Assassin's Quest

I sat very still and he did not cut me. It was hard to be still when he came so near to me and looked at me so closely. When he was done, he took my chin in his hand. He tipped my face up and looked at me. He looked at me hard. "Fitz?" he said. He turned his head and smiled at me, but then the smile faded when I just looked at him. He gave me a brush.

"There is no horse to brush," I told him.

He looked almost pleased. "Brush this," he told me, and roughed up my hair. He made me brush it until it would lie flat. There were sore places on my head. Burrich frowned when he saw me wince. He took the brush away and made me stand still while he looked and touched beneath my hair. "Bastard!" he said harshly, and when I cowered, he said, "Not you." He shook his head slowly. He patted me on the shoulder. "The pain will go away with time," he told me. He showed me how to pull my hair back and tie it with leather. It was just long enough. "That's better," he said. "You look like a man again."

I woke up from a dream, twitching and yelping. I sat up and started to cry. He came to me from his bed. "What's wrong, Fitz? Are you all right?"

"He took me from my mother!" I said. "He took me away from her. I was much too young to be gone from her."

"I know," he said, "I know. But it was a long time ago. You're here now, and safe." He looked almost frightened.

"He smoked the den," I told him. "He made my mother and brothers into hides."

His face changed and his voice was no longer kind. "No, Fitz. That was not your mother. That was a wolf's dream. Nighteyes. It might have happened to Nighteyes. But not you."

"Oh, yes, it did," I told him, and I was suddenly angry. "Oh, yes it did, and it felt just the same. Just the same." I got up from my bed and walked around the room. I walked for a very long time, until I could stop feeling that feeling again. He sat and watched me. He drank a lot of brandy while I walked.

One day in spring I stood looking out of the window. The world smelled good, alive and new. I stretched and rolled my shoulders. I heard my bones crackle together. "It would be a good morning to go out riding," I said. I turned to look at Burrich. He was stirring porridge in a kettle over the fire. He came and stood beside me.

"It's still winter up in the Mountains," he said softly. "I wonder if Kettricken got home safely."

"If she didn't, it wasn't Sooty's fault," I said. Then something turned over and hurt inside me, so that for a moment I couldn't catch my breath. I tried to think of what it was, but it ran away from me. I didn't want to catch up with it, but I knew it was a thing I should hunt. It would be like hunting a bear. When I got up close to it, it would turn on me and try to hurt me. But something about it made me want to follow anyway. I took a deep breath and shuddered it out. I drew in another, with a sound that caught in my throat.

Beside me, Burrich was very still and silent. Waiting for me.

Brother, you are a wolf. Come back, come away from that, it will hurt you, Nighteyes warned me.

I leaped back from it.

Then Burrich went stamping about the room, cursing things, and letting the porridge burn. We had to eat it anyway, there was nothing else.

For a time, Burrich bothered me. "Do you remember?" he was always saying. He wouldn't leave me alone. He would tell me names, and make me try to say who they were. Sometimes I would know, a little. "A woman," I told him when he said Patience. "A woman in a room with plants." I had tried, but he still got angry with me.

If I slept at night, I had dreams. Dreams of a trembling light, a dancing light on a stone wall. And eyes at a small window. The dreams would hold me down and keep me from breathing. If I could get enough breath to scream, I could wake up. Sometimes it took a long time to get enough breath. Burrich would wake up, too, and grab the big knife off the table. "What is it, what is it?" he would ask me. But I could not tell him.

It was safer to sleep in the daylight, outside, smelling grass and earth. The dreams of stone walls did not come then. Instead, a woman came, to press herself sweetly against me. Her scent was the same as the meadow flowers', and her mouth tasted of honey. The pain of those dreams came when I awoke, and knew she was gone forever, taken by another. At night I sat and looked at the fire. I tried not to think of cold stone walls, nor of dark eyes weeping and a sweet mouth gone heavy with bitter words. I did not sleep. I dared not even lie down. Burrich did not make me.

Chade came back one day. He had grown his beard long and he wore a wide-brimmed hat like a peddler, but I knew him all the same. Burrich wasn't at home when he arrived, but I let him in. I did not know why he had come. "Do you want some brandy?" I asked, thinking perhaps that was why he had come. He looked closely at me and almost smiled.

"Fitz?" he said. He turned his head sideways to look into my face. "So. How have you been?"