Then, from the gleaming mists that surrounded us, there burst a wolf, all black and silver. He was covered in scars and death clung to him as water clings to a dog’s coat after he has plunged through a river. My father was with him and in him and around him, and never had I realized him as he was. He bled from dozens of unhealable wounds and yet at the core of him, life burned like molten gold in a furnace.
Bee Badgerlock’s Dream Journal
It had all been ruined when the door of the tavern opened and banged shut again, and suddenly Shun and FitzVigilant were there. The way FitzVigilant looked at my father, I knew he had already heard the tale of what had happened in the town commons. I did not want him to speak of it to my father. We were past it now, and if he brought it up, Riddle would have to think about it again. Riddle and my father were behaving as if all were well now, but I knew that my father’s actions would gnaw at Riddle’s heart like a worm. My father was his friend, but he gave his ultimate loyalty to Nettle, and he dreaded telling her this story and revealing to her his part in it.
But Shun, if she knew of it, made nothing of it, but only began to natter on about she must have this and she must have that, and if my father had coin, perhaps they could go get it right now, or perhaps she would eat first. She sat down beside my father and FitzVigilant sat on the other side of Riddle, and they reminded me of red-mouthed fledglings squawking in a nest as they spoke of needing this and wanting that. My father turned away from me to speak to Shun. I couldn’t stand it. I was suddenly too warm and the press of the myriad conversations felt like hands over my ears. I tugged on Riddle’s sleeve. ‘I need to go outside.’
‘What? Oh. It’s behind the inn. And come right back, you hear me?’ He twisted away to me to reply to something FitzVigilant had said to him. Odd, how I must never interrupt, but my tutor saw no reason to observe the same courtesy to me. ‘It’s country food, Lant. Different from what you’d find in a Buckkeep Town tavern, but not bad. Try the soup.’
I had to wiggle to turn on the bench and then get down from it. I do not think my father had even noticed me leaving. On my way to the door, a large woman nearly stepped on me, but I darted round her. The door was so heavy I had to wait until someone was coming in before I could slip out. The cooler air greeted me; it seemed as if the bustle of the street and merry atmosphere had increased as evening drew closer. I stepped just slightly away from the door so that I would not be hit if it opened, and then I had to move out of the way again because a man needed to unload a cart of firewood for the tavern next door. So I crossed the street and watched a man juggling three potatoes and an apple. He sang a merry little song as he juggled. When he was finished, I twisted to reach past my new market bag and dug deep into my new little pouch. In the bottom, I found my half copper. When I gave it to him, he smiled and gave me the apple to keep.
It was definitely time for me to go back to the tavern and find my father, much as I dreaded being dragged about on Shun’s errands now. But perhaps my father would send Riddle with her or just give her money to waste. A wagon full of cider kegs with a team of four horses had stopped in the street, so I had to go around it. To get back to the tavern, I must walk past the grey beggar.
I stopped to look at him. He was so empty. Not just his dirty pleading hand on his knee, but all of him, as if he were a plum skin hanging on a tree after wasps had stolen all its sweet flesh and left only an empty shell. I looked at his empty hand, but I desperately wanted to keep my two coppers. So I said, ‘I’ve an apple. Would you like an apple, beggar?’
He shifted his eyes toward me as if he could see me. They were terrible, dead and clouded. I did not want him to look at me with such eyes. ‘You are kind,’ he said, and I bravely stooped to set the apple in his hand.
Just then, the door of the spice shop opened and the thin little woman who owned it stepped out. ‘You!’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you still squatting here? Away! I told you, get away! A street full of customers and my shop is empty because no one wants to step over your smelly bones and rags. Away! Or my husband comes with his stick to teach you how to dance!’
‘I go, I go,’ the beggar said softly. His grey hand had closed on the red apple. He tucked the fruit into the breast of his ragged tunic and began the slow struggle to rise. The woman was glaring at him. I stooped, found the staff he was groping for, and put it into his hand. ‘You are kind,’ he said again. He gripped the stick tight, one hand above the other and levered himself to his feet. He swayed and turned his face slowly from side to side. ‘Is the street clear?’ he asked piteously. ‘If I step out now, is the street clear?’
‘Clear enough. Go now!’ The spice woman spoke harshly as a team and wagon rounded the corner, heading our way, and I resolved never to buy anything in her store.
‘Don’t step out,’ I warned him. ‘You’ll be crushed. Wait and I’ll walk across with you.’
‘Well, aren’t you the interfering little snippet!’ She bent forward at the waist to mock me. Her heavy breasts lunged at me like chained dogs. ‘Does your mother know you are running wild on the street and talking to dirty beggars?’
I wanted to say something clever back to her, but she turned back into her shop, calling, ‘Heny? Heny, that beggar is still blocking our door! See him off, as I asked you to do hours ago!’
The rumbling wagon had passed. ‘Come with me now,’ I said. He smelled very bad. I didn’t want to touch him. But I knew that my father would not have left him there at the mercy of the spice woman. It was time for me to begin behaving as my father’s daughter. I took hold of his staff below his grip. ‘I’ll guide you,’ I told him. ‘Step now. Come.’
It was a slow business. Even with both hands grasping his stick, he could barely stand. He took two little steps, hopped his stick forward and took two more little steps. As I guided him out into the street and away from the door of the spice shop, I realized suddenly I did not know where to put him. There, he had been sheltered from the wind. To either side of us, the doors of the shops were busy with customers coming and going. Ahead of us was only the town commons. We hitched along slowly toward it. No one had returned to the place where the dog had died. Someone had taken her body away and the bull’s head, and as my father had asked, they had spread clean snow there, but the blood had soaked up through it. Pink snow, almost pretty, if one did not know what it was. I do not know why I guided him there, except that it was an open space. The canvas that had covered the bull’s head was on the ground under the tree. Perhaps he could sit on that.
