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 undeer-like 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.
And so I rubbed my eyes and looked again and saw only a deer. The woman had been an expectation of my mind, based on my Wit. Physically, she was not there. Her presence inside the hind distorted my Wit-sense of the deer. I shuddered away from the wrongness of it. Rolf had left us behind. In confusion, Nighteyes and I hastened after Rolf as he strode away from the sheltered dell and the quiet pool. Some time and distance later, “What was that?” I asked him.
He rounded on me, affronted by my ignorance. “What was that? That was you, a dozen years hence, if you do not mend your ways. You saw her eyes! That was no deer down there, but a woman in the skin of a hind. It’s what I wanted you to see. The wrongness of it. The complete perversion of what should have been shared trust.”, I looked at him quietly, waiting. I think he had expected me to concur with his judgment, for he made a deep noise in his throat. “That was Delayna, who slipped through the ice into Marple Pond and drowned two winters ago. She ought to have died right then, but no, she clung to Parela. The hind either hadn’t the heart or the strength to oppose her. Now there they are, a deer with the mind and heart of a woman, and Parela with scarcely a thought to call her own. It goes against all nature, it does. Ones like Delayna are at the root of all the evil talk the un-Blooded wag on about us. She’s what makes them want to hang us and burn us over water. She deserves such treatment.”
I looked away from his vehemence. I’d come too close to that fate myself to believe anyone could deserve it. My body had lain cold in my grave for days while I’d shared Nighteyes’ flesh and life. I was certain then that Rolf suspected as much of me. I wondered then, if he so despised me, why he taught me at all. As if he had caught some whiff of my thought, he added gruffly, “Anyone untaught can do a wrong thing. But after he’s been taught, there’s no excuse to repeat it. None at all.”
He turned and strode off down the path. We trailed after him. Nighteyes’ tail stuck out straight behind him. Rolf muttered to himself as he stumped along. “Delayna’s greed destroyed them both. Parela’s got no life as a deer. No mate, no young, when she dies, she’ll just stop, and Delayna with her. Delayna couldn’t accept death as a woman, but she won’t accept life as a deer, either. When the bucks call, she won’t let Parela answer them. She probably thinks she’s being faithful to her husband or some such nonsense. When Parela dies and Delayna with her, what will either of them have gained, save a few years of existence that neither of them could call complete?”
I could not argue with him. The wrongness I had sensed still crawled along my spine. “Yet.” I struggled to make myself admit this to the Fool. “Yet privately I wondered if any save those two could fully understand the decision that had been made. If perhaps, despite how it appeared to us, it felt right to them.”
I paused for a time in my telling. The story of those two always disturbed me. If Burrich had not been able to call me back from the wolf and into my own body, would we have become as they did? If the Fool had not been nearby today, would Nighteyes and I dwell in one body even now? I did not speak the thought aloud. I knew the Fool would have already made that leap. I cleared my throat.
“Rolf taught us a great deal in the year we were there, but even as we learned the techniques of the magic we shared, Nighteyes and I stopped short of accepting all the customs of the Old Blood folk. The secrets we learned, I felt we had a right to, simply by virtue of what we were, but I did not feel bound to accept the rules Rolf attempted to impose on us. Perhaps I would have been wiser to dissemble, but I was tired to death of deception, and the layers of lies that must be woven to protect it. So I held myself back from that world, and Nighteyes consented to be held back with me. So it was that we observed their community, but never engaged fully in the lives of the Old Blood folk.”
“And Nighteyes too held back from them?” The Fool’s question was gentle. I tried not to think that there might be a hidden rebuke in it, a questioning as to whether I was the one who had held him back for my own selfish reasons.
“He felt as I did. The knowledge of the magic that is in us by our blood: this was something they owed to us. And when Rolf dangled it over us as a reward to be given only when we accepted the yoke of his rules well, that is a form of exclusion, my friend.” I glanced over at the gray wolf curled in my blankets. He slept deeply, paying the price of my interference with his body.
“Did no one extend a simple friend’s hand to you there?” The Fool’s question drew me back to my story. I considered it.
“Holly tried to. I think she pitied me. She was shy and solitary by nature; it was something we had in common. Sleet and his mate had a nest in a great tree on the hillside above Rolf’s house, and Holly herself was wont to spend hours perched on a woven platform not far below Sleet’s nest. She was never talkative to me, but showed me many small kindnesses, including the gift of a feather bed, a side-product of Sleet’s kills.”