Oh, he thought. Maybe he shouldn’t have made up that story. He’d meant well, but he hadn’t wanted this. Even his own men—who had been there with him and heard Rabedy’s tale, who’d seen Gathen’s body without a dog or wolf bite upon it—were getting caught up in the anger against the canids. They knew how Gathen had really died. Taken out by some pluiking slip of a girl. But here they were, getting carried away by the elder Redshanks’ speechifying.

“Tatiana will tell us we need peace,” Stourin went on. “That we must maintain the truce. But what do we tell her?”

“No!” almost a hundred bogan voices cried in return.

It made a sound loud enough to be heard halfway across the Tombs.

This wasn’t good. This wasn’t any bloody good at all.

Big Dan had only meant to give Gathen some measure of respect in how his life had ended. A tale of a battle with canids seemed so much more noble a death than the truth.

“And if she sends her guard to tell us different?” Stourin demanded.

“We’ll send them back in pieces!” someone shouted to a general roar of approval.

This was truly, pluiking bad, Big Dan thought. But it was too late to own up now. Better the anger be turned on the court’s guard and the canids than on him. And besides, by the time Tatiana actually sent anyone to look into this, all the hubbub would probably have died down, just the way it always did. There’d be no pack of bogans heading off into the wild and the green to hunt down Gathen’s supposed murderers. That was too much like work. A more likely scenario was that the next canid some of these bogans ran into here in the city might have himself a bit of a hard time. But so what? Big Dan’s sympathies had never run with canids, innocent or not.

He let himself relax and concentrated on the moment at hand. He thought of the good times he’d had with Gathen, the stupid little bugger. Lairds, but he was a bogan’s bogan, always into something and none of it good.

When Stourin stopped for a breath in the middle of a particularly descriptive rant against the canids who’d murdered his grandson, Big Dan let himself get into the spirit that the others were showing.

“We’ll hunt the pluikers down like the dogs they are!” he shouted.

That brought him a response of thumping staves and stamping feet as loud as any Stourin had received. Big Dan let himself look stern, hiding the grin that was building inside him. Maybe this was a better way. Instead of making deals with some pluiking green-bree, to just take what they wanted from the green and the wild. Bugger them all.