“You don’t know what I was.” Shivers fussed at that ring with the red stone he wore on his little finger. “I cared for nothing. Hated everything. Came to serve your father ’cause of all the men I hated, he was the one I hated least. I walked in a nightmare.” He shut his eyes. Or the one that could see. The other showed a slit of gleaming metal still. “You were so sick, then. No one thought you’d last another winter. Your mother dead and your father grieving. So sick, but so full of hope. You trusted me. Me, with nothing in him to trust. You sucked goat’s milk from a cloth, in my arms. Your
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