by Robin Hobb
Three riders and horses appear. Two come from behind, but those horses are running wearily, heavily. The lone rider will outdistance them if the chase goes much longer. The third pursuer cuts the plain at an angle to the others. The piebald horse runs with a will, unmindful of the deeper snow he churns through in pursuit. His small rider sits him high and well, a woman or a young man. The moonlight dances lightly along a drawn blade. For a time it looks as if the young rider will intersect with Chade’s path of flight, but the old assassin has seen him. He speaks to his horse, and the gelding puts on a burst of speed, incredible to see. He leaves the two lumbering pursuers far behind, but the piebald reaches the packed trail now and his legs stretch long as he endeavours to catch up. For a time, it looks as if Chade will escape cleanly, but the piebald horse is fresher. The gelding cannot maintain his burst of speed, and the even pace of the piebald slowly eats into his lead. The gap closes gradually but relentlessly. Then the piebald is running right behind the black gelding. The gelding slows and Chade turns in the saddle and lifts an arm in greeting. The other rider shouts to him, her voice thin in the cold air. ‘For Verity the true King!’ She tosses a bag to him, and he throws a packet to her. Abruptly they separate, the two horses both veering from the trodden path to go wide of one another. The hoofbeats dwindle in the night.
The labouring mounts of the pursuers are lathered and wet, steaming in the cold air. Their riders pull them up, cursing, when they reach the place where Chade and his cohort separated. Snatches of conversation mixed with curses float on the air. ‘Damned Farseer partisans!’ and ‘No way to tell which one has it now!’ and finally, ‘Not going back to face a lash over this mess.’ They seem to have reached an agreement, for they let their horses breathe, and then proceed more slowly, following the trodden path away from wherever they have come.
I found myself briefly. Strange to discover I was smiling even though sweat misted my face. The Skilling was strong and true. I was breathing deep with the strain of it. I tried to draw back from it, but the sweet rush of knowing was too keen. I was elated at Chade’s escape, elated to know that there were partisans who worked on Verity’s behalf. The world stretched out wide before me, tempting as a tray of sweet cakes. My heart chose instantly.
A baby is wailing, in that endless, hopeless way that infants have. My daughter. She is lying on a bed, still wrapped in a blanket that is beaded with rain. Her face is red with the earnestness of her screaming. The pent frustration in Molly’s voice is frightening as she says, ‘Be quiet. Can’t you just be quiet!’
Burrich’s voice, stern and weary. ‘Don’t be cross at her. She’s only a babe. She’s probably just hungry.’
Molly stands, lips pinched tight, arms folded tightly across her chest. Her cheeks are red, her hair has gone to wet strands. Burrich is hanging up his dripping cloak. They have all been somewhere, together, and just returned. The ashes are dead in the fireplace, the cottage cold. Burrich goes to the hearth and awkwardly kneels by it, favouring his knee, and begins to select kindling to build a fire. I can feel the tension in him, and I know how he strives to contain his temper. ‘Take care of the baby,’ he suggests quietly. ‘I’ll get the fire going and put some water to boil.’
Molly takes off her cloak and moves deliberately to hang it by his. I know how she hates to be told what to do. The baby continues wailing, as remorseless a demand as the winter wind outside. ‘I am cold, and tired, and hungry, and wet. She’s going to have to learn that sometimes she just has to wait.’
Burrich leans down to blow on a spark, curses softly when it does not catch. ‘She is cold and hungry and tired and wet, too,’ he points out. His voice is getting crisper. He continues doggedly with his fire-making. ‘And she is too small to do anything about it. So she cries. Not to torment you, but to tell you she needs help. It’s like a puppy yelping, woman, or a chick cheeping. She doesn’t do it to annoy.’ His voice is rising on every sentence.
