She poked moodily among the books and codices she had chosen for tonight. ‘Bad’? What’s ‘bad’? Treskiel was not ‘bad,’ he was rude, and she wanted him to be bad so that it would be good that she disliked him. No, she thought with a bitter deprecating laugh, so that I will be ‘good’ for disliking him.

She shoved the books away and prowled into Master Merry’s corner. He at least had not given up speech for the season.

“Why,” he asked, once she had done pouting about the prince of Ristover, “why dosta depend thy mood and thy sense, from him?”

“Er. What?”

Merry grinned, tipping his head far sideways. His lank hair almost dangled into his candle-flame, she jumped with a gasp to rescue him, and, once set straight again, he thanked her sheepishly. “But, the Prince, now—or any living soul. They are what they are, to thy liking or not. If tha’lt hang thy joy on them, any of them, th’art—” he plucked a small white feather out of the cushion under his elbow, and puffed to set it adrift in the air, “—so, at the mercy of whoever they may be.” He picked it back out of the air, and held it steady between two long blue- and red-stained fingers. “Found thy joy in what never changes, and then so dost thy joy endure.”

“Oh! Great advice, Master. What never changes?” she asked dryly.

He brushed his thin bent nose idly with the feather, while regarding her from deep in some thought. Then he brightened. “Didsta think, just now, ’t was an accident, with my candle and my hair?”

She glanced involuntarily from him to the flame, and back. He was after all a Master, she reminded herself, however much an idiot he seemed, but, yes, she had thought just that, as far as she had thought at all. She nodded, reluctant to admit what apparently was an error, but curious.

“’T was my device, to hang thy heart—or at least thy tenderness—upon me. We come to cherish those whom we aid; as though to prove to ourselves we were right, so. ‘I acted on that one’s behalf; therefore, he must have deserved my action!’ Dosta see?”

“It makes sense,” she admitted, “but I’ll have to see more of it, to really believe it.”

He grinned more widely. “Well answered, but look now: dosta see in theyself aye more fondness for such a fool as I? Even a little?”

“But I’ve always liked you!”

He nodded. “Because I am a fool, who needs looking after.” And he gave that flicker of an eyelid that might be a wink.

She opened her mouth to protest, but shut it again: he was right, that was a great part of his peculiar charm. And it was deliberate? She studied him with a new unease. “I don’t think I want you—or anyone!” she added hastily, not to hurt his feelings, and kicked herself for perhaps playing still into his game, “—making me feel this way or that.”

He nodded, slowly, blue eyes dancing. “Good.”

“Er. ‘Good’?”

“Tha dislikes, first, my intent, that I intend it at all; and second, thy dependence. And seest that th’ already depend’st thy mood from those, like his Radiance, who intend neither one thing nor another? Master the one dependence, and tha’lt master the other.”

“I—shouldn’t be bothered that his Radiance is a lout?”

“Is he here, to trouble thee?”

“Well, no—”

“And if he were, would it help, thy grousing that he was not as tha’d have him be?”

“If he’s rude, he ought to pay the price of it!”

“And if he cares nothing for thy little snub—?”

She stopped herself from saying that he should care; what did a great prince care about—well, even Princess Cherusay’s only child was just a powerless nobody, at least at present. She gritted her teeth. How humiliating, to be nobody!

“Na, th’art following the wrong path, Rothesay. The price of rudeness is: to endure the censure of other folk. There are those who find it cheap even at that, even if other folk are great, or greater than themselves. They pay it, easily, undaunted.

“Yet, there art tha left, cross and indignant, and they untouched by it. Now, what good dosta serve by stewing in theyne own wrath?”

Her eyes narrowed, part question, part sullenness for her own ignorance. “What do you suggest?”

“Master the one dependence, master the other,” he repeated cheerfully, and he poked a finger at his candle. “Undo this my power over thee.”

“By—disliking you?” she hazarded, hoping for contradiction.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“By retaining the power to dislike me, whatever I would or not.”

“How?”

“Begin by knowing that tha canst do so, at all.”

“Fine,” she said flatly, for the moment willing to concede anything a Master or Mistress claimed was possible. “Then what?”

“Then learn out of what ground a mood arises.” He rolled lightly to his feet, and ambled away into the library stacks. “Corandere,” he said, pulling down a slender scroll. “Calmarath; Gaioar the Elder; Maelstar. The basic teachings.” He piled two more scrolls, thicker ones, and a small book into her arms. “Bring me thy questions from these. My Chain is on.”

“I—I’m learning to dance—”

“Oh! Excellent!” He flapped his hands as if to shoo her on. “Continue, then: tha’lt need the one study for the other. Or, tha’lt find one study serves the other. Tell Davi he’s teaching under my Chain.” And Merrithorander winked openly.

She soon learned why Merry thought the studies related. Mood, said the ancients, arose from the body: keep the body still and silent, and so followed all feeling. Rouse motion, rouse emotion. The reverse was also true, as a calm spirit produced a calm body, or agitation, restlessness; Merry likened it to a breeze that might stir a leaf, while a leaf might be flapped to cause a breath of wind. An untutored person had more command of his body than of his spirit, to choose whether he rested or ran; bunched every muscle or slackened them, all or selectively; what pose he took or abandoned. The slightest physical change yielded some different movement in the soul. And in dancing, she learned that any frustration she felt spoiled her grace, while it seemed that any grace she achieved produced not only satisfaction but some sweetness of its own. Now she knew what Master Caltern had been about, when she had nearly decapitated Juris; Merry laughed when she told him how they had jumped about.

