Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)(26)

“Oh,” I finally said into the dangling silence. He nodded hard, twice. His voice was tight when he added, “When I said I'd have to tell you about her, Starling said I had the same Forged heart as my raping father.”

I suddenly wished he were smaller, so I could catch him up midstride and hug him. Instead, I put my arm around his shoulders and forced him to a halt. The pony ambled along without us. I didn't make him meet my eyes nor did I let my voice become too grave. “I'm going to give you a gift, son. This is knowledge it took me twenty years to gain, so appreciate that I'm giving it to you while you're young.” I took a breath. “It doesn't matter who a man's father is. Your parents made a child, but it's up to you to make the man you'll be.” I held his gaze for a moment. Then, “Come on. Let's go home.”

We walked on, my arm across his shoulders for a time, until he reached up to clap me on the shoulder. I let him go then, to walk on his own and silently finish his thinking. It was the best I could do for him. My thoughts of Starling were not charitable.

Night caught us before we reached the cottage, but there was a moon and both of us knew the road. The old pony meandered along placidly and the clopping of her hooves and the creaking of the twowheeled cart made an odd sort of music. A summer rain began to fall, damping the dust and cooling the night. Not far from home, Nighteyes came nonchalantly to meet us, as if mere chance had brought him out upon the road. We journeyed companionably together, the boy in silence, the wolf and I in the effortless communion of the Wit. We absorbed the other's experiences of the day like an indrawn breath. He could not grasp my worry for the boy's future.

He can hunt and he can fish. What more does he need to know? Why send one of our own off to another pack, to learn their ways? We are diminished by the loss of his strength. We grow no younger, you and .

My brother, that is perhaps the strongest reason why he should go. He must begin to make his own way in the world, so that when the time comes for him to take a mate, he can provide well for her and their children.

What of you and me? We will not help him in that providing? We will not watch the cubs while he hunts, or bring back our kill to share? Are we not pack with him?

Among human packs, this is the way of it. It was an answer I had given him many times in our years together. I knew how he interpreted it. It was a human custom that made no sense, and he need not waste time trying to understand it.

What of us, then, when he is gone? I've told you. Perhaps we shall travel again. Ah, yes. Leave a cozy den and a predictable food supply. That makes as much sense as sending the boy away.

I let his thought hang unanswered, for he was right. Perhaps the restlessness Chade had stirred in me had been the last gasp of my youth. Perhaps I should have bought that wifefinding charm from Jinna. From time to time I had considered the idea of looking for a wife, but it seemed too perfunctory a way to take a mate. Some did so, I knew, merely seeking out a woman or man who had similar goals and no excessively irritating habits. Such partnerships often grew into loving relationships. But having once experienced a relationship not only founded on years of knowing one another but blessed with the heady intoxication of genuine love, I did not think I could ever settle for anything else. It would not be fair to ask another woman to live in Molly's shadow. In all the years that Starling had intermittently shared herself with me, I had never thought to ask her to marry me. That thought gave me pause for a moment: had Starling ever hoped that I would? Then the moment of wondering passed and I smiled grimly to myself. No. Starling would have found such an offer baffling, if not laughable.

The last part of our journey was darker, for the track to our cottage was narrow and overshadowed on both sides by trees. Rain dripped from the leaves. The cart jounced along. “Should have brought a lantern,” Hap observed, and I grunted agreement. Our cottage was a darker hummock in the shadowed hollow we called home.

I went inside and kindled a fire and put our traded goods away. Hap took a light and settled the pony. Nighteyes immediately sighed down onto the hearth, as close to the fire as he could get without singeing his coat. I put on the kettle and added the few coins we had gained to Hap's small hoard. It wasn't going to be enough, I grudgingly admitted. Even if Hap and I hired ourselves out the rest of the summer to bring in hay and other crops, it still wouldn't be enough. Nor could we both work that way, unless we were resigned to our own chickens and garden perishing from neglect. Yet if only one of us hired out, it might be another year, perhaps longer, before we had saved enough.

“ should have started saving for this years ago,” I observed sourly as Hap came in from outside. He set the lantern on its shelf before dropping into the other chair. I nodded at the pot on the table and he poured himself a cup of tea. The stacked coins on the table were a pitiful wall between us.

“Too late to think that way,” he observed as he took up his cup. “We have to start from where we are.”

“Exactly. Do you think you and Nighteyes could manage here for the rest of the summer while I hired out?”

He met my gaze levelly. “Why should you be the one to hire out? The money would go for my apprenticeship.”

I experienced an odd little shift in perception. Because I was “bigger and stronger and could earn more” was no longer true. His shoulders were as wide as mine, and in any test of endurance, his young back would probably hold out better. He grinned sympathetically as he saw me grasp what he already knew. “Perhaps because it is something that I'd like to give you,” I said quietly, and he nodded, understanding what those words really meant.