The old man sighed. “Is Lal a wizard? Is Soukyan a wizard? Be quiet and pay attention. If you come home with me, it is possible that I may in a while remember a way to let this Lukassa and that Lukassa—the one still there in the riverbed—visit each other, talk together, perhaps even live together. Then again, perhaps not—I promise nothing. But the roof doesn’t leak, and the food is generally quite good, and the house is a restful one.” He grinned then, a joyous, teasing, snaggle-mouthed grin, and I recalled Redcoat’s words, the fox’s words—Bones full of darkness, blood thick and cold with ancient mysteries. He added, “A little disquieting, just from time to time, but restful.”
Lukassa said firmly, “Tikat has to come too. I will not come without him.” The tafiya looked at me and raised his caterpillar eyebrows slightly. I said, “I can work, you know that. And what I can learn from being in your house, I will.” It made me nervous, to be talking to him in this way, and I kept turning Lukassa’s ring around and around on her finger, hardly aware that I was doing it.
The tafiya said nothing for a long time. He seemed to be looking, not at either of us, but at the fox, who presently yawned in his face, jumped down off the bed and trotted importantly away, tail high. Finally he said, and his tone was oddly melancholy, “You are as welcome as Lukassa, Tikat, but I would think carefully in your place, because you may find yourself learning more than you meant to learn. There are gifts and dreams and voices in you that may wake in my house, as they would nowhere else. So I would be very careful.”
I did not know how to answer him. I kept toying with Lukassa’s ring until it slipped over the knuckle and almost off her finger into my hand. She clutched at it immediately, saying, “Don’t, don’t do that, I must never take it off. Lal gave it to me when she raised me—if I lose it, I will die for good, fall to the dust I should have been so long ago.” Her hands were damp and shaking, and her face was old with fear.
The tafiya gazed at her with such concern, such tenderness that for a moment his face became like hers—he looked like her, how else can I say it? Only for a moment, it was, but I will remember it when I have forgotten every feat of wizardry I ever saw him do. Very, very gently, he said to her, “Lukassa, it is not so. I gave Lal that ring, and I should know. It was made to comfort and quiet certain sorrows, nothing more. Your life is yours, not the ring’s. Lukassa’s heart and soul and spirit are what keep Lukassa alive, not a dead green stone in a piece of dead metal. Give me the ring, and I will prove it to you.”
It took a long time for her to stop trembling and listen to him, and even then she would not take off the ring, for all his talk and mine. At first she said nothing but, “No,” over and over, into her fists; but at last she turned to the old man and told him, “I will give it to Lal. When we leave here, Tikat and I, to go with you, then I will give it back to Lal, and she can return it to you if she chooses. Or not.”
And from there she would not budge. The tafiya shook his head and blew through his beard and grumbled, “If we begin like this, teacher and student, how shall we end? You minded me better when I was a griga’ath.” But he had to be content with her decision all the same, and I think he was, in his way.
THE INNKEEPER
It has never been right since, I don’t care what he said or how great a wizard he was. Oh aye, everything works, if that’s what you mean by rightness, and some things work even better—I’m not such a fool as to say they don’t. But none of that is the same as being the way it was. Things can be replaced, fixed up perfectly, but they can’t be put back. Repaired doesn’t mean right.
Never mind, never mind—it isn’t worth the trouble, and besides there’s not much more to tell. The next two weeks were chaos, no more and no less. Marinesha and Rosseth had to run the inn—pity me, gods!—while I spent my time groveling and begging pardon before angry guests, injured guests (mercifully, a very few; as for the Kinariki wagoner, we never did find him again), and guests so terrified that some of them would not come back even for their belongings, not to mention settling their bills. Not only did I lose any number of valuable old customers, but of course the story got around everywhere, and I’ve been from that day to this building my clientele back to something like what it used to be. No wizard offered to help with that, I can assure you!
The woman Lal let me know that she and her companions would be leaving at last, as soon as the wizard and the little Lukassa were fit to travel. She also expressed her regrets—pointlessly but quite prettily, I will say—for all the troubles that had come with them to plague The Gaff and Slasher. “All the troubles”—as if she could have understood the half of what her lot had done to my life. But it was a change to have someone ask my pardon, so I told her we’d say no more about it, and let it go. Miss Nyateneri never bothered with any apology of her own, but that’s as well. I couldn’t have dealt with any more shocks just then.
Rosseth stayed out of my way to a remarkable degree during those days. It’s not that he doesn’t try to avoid me as much as he can, in the normal run of things; but in the normal run we don’t go much more than a long afternoon without my having to shout at him about something. To be honest, I made no great effort to bump into him, either. I had charged up a collapsing stairway through a stampede of screaming idiots and broken down a perfectly good door, all because I couldn’t endure the thought of having to train another stable boy. You never know how people take these things. It can be awkward afterwards, that’s all.
I became certain that he was once again planning to run off with the women and the wizard, and didn’t want to face me because he knew I’d read him first glance. I took council with myself one night, consulting in my room with two bottles of that fermented harness polish they make east of the mountains—Sheknath’s Kidneys, the locals call it. What all of us decided eventually was, if he wanted that much to leave, let him leave and be damned. I had headed him off a dozen times when he and I were both younger; he was sharp enough now to give me the slip tomorrow, the day after, if not today. Well, let him, then, and good riddance, the best riddance—but before he showed me his heels, I had a thing or two to show him.
Thinking about that made the night go too slowly, and the Sheknath’s Kidneys far too fast, and I was moving a bit gingerly when I sought him out the next morning. He was rubbing a vile-smelling ointment that he makes himself into the flanks of a bay gelding whose owner obviously enjoyed owning a pair of spurs. Rosseth was talking to the horse as he worked—not in words, just murmuring quietly, smoothing his voice into the raw places with the ointment. I waited, watching him until he felt somebody there and whipped around fast, the way those women do. He said, “I’m almost through with him. I’ll get to the hogpen right away.”
Because there was a rail coming loose there, you see, and I’d been after him for a week to replace it. He finished with the gelding, forked some fresh hay into its manger, and then just leaned against it for a moment, the way horses will lean against each other, before he came out of the stall. We stood looking at each other, him braced for orders, keeping a careful eye on my hands; and me studying the size of his own stubby hands, and the two swirls of down on his upper lip. Won’t ever be as big as I am, but he might turn out stronger.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. Oh, that made his eyes go tight, flicking back and forth between me and the stable door. He said, “Well, the rail, the hogs might—” I nodded toward a bale of hay and said, “Sit.”