Authors: Patrick Rothfuss

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

The Wise Man's Fear (141 page)

The light-headedness and nausea passed. As I came to my senses, I realized Vashet had finished talking and was staring at me.

Before I could say anything, she waved a hand dismissively. “I see I will get no more use of you today. Take the rest of the evening for yourself. Get your thoughts in order or practice the Ketan. Go watch the sword tree. Tomorrow we will continue.”

I walked aimlessly for a while, trying not to think about my fingers being cut away. Then, coming over a hill, I stumbled almost literally onto a naked Adem couple tucked away in a grove of trees.

They didn’t scramble for their clothes when I burst out of the trees, and rather than try to apologize with my poor language and fuddled wits, I simply turned and left, face burning with embarrassment.

I tried to practice the Ketan but couldn’t keep my mind on it. I went to watch the sword tree, and for a while the sight of it moving gracefully in the wind calmed me. Then my mind drifted and I was confronted with the image of Vashet paring off my fingers again.

I heard the three high bells and went to dinner. I was standing in line, half stupid with the mental effort of not thinking of someone maiming my hands, when I noticed the Adem standing nearby were staring at me.A young girl of about ten wore an expression of open amazement on her face, and a man in his mercenary reds looked at me as if he had just seen me wipe my ass with a piece of bread and eat it.

Only then did I realize I was humming. Not loud, exactly, but loud enough for those nearby to hear. I couldn’t have been doing it for long, as I was only six lines into “Leave the Town, Tinker.”

I stopped, then lowered my eyes, took my food, and spent ten minutes trying to eat. I managed a few bites, but that was all. Eventually I gave up and headed to my room.

I lay in bed, running through the options in my mind. How far could I run? Could I lose myself in the surrounding countryside? Could I steal a horse? Had I even seen a horse since I’d been in Haert?

I brought out my lute and practiced my chording a bit, all five of my clever fingers flicking up and down the long neck of the lute. But my right hand ached to strum and pick notes from the strings. It was as frustrating as trying to kiss someone using only one lip, and I soon gave up.

At last I brought out my shaed and wrapped it around myself. It was warm and comforting. I drew the hood over my head as far as it would go and thought of the dark piece of Fae where Felurian had gathered its shadows.

I thought of the University, of Wil and Sim. Of Auri and Devi and Fela. I had never been popular at the University, and my circle of friends had never seemed particularly large. But the truth was I’d simply forgotten what it was like to be truly alone.

I thought of my family then. I thought of the Chandrian, of Cinder. His fluid grace. His sword held easy in his hand like a piece of winter ice. I thought of killing him.

I thought of Denna and what the Cthaeh had told me. I thought of her patron and the things I had said during our fight. I thought about the time she had slipped on the road and I had caught her, how the gentle curve above her hip had felt against my hand. I thought about the shape of her mouth, the sound of her voice, the smell of her hair.

And, eventually, I stepped softly through the doors of sleep.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FIFTEEN

Storm and Stone

I
WOKE THE NEXT MORNING knowing the truth. My only way out of this situation was through the school. I needed to prove myself. That meant I needed everything Vashet could teach me as quickly as possible.

So the next morning I rose in the pale blue light of dawn. And when Vashet emerged from her small stone house I was waiting for her. I was not particularly bright-eyed or bushy-tailed, as my sleep had been filled with troubling dreams, but I was ready to learn.

I realize now that I may have given an inaccurate impression of Haert.

It was no thriving metropolis, obviously. And it couldn’t be considered a city by any stretch of the imagination. In some ways it was barely a town.

I do not say this disparagingly. I spent the majority of my young life traveling with my troupe, moving from small town to small town. Half the world is made of tiny communities that have grown up around nothing more than a crossroads market, or a good clay pit, or a bend of river strong enough to turn a mill wheel.

Sometimes these towns are prosperous. Some have rich soil and generous weather. Some thrive on the trade moving through them. The wealth of these places is obvious. The houses are large and well-mended. People are friendly and generous. The children are fat and happy. There are luxuries for sale: pepper and cinnamon and chocolate. There is coffee and good wine and music at the local inn.

Then there are the other sort of towns. Towns where the soil is thin and tired. Towns where the mill burned down, or the clay was mined out years ago. In these places the houses are small and badly patched. The people are lean and suspicious, and wealth is measured in small, practical ways. Cords of firewood. A second pig. Five jars of blackberry preserve.

At first glance, Haert seemed to be this sort of town. It was little more than tiny homes, broken stone, and the occasional penned goat.

