The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (226 page)

We both sat still and silent for a time, finding a moment of respite in the eye of the storm all around us. Outside, I could hear the muffled noises of the working men. Their voices came distantly through the cold. I heard the dull ring of metal tools against ice, and the deeper thuds of chunks of ice flung into the wooden bottomed sleds. Closer to hand, Chade muttered to himself and scraped his powder into precise loads. I felt for the dragon, and he was there, but my Wit-sense of him was dimmed as if he conserved his strength
and now would do no more for himself than remain alive and await rescue. Burrich’s hand was still on my shoulder. I suddenly suspected that, just as I did, he quested out toward the dragon.

‘What will you do about Swift?’ I asked Burrich, before I was even aware I was going to speak.

Burrich spoke almost casually. ‘I’ll take my son home. Try to raise him to be an upright man.’

‘You mean, not to use his Wit.’

Burrich made a noise that might have been an assent or a request to drop the topic. I couldn’t.

‘Burrich, all those years in the stables, all your gift for healing and calming and training animals. Was that the Wit? Did you have a bond with Vixen?’

He took his time answering me. Then, he gave me a question instead. ‘What you are really asking me is, did I do one thing and demand another of you?’

‘Yes.’

He sighed. ‘Fitz. I’ve been a drunk. It was nothing I ever wished to see you or my sons become. I’ve given in to other appetites, knowing well that no good could come of it. I am a man, and human. But that doesn’t mean that I would condone or encourage those things in my boys. Would you? Kettricken told me that you had a foster son. I was glad to hear that you had not been entirely alone. But did raising him not teach you something about yourself? That the faults you find abhorrent in yourself are even more horrifying when you see your son manifest them?’

He had summed it up too neatly. But I still took him round to the jump again, asking him, ‘Did you use the Wit when you were Stablemaster?’

He took a breath and said shortly, ‘I chose not to.’ I thought that was all he would say, but a short time later, he cleared his throat and said, ‘But it is as Nighteyes said long ago. I could choose not to reply, but I could not choose to be deaf to them. I know what the hounds called me. I’ve even heard it from your own lips. Heart of the Pack. I knew what they called me and I was aware of their … regard for me. I could not conceal from them that I was aware of them, when they cried back to me of the joy of the
hunt as they gave tongue to the chase. I shared that joy, and they knew it.

‘Long ago, you told me you did not choose Nighteyes. That he chose you and bonded to you and gave you little choice in the matter. So it was with Vixen and me. She was a sickly pup, the runt of an otherwise hearty litter. But she had … something about her. Tenacity. And a mind to find a way around every obstacle. It was not to her mother that she whimpered when her brothers pushed her aside from the nipple, but to me. What was I to do? Pretend I could not hear her plea for a fair share, for a chance at life? So, I saw that she had a chance at the milk. But by the time she was large enough to fend for herself, she had attached herself to me. And in time, I admit, I came to rely on her.’

On some level, I had known it. I don’t know why I wanted him to admit it. ‘Then you did forbid me what you yourself did.’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘Have you any idea how unhappy you made me?’

He didn’t flinch. ‘About as unhappy as you made me when you didn’t obey me. But, then, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Doubtless you never forbade anything to your Hap that you yourself were guilty of. And I’m sure he always listens to your wisdom.’ He was very good. The sarcasm was there only if I looked for it.

That silenced me, for a time. But there was still one more question. ‘But why, Burrich? Why did you, why do you still so despise the Wit? Web, a man I much admire, sees no harm or danger in his magic. How could your own magic disgust you?’

He smoothed his hair back from his face and then rubbed his eyes. He spoke reluctantly. ‘Ah, Fitz, it’s a long, old tale. My grandmother, when she discovered I had the taint, was horrified. Her father had it. And when he was faced with the choice of saving his wife and small children from slavers or getting his Wit-partner out of a burning stable, he chose his Wit-partner. And because of that, slavers took them. My great-grandmother lived a short, miserable time after that. My grandmother said she was a very beautiful woman. There are few worse traits for a slave to have. Her masters used her and her mistresses abused her out of jealousy.
My grandmother and her two sisters witnessed it all. And grew up as slaves, used and abused. Because the man who should have made his primary bond to his wife instead chose a horse over her and his children.’

