style="font-size:15px;"> ‘It’s still winter up in the Mountains,’ he said softly. ‘I wonder if Kettricken got home safely.’
‘If she didn’t, it wasn’t Sooty’s fault,’ I said. Then something turned over and hurt inside me, so that for a moment I couldn’t catch my breath. I tried to think of what it was, but it ran away from me. I didn’t want to catch up with it, but I knew it was a thing I should hunt. It would be like hunting a bear. When I got up close to it, it would turn on me and try to hurt me. But something about it made me want to follow anyway. I took a deep breath and shuddered it out. I drew in another, with a sound that caught in my throat.
Beside me, Burrich was very still and silent. Waiting for me.
Brother, you are a wolf. Come back, come away from that, it will hurt you, Nighteyes warned me.
I leaped back from it.
Then Burrich went stamping about the room, cursing things, and letting the porridge burn. We had to eat it anyway, there was nothing else.
For a time, Burrich bothered me. ‘Do you remember?’ he was always saying. He wouldn’t leave me alone. He would tell me names, and make me try to say who they were. Sometimes I would know, a little. ‘A woman,’ I told him when he said Patience. ‘A woman in a room with plants.’ I had tried, but he still got angry with me.
If I slept at night, I had dreams. Dreams of a trembling light, a dancing light on a stone wall. And eyes at a small window. The dreams would hold me down and keep me from breathing. If I could get enough breath to scream, I could wake up. Sometimes it took a long time to get enough breath. Burrich would wake up, too, and grab the big knife off the table. ‘What is it, what is it?’ he would ask me. But I could not tell him.
It was safer to sleep in the daylight, outside, smelling grass and earth. The dreams of stone walls did not come then. Instead, a woman came, to press herself sweetly against me. Her scent was the same as the meadow flowers, and her mouth tasted of honey. The pain of those dreams came when I awoke, and knew she was gone forever, taken by another. At night I sat and looked at the fire. I tried not to think of cold stone walls, nor of dark eyes weeping and a sweet mouth gone heavy with bitter words. I did not sleep. I dared not even lie down. Burrich did not make me.
Chade came back one day. He had grown his beard long and he wore a wide-brimmed hat like a pedlar, but I knew him all the same. Burrich wasn’t at home when he arrived, but I let him in. I did not know why he had come. ‘Do you want some brandy?’ I asked, thinking perhaps that was why he had come. He looked closely at me and almost smiled.
‘Fitz?’ he said. He turned his head sideways to look into my face. ‘So. How have you been?’
I didn’t know the answer to that question, so I just looked at him. After a time, he put the kettle on. He took things out of his pack. He had brought spice tea, some cheese and smoked fish. He took out packets of herbs as well and set them out in a row on the table. Then he took out a leather pouch. Inside it was a fat yellow crystal, large enough to fill his hand. In the bottom of the pack was a large shallow bowl, glazed blue inside. He had set it on the table and filled it with clean water when Burrich returned. Burrich had gone fishing. He had a string with six small fish on it. They were creek fish, not ocean fish. They were slippery and shiny. He had already taken all the guts out.
‘You leave him alone now?’ Chade asked Burrich after they had greeted one another.
‘I have to, to get food.’
‘So you trust him now?’
Burrich looked aside from Chade. ‘I’ve trained a lot of animals. Teaching one to do what you tell it is not the same as trusting a man.’
Burrich cooked the fish in a pan and then we ate. We had the cheese and the tea also. Then, while I was cleaning the pans and dishes, they sat down to talk.
‘I want to try the herbs,’ Chade said to Burrich. ‘Or the water, or the crystal. Something. Anything. I begin to think that he’s not really … in there.’
‘He is,’ Burrich asserted quietly. ‘Give him time. I don’t think the herbs are a good idea for him. Before he … changed, he was getting too fond of herbs. Toward the end, he was always either ill, or charged full of energy. If he was not in the depths of sorrow, he was exhausted from fighting or from being King’s Man to Verity or Shrewd. Then he’d be into the elfbark instead of resting. He’d forgotten how to just rest and let his body recover. He’d never wait for it. That last night … you gave him carris seed, didn’t you? Foxglove said she’d never seen anything like it. I think more folk might have come to his aid, if they hadn’t been so frightened of him. Poor old Blade thought he had gone stark raving mad. He never forgave himself for taking him down. I wish he could know the boy hadn’t actually died.’
‘There was no time to pick and choose. I gave him what I had to hand. I didn’t know he’d go mad on carris seed.’
‘You could have refused him,’ Burrich said quietly.
‘It wouldn’t have stopped him. He’d have gone as he was, exhausted, and been killed right there.’
I went and sat down on the hearth. Burrich was not watching me. I lay down, then rolled over on my back and stretched. It felt good. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the fire on my flank.
‘Get up and sit on the stool, Fitz,’ Burrich said.
I sighed, but I obeyed. Chade did not look at me. Burrich resumed talking.
‘I’d like to keep him on an even keel. I think he just needs time, to do it on his own. He remembers. Sometimes. And then he fights it off. I don’t think he wants to remember, Chade. I don’t think he really wants to go back to being FitzChivalry. Maybe he liked being a wolf. Maybe he liked it so much he’s never coming back.’
‘He has to come back,’ Chade said quietly. ‘We need him.’
Burrich sat up. He’d had his feet up on the wood pile, but now he set them on the floor. He leaned toward Chade. ‘You’ve had word?’
‘Not I. But Patience has, I think. It’s very frustrating, sometimes, to be the rat behind the wall.’
‘So what did you hear?’
‘Only Patience and Lacey, talking about wool.’
‘Why is that important?’
‘They wanted wool to weave a very soft cloth. For a baby, or a small child. “It will be born at the end of our harvest, but that’s the beginning of winter in the Mountains. So let us make it thick,” Patience said. Perhaps for Kettricken’s child.’
Burrich looked startled. ‘Patience knows about Kettricken?’
Chade laughed. ‘I don’t know. Who knows what that woman knows? She has changed much of late. She gathers the Buckkeep guard into the palm of her hand, and Lord Bright does not even see it happening. I think now that we should have let her know our plan, included her from the beginning. But perhaps not.’
‘It might have been easier for me if we had.’ Burrich stared deep into the fire.
Chade shook his head. ‘I am sorry. She had to believe you had abandoned Fitz, rejected him for his use of the Wit. If you had gone after his