In most parts of the Commonwealth, or anywhere in the Four Corners for that matter, a family living in a small cottage with only a few sticks of furniture would be viewed as unfortunate. One step away from paupers.

But while most of the Adem homes I had seen were relatively small, they weren’t the same sort you would find in a desperate Aturan town, made of sod and logs chinked with mud.

The Adem homes were all snug stone, fit together as cunningly as anything I had ever seen. There were no cracks letting in the endless wind. No leaking roofs. No cracking leather hinges on the doors. The windows weren’t oiled sheepskin or empty holes with wooden shutters. They were fitted glass, tight as any you’d find in a banker’s manor.

I never saw a fireplace in all my time in Haert. Don’t get me wrong, fireplaces are better than freezing to death by a long step. But most of the rough ones folk can build for themselves out of loose fieldstone or cinder-brick are drafty, dirty, and inefficient. They fill your house with soot and your lungs with smoke.

Instead of fireplaces, each Adem home had its own iron stove. The sort of stove that weighs hundreds of pounds. The sort of stove made of thick drop-iron so you can stoke it until it glows with heat. The sort of stove that lasts a century and costs more than a farmer earns from an entire year of hard harvesting. Some of these stoves were small, good for heating and cooking. But I saw more than a few that were larger and could be used for baking too. One of these treasures was tucked away in a low stone house of only three rooms.

The rugs on the Adem floors were mostly simple, but they were of thick, soft wool, deeply dyed. The floors beneath those rugs were smooth-sanded wood, not dirt. There were no guttering tallow tapers or reedlights. There were beeswax candles or lamps that burned a clean white oil. And once, through a distant window, I recognized the unwavering red light of a sympathy lamp.

It was this last that made me realize the truth. This was not a scattered handful of desperate folk, scratching out a lean existence on the bare mountainside. They were not living hand-to-mouth, eating cabbage soup and living in fear of winter. This community was comfortably, quietly prosperous.

More than that. Despite the lack of glittering banquet halls and fancy gowns, despite the absence of servants and statuary, each of these homes was like a tiny manor house. They were each of them wealthy in a quiet, practical way.

“What did you think?” Vashet said, laughing at me. “That a handful of us win our reds and run off to lives of mad luxury while our families drink their own bathwater and die of scurvy?”

“I hadn’t though of it at all, really,” I said, looking around. Vashet was beginning to show me how to use a sword. We had been at it for two hours, and she had done little more than explain the different ways of holding it. As if it were a baby and not a piece of steel.

Now that I knew what to look for, I could see dozens of the Adem houses worked cunningly into the landscape. Heavy wooden doors were dug into bluffs. Others looked like little more than tumbles of stone. Some had grass growing on their roofs and could only be recognized by the stovepipes peeping out. A fat nanny goat grazed atop one of these, her udder swinging as she stretched out her neck to crop a mouthful of grass.

“Look at the land around you,” she said, spinning in a slow circle to take in the landscape. “The ground is too thin for the plow, too jagged for horses. The summer too wet for wheat, too harsh for fruit. Some mountains hold iron, or coal, or gold. But not these mountains. In winter the snow will pile higher than your head. In spring the storms will push you from your feet.”

She looked back at me. “This is our land because no one else wants it.” She shrugged. “Or rather, it became ours for that reason.”

Vashet adjusted her sword on her shoulder, then eyed me speculatively. “Sit and listen,” she said formally. “And I will tell a story of a time long gone.”

I sat on the grass, and Vashet took her place on a nearby stone. “Long ago,” she said, “the Adem were upheaved from our rightful place. Something we cannot remember drove us out. Someone stole our land, or ruined it, or made us flee in fear. We were forced to wander endlessly. Our whole nation mendicant, like beggars. We would find a place, and settle, and rest our flocks. Then those who lived nearby would drive us off.

“The Adem were fierce back then. If we had not been fierce, there would be none of us left today. But we were few, so we were always driven forth. Finally we found this thin and windy place, unwanted by the world. We dug our roots deep into the stone and made it ours.”

Vashet’s eyes wandered the landscape. “But this land had little to give us, a place for our flocks to graze, stone, and endless wind. We could not find a way to sell the wind, so we sold our fierceness to the world. So we lived, and slowly we sharpened ourselves into the thing we are today. No longer only fierce, but dangerous and proud. Unceasing as the wind and strong as stone.”

I waited a moment to make sure she was finished. “My people are wanderers too,” I said. “It is our way. Nowhere and everywhere is where we live.”

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