“You look like that when you listen to music,” she said. “You watch everything, don’t you? Why?”

“It’s peaceful. I learn things.”

Athelburh untied her braid and began combing through it with her fingers. “What things?”

“That rooks — dogs, cats, people — do some kinds of things depending on how old they are. Like those young rooks. In autumn they’ll lose their face feathers, and they’ll start playing fying for the fun of it, only they’re not doing it for the fun of it, they’re proving they’re good enough for the rookery, that they can stay. Like gesiths with their boasting and fighting. And rooks are like jackdaws — like people. They have families. They talk. They don’t like change. There’s an ash spinney a mile away where they like to go pluck the twigs for their nest. Always the same place; one patch is almost bare of twigs. But they’re just twigs, why fly all that way? I don’t know. But that’s what they do.”

… “And what do dogs and cats do?”

“Dogs own space and cats own time. … The cats share the barn and the byre. All of them. But you’ve seen the big ginger tom with the torn ear? … He gets to sit on the hay bale by the door at middæg. The two grey queens curl up there at æfen. The tom wouldn’t go there in the evening, and the queens wouldn’t go there at middæg. But a dog in hall or the kennel likes his own corner, morning, noon, and night. That’s his corner, no one else’s.”

“And people?”

“Kings travel from place to place like a cat but want to own those places like a dog. It’s why there are wars.”

  • Hild, pg. 241 💬📚