Fool's Errand (Tawny Man #1) 49

“So one partner could go on living within the other?” I asked, confused.

Rolf shot me a disgusted look. “No. I have just told you, we do not do that. When your time comes to die, you should separate yourself from your partner and die, not seek to leech onto his life.”

Nighteyes made a brief whistle of whine. He was as confused as I was. Rolf seemed to concede that he was teaching a difficult concept, for he stopped and scratched his beard noisily. “It's like this. My mother is long dead and gone. But I can recall still the sound of her voice singing me a lullaby, and hear the warnings she would give when I tried to do something foolish. Right?”

“I suppose so,” I conceded. This was another sore spot between Rolf and me. He had never accepted that I had no memories of my natural mother, although I had spent the first six years of my life with her. At my lukewarm response, he narrowed his eyes. cav, “As can most folks,” he went on more loudly, as if sound alone could persuade me. “And that is what you can have when Nighteyes is gone. Or what he can keep of you.”

“Memories,” I agreed quietly, nodding. Even discussing Nighteyes' death was unsettling.

“No!” Rolf exclaimed. “Not just memories. Anyone can have memories. But what a bonded one leaves behind for his partner is deeper and richer than memories. It's a presence. Not living on in the other's mind, not sharing thoughts, decisions, and experiences. But just Êbeing there. Standing by. So now you understand,” he informed me heavily.

No, I started to say, but Nighteyes leaned heavily against my leg, so I simply made a sound that might have been agreement. And over the next month, Rolf instructed us in his dogged way, bidding us separate, and then allowing us to come back together, but only in a thin, insubstantial way. I found it completely unsatisfactory. I was convinced we were doing something wrong, that this could not be the comfort and “being” that Rolf had spoken about. When I expressed my doubts to Rolf, he surprised me by agreeing with me, but then went on to declare that we were still far too intertwined, that the wolf and I must separate even more. And we gave heed to him and sincerely tried, but held our own counsel as to what we would actually do when death came for one of us.

We never voiced our obstinacy, but I am sure Rolf was aware of it. He took great pains to “prove” to us the error of our ways, and the examples he showed us were truly wrenching. A careless Old Blood family had let swallows nest in their eaves where their infant son could not only hear their familial twitterings but watch their comings and goings. And that was all he did, even now as a grown man of about thirty. In Buckkeep Town, folk would have called him simple, and so he was, but when Rolf bade us reach toward him more discriminatingly with the Wit, the reason was clear to us both. The boy had bonded, not just to a swallow, but to all swallows. In his mind he was a bird, and his dabbling in mud and fluttering hands and snapping after insects were the work of his bird's mind.

“And that's what comes of bonding too young,” Rolf told us darkly.

There was one other pair he showed us, but only from a distance. On an early morning when mist lay heavy in the vales, we lay on our bellies on the lip of a dell and made no sound or thought amongst ourselves. A white hind drifted through the fog toward a pond, walking not with a deer's true caution but with a woman's languid grace. I knew her partner must be close by, concealed in the mist. The deer lowered her muzzle to the water and drank long slow draughts of the coolness. Then she slowly lifted her head. Her large ears swiveled forward. I felt the tentative brush of her questing. I blinked, trying to focus on her, while the wolf made a small, questioning whine in the back of his throat.

Rolf rose abruptly, showing himself disdainfully. He coldly refused the contact. I sensed his disgust as he strode away, but we remained, staring down at her. Perhaps she sensed ambivalence, for she watched us with a very undeerlike boldness. An odd moment of vertigo washed over me. I squinted, trying to make the shape before me resolve into the two that my Wit told me were there.

When I was Chade's apprentice, he used several exercises to teach me to see what my eyes truly beheld, not what my mind expected to see. Most were simple drills, to look at a tangle of line and decide if it were knotted or merely flung down, or to glance at a jumble of gloves and know which ones lacked mates. A more peculiar trick he showed me was to write the name of a color in a mismatched ink, the word red painted in bright blue letters. To read a list of such colors, correctly saying the printed word rather than the color of the inked letters, took more concentration than I had expected it would.