lot instead, the past few weeks, was riding buses that didn’t matter, riding different lines than usual, picking out the bus line that would take the longest and most meandering route to wherever he was trying to go. He liked to listen to people talk – when he took the shittiest buses, the ones that went all the way around an area and through all the small villages or suburbs that were only on the one route, he got to see old ladies and teenagers and their dogs and tradies on their way into the city.
It was good, taking inefficient journeys. It was good for him. The longer the journey took somewhere, the more details he took in that weren’t important, or criminal, or noteworthy – he was counting the breeds of dogs and the number of specific jackets from M&S and number of men who’d had hair transplant surgery instead of counting potential threats.
He couldn’t make his brain stop sucking every detail up, but he could make sure that more of those details were nice, or if not nice, boring and unimportant.
He was taking the 305 into Lashton instead of any of the more central bus routes that would take him right into the centre. It was a three-hour route because it went through all these isolated, weird villages and had to take the long way around bits of deadland or areas that were too rich with magic for the bus to run, and dipping through mundie places on the way.
He didn’t normally come out this way, or get this way into town – he was still a few stops away from the build-up of Lashton proper, mostly green fields around them still, when he saw the sign and reached up and pulled the handle on the bell for the bus to stop.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and Cecil had texted to say that he and Coshel were on the train back from Camelot and were gonna go and get a few pints, if Valorous wanted to join them, but they would only just be coming back into town now, and they’d go to the house first and take Ruby out before they went out again.
The Lashton Animal Rescue was a decently big compound, with high fences all around the outside except for a paddock on the far side where it adjoined a few fields with dressage arenas and some basic courses for riding. The stables on the far side were privately owned, and he knew some of his cousins used to ride out here when they were kids, because it was the closest stables to them, and they could come out here on the bus.
Jack would drive them, sometimes – it was always Unfathomable, she was into horses even now, usually her and Grateful, and then sometimes Curious or Durable would go along with them – but he’d have to wait outside in the car when they went in. He was scared of horses, shit-scared of them, didn’t like horses or cows or even sheep, really. Farm animals all freaked him out, either ‘cause they were too big or he didn’t get how they moved.
Jack waiting while the others rode horses was part of why he’d written so many fucking pieces about the LAR over the years, Valorous thought.
It wasn’t like Jack was some hard-bitten serious journalist who was too good to write a human interest story, the Lashton Beacon wasn’t a huge press, but he mostly wrote about economics, politics and elections, or did analyses of fucking statistics and broke them down. Valorous liked Uncle Jack very much, but he was fundamentally a pretty boring guy despite how he dressed and held himself: he liked numbers and graphs, and he understood them a bit better than he did people.
But he’d interview Chutilla Nikifarenka pretty regularly.
About animals, mostly – Jack always said it wasn’t easy to get her to talk about anything else – and he’d write about cats or dogs that wanted adopting, or horses or whatever other animals they had, or birds; he’d write what she said about wildlife rehabilitation, or tips and tricks on feeding birds or planting the right flowers or helping hedgehogs or whatever else that she had, for mundie animals more than magical ones.
A few years back, he’d managed to get her to talk a little bit about growing up in caravans in the 1800s, before her sister had married a gadje and they’d settled in Poltava, and he’d mentioned he’d had to look at a decade’s worth of notes to get enough to put together for it. She never joined in taking on the Renn family name when they’d immigrated to the UK, said she was too old and too set in her ways, and that most souls she cared about never knew her name anyway.
It was her money and mostly her work that kept the rescue going – they were a charity, and so they did fundraising shit, but apparently the old lady didn’t actually have much interest in accountancy or paperwork or whatever else. She only really cared about the animals, and so she hired other people for everything else.
Valorous stood with his rucksack on his back – over both shoulders, thanks, Cecil – and looked at the picture of her up on the wall, a painted portrait of her holding a really fucked-up looking cat with an underbite and one eye in her arms, which the plaque said had been called Truffle until she died in 2007.
“Hi there,” said the boy behind the desk – Cecil would have liked the look of this kid when he was in here, when he’d picked Ruby out and brought her home. He was called Archie, and he had curly red hair, was skinny and looked younger than he probably was because he had such big fucking eyes. “Can I help you? Are you looking to adopt, foster, just want to have a look around?”