‘Well, it annoys me!’ Molly declares, and turns to the fight. ‘She will just have to cry it out. I’m too tired to deal with her. And she’s getting spoiled. All she does is cry to be held. I never have a moment to myself any longer. I can’t even sleep a night through. Feed the baby, wash the baby, change the baby, hold the baby. That’s all my life is any more.’ She lists off her grievances aggressively. That glint is in her eye, the same one I’d seen when she defied her father, and I know she expects Burrich to stand and advance on her. Instead, he blows on a tiny glow and grunts in satisfaction when a narrow tongue of flame licks up and kindles a curl of birch bark. He doesn’t even turn to look at Molly or the wailing child. Twig after twig he sets on the tiny fire, and I marvel that he cannot be aware of Molly seething behind him. I would not be so composed were she behind me and wearing that expression.
Only when the fire is well established does he rise, and then he turns, not to Molly but to the child. He walks past Molly as if she is not there. I do not know if he sees how she steels herself not to flinch from the sudden blow she half-expects from him. It wrings my heart to see this scar her father has left on her. Burrich leans over the baby, speaking in his calming voice as he unwraps her. I watch in a sort of awe as he competently changes her napkin. He glances about, then takes up a wool shirt of his that is hanging on a chair back and wraps her in it. She continues to wail, but on a different note. He props her against his shoulder and uses his free hand to fill the kettle and set it on the fire. It is as if Molly is not there at all. Her face has gone white and her eyes are huge as he begins to measure out grain. When he finds the water is not yet boiling, he sits down with the baby and pats her back rhythmically. The wailing becomes less determined, as if the baby is wearying of crying.
Molly stalks over to them. ‘Give me the baby. I’ll nurse her now.’
Burrich slowly turns his eyes up to her. His face is impassive. ‘When you’re calm, and want to hold her, I’ll give her to you.’
‘You’ll give her to me now! She’s my child!’ Molly snaps and reaches for her. Burrich stops her with a look. She steps back. ‘Are you trying to make me ashamed?’ she demands. Her voice is going shrill. ‘She’s my child. I have a right to raise her as I see fit. She doesn’t need to be held all the time.’
‘That’s true,’ he agrees blandly, but makes no move to give her the child.
‘You think I’m a bad mother. But what do you know about children, to say I’m wrong?’
Burrich gets up, staggers a half step on his bad leg, and regains his balance. He takes up the measure of grain. He sprinkles it over the boiling water, then stirs it to wet it evenly. Then he puts a tight lid on the pot and pulls it slightly back from the fire’s reach. All this while balancing the babe in the crook of one arm. I can tell he has been thinking when he answers, ‘Not babies, perhaps. But I know about young things. Colts, puppies, calves, piglets. Even hunting cats. I know if you want them to trust you, you touch them often when they are small. Gently, but firmly, so they believe in your strength, too.’
He was warming to his subject. I’d heard this lecture a hundred times before, usually delivered to impatient stable-boys. ‘You don’t shout at them, or make sudden moves that look threatening. You give them good feed and clean water, and keep them clean and give them shelter from the weather.’ His voice drops accusingly as he adds, ‘You don’t take out your temper on them, or confuse punishment with discipline.’
Molly looks shocked at his words. ‘Discipline comes from punishment. A child learns discipline when she is punished for doing something wrong.’
Burrich is shaking his head. ‘I’d like to “punish” the man that beat that into you,’ he says, and an edge of his old temper creeps into his voice. ‘What did you really learn from your father taking his temper out on you?’ he demands. ‘That to show tenderness to your baby is a weakness? That to give in and hold your child when she cries because she wants you is somehow not an adult thing to do?’
‘I don’t want to talk about my father,’ Molly declares
suddenly, but there is uncertainty in her voice. She reaches for the baby like a child clutching at a favourite toy and Burrich lets her take the infant. Molly sits on the hearthstones and opens her blouse. The baby seeks her breast greedily and is instantly silent. For a time the only sounds are the wind muttering outside, the bubbling of the porridge pot and the small stick noises of Burrich feeding the fire. ‘You did not always keep your patience with Fitz when he was little,’ Molly mutters chidingly.
