Authors: Patrick Rothfuss

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

The Wise Man's Fear (163 page)

I made consoling noises and brushed at her hair with my hand. After a long while she quieted and eventually fell into an exhausted sleep, still clinging tightly to my chest.

I lay very still, not wanting to wake her by moving. My teeth were clenched. I thought of Alleg and Otto and all the rest. I remembered the blood and screaming and the smell of burning skin. I remembered it all and dreamed of worse things I could have done to them.

I never had the nightmares again. Sometimes I think of Alleg and I smile.

We made it to Levinshir the next day. Ell had come to her senses, but remained quiet and withdrawn. Still, things went more quickly now, especially as the girls decided they had recovered enough to take turns riding Greytail.

We covered six miles before we stopped at midday, with the girls becoming increasingly excited as they began to recognize parts of the countryside. The shape of hills in the distance. A crooked tree by the road.

But as we grew closer to Levinshir they grew quiet.

“It’s just over the rise there,” Krin said, getting down off the roan. “You ride from here, Ell.”

Ell looked from her, to me, to her feet. She shook her head.

I watched them. “Are the two of you okay?”

“My father’s going to kill me.” Krin’s voice was barely a whisper, her face full of serious fear.

“Your father will be one of the happiest men in the world tonight,” I said, then thought it best to be honest. “He might be angry too. But that’s only because he’s been scared out of his mind for the last eight days.”

Krin seemed slightly reassured, but Ell burst out crying. Krin put her arms around her, making gentle sounds.

“No one will marry me,” Ell sobbed. “I was going to marry Jason Waterson and help him run his store. He won’t marry me now. No one will.”

I looked up to Krin and saw the same fear reflected in her wet eyes. But Krin’s eyes were angry while Ell’s held nothing but despair.

“Any man who thinks that way is a fool,” I said, weighting my voice with all the conviction I could bring to bear. “And the two of you are too clever and too beautiful to be marrying fools.”

It seemed to calm Ell somewhat, her eyes turning up at me as if looking for something to believe.

“It’s the truth,” I said. “And none of this was your fault. Make sure you remember that for these next couple days.”

“I hate them!” Ell spat, surprising me with her sudden rage. “I hate men!” Her knuckles were white as she gripped Greytail’s reins. Her face twisted into a mask of anger. Krin put her arms around Ell, but when she looked at me I saw the sentiment reflected quietly in her dark eyes.

“You have every right to hate them,” I said, feeling more anger and helplessness than ever before in my life. “But I’m a man too. Not all of us are like that.”

We stayed there for a while, not more than a half-mile from town. We had a drink of water and a small bite to settle our nerves. And then I took them home.

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-FIVE

Homecoming

L
EVINSHIR WASN’T A BIG town. Two hundred people lived there, maybe three if you counted the outlying farms. It was mealtime when we rode in, and the dirt road that split the town in half was empty and quiet. Ell told me her house was on the far side of town. I hoped to get the girls there without being seen. They were worn down and distraught. The last thing they needed was to face a mob of gossipy neighbors.

But it wasn’t meant to be. We were halfway through the town when I saw a flicker of movement in a window. A woman’s voice cried out,
“Ell!”
and in ten seconds people began to spill from every doorway in sight.

The women were the quickest, and inside a minute a dozen of them had formed a protective knot around the two girls, talking and crying and hugging each other. The girls didn’t seem to mind. Perhaps it was better this way. A warm welcome might do a lot to heal them.

The men held back, knowing they were useless in situations like this. Most watched from doorways or porches. Six or eight came down onto the street, moving slowly and eyeing up the situation. These were cautious men, farmers and friends of farmers.They knew the names of everyone within ten miles of their homes. There were no strangers in a town like Levinshir, except for me.

None of the men were close relatives to the girls. Even if they were, they knew they wouldn’t get near them for at least an hour, maybe as much as a day. So they let their wives and sisters take care of things. With nothing else to occupy them, their attention wandered briefly past the horses and settled onto me.

I motioned over a boy of ten or so. “Go tell the mayor his daughter’s back. Run!” He tore off in a cloud of road dust, his bare feet flying.

The men moved slowly closer to me, their natural suspicion of strangers made ten times worse by recent events. A boy of twelve or so wasn’t as cautious as the rest and came right up to me, eyeing my sword, my cloak.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Pete.”

“Can you ride a horse, Pete?”

He looked insulted. “S’nuf.”

“Do you know where the Walker farm is?”

He nodded. “ ’Bout north two miles by the millway.”

I stepped sideways and handed him the reins to the roan. “Go tell them their daughter’s home. Then let them use the horse to come back to town.”

He had a leg over the horse before I could offer him a hand up. I kept a hand on the reins long enough to shorten the stirrups so he wouldn’t kill himself on the way there.

“If you make it there and back without breaking your head or my horse’s leg, I’ll give you a penny,” I said.

“You’ll give me two,” he said.

I laughed. He wheeled the horse around and was gone.

The men had wandered closer in the meantime, gathering around me in a loose circle.

A tall, balding fellow with a scowl and a grizzled beard seemed to appoint himself leader. “So who’re you?” he asked, his tone speaking more clearly than his words,
Who the hell are you?

“Kvothe,” I answered pleasantly. “And yourself?”