“To look around,” Valorous said. “My uncle used to come here a lot.”
“Oh, who’s your uncle?”
“Jack King.”
“Oh, we love Mr King!” Archie said immediately, smiling. “He’s one of our biggest donors, you know, and Madam Nikifarenka keeps all his articles in a little folder. I don’t think I’ve met you, though – you don’t ride horses?”
“Not like my cousins do,” Valorous said. “I grew up learning to ride war horses – I joust.”
He watched the other man’s gaze drop to his neck, and he felt the weight of Archie’s wide-eyed gaze on the scars that reached up his jaw, mostly hidden but not quite under the shadow of his sweatshirt hood. He wanted to be sick, but he didn’t avert his gaze, didn’t push the easy, casual smile off his face as he stood there in front of the desk.
“Oh, you’re, um, you’re Sir Valorous,” Archie said, and he exhaled. “Sorry, I didn’t recognise you. Your hair’s so long now, it’s— It really suits you. Did you used to have to keep it uniform short, when you were in active service?”
“Yeah,” Valorous said, smiling faintly, feeling a little dizzy and not really knowing why, the nausea disappearing all at once like it was in a bubble that had been burst. “Uh, something like that. How does this work, do I just, um, do you just show me around?”
“Sure,” said Archie, and rang a bell. “Let me just get someone to cover the desk.”
* * *
Archie was giving him the donor’s tour, Valorous thought, or something like it.
He told Valorous about when each wing had been built, and what their facilities offered, and what for – showed him the dogs in their pens and explained how they each got walks and they tried to socialise them, how some volunteers came in to help with that, pointed at the furniture and the rugs and how they tried to introduce the dogs to different scents and textures; showed him the cats in their rooms and the cat trees and explained a little about how they kept their scents separate and let them socialise, talked a bit about cats as colony animals and as individuals; showed him some of the domestic animals that were waiting for adoption, but were weirder than cats or dogs, a trio of budgies, a few pigeons, some lizards and snakes, and talked about the different stuff and stimulation they needed, heating pads, water dishes, cuttlefish, mirrors.
“We have these four visitor’s rooms for when we want a dog to be able to meet individuals or a family in a slightly more home-like setting, it’s great for socialising them and getting them used to the idea of being somewhere other than a pen if they’ve been here a while…”
“… a lot of our money goes into wildlife rehabilitation, we mostly focus on mundie animals like garden birds, hedgehogs, foxes, badgers, mustelids and rodents, but we do actually have another room where we take on demonic or fae species as an interim before they get to a magical rescue. Most of our volunteers can’t do much with them, though, um…”
“… doing outreach for volunteers, we’ve tried adverts and stuff, um, we get some vets doing their training out here because it’s such a big space from the college, and sometimes from Camelot as well—”
“… costs each month, just vet bills, but we fundraise for individual animals, that’s easiest for kittens and puppies and stuff, Sir Valorous, obviously harder for, um, less marketable animals, basically, I know that sounds mean…”
They were standing in a little kind of garden with some benches and stuff, and there was a grotto with a big icon of Saint Francis of Assisi. Through the glass walls of a little outbuilding, Valorous could see Madam Nikifarenka, a tall but wizened woman with thick curls of grey hair clouding around her head, showing a volunteer how to feed kittens that seemed tiny in the palms of her hands and his.
The volunteer was Ursus Hound.
He hadn’t seen Valorous yet, but somehow, Valorous couldn’t look away from him.
“Is she Catholic?” Valorous asked.
“… Sir Valorous?” Archie asked, stumbling over what he’d been talking about, something about making budget available for them to have an office manager.
“Madam Nikifarenka,” Valorous said, pointing at the painted wooden statue of the monk amongst the flowers. There were other statues all around the grotto, animals that had been made in the same style as the Franciscan icon, and they were all life-size and painted, then nestled in between rocks or under benches or on shelves or in amongst flowers and ferns. “That’s Saint Francis. He’s not canonised in the Eastern Orthodox church. Is the old lady a Catholic now, or what?”
