The Wise Man's Fear (100 page)

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Authors: Patrick Rothfuss

Tags: #Mercenary troops, #Magicians, #Magic, #Attempted assassination, #Fairies, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Heroes, #Epic

BOOK: The Wise Man's Fear
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At first I thought he was asking some strange philosophical question, then I realized he was asking for a word. I held up my hand and grabbed two of my fingers. “Some?” I grabbed three fingers. “Most?”
Tempi watched my hands intently, nodding. “Most,” he said, fidgeting. “I know most. Talk is fast.”
“We are looking for men.” His eyes slid away as soon as I started to speak, and I fought the urge to sigh. “We are trying to find men.”
Nod. “Yes.
Hunt
men.” He stressed the word. “Hunt
visantha
.”
At least he knew why we were here. “Red?” I reached out and touched the red leather strap that held the fabric of his shirt tight to his body. It was surprisingly soft. “For hunting? Do you have other clothes? Not red?”
Tempi looked down at his outfit, fidgeting. Then he nodded and went over to his pack and drew out a shirt of plain grey homespun. He held it up for me. “For hunting. But not fighting.”
I wasn’t sure what his distinction meant, but I was willing to let it go for now. “What will you do if
visantha
find you in the forest?” I asked. “Talk or fight?”
He seemed to think about it for a moment. “Not good at talk,” he admitted. “
Visantha?
Fight.”
I nodded. “One bandit, fight. Two, talk.”
He shrugged. “Can fight two.”
“Fight and win?”
He gave another nonchalant shrug and pointed to where Dedan was carefully picking twigs out of the sod. “Like him? Three or four.” He held out his hand, palm up, as if offering me something. “If three bandit, I fight. If four, I try best talk. I wait until three night. Then . . .” he made an odd, elaborate gesture with both hands. “Fire in tents.”
I relaxed, glad he had followed our earlier discussion. “Yes. Good. Thank you.”
The five of us had a quiet dinner of soup, bread, and a rather unimpressive gummy cheese we’d bought in Crosson. Dedan and Hespe bickered in a friendly way, and I speculated with Marten about what sort of weather we might expect over the next few days.
Other than that, there wasn’t much chatter. Two of us had already come to blows. We’d come a hundred miles since Severen, and we were all aware of the grim work ahead of us.
“Hold on,” Marten said. “What if they catch
you?
” He looked up at me. “We all have a plan if the bandits find us. We head back with them and you’ll track us down on the third day.”
I nodded. “And don’t forget the distraction.”
Marten looked anxious. “But what if they catch you? I don’t have any magic. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to track them down by that third night. Probably, sure. But tracking isn’t a certain thing. . . .”
“I’m just a harmless musician,” I reassured him. “I got in some trouble with the Baronet Banbride’s niece and thought it would be best if I legged it into the forest for a while.” I grinned. “They might rob me, but as I don’t have much, they’ll probably just let me go. I’m a persuasive fellow, and I don’t look like much of a threat.”
Dedan muttered something under his breath I was glad I couldn’t hear.
“But what if?” Hespe pressed. “Marten’s got a point. What if they take you back with them?”
That was something I hadn’t figured out yet, but rather than end the evening on a sour note, I smiled my most confident smile. “If they take me back to their camp, I should be able to kill them off myself without much trouble.” I shrugged with exaggerated nonchalance. “I’ll meet you back at camp after the job is done.” I thumped the ground beside me, grinning.
I had intended it as a joke, sure Marten at least would chuckle at my flippant response. But I’d underestimated how deep Vintic superstition tends to run, and my comment was met with an uncomfortable silence.
There was little conversation after that. We drew lots for the watch, doused the fire, and one by one we drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
 
