"What, supplanted?" with a little smile -- if he seems subdued, it's only because he's overwhelmed, by love for Laertes, by love for the dog, by the almost painful clenching of his heart when he looks at it.

He's six years old again, cradling a black and brown puppy who'll be his dearest friend for two precious years; he's eleven, flattened under the gleeful leaping of two half-grown split-nosed dogs that hate each other but love him more than life. He's twenty-five, sleeping with one of the berners who lets him into the kennel sometimes to play with the greyhounds reserved for the king's hunt. He can't keep a dog of his own in Camelot -- he has no lands to draw revenue from and mostly exists on the goodwill of other people, and maintaining a horse is expense enough -- but Rory thinks it's funny to watch him get down on the floor and wrestle around with the hounds, and likes how wild and ebullient his mood is after.

The puppy slams into his face with all the gleeful energy of a creature that has no concept of its strength or anything else except affection, and Sagramore has to hold back tears, because he'll be damned if he weeps about this. Instead he says, a bit gruffly, "We'll have to stop leaving things about the room."