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For instance, the ability for the magics known as the Skill is tied closely to blood relationship to the royal Farseer line, though it may also occur as a “wild strain” among folk whose ancestors came from both the inland tribes and the Outislanders. One trained in the Skill is able to reach out to another’s mind, no matter how distant, and know what he is thinking. Those who are strongly Skilled can influence that thinking, or have converse with that person. For the conducting of a battle, or the gathering of information, it is a most useful tool. Folklore tells of an even older magic, much
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I wince to think of the price willingly paid for loving me.
Always I have possessed the loneliness of one raised amid intrigues and clustering secrets, the isolation of a boy who cannot trust the completeness of his heart to anyone.
Molly was that most cherished of items: a genuine refuge.
She was but a year or two older than myself, and growing the same way a sprig of greenery forces its way up through a gap in the cobblestones. Neither her father’s near-constant drunkenness and frequent brutality nor the grinding chores of a child trying to maintain the pretense of both home and family business could crush her.
But through it all, Molly grew. She flowered, one sudden summer, into a young woman who left me in awe of her capable ways and womanly charms.
Should I catalog her hair flowing with the wind, or detail how the color of her eyes shifted from dark amber to rich brown depending on her mood and the color of her gown? I would catch a glimpse of her scarlet skirts and red shawl among the market throng, and suddenly be aware of no one else. These are magics I witnessed, and though I might set them down on paper, no other could ever work them with such skill.
To me, it was enough that she existed for me to love. I did not even dare to hope she might return that feeling.
I could no longer trust my body to perform the simplest task. It was damaged, and I rejected it fiercely. I felt savagely vindictive toward the flesh and bone that enclosed me, and wished for some way to express my raging disappointment. Why couldn’t I heal? Why hadn’t I recovered?
“The fight isn’t over until you win it, Fitz. That’s all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks. Or the horse.”
I wondered if I were a fight he had to win.
Vague discolorations upon the vellum suggest that it came from a parti-colored beast, one mottled in a way unfamiliar to any of our hunters. The lettering ink is one derived from squid ink and bell root. It has stood the test of time well, much better than the colored inks that originally supplied illustrations and illuminations for the text. These have not only faded and bled, but in many places have drawn the attentions of some mite that has gnawed and stiffened the once-supple parchment, making parts of the scroll too brittle to unroll.
rose-hip preserves.
new layer of sudden interests overlay all the discarded ones in the room.
bayberry
fortune-telling sticks
predicting sticks
elfbark
Certainly there is an ancient code of conduct, and certainly its customs were harsher than ours today. But I would venture that we have not wandered so far from those customs so much as put a veneer over them. A warrior’s word is still his bond, and among those who serve side by side, there is nothing so foul as one who lies to his comrades, or leads them into dishonor. The laws of hospitality still forbid those who have shared salt at a man’s table to shed blood on his floor.
Here, if anywhere in my life, I had always been safe. It seemed safe to reveal to him my pain.
Her voice faltered, and I listened to the silence of her loneliness.
Sometimes I felt as Kettricken did, that I was drowning in what was required of me, and that there was nothing left in my life that was for me alone.
tearfish
gadfly.
“Varta leaves.
He mourns of all the knowledge that goes into a grave each time a man dies, even the commonest of men.
Some things may be learned from words on a page, but some skills are learned first by a man’s hands and heart, and later by his head.
mastfish
A very faint scent of her clung to my shirt from our brief embrace, and I agonized over whether to wear the shirt that day, to carry that scent with me, or to set it aside carefully in my clothing chest, to preserve it. I did not think it a foolish thing at all to care so much about that. Looking back, I smile, but it is at my wisdom, not my folly.
But there was something there, a feeling almost of relief. I had seen that before, in a man who had had his maimed foot removed, or the family that finally finds their drowned child’s body. To finally confront the worst there is, to look it squarely in the face and say, “I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still I live. And I will go on living.” That was the feeling I got from the folk of the Keep. All had finally acknowledged the severity of our injuries from the Red-Ships. Now there was a sense that we might begin to heal, and to fight back.
homeless beast out to sniff and paw through the village trash heap. He is nothing to fear.” You think not? I’m hungry enough to eat that mule.
To bond to any animal was to promise oneself that future pain.
What have the likes of us to do with men and all their petty plotting? There is not one mouthful of meat to be had in all their wrangling, no clean joys in their scheming, and never a simple pleasure taken unthinkingly. Why do you choose it? Come, come away!
It was a world bereft of court intrigues or plotting, of worries and plans. My wolf lived in the present. I found his mind clean of the cluttering detail of memories. From day to day, he carried only that necessary to his survival. He did not remember how many shrews he had killed two nights ago, but only larger things, such as which game trails yielded the most rabbits to chase or where the spring ran swift enough that it never iced over.
One can only walk so far from one’s true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.
“Our own ambitions and tasks that we set for ourselves, the framework we attempt to impose upon the world, is no more than a shadow of a tree cast across the snow. It will change as the sun moves, be swallowed in the night, sway with the wind, and when the smooth snow vanishes, it will lie distorted upon the uneven earth. But the tree continues to be.
“You would if you stopped trying to understand it, if you gave up worrying about why this is important to me, and simply tried to see if it is an idea that has worth in your own life.
Trust is not trust until it is complete.
catmint.”
There is a flower called a snowdrop, that sometimes blooms even as the banked snows of winter are retreating.
The color blue can only be experienced, as can the scent of jasmine or the sound of a flute.
The curve of a warm bared shoulder, the uniquely feminine softness of a breast, the startled sound one makes when all barriers suddenly yield, the perfume of her throat, the taste of her skin are all but parts, and sweet as they may be, they do not embody the whole. A thousand such details still would not illustrate it.
I told myself that I clenched my lips shut because it was the nobler thing to do, to keep these secrets to myself was better than to let the truth destroy her. Did I lie to myself, then? Don’t we all?
cottonwood, now standing bare but for snow burden.
“After you’ve talked. There’s enough valerian in here to drop you in your tracks.”
mirthleaf.
“This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man’s fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man’s whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft.” “Not all men are destined for greatness,” I reminded him. “Are you sure, Fitz?
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His tongue was a sword, and as the King’s enemies drew closer to the throne, the Fool slew them, slashed them to bits, and turned them back from the paper man on the throne.
I looked and saw they were both made of hungers, like containers made of emptiness. I felt so sad, I’d never be able to fill either of them, for they were both so terribly empty.
I had heard legends of berserks. I had thought them animalistic brutes, powered by bloodlust, insensitive to the damage they wrought. Perhaps, instead, they were oversensitized, unable to defend their own minds from the emotions that rushed in to drive them, unable to heed the pain signals of their own bodies. I do not know.
