Authors: Patrick Rothfuss

Tags: #Mercenary troops, #Magicians, #Magic, #Attempted assassination, #Fairies, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Heroes, #Epic

The Wise Man's Fear (117 page)

Now, however, they were considerably richer, and they got to feel honest about it. A heavy piece of gold would keep their minds off the money I was carrying. Though I still planned on sleeping with the locked box under my pillow at night.

Second, I could use the money. Both the royal I had tucked openly into my pocket, and the other three I’d palmed when handing out coins to the others. As I said, Alveron would never know the difference, and four royals would cover a full term’s tuition at the University.

After I secured the Maer’s lockbox in the bottom of my travelsack, each of us decided what we would scavenge from the bandits’ equipment.

The tents we left for the same reason we hadn’t brought our own in the first place. They were too bulky to carry. We took as much of their food as we could stow, knowing the more we carried, the less we would have to buy.

I decided to take one of the bandits’ swords. I wouldn’t have wasted the money to buy one, since I didn’t know how to use it, but if they were free for the taking....

As I was looking over the assorted weapons, Tempi came over and gave a few words of advice. After we had narrowed my options to two swords, Tempi finally spoke his mind. “You cannot use a sword.”
Questioning. Embarrassment
.

I got the impression that to him, the thought of someone not being able to use a sword was more than slightly shameful. Like not knowing how to eat using a knife and fork. “No,” I said slowly. “But I was hoping you could show me.”

Tempi stood very still and quiet. I might have taken it for a refusal if I had not come to know him so well. This type of stillness meant he was thinking.

Pauses are a key part of Ademic conversation, so I waited patiently. The two of us stood quietly for a minute, then two. Then five. Then ten. I fought to stay still and quiet. Perhaps this
was
a polite refusal.

I thought myself terribly savvy, you see. I had known Tempi for nearly a month, learned a thousand words and fifty pieces of the Adem hand-speech. I knew the Adem were not bashful about nudity, or touching, and I was beginning to grasp the mystery that was the Lethani.

Oh yes, I thought I was terribly clever. Had I truly known anything about the Adem, I never would have dared to ask Tempi such a question.

“Will you teach me that?” He pointed across the camp to where my lute case lay, leaning against a tree.

I was caught off guard by the question. I had never tried to teach anyone how to play the lute before. Perhaps Tempi knew this and was implying something similar about himself. I knew he was prone to subtly layered speaking.

A fair offer. I nodded. “I will try.”

Tempi nodded and pointed to one of the swords we had been considering. “Wear it. But no fighting.” With that he turned and left. At the time I took this for his natural brevity.

The scavenging continued throughout the day. Marten took a good number of arrows and all the bowstrings he could find. Then, after checking to see no one wanted any of them, he decided to take the four longbows that had survived the lightning. They made an awkward bundle, but he claimed they’d be worth a heavy penny when he sold them in Crosson.

Dedan grabbed a pair of boots and an armored vest nicer than the one he was wearing. He also laid claim to a deck of cards and a set of ivory dice.

Hespe took a slender set of shepherd’s pipes and tucked almost a dozen knives into the bottom of her pack with the hope of selling them later.

Even Tempi found some things he fancied: a whetstone, a brass saltbox, and a pair of linen pants he took down to the stream and dyed a familiar blood-red.

I took less than the rest of them. A small knife to replace the one I’d broken and a small shaving razor with a horn handle. I didn’t need to shave that often, but I’d gotten into the habit while in the Maer’s court. I might have followed Hespe’s example and taken a few knives as well, but my travelsack was already unpleasantly heavy with the weight of the Maer’s lockbox.

This may seem a little ghoulish, but it is simply the way of the world. Looters become looted, while time and tide make us mercenaries all.

CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR

Over Rock and Root

W
E DECIDED TO TRUST the map we’d found and cut straight west through the forest, heading toward Crosson. Even if we missed the town, we couldn’t help but hit the road and save ourselves long miles of walking.

Hespe’s wounded leg made the going slow, and we only put six or seven miles behind us that first day. It was during one of our many breaks that Tempi began my true instruction in the Ketan.

Fool that I was, I’d assumed he had already been teaching me. The truth was, he had merely been correcting my more horrifying mistakes because they irritated him. Much the same way I’d be tempted to tune someone’s lute if they were playing off-key in the same room.

This instruction was a different thing entirely. We started at the beginning of the Ketan and he corrected my mistakes. All my mistakes. He found eighteen in the first motion alone, and there are more than a hundred motions in the Ketan. I quickly began to have doubts about this apprenticeship.

I also began to teach Tempi the lute. I played notes as we walked, and taught him their names, then showed him some chords. It seemed as good a place as any to begin.

We hoped to make it to Crosson by noon of the next day. But near midmorning we encountered a stretch of dreary, reeking swamp that hadn’t been marked on the map.

Thus began a truly miserable day. We had to test our footing with every step, and our progress slowed to a crawl. At one point Dedan startled and fell, thrashing about and spattering the rest of us with brackish water. He said he’d seen a mosquito bigger than his thumb with a sucker like a woman’s hairpin. I suggested it might have been a sipquick. He suggested several unpleasant, unsanitary things I could do to myself at my earliest convenience.

As the afternoon wore on, we gave up on making it back to the road and focused on more immediate things, such as finding a piece of dry ground where we could sit without sinking. But all we found was more marsh, sinkholes, and clouds of keening mosquitoes and biting flies.

