The Wise Man's Fear

Dedan looked back at me. “You’ve already heard it then. You could have stopped me if you didn’t—”

“I’m just guessing,” I said quickly. “I hate not hearing the ending of a story.”

“Father put his foot in a rabbit hole,” Dedan said shortly. “Sprained his ankle. Nobody saw the uncle again.” He stalked out of the circle of firelight, his expression grim.

I cast an imploring look at Marten, who shook his head. “No,” he said softly. “I won’t have any part of it. Not for the world. Trying to help right now would be like trying to put out a fire with my hands. Painful, and with no real results.”

Tempi began to make up his bed. Marten made a circular gesture with one finger and gave me a questioning look, asking if I wanted the first watch. I nodded, and he gathered up his bedroll, saying, “Attractive as some things are, you have to weigh your risks. How badly do you want it, how badly are you willing to be burned?”

I spread the fire and soon the deep dark of night settled into the clearing. I lay on my back, looked at the stars, and thought of Denna.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO Barbarians

The next day, Tempi and I moved camp while Dedan and Hespe walked back to Crosson for supplies. Marten scouted out an isolated piece of flat ground close to water. Then we packed and moved everything, dug the privy, built the firepit, and generally got everything settled.

Tempi was willing to talk as we worked, but I was nervous. I had offended him by asking about the Lethani early on, so I knew to avoid that subject. But if he was upset by a simple question about singing, how could I begin to guess what might offend him?

Again, his blank expression and refusal to make eye contact were the main problems. How could I make intelligent conversation with a person when I had no idea how he felt? It was like trying to walk blindfolded through an unfamiliar house.

So I took the safer road and simply asked for more words as we worked. Objects, for the most part, as we were both too busy with our hands to pantomime.

Best of all, Tempi got to practice his Aturan while I built up my Ademic vocabulary. I noticed the more mistakes I made in his language, the more comfortable he grew in his own attempts at expressing himself.

This meant, of course, that I made many mistakes. In fact, I was occasionally so thickheaded that Tempi was forced to explain himself several times in several different ways. All in Aturan of course.

We finished setting up camp around noon. Marten left to go hunting and Tempi stretched and began to move through his slow dance. He did it twice in a row, and I began to suspect he was somewhat bored himself. By the time he finished he was covered in a sheen of sweat and told me he was going to bathe.

With the camp to myself, I melted down the tinker’s candles to make two small wax simulacra. I’d been wanting to do this for days, but even at the University creating a mommet was questionable behavior. Here in Vintas . . . suffice to say I thought it best to be discreet.

It wasn’t elegant work. Tallow isn’t nearly as convenient as sympathy wax, but even the crudest mommet can be a devastating thing. Once I had them tucked into my travelsack, I felt much better prepared.

I was cleaning the last of the tallow off my fingers when Tempi returned from his bath, naked as a new baby. Years of stage training allowed me to keep a calm expression, but just barely.

After spreading his wet clothing over a nearby branch to dry, Tempi walked over to me without showing the least embarrassment or modesty.

He held out his right hand, thumb and forefinger pinched together. “What is this?” He spread his fingers slightly for me to see.

I looked closely, glad to have something to focus my attention on. “That’s a tick.”

This close, I couldn’t help but notice his scars again, faint lines crossing his arms and chest. I could read scars from my time in the Medica, and his didn’t show the wide, puckered pink that would indicate a deep wound cutting through the layers of skin, fat, and muscle underneath. These were shallow wounds. Dozens of them. I couldn’t help but wonder how long he had been a mercenary to have scars so old. He didn’t look much older than twenty.

Oblivious to my scrutiny, Tempi stared at the thing between his fingers. “It bites. On me. Bites and stays.” His expression was blank as always, but his tone was tinged with disgust. His left hand fidgeted.

“There are no ticks in Ademre?”

“No.” He made a point of trying to pinch it between his fingers. “It not break.”

I gestured, showing him how to crush it between his fingernails, which he did with a certain amount of relish. He threw it away and stalked back to his bedroll. Then, still naked, he proceeded to pull out all of his clothing and give it a vigorous shaking.

I kept my eyes averted, knowing deep down in my heart that this would be the moment Dedan and Hespe would return from Crosson.

Thankfully they didn’t. After a quarter hour or so, Tempi put on a pair of dry pants, carefully inspecting them first.

Shirtless, he walked back to where I sat. “I hate tick,” he declared.

When he spoke, his left hand made a sharp gesture, as if he were brushing crumbs off the front of his shirt near his hip. Except he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and there was nothing on his bare skin to brush away. What’s more, I realized he’d made the same gesture earlier.

In fact, now that I thought of it, I’d seen him make that gesture a half-dozen times in the last several days, though never so violently.

I had a sudden suspicion. “Tempi? What does this mean?” I mimicked the brushing away gesture.

He nodded. “It is this.” He scrunched his face up in an exaggerated expression of disgust.

My mind went spinning back over the last span of days, thinking of how many times I had seen Tempi fidgeting restlessly while we talked. I reeled at the thought of it.

“Tempi,” I asked. “Is all of this?” I made a gesture to my face, then smiled, frowned, rolled my eyes. “Does all this happen with hands in Ademic?”

He nodded and made a gesture at the same time.

“That!” I pointed at his hand. “What is that?”

He hesitated, then gave a forced, awkward-looking smile.

I copied the gesture, splaying my hand slightly and pressing my thumb to the inside of my middle finger.

“No,” he said. “Other hand. Left.”

“Why?”

He reached out and thumped on my chest, just left of the breastbone: Tum-tump. Tum- tump. Then he ran a finger down to my left hand. I nodded to show I understood. It was closest to the heart. He held up his right hand and made a fist. “This hand is strong.” He held up his left. “This hand is clever.”

It made sense. That is why most lutists chord with the left hand and strum with their right. The left hand is more nimble, as a rule.

I made the gesture with my left hand, fingers splayed. Tempi shook his head. “That is this.” He quirked half of his mouth up into a smirk.

The expression seemed so out of place on his face that it was all I could do to keep from gawking. I looked more closely at his hand and adjusted the position of my fingers slightly.

He nodded approval. His face was expressionless, but for the first time I understood why.

In the hours that followed, I learned that Ademic hand gestures did not actually represent facial expressions. It was nothing so simple as that. For example a smile can mean you’re amused, happy, grateful, or satisfied. You can smile to comfort someone. You can smile because you’re content or because you’re in love. A grimace or a grin look similar to a smile, but they mean entirely different things.

Imagine trying to teach someone how to smile. Imagine trying to describe what different smiles mean and