“Oh,” said Archie, and looked around the grotto and the icons in it as if he’d never seen them before. “Um, I don’t know. She just likes to sit out here.” Casting his gaze around, he quickly rallied and said, “Um, but, Sir Valorous, we aren’t a religious institution, and none of our funds or policy are directed by any particular religious doctrine or affiliation. If, um, if that’s… if that’s a concern.”
Ursus Hound was a big boy. He was fifteen, stocky, and his body was in that teenage in-between stage where it could go either way, where he could grow up to be a big and bulky lad or where all that fat might still reconstitute into muscle and harder bone structure. Next to Madam Nikifarenka, he looked particularly big, as tall as she was as six feet but three times as wide as she seemed, her dungarees hanging off her skinny body like old clothes off a scarecrow.
She was looking over his shoulder and pointing as she took him through it, and Valorous could see the nervousness on his face, could read his lips as he anxiously turned to her from the tiny kitten in his palm and asked, “What if I feed it too much?”
“It will vomit, same as with a human baby,” Nikifarenka replied, her expression unaffected. “Or maybe it will vomit anyway. You wait, you leave it, then you feed it again.”
“You said that with how small they are, it’s uncertain if they’ll live. How old do they have to be before we know if they’ll survive?”
“There are no guarantees of survival, boy.”
Hound glanced up at her, his expression stricken, and in the moment he also saw Valorous on the other side of the glass. Valorous watched his eyes widen, watched his lips part as he leaned back on his feet and then carefully hand the kitten back to her – Madam Nikifarenka followed Hound’s gaze through the glass to take Valorous in, and gestured for him to go and wash his hands as she returned the kitten to the heated box it was in with its littermates.
“Madam Nikifarenka,” Archie said as the two of them came outside. “This is—”
“Valorous King,” pronounced the old lady. “The boy said you were very frightening. You don’t seem very frightening to me.”
Valorous looked at her and kept his gaze off of Hound as he trailed anxiously behind her, trying to hide his bulk behind the old lady’s form and not at all succeeding, even without the way he was anxiously peering around her at Valorous. Madam Nikifarenka had grey-brown eyes and a very small, pursed mouth, a natural, constant hollow in her cheeks, and age spots across her hands, her face, the wrinkled skin on her neck, but she didn’t show any signs of stiffness or difficulty moving despite her advanced age, even for somebody magical.
“You don’t expect me to call you sir, do you?” Madam Nikifarenka asked, arching one skinny eyebrow. “Tiny little boy like you – you look very small without your armour on.”
“You look pretty small even wearing yours,” Valorous replied, and he glanced down at the tear on Nikifarenka’s knee, the denim ripped. “You want me to patch that for you? They look like teeth marks to me, too close together to be a dog or fox. Small cat wouldn’t have shook its head from side to side like that. Somebody’s ferret, was it, a weasel, pine marten?”
“It was a stoat,” Nikifarenka said, but she’d gone from staring coldly at him, her lips twisted into a tight little frown, to smiling at him coldly instead. “Do you like animals, boy?”
“I don’t know,” said Valorous. “I like my dog. Ruby. My boyfriend got her from here a few months back.”
“She doing well?”
“Uh huh. She’s still quite reactive, but she’s a lot more confident and secure in herself than she used to be.”
“That the dog you terrorised, boy?” Nikifarenka asked, turning back to look at Hound, and he immediately looked at the ground before she chucked him under the chin with the knuckle of her index finger. “Uh uh. You are not a small creature, you cannot make yourself small by bowing your head. Keep your head tall, or you will injure your spine. Or I will injure it.”
“Yeah,” said Hound. His knees were shaking. “She was barking. And kind of— whimpering, screaming. It was bad. I felt bad. Even before he, um…” He gestured to Valorous, his eyes downcast again, his hands trembling as much as his knees were.
“She’s okay,” Valorous said, looking directly at him now, aware of Archie’s uncertainty beside him, the way that he obviously didn’t know what to say, his script derailed. “Ruby, she’s okay. She’d be scared of fireworks anyway, and the people that set them off in November won’t care. They won’t volunteer at a place like this because they feel guilty about it.”
A tremble went through Hound like he was going to collapse to the floor.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” Valorous added. “Sorry I grabbed you, the way I did. I quit the force, if that means anything to you. I’m not a copper anymore.”
Hound didn’t say anything, just released a sort of wet noise of acknowledgment, and went back to craning his head forward, staring at the floor.
