Mac learned a lot of things in his first couple of days as a dog.

Firstly, he couldn't tell Beth (or anyone else, for that matter) that he wasn't actually a dog, in any way. He'd tried writing with a stick held in his mouth while waiting for her outside the Houses of Healing the day after she'd taken him in. The stick had disappeared as soon as he'd started writing the first letter. He'd tried digging furrows in the castle gardens to spell out words. When those had magically erased themselves as fast as he could 'write' them, he'd tried Morse code, hoping that he could get around this arbitrary, infuriating and just plain befuddling magic. That didn't work either. He'd tried stealing Beth's books or notes and trying to spell things out in Null Cipher, but found himself actually incapable of putting them in the right order to spell anything but gibberish.

(Besides, stealing her books or notes annoyed her. It got him a scolding and a long-suffering, exasperated but ultimately fond look, and instructions to go outside and have a run around the gardens or the Knights' obstacle course to burn off his excess energy and address his boredom.)

He was just going to have to hope that she worked out that he was too smart and liked engineering too much for a Golden Retriever, then made that admittedly ludicrous logical leap.

(He had doubts. It wasn't exactly as if A followed B which followed C, after all.)

Secondly, he found that he really, really liked scratches under his chin and behind his ears.

Belly rubs were also great, and it felt really goodwhen the fur around his neck and chest were ruffled.

And it was going to be so awkward when he turned back into a human, but it was also very enjoyable when Beth gave him a bath, as was her brushing out his coat afterwards.

He also really enjoyed quiet evenings curled up in her reading nook, listening to the portions that she read out-loud, and her occasional thoughts.

(She had some really interesting ideas, her Healer's training giving her an interesting, new and different perspective.)

(He couldn't write them down, or add his thoughts to them, but he put some additional effort into making sure those ideas and thoughts didn't get lost in the whirlwind in his mind, so he could share them later.)

He learned things about her, too.

(Her favourite food was pie. He was pretty sure her favourite colour was blue. Tesla was her favourite of the famed Engineers, and she was very organized – hence why she couldn't stand it when he messed with her notes and books - and really liked to plan, and enjoyed doing experiments.)

He also learned about the women that Jack and Bozer had to find, and did what he could to help.


On the third day, Mac waited for Jack and Bozer to finish eating before he spoke, a little awkwardly and well aware of the fact, but very earnestly.

'I think you need to tell me about who you're looking for, especially as in four days, I won't be able to understand you.'

Jack stopped scratching absent-mindedly at his side, while Bozer looked up from where he was gnawing on a bone.

It was Bozer who spoke first.

'I don't remember enough to describe her, bro.' His voice was a little flat, which was unusual for him; Bozer was spirited, to say the least. Still, he perked up optimistically. 'But I'll know her when I see her!'

Mac just nodded, trying not to let his scepticism and concern show.

(He was a scientist at heart and liked precise answers, to the extent that he could be maddeningly pedantic.)

(Bozer wasn't quite so logical.)

The two younger men then turned to Jack, with looks on their faces that were amusingly identical and that he'd usually tease them for.

However, Jack sighed instead, resting his head on his paws.

Jack wasn't one for talking about the past.

Oh, he never let Mac forget a funny moment or a screw-up, and he was always ready with a story or two or three (which Mac called long-winded, frequently irrelevant and often pointless, but Jack maintained had subtle life-lessons and wisdom in them), but he didn't like to really talk about the past, about the regrets that haunted him and the bittersweet memories and the tragedies and losses and the what-could-have-beens.

(Mac was exactly the same about that.)

(It'd taken years of friendship and partnership for them to finally talk about Mac's dad who'd abandoned him at the age of ten.)

After a long moment, Jack spoke, his voice uncharacteristically quiet, a little rough with emotion and gilded with guilt.

'Sixteen years ago, I courted a seamstress. Her name was Diane, and she had a daughter, but she'd, uh, left her husband. Daughter's name was Riley, and she was twelve…'


'…He was drunk as a skunk and beating her up, so I threw him around, gladly. Tossed him out on his ass.' Jack swallowed, voice growing rougher, that note of guilt stronger, woven with regret. 'And then I walked out. Never came back, never saw 'em again.' Bozer's eyes were wide and Mac was listening intently. When Jack paused, Mac nudged him gently, comfortingly. Jack managed a wan little smile at him, before continuing. 'A few months later, I tried to find 'em, you know, make sure they were doing okay, but I couldn't find them. Not at their house, not anywhere in the capital. So now I got no idea where to find Diane.'

That note of regret and guilt was stronger again. Mac nudged Jack again, in lieu of his ability to put a hand on his shoulder, while Bozer pushed the bone he'd been gnawing over to the older man. That got a wan little smile out of the Knight.

