“Lord Golden?” I asked softly.
“Yes, that was his name.”
I had no idea what the Fool had been talking about. “I don’t remember the purse,” I said. The pain was rising like an engulfing tide. I tried to hold on to my thoughts but could not. I pushed back my fear and discovered that it cloaked my anger. I didn’t deserve this. Why had they left me here? I could die here.
I could feel Dutiful fumbling at the edges of my mind. “I’m so tired,” I said, meaning to Skill it but saying it instead. The pain from my wound was thudding down my leg, making my hip and knee ache. My right arm had no strength in it. I closed my eyes, centered myself, and tried to reach out to the Prince. Instead I plunged into blackness.
The next several days passed for me like images glimpsed by lightning during a thunderstorm. The few memories I have are starkly and strongly etched, yet they are so momentary as to be nearly meaningless. A man I suspect was a healer looked into a basin of my blood and proclaimed it too dark. My cellmate complained bitterly to someone at the door grate that the stench was enough to choke a goat. I stared at an odd pattern of straw on the floor and listened to Hap scream obscenities at someone. I desperately wanted him to be quiet, lest they decide to hurt him, too. To be conscious was to be afraid. Sick, hurt, and afraid. Alone. They’d left me alone here to die, so I would not embarrass them. Sleep brought Nighteyes’ old nightmares of a filthy cage and a keeper who beat him.
The Skill is a magic that demands physical strength, a clear mental focus, and a strong will to perform. I had none of those. Waves of Skill sendings from Dutiful struck me and washed through me, leaving no clear residue of thought. I knew only that he tried to reach me, and I wished heartily that he would stop. I wanted silence and stillness so I could hide from my pain. Sometimes I was aware of Nettle, also. I doubt that she sensed she had reached me.
In between those glimpses of waking life and nightmare-plagued sleep, I lived another life. The rounded hillsides were smooth and white with snow under a gray sky. There were no trees, no bushes, and not even an upthrust of stone. Only the snow, the whispering wind, and the ever-twilight. The only break in the smoothness of the snow were Nighteyes’ tracks going on before me. I followed them doggedly. I would find him and I would join him. He could not be that far ahead of me. Once the wind turned to wolves howling in the distance, and I tried to hurry. That effort only woke me to the cold stink of the prison cell. I had moved and something hot and foul was trickling from my wound. I closed my eyes again and sought for the peace of the snowy hills.
It would be weeks before I pieced together the whole sequence of events. Lord Golden’s missing purse of raw gemstones was found in Laudwine’s cottage. Not that he was known as Laudwine in Buckkeep Town. Starling had been correct. To his neighbors, the one-armed man was known as Keppler. A witness attested that he had seen a man that might have been me pursue someone who might have been Padget into Keppler’s cottage. Obviously, I had been robbed of my master’s purse on my way to taking them to a gem cutter for him. I had followed the thieves, they had fought me, and I’d killed them all, taking a grievous injury myself. Then I had valiantly killed the rabid horse before it could break free of the shed and injure people in the street. From being an accused triple-murderer, I was suddenly elevated to the status of loyal servant willing to risk his life for his master’s property. As no one came forward to contradict this fabrication, or even to claim the bodies of “Keppler” and Padget, it became the acknowledged truth in Buckkeep Town. The goatherd’s neighbors soon spoke of how it seemed to them that Keppler had many visitors who came and went at odd hours.
And so Lord Golden was allowed to claim what was left of me. He sent two serving men to fetch me home. Stinking and semiconscious, I was loaded onto a litter for a cold and jolting trip up to Buckkeep Castle. I did not know the men who came to fetch me, and they cared little for me. I felt each step they took, and would have wept if I had had the strength. The pain was such that it kept jolting me back to wakefulness. The stoutly muscled men who trudged up the hill commented that they were grateful for the cold still air, for it made the smell of my pus-running wound less. They delivered me to Lord Golden’s door. He held a scented handkerchief over his mouth and nose as he commanded them to put me on my bed. Then he paid the men generously and thanked them for bringing me home to die. In the blackness of my closed room, I shut my eyes and tried to do just that.
Fragments of speech whirled like falling leaves in my memory. They flowed into my head and filled it up like other people’s furniture moved into a once-familiar room. I could not disengage from them. Something held me there as firmly as the hand that gripped mine.