she sat near the fire on the floor. She leaned back against my legs as she played. I watched her hands on the strings, marking the crookedness where once her fingers had been broken, as a warning to me. At the end of her song, I leaned down and kissed her. She kissed me back, setting the harp aside and making a more thorough job of it.
She stood then and took my hands to pull me to my feet. As I followed her into my bedroom, she observed, ‘You’re pensive tonight.’
I made some small sound of agreement. Sharing that she had bruised my feelings earlier would have seemed snivelling and childish. Did I want her to lie to me, to tell me that I was still young and comely when obviously I was not? Time had had its way with me. That was all, and to be expected. Even so, Starling kept coming back to me. Through all the years, she’d kept returning to me and into my bed. That had to count for something. ‘You were going to tell me about something?’ she prompted.
‘Later,’ I told her. The past clutched at me, but I put its greedy fingers aside, determined to immerse myself in the present. This life was not so bad. It was simple and uncluttered, without conflict. Wasn’t this the life I had always dreamed of? A life in which I made my decisions for myself? And I was not alone, really. I had Nighteyes and Hap, and Starling, when she came to me. I opened her vest and then her blouse to bare her breasts while she unbuttoned my shirt. She embraced me, rubbing against me with the unabashed pleasure of a purring cat. I clasped her to me and lowered my face to kiss the top of her head. This, too, was simple and all the sweeter that it was. My freshly-stuffed mattress was deep and fragrant as the meadow grass and herbs that filled it. We tumbled onto it. For a time, I stopped thinking at all, as I tried to persuade both of us that despite appearances I was a young man still.
A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.
I came awake. My eyes were open, studying the details of my darkened room before I realized that sleep had fled. Starling’s wide-flung arm was across my chest. In her sleep, she had kicked the blanket away from both of us. Night hid her careless nakedness, cloaking her in shadows. I lay still, hearing her breathe and smelling her sweat mixed with her perfume, and wondered what had wakened me. I could not put my finger on it, yet neither could I close my eyes again. I slid out from under her arm and stood up beside my bed. In the darkness I groped for my discarded shirt and leggings.
The coals of the hearth fire gave hesitant light to the main room, but I did not linger there. I opened the door and stepped barefoot into the mild spring night. I stood still for a moment, letting my eyes adjust, and then made my way away from the cottage and garden and down to the stream bank. The path was cool hard mud underfoot, well packed by my daily trips to fetch water. The trees met overhead, and there was no moon, but my feet and my nose knew the way as well as my eyes did. All I had to do was follow my Wit to my wolf. Soon I picked out the orange glow of Hap’s dwindled fire, and the lingering scent of cooked fish.
They slept by the fire, the wolf curled nose to tail and Hap wrapped around him, his arm around Nighteyes’ neck. Nighteyes opened his eyes as I approached, but did not stir. I told you not to worry.
I’m not worried. I’m just here. Hap had left some sticks of wood near the fire. I added them to the coals. I sat and watched the fire lick along them. Light came up with the warmth. I knew the boy was awake. One can’t be raised with a wolf without picking up some of his wariness. I waited for him.
‘It’s not you. Not just you, anyway.’
I didn’t look at Hap, even when he spoke. Some things are better said to the dark. I waited. Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone only to ask the wrong one.
‘I have to know,’ he burst out suddenly. My heart seized up at the question to come. In some corner of my soul, I had always dreaded him asking it. I should not have let him go to Springfest, I thought wildly. If I had kept him here, my secret would never have been threatened.
But that was not the question he asked.
‘Did you know that Starling is married?’
I looked at him then, and my face must have answered for me. He closed his eyes in sympathy. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I should have known you didn’t. I should have found a better way to tell you.’
And the simple comfort of a woman who came to my arms when she would, because she desired to be with me, and the sweet evenings of tales and music by the fire, and her dark merry eyes looking up into mine were suddenly guilty and deceptive and furtive. I was as foolish as I had ever been, no, even stupider, for the gullibility of a boy is fatuousness in a man. Married. Starling married. She had thought no one would ever want to marry her, for she was barren. She had told me that she had to make her own ways with her songs, for there would never be a man to care for her, nor children to provide for her old age. Probably, when she had told me those things, she had believed they were true. My folly had been in thinking that truth would never change.
Nighteyes had risen and stretched stiffly. Now he came to lie down beside me. He set his head on my knee. I don’t understand. You are ill?
No. Just stupid.
Ah. Nothing new there. Well, you haven’t died from that so far.
But sometimes it has been a near thing. I took a breath. ‘Tell me about it.’ I didn’t want to hear it, but I knew he had to tell it. Better to get it over with.
Hap came with a sigh, to sit on the other side of Nighteyes. He picked up a twig from the ground beside him and teased the fire with it. ‘I don’t think she meant for me to find out. Her husband doesn’t live at Buckkeep. He travelled in to surprise her, to spend Springfest with her.’ As he spoke, the twig caught fire. He tossed it in. His fingers wandered to idly groom Nighteyes.
I pictured some honest old farmer, wed to a minstrel in the quiet years of his life, perhaps with children grown from an earlier marriage. He loved her, then, to make a trip to Buckkeep to surprise her. Springfest was traditionally for lovers, old and new.
‘His name is Dewin,’ Hap went on. ‘And he’s some sort of kin to Prince Dutiful. A distant cousin or something. He’s a tall man, always dressed very grand. He wore a cloak, twice as big around as it need be, collared with fur. And he wears silver on both wrists. He’s strong, too. At the Springfest dancing, he lifted Starling right up and swung her around, and all the folk stood back to watch them.’ Hap was watching my face as he spoke. I think he found my obvious dismay comforting. ‘I should have known you didn’t know. You wouldn’t cuckold a grand man like that.’
‘I wouldn’t cuckold any man,’ I managed to say. ‘Not knowingly.’
He sighed as if relieved. ‘So you’ve taught me.’ Boyishly, his mind instantly reverted to how it had affected him. ‘I was upset when I saw them kiss. I’d never seen anyone except you and Starling kiss like that. I thought she was betraying you, and then when I heard him introduced as her husband …’ He cocked his head at me. ‘It really hurt my feelings. I thought then that you knew and didn’t care. I thought that perhaps all these years you had taught me one thing, and done another. I wondered if you thought me so dull I’d never discover it, if you and Starling laughed about it as if it were a joke for me to be so stupid. It built up in my mind until I began to question everything you’d ever taught me about anything.’ He looked back at the fire. ‘It felt horrible, to be so betrayed.’
I