I glanced back at the tavern door, knowing that if I did not return soon, my father or Riddle would come after me. Perhaps both of them.
Or perhaps neither. Shun was there and she was fully capable of keeping both of them occupied to the point at which they would forget about me. A nasty feeling smothered my heart. Jealousy. I finally named it for what it was. I was jealous.
It fuelled my desire to help the blind beggar. I would not go back. They would have to come and find me, and when they did, they would see that I could be as brave and kind as my father. Helping a beggar that no one else would touch.
A man by a tinker’s cart was staring at us in distaste. Plainly he wanted us to move further away from him. I steeled my resolve and shifted my bag to settle firmly on my shoulder. ‘Give me your arm,’ I said boldly. ‘I can help you walk better.’
He hesitated, knowing how disgusting he was. Then, his weariness won. ‘You are too kind,’ he said, almost sadly, and held out his stick of an arm. I took it. He lurched a little. I was shorter than he had expected. His dirty hand gripped my forearm.
The world wheeled around us. The sky rainbowed. There had been a fog, but it had been a fog I had looked through all my life. Now it parted, as if a wind of joy had torn through it. I looked in awe at a beauty that tore my heart wide open. All of them, the scowling tinker, the holly-crowned girl kissing a boy behind a tree, the inn cat under the porch, the old man bartering for a new felted hat, all of them burst forth in glorious colours I had never imagined existed. Their flaws were overcome by the potential for beauty in each of them. I made a small sound and the beggar sobbed aloud.
‘I can see,’ he cried out. ‘My sight has come back to me. I can see! Oh, my light, my sun, where have you come from? Where have you been?’
He gathered me to his breast and embraced me and I was glad of it. The beauty and the possibility of glory that blossomed all around me flowed from him through me. This, this was how it was supposed to be done. Not in tiny glimpses, not as unconnected dreams. Everywhere I looked, possibilities multiplied. It reminded me of the first time my father had lifted me to his shoulder and I suddenly realized how much further he could see from his height. But now I saw, not just from a better vantage, not just to a distance, but to all times. It was comforting to be held safe at the middle of that swirling vortex. I did not fear as I allowed my sight to follow the myriad threads. One caught my attention. The kissing girl would marry that boy, crowned with orange blossoms, and bear him nine children at a farm in a valley. Or not. She might dally with him for a time, and marry another, but her memory of this moment would add sweetness to every pie she baked, and the love she had known would be shared with chickens and cats until she died, barren, at seventy-two. But no. They would run away together, this very night, and lie together in the forest, and the next day, on the road to Buckkeep, they would both die, he of an arrow wound and she would be raped and torn and cast aside to die in a ditch. And because of that, her older brothers would band together and become the Oaksby Guard. During the time of their patrols, they would take the lives of fifty-two highwayman and save over six hundred travellers from pain and death. The numbers were plain. It was suddenly so very simple. All I had to do was give them a tiny nudge. If I smiled at them as they strolled the village green and told them, ‘You shine with love. Love should not wait. Run away tonight!’ They would see me as a harbinger and take my advice. His pain would last but a moment, and hers only hours. Less time than she would spend struggling in childbirth for her first child. I had the power. I had the power and the choice. I could do so much good in the world. So much good. There were so many choices I could make for the good of the world. I would start with the holly-crowned girl.
He clutched me tighter and spoke by my ear. ‘Stop. Stop. You must not! Not without great thought and then … even then … there is so much danger. So much danger!’
He turned my eyes, and the threads splintered into a thousand more threads. It was not as simple as I had thought. For every thread I tried to follow became a multitude, and the moment I chose one thread from that multitude, it shattered again into yet more possibilities. She might say the wrong word to him and he would murder her this afternoon. She told her father she had kissed him and her father blessed them. Or cursed them. Or drove her from her home into the storm, to die of cold in the night.
‘Some are far more likely than others, but each has at least one chance to be real. So each path must be studied so carefully before any path is chosen. The path you observed, where they both must die? If we were dedicated to this creation of the Oaksby Guard, we would look and look. There are, always, other time paths that lead to the same end. There will be some more destructive and ugly, and some less so.’
I had thought he was speaking aloud to me. I became aware that his thoughts were seeping into me through the bond we shared. He poured knowledge from his mind to mine as if he were a pitcher and I the cup. Or the thirsty garden that only been waiting, all this time, for this nourishment.
‘And the paths change, they change constantly. Some vanish, impossible now, and others grow more likely. That is why the training takes so many years. So many years. One studies, and one pays attention to the dreams. Because the dreams are like guideposts for the most significant moments. The most significant moment …’
He took his attention from me, and it was as if someone had torn a warm cloak from me in the midst of an ice storm. He stared with his blind eyes, terror and joy stamped on his scarred face. ‘The wolf comes,’ he recited. ‘His teeth are a knife, and the flying drops of blood are his tears.’
Then my vision faded to the same sort of sight one has in deep twilight before the last light of the day fades. All colours were muted and shadows prevailed, hiding all detail from me. I thought I would die. All possibility was hidden, masked and limited to a single instant of time. I felt I could not move. Life was stiff and limited and slow. Time had been a limitless ocean, spreading out in every direction, and I had been a seabird, free to wheel and flit from one moment to a thousand other possibilities. Now I was mired in a tiny puddle, struggling to experience even one second fully, blinded to the future consequences of any action I might take. I stopped and stood and let life happen around me.