Later he was gone, but Vixen was on the bed, not at my feet, but beside me, panting heavily but refusing to abandon me for the cooler floor. I opened my eyes again, still later, to early twilight. Burrich had tugged free my pillow, shook it a bit, and was awkwardly stuffing it back under my head, cool side up. He then sat down heavily on the bed.
He cleared his throat. “Fitz, there’s nothing the matter with you that I’ve ever seen before. At least, whatever’s the matter with you isn’t in your guts or your blood. If you were a bit older, I’d suspect you had woman problems. You act like a soldier on a three-day drunk, but without the wine. Boy, what’s the matter with you?”
He looked down on me with sincere worry. It was the same look he wore when he was afraid a mare was going to miscarry, or when hunters brought back dogs that boars had gotten to. It reached me, and without meaning to, I quested out toward him. As always, the wall was there, but Vixen whined lightly and put her muzzle against my cheek. I tried to express what was inside me without betraying Chade. “I’m just so alone now,” I heard myself say, and even to me it sounded like a feeble complaint.
“Alone?” Burrich’s brows knit. “Fitz, I’m right here. How can you say you’re alone?”
And there the conversation ended, with both of us looking at one another and neither understanding at all. Later he brought me food, but didn’t insist I eat it. And he left Vixen with me for the night. A part of me wondered how she would react if the door opened, but a larger part of me knew I didn’t have to worry. That door would never open again.
Morning came again. And Vixen nosed at me and whined to go out. Too broken to care if Burrich caught me, I quested toward her. Hungry and thirsty and her bladder was about to burst. And her discomfort was suddenly my own. I dragged on a tunic and took her down the stairs and outside, and then back to the kitchen to eat. Cook was more pleased to see me than I had imagined anyone could be. Vixen was given a generous bowl of last night’s stew, while Cook insisted on fixing me six rashers of thick-cut bacon on the warm crust of the day’s first baking of bread. Vixen’s keen nose and sharp appetite sparked my own senses, and I found myself eating, not with my normal appetite but with a young creature’s sensory appreciation for food.
From there she led me to the stables, and though I pulled my mind back from her before we went inside, I felt somewhat rejuvenated from the contact. Burrich straightened up from some task as I came in, looked me over, glanced at Vixen, grunted wryly to himself, and then handed me a suckle bottle and wick. “There isn’t much in a man’s head,” he told me, “that can’t be cured by working and taking care of something else. The rat dog whelped a few days ago, and there’s one pup too weak to compete with the others. See if you can keep him alive today.”
It was an ugly little pup, pink skin showing through his brindle fur. His eyes were shut tight still, and the extra skin he’d use up as he grew was piled atop his muzzle. His skinny little tail looked just like a rat’s, so that I wondered his mother didn’t worry her own pups to death just for the resemblance’s sake. He was weak and passive, but I bothered him with the warm milk and wicking until he sucked a little, and got enough all over him that his mother was inspired to lick and nuzzle him. I took one of his stronger sisters off her teat and plugged him into her place. Her little belly was round and full anyway; she had only been sucking for the sake of obstinacy. She was going to be white with a black spot over one eye. She caught my little finger and suckled at it, and already I could feel the immense strength those jaws would someday hold. Burrich had told me stories about rat dogs that would latch onto a bull’s nose and hang there no matter what the bull did. He had no use for men that would teach a dog to do so, but could not contain his respect for the courage of a dog that would take on a bull. Our rat dogs were kept for ratting and taken on regular patrols of the corncribs and grain barns.
I spent the whole morning there and left at noon with the gratification of seeing the pup’s small belly round and tight with milk. The afternoon was spent mucking stalls. Burrich kept me at it, adding another chore as soon as I completed one, with no time for me to do anything but work. He didn’t talk with me or ask me questions, but he always seemed to be working but a dozen paces away. It was as if he had taken my complaint about being alone quite literally and was resolved to be where I could see him. I wound up my day back with my puppy, who was substantially stronger than he had been that morning. I cradled him against my chest and he crept up under my chin, his blunt little muzzle questing there for milk. It tickled. I pulled him down and looked at him. He was going to have a pink nose. Men said the rat dogs with the pink noses were the most savage ones when they fought. But his little mind now was only a muzzy warmth of security and milk want and affection for my smell. I wrapped him in my protection of him, praised him for his new strength. He wiggled in my fingers. And Burrich leaned over the side of the stall and rapped me on the head with his knuckles, bringing twin yelps from the pup and me.
“Enough of that,” he warned me sternly. “That’s not a thing for a man to do. And it won’t solve whatever is chewing on your soul. Give the pup back to his mother, now.”
So I did, but reluctantly, and not at all sure that Burrich was right that bonding with a puppy wouldn’t solve anything. I longed for his warm little world of straw and siblings and milk and mother. At that moment I could imagine no better one.
Then Burrich and I went up to eat. He took me into the soldiers’ mess, where manners were whatever you had and no one demanded talk. It was comforting to be casually ignored, to have food passed over my head with no one being solicitous of me. Burrich saw that I ate, though, and then afterward we sat outside beside the kitchen’s back door and drank. I’d had ale and beer and wine before, but I had never drunk in the purposeful way that Burrich now showed me. When Cook dared to come out and scold him for giving strong spirits to a mere boy, he gave her one of his quiet stares that reminded me of the first night I had met him, when he’d faced down a whole room of soldiers over Chivalry’s good name. And she left.
He walked me up to my room himself, dragged my tunic off over my head as I stood unsteadily beside my bed, and then casually tumbled me into the bed and tossed a blanket over me. “Now you’ll sleep,” he informed me in a thick voice. “And tomorrow we’ll do the same again. And again. Until one day you get up and find out that whatever it was didn’t kill you after all.”
He blew out my candle and left. My head reeled and my body ached from the day’s work. But I still didn’t sleep. What I found myself doing was crying. The drink had loosened whatever knot held my control, and I wept. Not quietly. I sobbed, and hiccuped and then wailed with my jaw shaking. My throat closed up, my nose ran, and I cried so hard I felt I couldn’t breathe. I think I cried every tear I had never shed since the day my grandfather forced my mother to abandon me. “Mere!” I heard myself call out, and suddenly there were arms around me, holding me tight.
Chade held me and rocked me as if I were a much younger child. Even in the darkness I knew those bony arms and the herb-and-dust smell of him. Disbelieving, I clung to him and cried until I was hoarse, and my mouth so dry no sound would come at all. “You were right,” he said into my hair, quietly, calmingly. “You were right. I was asking you to do something wrong, and you were right to refuse it. You won’t be tested that way again. Not by me.” And when I was finally still, he left me for a time, and then brought back to me a drink, lukewarm and almost tasteless but not water. He held the mug to my mouth and I drank it down without questions. Then I lay back so suddenly sleepy that I don’t even remember Chade leaving my room.