Sometimes he spoke of his life, which had been a very long one. I never knew how old he was; but if even half of what he told me is true—half the journeys in quest of hidden learning, half the tests and terrors and magical encounters—it would surely have taken two ordinary mortal lifetimes to crowd them all in. Wizards must lie like other people—only better—but in fact he mumbled quickly over the adventurous parts and kept returning again and again to the plainest human sorrows and defeats. “There was a woman,” he said once. “We traveled together, many, many years. Then she died.” I saw no tears in his pale greenish eyes, but I don’t think you can tell with a wizard.
“I am sorry,” I said. The eyes had turned away from me; now they swung back with an impact I could feel in my flesh. “Why? Imagining that moping and pining for Lukassa fits you for understanding someone else’s loss? There is no comparison. You understand nothing.” And he spoke no further for the rest of that day.
Yet another time he asked me, very suddenly, in the middle of a complaint about Shadry’s bread, “Is there anything you fear, Tikat?” The words came lightly, but his voice was like thatch tearing in the wind. “Tell me what you fear.”
I had no need to think longer than it took me to draw breath. “Nothing. Before… before, I was afraid of everything in the world, everything that had the least chance of parting Lukassa and me. Now the worst that could have happened has happened, and there is nothing left for me to fear.” I stopped for a moment, as he began to smile, and then I added, “I truly wish there were. I don’t think it can be right, to fear nothing at all.”
The smile widened, exposing his withered gums and stumpy teeth. I thought that I would never let myself fall to ruin like that, not if I could mend such things with a snap of my fingers. He said softly, almost dreamily, “No, it is not, but I envy you all the same. You see, the thing you are most afraid of is always the thing that happens— always.” The last word seared the air between us. “We make it happen, we all do, wizard and weaver alike, though I could never tell you how. Yet here you are—here you sit by me, and your worst fear has come true, it’s done with, and you did not die. Indeed I do envy you, Tikat.”
I thought he was mocking me. I said, “I survived. I do not know if that is the same as not dying.”
“A dainty distinction for a village boy,” and this time there was no missing the ravaged amusement in that voice. “Now I recall that I have feared many, many things myself, in different times, but I seem to have outlived them all, just as I have outlived loving and hating as well. The irony of it is that in all these years I have never feared death, being what I am and knowing what I know. Now I do. As much as you dreaded living without Lukassa, so I live in absolute horror of dying. It is a great humiliation for a magician.”
All mockery, whether of me or of himself, was gone from his voice. He reached up to grip my shoulder, and I could feel how thin and tremulous his fingers had become. “Tikat, I dare not die, I must not, not yet. Do not let me die.”
Panic and bewilderment spilled through me then, as though from his fingers on my arm. I said, “Why turn to me? What can I do to help you?”
But he was looking beyond me as I spoke, toward the one window. He said loudly, “Ah, there you are. I was beginning to think you had forsaken me.”
There was no one else in the room. He was talking to a dance of sunlight just below the windowsill. “No, no, certainly not, I trust I know you better than that.” The voice held a bantering tone, close almost to laughter.
I left then, before I could begin hearing the sunlight answer him. In the corridor, sweeping, Marinesha looked up too quickly and then away. I knew that she had been listening at the door—Marinesha is a bad liar, even wordlessly. I said, “He is no worse. No better than yesterday, but no worse.”
I would have gone on by, but she came and stood before me, closer than was usual for her. If I have not said that Marinesha is quite pretty, with large dark-gray eyes, a generous mouth, and skin that should have been coarsened by her work and has not been at all, it is because her appearance meant nothing to me, one way or the other. She talked too much, but she always treated me gently enough, while giving Rosseth the raw side of her tongue on any pretext. She said now, anxious but hesitant, “Tikat—Tikat, did he speak to—to another in the room?”
“Aye,” I said, “an old acquaintance who just happens to look like a wall. For all I know, wizards have many such friends.” In truth, I was concerned to be away, to puzzle over my tafiya’s words by myself. But Marinesha did not move from my path. She bit her lip and looked somewhere else again, and said, very low, “Tikat, Lukassa is not the only woman in the world.”
I could hardly hear her. She was blushing so deeply that even her yellow-brown hair seemed to darken with blood. I said, with a harshness that was starting to come too easily, “And if she were, I would not have her, nor any other in her place. I want no one, Marinesha. No more of that for me, never.”
Marinesha put her hand timidly against my cheek. I took hold of her wrist and shook my head, saying nothing. I think I was not rough, but when I looked back she had pushed the wrist hard against her lips, as though I had bruised her. It plagues me to this day, that sight of her. There was no need to hurt Marinesha.
The days strained toward autumn without seeming to grow any shorter or cooler. I felt that I had been all my life drudging at that inn, like Rosseth, and wondered often why I should stay on another hour. There were some still who might be missing me at home; and the Barrens, killing in spring, would be impassable when the snow came. There was nothing for me in this place; there never had been. It was all a waste, all of it, and time to say so and be done. And still I drudged on.
One afternoon Karsh ordered Rosseth and me to replace several rotted roof beams in the smokehouse. This would have been weary work in any weather; now it was both exhausting and dangerous, since the timbers slipped constantly through our sweating fingers and twice came near crushing our legs. We finally rigged a serviceable hoist, and I was standing underneath, guiding a beam up to Rosseth on the roof, when I saw Nyateneri in the doorway. The fox sat on his haunches beside her.
We got the beam properly set in, and Rosseth began hammering hard and wildly, never looking at Nyateneri. She was a handsome woman, in a soldierly way, as tall as I, with changing eyes and short, thick gray-brown hair. Not at all beautiful, nor suddenly, unexpectedly pretty like Marinesha—but even in my village you would stare when she strode past, and remember her long after the beautiful ones. I had never seen her and the fox together. He looked straight at me, putting one ear back and laughing out of his bright yellow eyes.
Nyateneri said, “I need to speak to you both. Come down, Rosseth.” She did not raise her voice, but he looked up, hesitated for a moment, and then dropped lightly from the roof to land in the straw beside me. “Soukyan,” he said, almost whispering. I did not know what the word meant then.
“He is dying,” Nyateneri said. “There is nothing we can do.” Her brown face showed no emotion, but her voice was slow in that way I know myself, when each word seems to be dragged back into your throat by despair. She said, “It will be tomorrow night.”