Burrich gives a brief snort of laughter. ‘I don’t think anyone would have been eternally patient with that one. When I got him, he was five or six, and I knew nothing of him. And I was a young man, with many other interests. You can put a colt in a corral, or tie a dog up for a time. Not so with a child. You can never forget you have a child for even an instant.’ He shrugs his shoulders helplessly. ‘Before I knew it, he’d become the centre of my life.’ An odd little pause. ‘Then they took him from me, and I let them … And now he’s dead.’
A silence. I wanted desperately to reach to them both, then, to tell them that I lived. But I could not. I could hear them, I could see them, but I could not reach them. Like the wind outside the house, I roared and pounded at the walls, to no avail.
‘What am I going to do? What will become of us?’ Molly asks abruptly of no one. The despair in her voice is rending. ‘Here I am. No husband, and a child, and no way to make my own way in the world. Everything I saved is gone.’ She looks at Burrich. ‘I was so stupid. I always believed he would come to find me, that he would marry me. But he never did. And now he never will.’ She begins to rock as she clutches the baby to her. Tears spill unheeded down her cheeks. ‘Don’t think I didn’t hear that old man today, the one that said he’d seen me in Buckkeep Town and I was the Wit-Bastard’s whore. How long before that tale races through Capelin Beach? I daren’t go to town any more, I can’t hold up my head.’
Something goes out of Burrich at her words. He slumps, elbow on knee, head in his hand. He mutters, ‘I thought you had not heard him. Had he not been half as old as god, I’d have made him answer for his words.’
‘You can’t challenge a man for speaking the truth,’ Molly says dispiritedly.
That brings Burrich’s head up. ‘You’re not a whore!’ he declares hotly. ‘You were Fitz’s wife. It’s not your fault if not all were privy to it.’
‘His wife,’ Molly says mockingly to herself. ‘I was not, Burrich. He never married me.’
‘Such was how he spoke of you to me. I promise you, I know this. Had he not died, he would have come to you. He would. He always intended to make you his wife.’
‘Oh, yes, he had many intentions. And he spoke many lies. Intentions are not deeds, Burrich. If every woman who had heard a man promise marriage were a wife, well, there’d be a spate less of bastards in the world.’ She straightens up and wipes the tears from her face with a weary finality. Burrich makes no answer to her words. She looks down into the little face that is finally at peace. The babe has gone to sleep. She slips her little finger into the child’s mouth to free her nipple from the babe’s sleepy grip on it. As Molly does up her blouse, she smiles weakly. ‘I think I feel a tooth coming through. Maybe she’s just colicky from teething.’
‘A tooth? Let me see!’ Burrich exclaims and comes to bend over the baby as Molly carefully pushes down her pink lower lip to reveal a tiny half-moon of white showing in her gum. My daughter pulls away from the touch, frowning in her sleep. Burrich takes her gently from Molly and carries her over to the bed. He settles her into it, still wrapped in his shirt. By the fire, Molly takes the lid off the kettle and gives the porridge a stir.
‘I’ll take care of you both,’ Burrich offers awkwardly. He is looking down at the child as he speaks. ‘I’m not so old I can’t get work, you know. As long as I can swing an axe, we can trade or sell firewood in town. We’ll get by.’
‘You’re not old at all,’ Molly says absently as she sprinkles a bit of salt into the porridge. She goes to her chair and drops into it. From a basket by her chair, she takes up a piece of mending and turns it about in her hands, deciding where to begin. ‘You seem to wake up new each day. Look at this shirt. Torn out at the shoulder seam as if a growing boy did it. I think you get younger each day. But I feel as if I get older with every passing hour. And I can’t live on your kindness forever, Burrich. I’ve got to get on with my life. Somehow I just can’t think how to begin, just now.’
‘Then don’t worry about it, just now,’ he says comfortingly. He comes to stand behind her chair. His hands lift as if he will put them on her shoulders. Instead he crosses his arms on his chest. ‘Soon it will be spring. We’ll put in a garden and the fish runs will begin again. There may be some hiring work down in Capelin Beach. You’ll see, we’ll get by.’