Signs
 
A
FTER BREAKFAST, MARTEN BEGAN teaching Tempi and me how to search for the bandits’ trail.
Anyone can spot a piece of torn shirt hanging from a branch or a footprint gouged into the dirt, but those things never happen in real life. They make for convenient plot devices in plays, but really, when have you ever torn your clothing so seriously that you’ve left a piece of it behind?
Never. The people we were hunting were clever, so we couldn’t count on them making any obvious mistakes. That meant Marten was the only one among us who had any idea what we were really looking for.
“Any broken twig,” he said. “They’ll mostly be where things are thick and tangled: waist high or ankle high.” He gestured as if kicking through thick scrub and pushing things aside with his hands. “Seeing the actual break is hard, so look at the leaves instead.” He gestured to a nearby bush. “What do you see there?”
Tempi pointed at a lower branch. He wore his plain grey homespun today, and without his mercenary reds, he looked even less imposing.
I looked where Tempi was pointing and saw the branch had been snapped, but not badly enough to break off.
“So someone has been through here?” I asked
Marten shrugged his bow higher up on his shoulder. “I was. I did this last night.” He looked at us. “See how even the leaves that aren’t hanging strange are starting to wilt?
I nodded.
“That means someone has been by this way within a day or so. If it’s been two or three days, the leaves will brown out and die. You see both close to each other . . .” He looked at me.
“It means you have someone moving through the area more than once, days apart.”
He nodded. “Since I’m scouting and keeping an eye out for bandits, you’ll be the ones with your noses to the ground. When you find something like this, call me.”
“Call?” Tempi cupped his hands around his mouth and turned his head in different directions. He made a wide gesture to the surrounding trees and put his hand to his ear, pretending to listen.
Marten frowned. “You’re right. You can’t just go shouting for me.” He rubbed the back of his neck in frustration. “Damn, we didn’t think this all the way through.”
I smiled at him. “I thought it through,” I said, and brought out a rough wooden whistle I’d carved last night. It only had two notes, but that was all we needed. I put it to my mouth and blew.
Ta-ta DEE. Ta-ta DEE
.
Marten grinned. “That’s a Will’s Widow, isn’t it? The pitch is dead on.”
I nodded. “That’s what I do.”
He cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, Will’s Widow is also called a night-jar.” He grimaced apologetically.
“Night
-jar, mind you. That’ll catch at the ear of any experienced woodsman like a fishhook if you go blowing it every time you want me to come take a look at something.”
I looked down at the whistle. “Black hands,” I swore. “I should have thought of that.”
“It’s a good idea,” he said. “We just need one for a daytime bird. Maybe a gold piper.” He whistled two notes. “That should be simple enough.”
“I’ll carve a different one tonight,” I said, then reached down for a twig. I snapped it and handed half to Marten. “This will do if I need to signal you today.”
He looked at the stick oddly. “How exactly will this help?”
“When we need your opinion on something we’ve found, I’ll do this.” I concentrated, muttered a binding, and moved my half of the stick.
Marten jumped two feet up and five feet back, dropping the stick. To his credit, he didn’t shout. “What in ten hells was that?” he hissed, wringing his hand.
His reaction had startled me, and my own heart was racing. “Marten, I’m sorry. It’s just a little sympathy.” I saw a wrinkle in between his eyebrows and changed my tack. “Just a small magic. It’s like a bit of magic string I use to tie two things together.”
I imagined Elxa Dal swallowing his tongue at this description, but pressed ahead. “I can tie these things together, so when I tug on mine . . .” I moved to stand over where his half of the twig lay on the ground. I raised my half, and the half on the ground lifted into the air.
My display had the desired effect. Moving together, the two twigs looked like the crudest, saddest string puppet in the world. Nothing to be frightened of. “It’s just like invisible string, except it won’t get tangled or caught on anything.”
“How hard will it pull at me?” he asked warily. “I don’t want it yanking me out of a tree when I’m scouting.”
“It’s just me on the other end of the string,” I said. “I’ll just jiggle it a bit. Like the float on a fishing line.”
Marten stopped wringing his hand and relaxed a little. “Startled me is all,” he said.
“That’s my fault,” I said. “I should have warned you.” I picked up the stick, handling it with a deliberate casualness. As if it were nothing more than an ordinary stick. Of course it
was
nothing more than an ordinary stick, but Marten needed to be reassured as to that point. It’s like Teccam said, nothing in the world is harder than convincing someone of an unfamiliar truth.
 
Marten showed us how to see when leaves or needles had been disturbed, how to spot when stones had been walked across, how to tell if moss or lichen had been damaged by someone’s passing.
The old huntsman was a surprisingly good teacher. He didn’t belabor his points, didn’t talk down to us, and didn’t mind questions. Even Tempi’s trouble with the language didn’t frustrate him.
Even so, it took hours. A full half day. Then, when I thought we were finally finished, Marten turned us around and started leading us back toward the camp.
“We’ve already been that way,” I said. “If we’re going to practice, let’s practice in the right direction.”
Marten ignored me and kept walking. “Tell me what you see.”
Twenty paces later, Tempi pointed. “Moss,” he said. “My foot. I walked.”
Realization dawned, and I began to see all the marks Tempi and I had made. For the next three hours, Marten walked us step by humiliating step back through the trees, showing us everything we had done to betray our presence there: a scuff against the lichen on a tree trunk, a piece of freshly broken rock, the discoloration of overturned pine needles.
Worst of all were a half-dozen bright green leaves that lay shredded on the ground in a tidy semicircle. Marten raised an eyebrow, and I blushed. I had plucked them from a nearby bush, idly shredding them while listening to Marten.
“Think twice and step carefully,” Marten said. “And keep an eye on each other.” He looked back and forth between Tempi and me. “We’re playing a dangerous game here.”
Then Marten showed us how to cover our tracks. It quickly became clear that a poorly concealed sign was often more obvious than one simply left alone. So over the next two hours we learned how to hide our mistakes and spot mistakes that others had tried to hide.
Only then, as afternoon was turning to evening, did Tempi and I begin searching this swath of forest bigger than most baronies. We walked close together, zigzagging back and forth, looking for any sign of the bandits’ trail.
I thought about the long days stretching out ahead of us. I’d thought searching the Archives had been tedious. But looking for a broken twig in this much forest made hunting for the gram seem like going to the baker for a bun.
In the Archives I had the chance to make accidental discoveries. In the Archives I’d had my friends: conversation, jokes, affection. Looking sideways at Tempi, I realized I could count the words he had said today: twenty-four, and the number of times he had met my eye: three.
How long would this take? Ten days? Twenty? Merciful Tehlu, could I spend a month out here without going mad?
With thoughts like this, when I saw some bark chipped off a tree and a tuft of grass bent the wrong way, I was flooded with relief.
Not wanting to get my hopes up, I motioned to Tempi. “Do you see anything here?” He nodded, fidgeting with the collar of his shirt, then pointed to the grass I’d spotted. Then he pointed to a scuffed bit of exposed root I hadn’t noticed.

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