'We'll find her, Jack. I promise.'

(Mac's brain was already whirring with possibilities, with ideas on how one could track down one particular seamstress in the admittedly-large Kingdom of Phoenix.)

(Most of them centred on waiting until he was turned back into a human and sending an urgent letter by courier pigeon to Matty.)

(Matty, despite apparently not having any magic – Mac suspected she had a little, but he wasn't going to say anything if she wanted to keep that a secret – knew nearly everything, as befitted the Kingdom's Spymaster.)

(She also had a close friendship with the King, and had many resources at her disposal.)

(If anyone could find Diane Davis, it was Matty and her Spies and the Scribes who worked with them.)

That promise, backed up by Bozer's decisive, immediate nod of agreement, made Jack's smile widen just a little bit.

He'd never have children of his own.

He'd sort-of made his peace with that.

He'd been younger when Diane and Riley had come into his life, not quite realized that that hole in his life was there or caring about filling it anytime soon, but he'd felt the loss of his near-stepdaughter from his life acutely.

It was a hole that stayed there, gaping, obvious and still aching, completely unfilled until he'd met Mac.

It was still very much there, and he still missed Diane and Riley, that wound still ached from time-to-time, but Mac and Bozer were good surrogate kids.


Mac walked through town, keeping an eye out for a woman matching Diane Davis' description, or her daughter's, on the off-chance that improbably, they'd happened to move to Lafayette Town.

Hey, highly improbable is not impossible. Trust me, I would know.

And coincidences are statistically inevitable.

A shirt flew over his head, blown by the wind, and he jumped up and caught it instinctively, then ran over, carrying it in his mouth, to the teenage girl who'd been taking down her family's washing when the gust of particularly-strong wind had blown through.

She grinned at him, and took the shirt, crouching down to scratch behind his ears.

'Thank you!'


Mac lay just inside Beth's bedchamber, head on his paws as he listened with interest to the conversation the Healer and her mother were having out on the balcony as they measured and counted the healing herbs that covered most of the balcony.

(Beth was empirically and methodically determining ideal growing conditions for a selection of medicinal plants considered 'tricky' to grow.)

He couldn't follow half of their conversation (which was very unusual for him) as they discussed Caitlyn's idea for the development of a new painkiller using an extract of one of the plants, something not previously invented due to the fact that the plant was rare in the wild and hard to cultivate, at least until Beth had, by process of elimination and the law of large numbers, worked out the right growing conditions.

'…but won't that have an adverse reaction with poppy syrup? Even if we use this as a painkiller to replace poppy syrup, we do still use it as a sedative, and any patients in that much pain will almost-certainly need to be sedated as well.'

'If combined with concentrated lemon balm, I think the combined analgesic and sedative properties will be sufficient for most patients, but of course, we'll need to do some experiments…'

As she listened to her mother, Beth held out the empty watering can to Mac.

He took it, and ran over to the bathroom, going up on his hind legs to dump it in the bathtub, then opened the tap with his mouth to fill it with cold water. When the watering can was full, he turned off the tap, and retrieved the watering can, and ran it back to Beth.

Caitlyn looked impressed, and a little surprised, and just glanced at her daughter with a question in her eyes. Beth shrugged, a little helplessly.

'He's very clever and really likes to help.'


On the fourth day, a Saturday, Mac and Bozer were walking around town, Mac having suggested that the more women Bozer saw in a day, the more likely he was to find the woman in a timely fashion, due to simple probability.

They happened to stumble upon a bigger boy bullying a smaller one, having stolen his kite, and exchanged a glance, not needing to speak.

(Bozer had first met Mac – who'd been moved up two grades at school into Bozer's year – when Donnie Sandoz had been beating up the younger boy. Bozer had jumped into the fray and broken the bully's nose, getting suspended from school for two weeks. Mac had gone over to his house every day of that suspension to do his homework, and they'd been best friends ever since.)

Mac went left, and Bozer went right.


Fifteen minutes later, the bully was gone, and Mac had somehow managed to mostly fix the boy's damaged kite, despite his lack of opposable thumbs, with the aid of the boy and Bozer.

The boy grinned widely, and headed for a local park at a run, though not before gesturing for Bozer and Mac to follow him.

The two best friends exchanged a glance, and then ran after the boy, Bozer with an excited whoop (which came out as a woof), Mac with a grin.

Kite-flying is lots of fun, no matter how old you are.

And there's lots of fascinating physics. Air resistance, surface area, wind currents and variation in local air temperature, velocity, tension and elasticity in the string, the fabric and the frame…

And I can now tell you, empirically, that it's also lots of fun for our four-legged friends.

