What do you want to do? Nighteyes stretched and then yawned in resignation.
I don’t know, I admitted to the old wolf. Something different. How would you feel about wandering the world for a bit?
For a time, he retreated into that part of his mind that was his alone. Then he asked, somewhat testily, Would we both be afoot, or do you expect me to keep pace with a horse all day?
That’s a fair question. If we both went afoot?
If you must, he conceded grudgingly. You’re thinking about that place, back in the Mountains, aren’t you?
The ancient city? Yes.
He did not oppose me. Will we be taking the boy?
I think we’ll leave Hap here to do for himself for a bit. It might be good for him. And someone has to look after the chickens.
So I suppose we won’t be leaving until the boy comes back?
I nodded to that. I wondered if I had taken complete leave of my senses.
I wondered if we would ever come back at all.
Starling Birdsong, minstrel to Queen Kettricken, has inspired as many songs as she has written. Legendary as Queen Kettricken’s companion on her quest for Elderling aid during the Red Ship war, she extended her service to the Farseer throne for decades during the rebuilding of the Six Duchies. Gifted with the knack of being at home in any company, she was indispensable to the Queen in the unsettled years that followed the Cleansing of Buck. The minstrel was trusted not only with treaties and settlements between nobles, but with offers of amnesty to robber bands and smuggler families. She herself made songs of many of these missions, but one can be sure that she had other endeavours, carried out in secret for the Farseer reign, and far too sensitive ever to become the subject of verse.
Starling kept Hap with her for a full two months. My amusement at his extended absence changed first to irritation and then annoyance. The annoyance was mostly with myself. I had not realized how much I had come to depend on the boy’s strong back until I had to bend mine to the tasks I’d delegated to him. But it was not just the boy’s ordinary chores that I undertook during that extra month of his absence. Chade’s visit had awakened something in me. I had no name for it, but it seemed a demon that gnawed at me, showing me every shabby aspect of my small holding. The peace of my isolated home now seemed idle complacency. Had it truly been a year since I had shoved a rock under the sagging porch step and promised myself I’d mend it later? No, it had been closer to a year and a half.
I put the porch to rights, and then not only shovelled out the chicken house but washed it down with lye-water before gathering fresh reeds to floor it. I fixed the leaking roof on my work shed, and finally cut the hole and put in the greased skin window I’d been promising myself for two years. I gave the cottage a more thorough spring-cleaning than it had had in years. I cut down the cracked ash-limb, dropping it neatly through the roof of the freshly cleaned chicken house. I re-roofed the chicken house. I was just finishing that task when Nighteyes told me he heard horses. I clambered down, picked up my shirt and walked around to the front of the cottage to greet Starling and Hap as they came up the trail.
I do not know if it was our time apart, or my newly-seeded restlessness, but I suddenly saw Hap and Starling as if they were strangers. It was not just the new garb Hap wore, although that accentuated his long legs and broadening shoulders. He looked comical upon the fat old pony, a fact I am sure he appreciated. The pony was as ill suited to the growing youth as the child’s bed in my cottage and my sedate life style. I suddenly perceived that I could not rightfully ask him to stay home and watch the chickens while I went adventuring. In fact, if I did not soon send him out to seek his own fortune, the mild discontent I saw in his mismatched eyes at his homecoming would soon become bitter disappointment in his life. Hap had been a good companion for me; the foundling I had taken in had, perhaps, rescued me as much as I had rescued him. It would be better for me to send this young man out into the world while we both still liked one another rather than wait until I was a burdensome duty to his young shoulders.
Not just Hap had changed in my eyes. Starling was vibrant as ever, grinning as she flung a leg over her horse and slid down from him. Yet as she came towards me with her arms flung wide to hug me, I realized how little I knew of her present life. I looked down into her merry dark eyes and noted for the first time the crowsfeet beginning at the corners. Her garb had become richer over the years, the quality of her mounts better, and her jewellery more costly. Today her thick dark hair was secured with a clasp of heavy silver. Clearly, she prospered. Three or four times a year, she would descend on me, to stay a few days and overturn my calm life with her stories and songs. For the days she was there, she would insist on spicing the food to her taste, she would scatter an overlay of her possessions upon my table and desk and floor, and my bed would no longer be a place to seek when I was exhausted. The days that immediately followed her departure would remind me of a country road with dust hanging heavy in the air in the wake of a puppeteer’s caravan. I would have the same sense of choked breath and hazed vision until I once more settled into my humdrum routine.
I hugged her back, hard, smelling both dust and perfume in her hair. She stepped away from me, looked up into my face and immediately demanded, ‘What’s wrong? Something’s different.’
I smiled ruefully. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I promised, and we both knew that it would be one of our late night conversations.
‘Go wash,’ she agreed. ‘You smell like my horse.’ She gave me a slight push, and I stepped clear of her to greet Hap.
‘So, lad, how was it? Did a Buckkeep Springfest live up to Starling’s tales?’
‘It was good,’ he said neutrally. He gave me one full look, and his mismatched eyes, one brown, one blue, were full of torment.
‘Hap?’ I began concernedly, but he shrugged away from me before I could touch his shoulder.
He walked away from me, but perhaps he regretted his surly greeting, for a moment later he croaked, ‘I’m going to the stream to wash. I’m covered in road dust.’
Go with him. I’m not sure what’s wrong, but he needs a friend.
Preferably one that can’t ask questions, Nighteyes agreed. Head low, tail straight out, he followed the boy. In his own way, he was as fond of Hap as I was, and had had as much to do with his raising.
When they were almost out of eyeshot, I turned back to Starling. ‘Do you know what that was about?’
She shrugged, a twisted smile on her lips. ‘He’s fifteen. Does a sullen mood have to be about anything at that age? Don’t bother yourself over it. It could be anything: a girl at Springfest that didn’t kiss him, or one that did. Leaving Buckkeep or coming home. A bad sausage for breakfast. Leave him alone. He’ll be fine.’
I looked after him as he and the wolf vanished into the trees. ‘Perhaps I remember being fifteen a bit differently from you,’ I commented.
I saw to her horse and Clover the pony