“Aye, aye, just so! Though there are subtler methods, happily. Motion, of soul or of flesh, yields emotion.”

“Sorchone said something about that—about soul and flesh being not two things, but one!”

“Aye,” said Merry, “as one end of a sword and the other. Think of something—something vivid. Call it to mind, as if ’t were real and now.”

After a moment, she settled on the hour that ‘Dor’ had forced her mother and herself into the after-boat. She still felt a breathless confusion about a betrayal that was a salvation. How she wanted to summon him back, to demand an accounting!

Merrithorander described the scene then, down to the color of the sails and the silvery sheen of Mother’s gown. “Aye,” he said softly, “he loved tha well, that one.” He looked up wistfully into her dark face. “Tha canst have him back when tha mourns him aright.”

“Thank you,” she said politely, and they left it at that.

Snow came early, only a couple of weeks after Wintersgate. White softness drifted down, filled all the hold with a peace that Elraic Marre cheerfully likened to a death, a drowsy death come late in a long and well-lived life. “I should like to die so myself—barring the snowball fights across my grave.” A window-shutter shuddered under a muffled impact. Rothesay flung down Corandere’s treatise, and bolted out to join the war.

A few mornings later, Móravn returned with Hael, or rather, with Hael’s body, draped over a horse. Weary, not having slept for days, he insisted on personally carrying him, heavy across his shoulders, into the funerary chamber in the great keep. There he sat vigil, and required Mistress Enllian to direct him in cleaning and preparing the corpse, rather than do it herself. Elraic joined him for a time, and Dav, but Enllian kept others away.

The next day smoke, plain gray smoke, rose into the sunlight from a pyre in the fire-circle, the bitter smell of charring meat blending with sweet resinous incenses and herbs: those who had known Hael circled the fire, and from time to time pitched in handfuls of sweet stuffs from bronze pots arrayed along their path. Rothesay wondered if she should.

“I really liked Hael,” Lacie sniffled. “He was just everybody’s big brother, but kind of mine especially. He was a big old cuddly doll and I don’t know if he could ever have killed anybody—unless they were trying to hurt one of us, and then watch out! And it would just be really sweet if you wanted to remember him, even if you only ever saw him that one day.”

So she did. Finishing her circuit with one last toss of cedar incense, she turned and almost walked straight into the bleak, haggard scarecrow that was Móravn.

His hollow eyes flicked to where her offering flared suddenly. “Thanks.” He drifted, almost stumbled away and began his own circuit. She dearly wanted to ask what had happened, but knew she would just have to wait. Móravn looked nearly dead himself.

They sang their bell-tones for Hael that evening, and Elraic made a sweet poem, a short one to say that beauty did not depend on length, neither of stanzas nor of years. Móravn then slept for two days, and finally, after supper one night, sat in the students’ favorite corner of the supper-hall and told them how it was.

“We were coming home,” he said, staring into the shadows beyond their little group. Then he glanced around the hall, deliberately looking at all he could make out, and nodded. “Home.” No expression either lightened or darkened his face; the ground of his mood seemed to be as dead as his friend. “Camped; made a stew; started singing. He said he itched. Then he said he was freezing; I touched him and he had a hell of a fever, so we bundled him up, built up the fire. Then his chest hurt him and he couldn’t breathe, and he died. Couple of hours, maybe, the whole thing.” He watched the wine he swirled in his cup for a moment. “Damn stupid death,” he said suddenly, bitterly. “He always thought he was a coward, you know? And all summer—we ran into a few things, ran away from a lot, and he did damned good, and he’d finally figured out that, hey, it’s all right to run away sometimes—he’d been so amazed that I’m not the least bit shy of running from what I can’t handle and he’d finally understood there’s ‘brave’ and there’s ‘stupid’ and I wish you could have seen him a week ago. . . . You could see it in him. He just looked—stronger. He thought it was the funniest thing, that he’d got the courage he wanted—or saw what he had—once he let himself run from things. . . . Mother Night, he looked good.

“Then he goes and gets killed by what? An evil spirit we’d camped on top of? Not a curse: he never had any enemies to be cursed by. And the stew didn’t even give me gas; but,” he sighed, and ran a hand back through his black hair, “Mistress Enllian says there are things poison to one man, that another man’ll die if he don’t eat.

“But there it is, children, Hael’s Lesson: you could die between this breath and the next. And what in all the hells are you going to do about that?”

His brief bitterness had faded. He finished his wine slowly, and then he wept.

Rory watched him for a while, then leaned over and hugged him hard, and nodded to the rest. They piled on, grabbing any bit of Móravn left exposed by the others; Rothesay clung to his left calf as if it were her own doll and Flick tucked the other foot under his arm, until their victim at last started to laugh.

“All right, all right! We’re home, already!”