‘One man, Burrich. One man making a bad decision. Or who knows what went through his head? Did he think that if he got to the horse, it could carry his wife and children to safety? Or help him battle the slavers? We can’t know. But he was only one man. That seems a small foundation upon which to condemn all the Wit.’

He exhaled a short breath through his nose. ‘Fitz. His decision condemned three generations of his family. It did not seem small to anyone who bore that burden. And my grandmother feared that if I were allowed to go on as I had begun, I would do the same. Find an animal, bond to it, and put it above all other considerations. And after she died, for a time, she was right. I did exactly that. As did you. Have you never looked at your own life and said, “take the Wit away, and what changes?” Think on it. If Nosey had not come between you and me, would not we have been closer when you were a boy? If you had not bonded to Smithy, would you have done better with your Skill-lessons? If Nighteyes had not been in your life, could Regal have found excuse to condemn you?’

For a moment, I was stymied. Then I replied, ‘But if the Wit had not been held a shameful thing, none of that would have been true. If you had spoken of it as Old Blood and taught me why I must not bond, if the Wit had been held in esteem as the Skill is, then all would have been well.’

His face darkened with rising blood, and for a moment I glimpsed Burrich’s old temper. Then, with a patience that only time could have taught him, he said quietly, ‘Fitz. It is a thing I was taught from the time my grandmother first discovered the taint in me. The Wit is shameful magic, and it shames a man to practise it. Now, you talk of people who practise it openly and find no disgrace in it. Well, I have heard of places where men marry their sisters and have children, where women go about with their breasts showing, where it is not accounted shameful to discard your mate simply because her youth has faded. Yet, would you teach your children
that these behaviours are good? Or would you teach them to live as you yourself were taught?’

Chade startled me when he spoke. ‘There are unspoken rules to every society. Most of us never question them. But surely, Burrich, you must have some time wondered about what you were taught. Did you never decide that you would determine for yourself if the magic was worth having?’

Burrich turned to regard Chade with his clouded eyes. What did he see? A shape, a shadow, or only his Wit-sense of the old man?

‘I always knew it was worth having, Lord Chade. But I was an adult, and I knew the cost of it. Your prince out there; what price would he have to pay for his useful, worthwhile magic if it became known that he was Witted? You deny he has it to shield him from hatred and prejudice. Do you fault me that I tried to shield Chivalry’s son?’

Chade looked down at the work of his hands and didn’t answer. He had finished. Six containers, everything from flasks to saltboxes, were filled with his explosive powder and resting in kettles or pots. ‘I’m ready,’ he said. He lifted his gaze to me and smiled a strange smile. ‘Let’s go and free the dragon.’

I could not read his green eyes. I could not decide if he truly intended to free the dragon from the ice or meant to blast it to pieces. Perhaps he himself didn’t know. But as if his resolve were contagious, I suddenly felt tight with the need to end this.

‘How dangerous is this?’ Burrich asked.

‘Just as dangerous as it was last night,’ Chade replied testily.

Burrich put out a hand and ran his fingertips lightly across the pots. ‘Not six times as dangerous?’ he asked. ‘How will you do it? Will one man set them all, or six?’

Chade thought a moment. ‘Six men, each to get a kettle fire going. And then Fitz, to go down the line putting the containers in each pot.’

I nodded to the wisdom of that. Six men each judging their own time to put the powder in and flee might end up running into one another. ‘I’ll do it.’

I carried three of the pots and Chade carried the other three. Burrich brought the sack of fuel and a smaller kettle of coals from the
guards’ hoarded night fire. The day seemed very bright to me as we walked up the hill. It was warm, for that place, and the sun glinted off the glistening ice. As we walked up the hill together, Burrich asked me, ‘Are you sure Nettle is safe now? I do not understand the risk she took, but it seems to have frightened all of you.’

I swallowed and admitted my guilt. ‘I asked her to go into the dragon’s dream and wake him. Her strongest Skill-talent is the manipulation of dreams. I never paused to consider that it might be dangerous, that the dreams of a dragon might be a far different challenge than the dreams of a man.’

‘Yet still she went?’ There was quiet pride in Burrich’s voice.

