![]() Grizzle's troops were gentlemen compared with the dregs that soldiered for Jecto, but I still preferred the company of horses to theirs. Somehow I ended up taking care of my troop's horses. I went to the Six Duchies, where there are no slaves, nor slavers. When I escaped, I did what she had always dreamed of doing. I spent several months, no, almost a year, learning my grandmother's hatred of slavers. It was my only key to survival amongst the kind of men I soldiered with then. No one expects a boy to fight with a beast's ferocity and guile. Not knowing or caring why we fought, if there was any right or wrong to it." He snorted softly. "I first fought for some petty land chief in Chalced. "Right on target." The sound he made might have been a laugh, if not so freighted with bitterness. And there was no one at home strong enough to oppose my will. But I was not a boy who would play in the cottage at quiet games. "A lifetime of being a slave does not leave a woman with sound health. My grandmother looked after me, but she was very old, and often ill." I heard more than saw his bitter smile. My father was dead before I was born, taken by the sea. My mother did washing to support my grandmother and me. A little coast town, a fishing and shipping port. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense. There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. The dwindling light of the fire made a shadowy landscape of his face. He sounded as if he were telling an old tale to a sleepy child. At last he began to speak again, softly, to the fire. But sometimes it seemed to me that no matter what I did, you persisted in patterning your life after mine." He stared into the embers for a time. That is not a thing I would wish on any man. "I did not set out to make you just like me, Fitz. He sat up, let his boots drop to the floor. Perhaps this dog does need a master." The mockery in his voice as he spoke of himself was more poisonous than any venom I had spewed. About a hand of years later, the blood plague went through Chalced. I made my mother and grandmother's life a bit better with my new trade, though they never suspected what I did. In a sense, I transferred my bond to her. "My grandmother forced me to survive Slash's death. "I learned to talk," he said after a bit. I heard him making up his bed and lying down on it. "Chade said I should leave you tomorrow," he said quietly. Perhaps Chade could leech some of the poison I'd sprayed at Burrich. Perhaps Burrich could talk Chade into coming back until morning. I felt jealous that they were together while I was alone. It was little different from dying oneself. But Burrich had experienced the actual, violent death of his bond companion. A life, rather than a living."īurrich had taken Nosy away from me when I was less than that age. He made me see it was more than rules, it was a way of being. He taught me to be a man, not a beast in a man's shape. He showed them to me as a man's values, not just manners for inside a woman's house. ![]() He put a value on what my mother and grandmother had tried to instill in me so long ago. Then in general charge of the pack beasts and wagon animals. "He taught me numbers first, then reading.
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