His optimism reaches something in her. ‘I should start now and make some straw hives. With great good luck, I might chance on a swarming of bees.’
‘I know a flowering field up in the hills where the bees work thick in summer. If we set out hives there, would the bees move in to them?’
Molly smiles to herself. ‘They are not like birds, silly. They only swarm when the old hive has too many bees. We might get a swarm that way, but not until high summer or autumn. No. Come spring, when the bees first stir, we’ll try to find a bee tree. I used to help my father hunt bees when I was smaller, before I grew wise enough to winter a hive over. You put out a dish of warmed honey to draw them. First one, and then another will come. If you are good at it, and I am, you can find the bee line and follow it back to the bee tree. That is only the start, of course. Then you have to force the swarm out of the tree and into the hive you’ve made ready. Sometimes, if the bee tree is small, you can simply cut it down and take the bee gum home with you.’
‘Bee gum?’
‘The part of the tree they nest in.’
‘Don’t they sting you?’ Burrich asks incredulously.
‘Not if you do it right,’ she tells him calmly.
‘You’ll have to teach me how,’ he says humbly.
Molly twists in her seat to look up at him. She smiles, but it is not like her old smile. It is a smile that acknowledges that they are pretending it will all go as they plan. She knows too well now that no hope can be completely trusted. ‘If you’ll teach me to write my letters. Lacey and Patience started, and I can read a bit, but the writing comes harder to me.’
‘I’ll teach you and then you can teach Nettle,’ he promises her.
Nettle. She has named my daughter Nettle, after the herb she loves, though it leaves great rashes on her hands and arms if she is careless when she gathers it. Is that how she feels about our daughter, that she brings pain even as she brings enjoyment? It pains me to think it is so. Something tugs at my attention, but I cling fiercely where I am. If this is as close as I can come to Molly right now, then I will take what I can and cling to it.
No. Verity speaks firmly. Come away now. You put them in danger. Do you think they would scruple to destroy them, if they thought by doing so they could hurt and weaken you?
Abruptly I am with Verity. He is somewhere cold and windy and dark. I try to see more of what is around us, but he blocks my eyes. So effortlessly he has brought me here against my will, so effortlessly he closes off my vision. The strength of Skill on him is frightening. Yet I can sense he is tired, weary almost to death despite this vast power. The Skill is like a strong stallion and Verity is the fraying rope that tethers it. It pulls at him every minute and every minute he resists it.
We are coming to you, I tell him needlessly.
I know. Hurry. And do this no more, think of them no more, and give no thought at all to the names of those who would do us harm. Every whisper here is a shout. They have powers you do not imagine, in strengths you cannot defy. Where you go, your enemies may follow. So leave no trail.
But where are you? I demand as he thrusts me away from him.
Find me! he commands me, and slams me back into my own body and li
fe.
I sat up in my blankets, convulsively gasping for air. It reminded me of wrestling and being slammed down on the flat of my back. For a moment I made tiny sounds as I sought to fill my lungs. Finally I drew a full breath. I looked about me in the darkness. Outside the tent, the windstorm howled. The brazier was a small red glow in the centre that illuminated little more than Kettle’s huddled form sleeping close to it.
‘Are you all right?’ the Fool asked me quietly.
‘No,’ I said softly. I lay back down beside him. I was suddenly too tired to think, too tired to say another word. The sweat on my body chilled and I began to shiver. The Fool surprised me by putting an arm around me. I moved closer to him gratefully, sharing warmth. The sympathy of my wolf wrapped me. I waited for the Fool to say something comforting. He was too wise to try. I fell asleep longing for words that did not exist.
TWENTY-FIVE
Strategy
Six Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town
Climbed a hill, and never came down
Found their flesh and lost their skins
Flew away on stony wings.
Five Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town
Walked a road not up nor down
Were torn to many and turned to one
In the end, left a task half-done.
Four Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town
They spoke in words without a sound
They begged their Queen to let them go
And what became of them, no one can know.
Three Wisemen came to Jhaampe-town