The Wise Man's Fear

“Yes!” Absolute agreement. “She is five times the fighter you are. You might have had a chance if you had kept your sword!”

“Tempi is right,” I heard Shehyn’s voice behind me. “Knowing your enemy is in keeping with the Lethani. Once a fight is inevitable, a clever fighter takes any advantage.” I turned and saw her coming down the path. Penthe walked beside her.

I gestured polite certainty. “If I had kept my sword and won, people would have thought Carceret was a fool and resented me for gaining a rank I did not deserve. And if I had kept my sword and lost, it would have been humiliating. Neither reflects well on me.” I looked back and forth between Shehyn and Tempi. “Am I wrong in this?”

“You are not wrong in this.” Shehyn said. “But neither is Tempi wrong.”

“Victory is always to be sought,” Tempi said. Firm.

Shehyn turned to face him. “Success is key,” she said. “Victory is not always needed to succeed.”

Tempi gestured respectful disagreement and opened his mouth to respond, but Penthe spoke first, cutting him off. “Kvothe, are you hurt from your fall?”

“Not badly,” I said, moving my back gingerly. “A few bruises, perhaps.”

“Do you have anything to put on them?”

I shook my head.

Penthe stepped forward and took hold of my arm. “I have things at my house. We will leave these two to discuss the Lethani. Someone should tend to your hurts.” She held my arm with her left hand, making her statement curiously empty of any emotional content.

“Of course,” Shehyn said after a moment, and Tempi gestured a hasty agreement. But Penthe was already leading me firmly down the hill.

We walked for a quarter mile or so, Penthe holding my arm lightly.

Eventually she spoke in her lightly accented Aturan. “Are you bruised badly enough to need a salve?” she asked.

“Not really,” I admitted.

“I thought not,” she said. “But after I have lost a fight, I rarely wish to have people tell me how I lost it.” She flashed me a small, secret smile.

I smiled back.

We continued to walk, and Penthe kept hold of my arm, subtly guiding us through a grove of trees, then up a steep path carved through a small bluff. Eventually we came to a secluded dell that had a carpet of wild papavlerflower blossoming among the grass. Their loose, blood-red petals were almost exactly the same color as Penthe’s mercenary reds.

“Vashet told me barbarians have strange rituals with your sex,” Penthe said. “She told me if I wanted to bed you, I should bring you to some flowers.” She gestured around. “These are the best I could find in this season.” She looked up at me expectantly.

“Ah,” I said. “I expect Vashet was having a bit of a joke with you. Or perhaps a joke with me.” Penthe frowned and I hurried to continue. “But it is true that among the barbarians there are many rituals that lead up to sex. It is somewhat more complicated there.”

Penthe gestured sullen irritation. “I should not be surprised,” she said. “Everyone tells stories about the barbarians. Some of it is training, so I can move well among you.” Wry however. “Since I have not been out among them yet, they also tell stories to tease me.”

“What sort of stories?” I asked, thinking of what I had heard about the Adem and the Lethani before I had met Tempi.

She shrugged, slight embarrassment. “It is foolishness. They say all the barbarian men are huge.” She gestured far above her head, showing a height of more than seven feet. “Naden told me he went to a town where the barbarians ate a soup made of dirt. They say the barbarians never bathe. They say barbarians drink their own urine, believing it will help them live longer.” She shook her head, laughing and gesturing horrified amusement.

“Are you saying,” I asked slowly, “that you don’t drink yours?”

Penthe froze midlaugh and looked at me, her face and hands showing a confused, apologetic mix of embarrassment, disgust, and disbelief. It was such a bizarre tangle of emotions I couldn’t help but laugh, and I saw her relax when she realized the joke.

“I understand,” I said. “We tell similar stories about the Adem.”

Her eyes lit up. “You must tell me as I told you. It is fair.”

Given Tempi’s reaction when I’d told him of the word-fire and Lethani, I decided to share something else. “They say those who take the red never have sex. They say you take that energy and put it into your Ketan, and that is why you are such good fighters.”

Penthe laughed hard at that. “I would have never made the third stone if that were the case,” she said. Wry amusement. “If keeping from sex gave me my fighting, there would be days I could not make even a fist.”

I felt my pulse quicken a bit at that.

“Still,” she said. “I can see where that story comes from. They must think we have no sex because no Adem would bed a barbarian.”

“Ah,” I said, somewhat disappointed. “Why have you brought me to the flowers then?”

“You are now of Ademre,” she said easily. “I expect many will approach you now. You have a sweet face, and it is hard not to be curious about your anger.”

Penthe paused and glanced significantly downward. “That is unless you are diseased?”

I blushed at this. “What? No! Of course not!”

“Are you certain?”

“I have studied at the Medica,” I said somewhat stiffly. “The greatest school of medicine in all the world. I know all about the diseases a person might catch, how to spot them and how to treat them.”

Penthe gave me a skeptical look. “I do not question you in particular. But it is well known that barbarians are quite frequently diseased in their sex.”

I shook my head. “This is just another foolish story. I assure you the barbarians are no more diseased than the Adem. In fact, I expect we may be less.”

She shook her head, her eyes serious. “No. You are wrong in this. Of a hundred barbarians, how many would you say were so afflicted?”

It was an easy statistic I knew from the Medica. “Out of every hundred? Perhaps five. More among those who work in brothels or frequent such places, of course.”

Penthe’s face showed obvious disgust and she shivered. “Of one hundred Adem, none are so afflicted,” she said firmly. Absolute.

“Oh come now.” I held up my hand, making a circle with my fingers. “None?”

“None,” she said with grim certainty. “The only place we could catch such a thing is from a barbarian, and those who travel are warned.”

“What if you caught a disease from another Adem who had not been careful while traveling?” I asked.

Penthe’s tiny heart-shaped face went grim, her nostrils flaring. “From one of my own?” Vast anger. “If one of Ademre were to give me a disease, I would be furious. I would shout from the top of a cliff what they had done. I would make their life as painful as a broken bone.”

She gestured disgust, brushing at the front of her shirt in the first piece of Adem hand-talk I had ever learned from Tempi. “Then I would make the long trek over the mountains into the Tahl to be cured of it. Even if the trip should take two years and bring no money to the school. And none would think the less of me for that.”

I nodded to myself. It made sense. Given their attitudes about sex, if it were any other way, disease would run rampant through the population.

I saw Penthe looking at me expectantly. “Thank you for the flowers,” I said.

She nodded and stepped closer, looking up at me. Her eyes were excited as she smiled her shy smile. Then her face grew serious. “Is it enough to satisfy your barbarian rituals, or is there more that must be done?”

I reached down and ran my hand along the smooth skin of her neck, sliding my fingertips under the long braid