The sun began to set before we finally made our way out of the swamp, and the weather quickly turned from hot and muggy to chill and damp. We trudged until the ground finally began to slope upward. And though we were all weary and wet, we unanimously decided to press on and put a little distance between ourselves and the insects and smell of rotting plants.

The moon was full, giving us more than enough light to pick our way through the trees. Despite the miserable day, our spirits began to rise. Hespe had grown tired enough to lean on Dedan, and as the mud-covered mercenary put an arm around her she told him he hadn’t smelled this good in months. He replied that he would have to bow to the judgment of a woman of such obvious grace.

I tensed, waiting for their banter to turn sour and sarcastic. But as I plodded along behind them I noticed how gently he had his arm around her. Hespe leaned on him almost tenderly, hardly favoring her wounded leg at all. I glanced at Marten, and the old tracker smiled, his teeth white in the moonlight.

Before long we found a clear stream and washed the worst of the smell and mud away. We rinsed out our clothes and donned dry ones. I unpacked my tatty, threadbare cloak and fastened it across my chest, vainly hoping it might keep away the evening’s chill.

As we were finishing up, we heard the faint sound of singing upstream. Each of us pricked up our ears, but the chattering sound of the stream made it difficult to hear with any clarity.

But singing meant people, and people meant we were almost to Crosson, or perhaps even the Pennysworth if the swamp had turned us too far south. Even a farmhouse would be better than another night in the rough.

So, despite the fact that we were tired and aching, the hope of soft beds, warm meals, and cool drinks gave us energy to gather up our packs and press on.

We followed the stream, Dedan and Hespe still walking as a pair. The sound of singing came and went. The recent rains meant the stream was running high, and the noise of it tumbling over rock and root was sometimes enough to drown out even the sound of our own footsteps.

Eventually the stream grew broad and still as the heavy brush thinned and opened into a wide clearing.

There was no singing any longer. Nor did we see a road, inn, or any flicker of firelight. Just a wide clearing well-lit by moonlight. The stream broadened out, forming a bright pool. And sitting on a smooth rock by the side of the pool....

“Lord Tehlu protect me from the demons of the night,” Marten said woodenly. But he sounded more reverent than afraid. And he did not look away.

“That’s ...” Dedan said weakly. “That’s ...”

“I do not believe in faeries,”
I tried to say, but it came out as barely a whisper.

It was Felurian.

CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE

Chased

T
HE FIVE OF US stood frozen for a moment. The slow rippling of the pool reflected onto the fair form of Felurian. Naked in the moonlight, she sang:

cae-lanion luhial
di mari felanua
kreata tu ciar
tu alaran di.
dirella. amauen.
loesi an delian
tu nia vor ruhlan
Felurian thae.

The sound of her voice was strange. It was soft and gentle, far too quiet for us to hear across the entire length of the clearing. Far too faint for us to hear over the sound of moving water and stirring leaves. Despite this, I
could
hear it. Her words were clear and sweet as the rising and falling notes of a distant flute. It reminded me of something I could not press my finger to.

The tune was the same Dedan had sung in his story. I did not understand a word of it save her name in the final line. Nevertheless I felt the draw of it, inexplicable and insistent. As if an unseen hand had reached into my chest and tried to pull me into the clearing by my heart.

I resisted. I looked away and set one hand against a nearby tree to steady myself.

Behind me I heard Marten murmuring, “No no no,” in a low voice as if he were trying to convince himself. “No no no no no. Not for all the money in the world.”

I looked over my shoulder. The tracker’s eyes were fixed feverishly on the clearing in front of him, but he seemed more afraid than aroused. Tempi stood, surprise plain on his normally impassive face. Dedan stood rigidly to one side, his face drawn while Hespe’s eyes darted back and forth between him and the clearing.

Then Felurian began to sing again. It felt like the promise of a warm hearth on a cold night. It was like a young girl’s smile. I found myself thinking of Losi at the Pennysworth, her red curls like a tumble of fire. I remembered the swell of her breasts and the way her hand had felt running through my hair.

Felurian sang, and I felt the pull of it. It was strong, but not so strong that I couldn’t hold myself back. I looked into the clearing again and saw her, skin silver-white under the evening sky. She bent to dip one hand in the water of the pool, more graceful than a dancer.

A sudden clarity of thought came over me. What was I afraid of? A faerie story? There was magic here, real magic. What’s more, it was a magic of singing. If I missed this opportunity I would never forgive myself.

I looked back again at my companions. Marten was shaking visibly. Tempi was backing slowly away. Dedan’s hands made fists at his sides. Was I going to be like them, superstitious and afraid? No. Never. I was of the Arcanum. I was a namer. I was one of the Edema Ruh.

I felt wild laughter boil up in me. “I will meet you at the Pennysworth in three days’ time,” I said, and stepped into the clearing.

I felt Felurian’s pull more strongly now. Her skin was bright in the moonlight. Her long hair fell like a shadow all around her.

“Sod this,” I heard Dedan say behind me. “If he’s going, then I’m g—” There was a short scuffle ending with the sound of something hitting the ground. I glanced behind me and saw him facedown on the low grass. Hespe had her knee on the small of his back and one of his arms pulled up tight behind him. He was struggling weakly and cursing strongly.

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