I looked away from his vehemence. I’d come too close to that fate myself to believe anyone could deserve it. My body had lain cold in my grave for days while I’d shared Nighteyes’ flesh and life. I was certain then that Rolf suspected as much of me. I wondered then, if he so despised me, why he taught me at all. As if he had caught some whiff of my thought, he added gruffly, ‘Anyone untaught can do a wrong thing. But after he’s been taught, there’s no excuse to repeat it. None at all.’
He turned and strode off down the path. We trailed after him. Nighteyes’ tail stuck out straight behind him. Rolf muttered to himself as he stumped along. ‘Delayna’s greed destroyed them both. Parela’s got no life as a deer. No mate, no young, when she dies, she’ll just stop, and Delayna with her. Delayna couldn’t accept death as a woman, but she won’t accept life as a deer, either. When the bucks call, she won’t let Parela answer them. She probably thinks she’s being faithful to her husband or some such nonsense. When Parela dies and Delayna with her, what will either of them have gained, save a few years of existence that neither of them could call complete?’
I could not argue with him. The wrongness I had sensed still crawled along my spine. ‘Yet.’ I struggled to make myself admit this to the Fool. ‘Yet privately I wondered if any save those two could fully understand the decision that had been made. If perhaps, despite how it appeared to us, it felt right to them.’
I paused for a time in my telling. The story of those two always disturbed me. If Burrich had not been able to call me back from the wolf and into my own body, would we have become as they did? If the Fool had not been nearby today, would Nighteyes and I dwell in one body even now? I did not speak the thought aloud. I knew the Fool would have already made that leap. I cleared my throat.
‘Rolf taught us a great deal in the year we were there, but even as we learned the techniques of the magic we shared, Nighteyes and I stopped short of accepting all the customs of the Old Blood folk. The secrets we learned, I felt we had a right to, simply by virtue of what we were, but I did not feel bound to accept the rules Rolf attempted to impose on us. Perhaps I would have been wiser to dissemble, but I was tired to death of deception, and the layers of lies that must be woven to protect it. So I held myself back from that world, and Nighteyes consented to be held back with me. So it was that we observed their community, but never engaged fully in the lives of the Old Blood folk.’
‘And Nighteyes, too, held back from them?’ The Fool’s question was gentle. I tried not to think that there might be a hidden rebuke in it, a questioning as to whether I was the one who had held him back for my own selfish reasons.
‘He felt as I did. The knowledge of the magic that is in us by our blood: this was something they owed to us. And when Rolf dangled it over us as a reward to be given only when we accepted the yoke of his rules – well, that is a form of exclusion, my friend.’ I glanced over at the grey wolf curled in my blankets. He slept deeply, paying the price of my interference with his body.
‘Did no one extend a simple friend’s hand to you there?’ The Fool’s question drew me back to my story. I considered it.
‘Holly tried to. I think she pitied me. She was shy and solitary by nature; it was something we had in common. Sleet and his mate had a nest in a great tree on the hillside above Rolf’s house, and Holly herself was wont to spend hours perched on a woven platform not far below Sleet’s nest. She was never talkative to me, but showed me many small kindnesses, including the gift of a featherbed, a side-product of Sleet’s kills.’ I smiled to myself. ‘And she taught me the many skills of living on my own, all I had never learned while I lived in Buckkeep Castle and others saw to my needs. There is a genuine pleasure to making leavened bread, and she taught me to cook, beyond Burrich’s travelling stews and porridges. I was ragged and worn when I first arrived there. She demanded all my clothes, not to mend, but to teach me the proper care of them. I sat by her fire, and learned to darn socks without lumping them, how to turn the hems on cuffs before they frayed hopelessly …’ I shook my head, smiling at the memories.
‘And no doubt Rolf was pleased to see your heads bent together so cosily and so often?’ The Fool’s tone asked the other question. Had I given Rolf reason to be jealous and spiteful?
I drank the last of the lukewarm elfbark tea and leaned back in my chair. The familiar melancholy of the herb was stealing over me. ‘It was never like that, Fool. You can laugh if you wish, but it was more like finding a mother. Not that she was that much older than I, but the gentleness and acceptance and the wishing me well. But,’ I cleared my throat, ‘you are right. Rolf was jealous, though he never put it into words. He would come in from the cold, to find Nighteyes sprawled on his hearth, and my hands full of yarn from some project of Holly’s needles, and he would immediately find some other task that she must do for him. Not that he treated her badly, but he took pains to make it clear she was his woman. Holly never spoke of it to me, but in a way I think she did it for the purpose, to remind him that however many years they had been together, she still had a life and a will of her own. Not that she ever tried to raise the pitch of his jealousy.