“Go muck out the horses together,” Nikifarenka ordered. “I will accompany our visitor back to the office.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Archie – Hound didn’t say anything, but stumbled in his haste to hurry after him. His shoes were worn through and had holes in their cloth, the soles coming away from their body, and his socks had holes in them too, so that Valorous saw bits of his bare feet as he hurried away.
“Archie give you his speech? Hoping you will give us money?”
“He talked a lot, yeah,” said Valorous. “I already knew most of it. I always read Uncle Jack’s pieces about this place.”
“Your uncle is a good man,” Nikifarenka said. “Shame he is like a pipe cleaner wrapped in black tissue. He used to have a very stupid moustache – a joy to us all it is gone.”
“Noble made him shave it off. Said it looked like he was holding a slug under his nose.”
“Yes,” Nikifarenka agreed gravely. “It did resemble this. You were asking the boy Archie about this grotto, yes? I have keen hearing. When first I built this place, it was 1973, and Eadbhárd Sorrel thought he might like to marry me. He was a carpenter, you know. He has been dead now many years.”
Valorous looked at the statues around the grotto, at the carefully carved deer underneath one of Francis’ outstretched hands, a dove alighting on his shoulder; perched on a lamp post was a painted gull, and there were other small birds, robins, finches, tits, thrushes; there was a red squirrel; a pair of badgers, mother and cub, were poised over a stream running through the rocks; further up, posed inside the fountain it ran from, was an otter, and a little shrew or some other water rodent.
“You didn’t marry him?”
“I’ve never fucked a man in my life,” the old lady scoffed. “He was sniffing about the wrong tree, but the grotto is fine. Sensitive sorts like to sit here when animals die, cry and weep and decide what sort of urns they want to keep their dead dog inside. What are you here for, boy? You can’t have another animal in that house with your “boyfriend”, which is no word at all for that man, more jowl and hair than skin and face.”
“Archie said you’re looking to hire a new facility manager,” Valorous said. “You should hire me.”
Madam Nikifarenka put her hands on her narrow hips, raised narrow eyebrows, and gave him a long, hard look. “It is not a competitive salary,” she said.
“I’m not in it for the money.”
“You’re in it for the animals, huh?”
“I saw your office,” Valorous said. “Post-it notes everywhere. Stacks of paperwork. Coffee rings on all the desks, empty and half-empty packets of medical instruments. It’s a fucking shitshow back there, and that’s just your reception. I bet your admin office is a fucking sty. You don’t need somebody who gets weepy about animals and is volunteering for a good cause – you need someone who’s kind of a cunt, who keeps an office in good order, who doesn’t mind shaking people down for money when Archie’s little speeches don’t do the job.
“You don’t find me frightening, but other people do. That’s pretty fucking useful, in an administrator.”
Nikifarenka was smiling again, the crescent of her lips dragging at her ancient cheeks and making them pucker and line, making all her liver spots and freckles move together like confetti on a scrunched-up tablecloth.
“Will you bring a sword to work?” she asked.
“Depends on the day. Sometimes I might want an axe or a halberd.”
“Good,” she said. “Come to the office, now, we will fill out the paperwork. How did you hear about it, before Archie told you? We were about to put out advertisements tomorrow.”
Valorous smiled. “I got off the bus,” he said. “I’d never actually been in here before, and I saw the sign, so I got off and came in.”
Nikifarenka paused a moment. “You are, uh…” She didn’t have a very strong accent, just a very slight overhang on her speech, her rhythms and the way she stopped and started her sentences more suited to Slavic languages than English. Nonetheless, it sounded pretty fucking Russian when she asked, “Are you psychologically deficient, boy? Unstable?”
“A little bit,” he said, after a moment’s pause. “I’m in therapy.”
Without even a shrug, the old lady nodded her head, as if this was the answer she expected – Hell, maybe even the one she fucking wanted. “Okay,” she said, and started leading the way again. “Come. You can patch my overalls while I fill out this piece of paper.”
VALOROUS, 17:23: got a new job.
CECIL, 17:23: ??
VALOROUS, 17:23: will tell you at the pub.
Putting his phone back in his pocket, he smiled, and trudged after the old lady down the hall.
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