“Isn’t this Lord Derrick’s roan?” one of them dared to ask of me.
“Not anymore,” I told him, and was taken aback by the warm confirmation I received from the mare. My rider.
“She likes you,” Per told me from the next stall. He was brushing Priss. He’d let one of the other boys take Speckle but Priss he was doing himself.
I didn’t ask him how he knew. “What are you doing here?”
“She’s muddy, sir. We were crossing an iced-over stream and she broke through and got her legs muddy. So I’m grooming her.”
Technically, a truthful answer. This boy. I admired him grudgingly. “Perseverance. Why did you come to Buckkeep?”
He straightened to look over the stall wall at me. If he was not genuinely surprised at my question, he was very good at dissembling. “Sir, I am sworn to you. Where else should I be? I knew you would want your horse, and I did not trust those … guardsmen to bring her. And I knew that you would need Priss. When we go after those bastards and take Bee back, she will want to ride her own horse home. Your pardon, sir. Lady Bee, I meant to say. Lady Bee.” He caught his lower lip between his teeth and bit down on it hard.
I had intended to rebuke him and send him home. But when a youngster speaks as a man it’s not right to reply to him as a child. A stable girl had just arrived with a bucket of water. I turned to her. “Your name?”
“Patience, sir.”
That jolted me for an instant. “Well, Patience, when Per is finished, would you show him where to get some hot food and where the steams are. Find him a bed in the …”
“I’d rather stay near the horses, sir. If no one minds.”
I understood that, too. “Help him find some bedding, then. You can sleep in one of the empty stalls, if that’s what you wish.”
“Thank you, sir. It is.”
“Should I make him a poultice for that cheek? I know one that can draw the swelling down by morning.” Patience looked very pleased to be put in charge of Perseverance.
“Do you? Well, then, you should do that also, and I’ll be pleased to see how well it works by the morning.” I started to leave and then remembered the pride of a boy. I turned back. “Perseverance. You are to stay well away from any of the Rousters. Am I understood?”
He looked down. “Sir,” he acknowledged me unhappily.
“They will be dealt with. But not by you.”
“They’re a bad lot,” Patience said quietly.
“Stay clear,” I warned them both, and left the stables.
Chapter Twenty-One
Vindeliar
So let us speak of forgetfulness. We all recall episodes of forgetfulness. We have missed a meeting with a friend, burned the bread, or set down an object and forgotten where we put it. That is the forgetting we are aware of.
There is another kind, one we seldom think about. Until I mention the phase of the moon, chances are that it is not in your thoughts. It is pushed aside by the food you are eating, or the path you are walking upon. Your mind is not fixed upon the moon, and so for that moment you have forgotten it. Or, perhaps it is better to say, you are not remembering that bit of information at this time.
If I enter the room as you are fastening your shoe, I can say, “There will be a lovely moon tonight,” and then you will call it to mind. But before I call it forth for you, you have forgotten the moon.
One can swiftly understand that for most moments of our lives, we have forgotten almost all of the world around us, except for what currently claims our interest.
The talent of the part-Whites is most often to be able to glimpse the future in dreams. There are a rare few who can find a future that is but a breath away, a future in which a chosen person will not be remembering that which we wish to hide from him. Those rare few can persuade this person to remain in that non-remembering state. And thus one with that rare talent can render an event or person almost invisible, almost forgotten. We have records of part-Whites who could do this and hold it for a single person. We have records of some few who could cause up to six persons to continue forgetting something. But in the young student Vindeliar, I believe we have found a truly extraordinary talent. Even at seven years old, he can master the minds of twelve of my students and cause them to forget hunger. And so I ask that he be given over to me, to train specifically in that capacity.
— From the Servants’ Archives, Lingstra Dwalia