Royal Assassin

I really want to, Nighteyes. But I just don't know how.

Changer. Changer! My brother! Changer.

What is it?

You have been silent for so long. Are you coming now?

I have been ... silent?

Yes. I thought you had died, without coming to me first. I could not reach you.

Probably a seizure. I didn't know it had happened. But now I am right here, Nighteyes. Right here.

Then come to me. Hurry, before you die.

A moment. Let us be sure of this.

I tried to think of a reason not to. I knew there had been some, but I could no longer recall them. Changer, he had called me. My own wolf, calling me that, just as the Fool or Chade called me a catalyst. Well. Time to change things for Regal. The last thing I could do was make sure I died before Regal broke me. If I had to go down, I would do it alone. No words of mine would implicate anyone else. I hoped the Dukes would demand to see my body.

It took a long time to get my arm from the floor to my chest. My lips were cracked and swollen, my teeth aching in my gums. But I put my shirt cuff to my mouth and found the tiny lump of the leaf pellet inside the fabric. I bit down at it as hard as I could, then sucked on it. After a moment the taste of carryme flooded my mouth. It was not unpleasant. Pungent. As the herb deadened the pain in my mouth, I could chew at my sleeve more strongly. Stupidly, I tried to be careful of the porcupine quill. Didn't want to get a quill in my lip.

It really hurts when that happens.

I know, Nighteyes.

Come to me.

I'm trying. Give me a moment.

How does one leave one's body behind? I tried to ignore it, to be aware of myself only as Nighteyes. Keen nose. Lying on my side, chewing diligently at a lump of snow wadded up in the space between my toes. I tasted snow and my own paw as I nibbled and licked it away. I looked up. Evening coming on. It would soon be a good time to hunt. I stood up, shook myself all over.

That's right, Nighteyes encouraged me. .

But there was still that thread, that tiny awareness of a stiff and aching body on a cold stone floor. Just to think of it made it more real. A tremor ran through it, rattling its bones and teeth. Seizure coming. Big one this time.

Suddenly it was all so easy. Such an easy choice. Leave that body for this one. It didn't work very well anymore anyway. Stuck in a cage. No point to keeping it. No point to being a man at all.

I'm here.

I know. Let us hunt.

And we did.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. Wolf Days

THE EXERCISE FOR centering oneself is a simple one. Stop thinking of what you intend to do. Stop thinking of what you have just done. Then, stop thinking that you have stopped thinking of those things. Then you will find the Now, the time that stretches eternal, and is really the only time there is. Then, in that place, you will finally have time to be yourself

There is a cleanness to life that can be had when you but hunt and eat and sleep. In the end, no more than this is really needed by anyone. We ran alone, we the Wolf, and we lacked for nothing. We did not long for venison when a rabbit presented itself nor begrudge the ravens that came to pick through our leavings. Sometimes we remembered a different time and a different way. When we did, we wondered what had been so important about any of it. We did not kill what we could not eat, and we did not eat what we could not kill. Dusks and dawns were the best times for hunting, and other times were good for sleeping. Other than this, time had no meaning.

For wolves, as for dogs, life is a briefer thing than for men, if you measure it by counting days and how many turns of a season one sees. But in two years, a cub wolf does all a man does in a score. He comes to the full of his strength and size, he learns all that is needful for him to be a hunter or a mate or a leader. The candle of his life burns briefer and brighter than a man's. In a decade of years, he does all that a man does in five or six times that many. A year passes for a wolf as a decade does for a man. Time is no miser when one lives always in the now.

So we knew the nights and the days, the hunger and the filling. Savage joys and surprises. Snatch up a mouse, fling it up, eat it down with a snap. So good. To start a rabbit, to pursue it as it dodges and circles, then suddenly, to stretch your stride and seize it in a flurry of snow and fur. The shake that snaps its neck, and then the leisurely eating, the tearing open of its belly and nosing through the hot entrails, and then the thick meat of the haunches, the easy crunching of its backbone. Surfeit and sleep. And waken to hunt again.