“Don’t know as that’s any of your business,” he growled. “What are you doing here?”
What the hell are you doing here with our two girls?

“God’s mother, Seth,” an older man said to him. “You don’t have the sense God gave a dog. That’s no way to talk to the . . .”

“Don’t give me any of your lip, Benjamin,” the scowling man bristled back. “We got a good right to know who he is.” He turned to me and took a few steps in front of everyone else. “You one of those trouper bastards what came through here?”

I shook my head and attempted to look harmless. “No.”

“I think you are. I think you look kinda like one of them Ruh. You got them eyes.” The men around him craned to get a better look at my face.

“God, Seth,” the old fellow chimed in again. “None of them had red hair. You remember hair like that. He ain’t one of ’em.”

“Why would I bring them back if I’d been one of the men who took them?” I pointed out.

His expression grew darker and he continued his slow advance. “You gettin’ smart with me, boy? Maybe you think all of us are stupid here? You think if you bring ’em back you’ll get a reward or maybe we won’t send anyone else out after you?” He was almost within arm’s reach of me now, scowling furiously.

I looked around and saw the same anger lurking in the faces of all the men who stood there. It was the sort of anger that comes to a slow boil inside the hearts of good men who want justice, and finding it out of their grasp, decide vengeance is the next best thing.

I tried to think of a way to calm the situation, but before I could do anything I heard Krin’s voice lash out from behind me. “Seth, you get away from him!”

Seth paused, his hands half raised against me. “Now ...”

Krin was already stepping toward him. The knot of women loosened to release her, but stayed close. “He saved us, Seth,” she shouted furiously. “You stupid shit-eater,
he
saved us. Where the hell were all of you? Why didn’t you come get us?”

He backed away from me as anger and shame fought their way across his face. Anger won. “We came,” he shouted back. “After we found out what happened we went after ’em. They shot out Bil’s horse from under him, and he got his leg crushed. Jim got his arm stabbed, and old Cupper still ain’t waked up from the thumping they give him. They almost killed us.”

I looked again and saw anger on the men’s faces. Saw the real reason for it. The helplessness they had felt, unable to defend their town from the false troupe’s rough handling. Their failure to reclaim the daughters of their friends and neighbors had shamed them.

“Well it wasn’t good enough!” Krin shouted back hotly, her eyes burning. “He came and got us because he’s a real man. Not like the rest of you who left us to die!”

The anger leapt out of a young man to my left, a farm boy, about seventeen. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t been running around like some Ruh whore!”

I broke his arm before I quite realized what I was doing. He screamed as he fell to the ground.

I pulled him to his feet by the scruff of his neck. “What’s your name?” I snarled into his face.

“My arm!” He gasped, his eyes showing me their whites.

I shook him like a rag doll. “Name!”

“Jason,” he blurted. “God’s mother, my arm . . .”

I took his chin in my free hand and turned his face toward Krin and Ell. “Jason,” I hissed quietly in his ear. “I want you to look at those girls. And I want you to think about the hell they’ve been through in these past days, tied hand and foot in the back of a wagon. And I want you to ask yourself what’s worse. A broken arm, or getting kidnapped by a stranger and raped four times a night?”

Then I turned his face toward me and spoke so quiet that even an inch away it was hardly a whisper. “After you’ve thought of that, I want you to pray to God to forgive you for what you just said. And if you mean it, Tehlu grant your arm heal straight and true.” His eyes were terrified and wet. “After that, if you ever think an unkind thought about either of them, your arm will ache like there’s hot iron in the bone. And if you ever say an unkind word, it will go to fever and slow rot and they’ll have to cut it off to save your life.” I tightened my grip on him, watching his eyes widen. “And if you ever do anything to either of them, I’ll know. I will come here, and kill you, and leave your body hanging in a tree.”

There were tears on his face now, although whether from shame or fear or pain I couldn’t guess. “Now you tell her you’re sorry for what you said.” I let go of him after making sure he had his feet under him and pointed him in the direction of Krin and Ell. The women stood around them like a protective cocoon.

He clutched his arm weakly. “I shouldn’ta said that, Ellie,” he sobbed, sounding more wretched and repentant than I would have thought possible, broken arm or no. “It was a demon talkin’ out of me. I swear though, I been sick worryin’. We all been. And we did try to come get you, but they was a lot of them and they jumped us on the road, then we had to bring Bil home or he would’ve died from his leg.”

Something tickled my memory about the boy’s name. Jason? I suddenly suspected I had just broken Ell’s boyfriend’s arm. Somehow I couldn’t feel bad for it just now. Best thing for him, really.

Looking around I saw the anger bleed out of the faces of the men around me, as if I’d used up the whole town’s supply in a sudden, furious flash. Instead they watched Jason, looking slightly embarrassed, as if the boy were apologizing for the lot of them.

Then I saw a big, healthy-looking man running down the street followed by a dozen other townsfolk. From the look on his face I guessed it was Ell’s father, the mayor. He forced his way into the knot of women, gathered his daughter up in his arms, and swung her around.

You find two types of mayor in small towns like this. The first type are balding, older men of considerable girth who are good with money and tend to wring their hands a great deal when anything unexpected happens. The second type are tall, broad-shouldered men whose families have grown slowly prosperous because they had worked like angry bastards behind a plow for twenty generations. Ell’s father was the second sort.

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