Chasing a kite tail is a surprisingly occupying and enjoyable pastime.


The fourth night, Mac slept in front of a small pot-bellied stove in a tiny chamber with a small cot in it in the Houses of Healing, hoping that this still counted as Beth's hearth, since she was technically sleeping there for the night, even though she'd only had a two-hour nap in the late evening.

Beth had had to stay to treat and monitor a patient, a sixteen-year-old farmer's son from an outlying area who'd been badly cut on the arm in an attack by bandits eight days ago. The wound had gotten infected, and when it became clear that their son was desperately ill, his parents had undertaken an urgent journey to Lafayette Town and the Houses of Healing. They'd arrived around noon, and the Healers had immediately gotten to work, but the boy was well and truly fighting for his life.

Mac woke up sometime in the very early hours of the morning, perhaps about 4 am, when Beth came back into the tiny room, expression full of grief and exhaustion.

She sank down onto the cot, posture slumping, and rubbed her temple with her free hand. Mac gave a sympathetic whine, and got up and nudged her hand with his nose.

Automatically, she reached out to ruffle his fur, silent for a moment, before speaking after he gave another whine.

Her voice was quiet and exhausted and sad, with a clear note of grief in there.

'We lost him.' Her voice shook a little. 'Sixteen years old and trying to protect his family, and…'

Beth trailed off and just flung her arms around him, resting her cheek against his ruff. He felt and heard her give a sob, then another.

She was trained to detach a little, as all Healers were, so that they could stay objective, triage and continue to treat patients even when the losses piled up, as they always did, inevitably.

(Every Healer lost patients, and the longer their career, the more they lost. It was just a fact of life, one that Healers had to live with.)

But she was also still human, like they all were.

Mac had no doubt that she'd remained a consummate, focused professional, caring but calm and objective, while she'd fought for the farmer's son's life.

But now, she had to let her emotions out.

(He had a feeling that this wasn't just about the farmer's son, but about the doubtlessly many patients she'd seen suffer, die or be disabled in the recent dark years.)

(Necessity would have forced her to keep her Healer's calm and composure during the dark days, but now that they were over, and the shadow they'd cast beginning to fade – spring was coming faster than ever recorded, just in the last five days – she couldn't hold it back any longer.)

'…you can't save everyone, you can only try as hard as you can, and that has to be enough.'

Beth said that as if it were a mantra. He suspected it was a piece of much-valued advice from a mentor or a teacher during her Healer training.

She raised her head, and took several deep breaths, drying her eyes with a handkerchief that she pulled out of a pocket sewn into her dress.

Then, she put her handkerchief away and reached out to stroke behind his ears. He leaned into her touch, and did his best to make a happy little noise for her, and she gave a wan smile.

'Now that Murdoc's been defeated and the dark days are over…' As she spoke, her smile widened a little, growing more hopeful, matching her voice. '…things will get better, won't they, boy?'

There was something fiercely determined in the last few words, like she would personally, somehow, by sheer strength of will, make things get better.

It made him smile too, and he nodded insistently.

A not-so-little voice in his head insistently and determinedly hoped that the hopefulness in her voice, that better that she was referring to, wasn't just for the Kingdom or her patients, but also for him coming back to fulfil that promise he'd made her.

(That promise had been, for some reason that he'd refused to become distracted by by fully analysing at the time, one of his admittedly-many things to fight for, to keep going for, during that long trek through the wilderness to The Witch of Thorns' home, during that long battle through Murdoc's guards, during that knife-edged battle with the sorcerer himself.)

Mac gave another sympathetic whine as Beth removed her Healer's apron and curled up on her cot, nudging his nose into her hand again, before settling himself down next to the cot.

(It meant he wasn't exactly on the hearth anymore, but if this didn't count towards the seven nights, or restarted the count, he didn't mind.)

(She was running her hand along his back, and the action and his nearness seemed to provide her with comfort, so he was going to stay there.)


AN: Mac is literally a Golden Retriever, both literally and figuratively, in this chapter, no?

Shout-out to deepandlovelydark (thank you very much!) for pointing out to me that Mac really should have tried more than just talking to Beth (since he's Mac and all), and hence reminding me of that little bit at the start of this chapter. I'm still convinced that I wrote something along those lines about a month ago, but I suspect I either accidentally deleted it, or wound up getting distracted by something/someone/another part of this story, thought I'd written it and then never went back. I missed it on my editing run, too, which is embarrassing! My only excuse is that this is a really long story, and a lot happens, so…

Teaser for next chapter: 'Maybe MacGyver will be back.'