‘Yes, she did. Because I asked her. I’m ashamed that I risked her.’

He was silent for several strides then said, ‘So. She knows you, and knows you well enough to trust you. For how long?’

‘I’m not sure. It’s a hard thing to explain, Burrich.’ I felt a flush rise but forced myself to speak on. ‘I used to … look in on you. Not often. Only when it got so … It was wrong of me.’

His silence was long. Then he said, ‘That must have been a special torment for you. For the most part, we have been happy.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Yes. It was. Yet I never realized I was involving Nettle to do it. She was my … I don’t know, my focus point, I suppose. After a time, she became aware of me. She knew me through her dreams of me, as a, as a wolf man.’ I halted, flustered.

Burrich almost kept the amusement out of his voice as he said, ‘Well. That accounts for some very odd nightmares, when she was small.’

‘I didn’t know I was doing it. Then, after a time, I became aware of her. In my dreams. We talked there, in the dream worlds she made. It took me a while to realize that she was manifesting the Skill, in a way I’d never seen it used before her. But I never … She doesn’t, that is, she doesn’t know –’ And suddenly I couldn’t go any further. My throat had crushed the words unsaid.

‘I know. If you had told her I wasn’t her father, I’d have known.’

I nodded wordlessly. It was strange to see how he would perceive
such a telling. I thought only of telling her who her father was; Burrich saw it as telling her who was not her father.

He cleared his throat and changed the subject. ‘She will have to be taught how to manage her magic, or the Skill can steal her mind. I know that is so, from what Chivalry taught me of it.’

‘Nettle should be taught,’ I conceded. ‘It has become dangerous for her to go further without being taught. But she will, if we don’t intervene. She must be taught.’

‘By you?’ he asked quickly.

‘By someone,’ I amended. And there we left it. I listened to the sound of tools crunching into snow and ice and the ever present whooshing of the wind over the glacier. It was like a strange music, one interspersed with the upraised voices of the workers as they exhorted one another. But when we arrived at the lip of the ice quarry, work ceased almost immediately.

Chade stood at the edge of our excavation and spoke to them all, explaining his exploding powder and what he intended to do with it. I felt oddly apart from all of it. I looked from face to uplifted face, seeing concern on Web’s and intrigue on Cockle’s. Some of the men reverted to being boys immediately, with boyish enthusiasm for testing the unknown. Chade went down the ramp with his kettles and I followed with mine. He inspected the holes that Dutiful and Longwick had caused to be dug. One he wanted deepened and another he declined, requesting that a new hole be dug close to the mouth of the caved-in tunnel. All would be in a row, along the deepest fractures that the dragon had made in the ice. Here Chade judged the ice to be weakest and that the powder would have the most efficacy. He chose six men to build the fires in the pots, and Burrich walked slowly down the line of them, giving each kindling and fuel and coals from his fire kettle. Then Chade sent him out of the pit. Chade remained, moving slowly from fire pot to fire pot, making sure that each was set well in its hole in the ice and that the fire would have a deep foundation of coals for the powder vessels to nestle into. Several times as his chosen men were kindling the fires in their pots, he repeated how these were actually rather small doses of the powder, not enough to do harm to the dragon, only enough
to further crack the ice around him so that we might move it more swiftly.

Each man stood as he judged that his pot was burning well enough. In each case, Chade moved down the line, added more fuel, and then sent the man up to stand with the others at the edge of the excavation. Each container of powder was left sitting on the ice, two spans away from the fire. When Chade and I alone remained in the hole, he came to me and spoke quietly. ‘I will join the others at the edge of the pit. When I nod to you, move swiftly down the kettles. Drop each container of powder into the kettle that matches it. Then come quickly to join me. It will take some little time for the fire to burn through to the powder, but I judge it best that you do not linger here.’

‘And I.’

He paused as if he would say something more, then shook his head wordlessly at me. I wondered again if his will warred with his action. Then I watched him climb up the ramp and join the row of men standing at the edge of the pit looking down at me. It struck me that the walls that had first divided us were gone. Hetgurd, guardsmen and Wit-coterie mingled. Burrich stood beside Chade. Swift was next to Web. Civil’s Wit-cat was belly down on the ice, peering down at me curiously.