him six months ago. He was eating rotten vegetables from a village midden heap. His mother is dead, and his eyes don't match, so her sister wouldn't have him. She says he's a demon gotten bastard.' She cocked her head-at me and smiled as she added, 'So I suppose he might be yours.' She turned back to him again and raised her voice. 'Come inside, I tell you. It's warm. And a real wolf lives with him. You'll like Nighteyes.'
Hap is a strange boy, one brown eye and one blue. His mother had not been merciful, and his early memories are not gentle ones. She had named him Mishap. Perhaps, to her, he was. I find I call him 'boy' as often as not. He does not seem to mind. I have taught him his letters and his numbers and the growing and harvesting of herbs. He was seven when she brought him to me. Now he is nearly ten. He is good with a bow. Nighteyes approves of him. He hunts well for the old wolf.
When Starling comes, she brings me news. I do not know that I always welcome it. Too many things have changed, too much is strange. Lady Patience rules at Tradeford. Their hemp fields yield fully as much paper now as they do fine rope. The size of the gardens there have doubled. The structure that would have been the King's Circle is now a botanical garden of plants gathered from every corner of the Six Duchies and beyond.
Burrich and Molly and their children are well. They have Nettle and little Chivalry and another on the way. Molly tends her hives and candle shop, while Burrich has used stud fees from Ruddy and Ruddy's colt to begin to breed horses again. Starling knows these things, for it was she who tracked them down and saw to it that Ruddy and Sooty's colt were given over to him. Poor old Sooty was too old to survive the journey home from the Mountains. Molly and Burrich both believe I am many years dead. Sometimes I believe that, too. I have never asked her where they live. I have never seen any of the children. In that, I am truly my father's son.
Kettricken bore a son, Prince Dutiful. Starling told me he has his father's coloring, but looks as if he will be a tall slender man, like Kettricken's brother Rurisk, perhaps. She thinks he is more serious than a boy should be, but all of his tutors are fond of him. His grandfather journeyed all the way from the Mountain Kingdom to see the lad who will someday rule both lands. He was well pleased with the child. I wondered what his other grandfather would have thought of all that had come to pass from his treaty making.
Chade no longer lives in the shadows, but is the honored adviser to the Queen: According to Starling, he is a foppish old man who is entirely too fond of the company of young women. But she smiles as she says it, and 'Chade Fallstar's Reckoning' will be the song she is remembered for when she is gone. I am sure he knows where I am, but he has never sought me out. It is as well. Sometimes, when Starling comes, she brings me curious old scrolls, and seeds and roots for strange herbs. At other times she brings me fine paper and clear vellum. I do not need to ask the source. Occasionally, I give her in return scrolls of my own writing: drawings of herbs, with their virtues and dangers; an account of my time in that ancient city; records of my journeys through Chalced and the lands beyond. She bears them dutifully away.
Once it was a map of the Six Duchies that she brought to me from him. It was carefully begun in Verity's hand and inks, but never completed. Sometimes I look at it and think of the places I could fill in upon it. But I have hung it as it is upon my wall. I do not think I will ever change it.
As for the Fool, he returned to Buckkeep Castle. Briefly. Girl-on-a-Dragon left him there, and he wept as she rose without him. He was immediately acclaimed as a hero and a great warrior.
I am sure that is why he fled. He accepted neither title nor land from Regal. No one is quite sure where the Fool went or what became of him after that. Starling believes he returned to his homeland. Perhaps. Perhaps, somewhere there is a toymaker who makes puppets that are a delight and a marvel. I hope he wears an earring of silver and blue. The fingerprints he left on my wrist have faded to a dusky gray.
I think I will always miss him.
I was six years in finding my way back to Buck. One we spent in the Mountains. One was spent with Black Rolf. Nighteyes and I learned much of our own kind in our seasons there, but discovered we like our own company best. Despite Holly's best effort, Ollie's girl looked at me and decided I would most definitely not do. My feelings were not injured in the least and it provided an excuse to move on again.
We have been north to the Near Islands, where the wolves are as white as the bears. We have been south to Chalced, and even beyond Bingtown. We have walked up the banks of the Rain River and ridden a raft back down. We have discovered that Nighteyes does not like traveling by ship, and I do not like lands that have no winters. We have walked beyond the edges of Verity's maps.
I had thought I would never return to Buck again. But we did. The autumn winds brought us here one year, and we have not left since. The cottage we claimed as ours once belonged to a charcoal burner. It is not far from Forge, or rather where Forge used to be. The sea and the winters have devoured that town and drowned the evil memories of it. Someday, perhaps, men will come again to seek the rich iron ore. But not soon.
When Starling comes, she chides me, and tells me I am a young man yet. What, she demands of me, became of all my insistence that one day I would have a life of my own? I tell her I have found it. Here, in my cottage, with my writing and my wolf and my boy. Sometimes, when she beds with me and I lie awake afterward listening to her slow breathing, I think I will rise on the morrow and find some new meaning to my life. But most mornings, when I awake aching and stiff, I think I am not a young man at all. I am an old man, trapped in a young man's scarred body.
The Skill does not sleep easily in me. In summers especially, when I walk along the sea cliffs and look out over the water, I am tempted to reach forth as Verity once did. And sometimes I do, and I know for a time, of the fisherwoman's catch, or the domestic worries of the mate of the passing merchant ship. The torment of it, as Verity once told me, is that no one ever reaches back. Once, when the Skill-hunger was on me to the point of madness, I even reached for Verity-as-Dragon, imploring him to hear me and answer.
He did not.
Regal's coteries long ago disbanded for lack of a Skillmaster to teach them. Even on the nights when I Skill out in despair as lonely as a wolf's howling, begging anyone, anyone to respond, I feel nothing. Not even an echo. Then I sit by my window and look out through the mists past the tip of Antler Island. I grip my hands to keep them from trembling and I refuse to plunge myself whole into the Skill river that is waiting, always waiting to sweep me away. It would be so easy. Sometimes all that holds me back is the touch of a wolf's mind against mine.
My boy has learned what that look means, and he measures the elfbark carefully to deaden me. Carryme he adds that I may sleep, and ginger to mask the elfbark's bitterness. Then he brings me paper and quill and ink and leaves me to my writing. He knows that when morning comes, he will find me, head on my desk, sleeping amidst my scattered papers, Nighteyes sprawled at my feet.
We dream of carving our dragon.
