The Jaguar Knights Read Online Free

ourselves.”
    “Remember you are my subordinate, Inquisitor. How old are you?”
    She shook her head, chewing and smirking down at her platter.
    “I said, ‘How old are you? ’ ”
    She looked up with a sultry glance that would have stopped a knight in a tilting yard. “Old enough for anything you require, Sir Wolf.”
    He was outmatched. Already he could feel old yearnings wakening. Buxom was not essential. “What grade are you, then?”
    She sucked on a bone and waved it in a vague gesture. “Not allowed to tell.”
    “At least I’m entitled to know your abilities. I have worked with snoops often enough to know they come supplied with various tricks and skills. Some are conjuration, some come from long training, others are gadgets in your pockets.”
    “My skills will be at your disposal when needed.”
    Had she been a boy, at that point Wolf would have leaned across the table and belted his ear hard enough to spin his head like a weathercock. “When we set out today you questioned the Privy Council’s wisdom in sending a man of my age and background to investigate an act of war or armed rebellion. Tell me why Grand Inquisitor did not assign a senior agent to support me, instead of a flippant sixteen-year-old female apprentice?” That guess could be out three years either way.
    “Because I was the best-qualified inquisitor available.” The gibe had amused her, which was a warning that the truth might surprise him.
    “Qualified how, other than having shapely eyebrows?”
    “I am not permitted to answer.”
    Wolf hurled a bone into the fire. “This is ridiculous!” He studied her for a moment. “I know this fodder would sicken a sewer rat, but it’s cold out there, so eat. That’s an order. You’re as frightened as the King was. What do you fear, Hogwood?”
    “I am not afraid!” Anger darkened the flush the fire had brought to her cheeks.
    “Yes, you are. I know I have the ugliest face in Chivial and they call me the King’s Killer, but I rarely kill inquisitors, and never women or children, so you need fear nothing from me, girl. What else scares you? The journey?”
    “Nothing!” She glared.
    “You’re lying,” he said and cut a hefty slice of cheese.
    Suddenly his assistant was wearing the blank, glassy mask of an inquisitor. Even the flush faded from her cheeks. “This collaboration is not prospering. Start again. You tell me your background and I’ll tell you mine.”
    It was a peace offering, he supposed. They had time to kill, a meal to eat. A job to do. They couldn’t fight all the time.
    “My history is no secret. I was born Ed Attewell in Westerth.”
    “In Sheese, to be exact.”
    “A totally unimportant mining hamlet.”
    “Is it really?”
    He ignored that dangerous invitation to tattle. “My father died in a rock fall, and my mother found another breadwinner. When she died in childbirth, he found another bed mate. When he fell down a shaft…and so on. I lost count. They got worse. Worse, they got drunk, and often on money I’d earned in the pits.” The last stepfather had given him the start of his face—the smashed nose, crumpled ears, gap teeth. “I had one full brother, Alf. When the current house brute started in on him as well, I decided it was time for us to leave.” Wolf had gone for him with a shovel, leaving himself no safe course except flight.
    Hogwood had switched expressions, to Dark Chamber Sympathetic Face Number One, perhaps. “So what led you to choose Ironhall?”
    He laughed and gulped down some ale. “Crime, of course. Every kid in Ironhall brags of a criminal past. I remember one thirteen-year-old who boasted of being a serial rapist until Prime asked him to explain exactly what a rapist did.”
    Hogwood did not smile. “But he is one now, of course?”
    “He’s a Blade in the Royal Guard!”
    “The difference escapes me.”
    Was this insubordination intended to be some sort of flirtation? Hogwood had a very kinky taste in men if she