I took a breath, fearing my words would hurt him. “No,” I said quietly. “I wish it had been so. Too often I felt myself completely alone save for Nighteyes. Too often I've sat at the cliff's edge, reaching out to touch anyone, anywhere, yet never sensing that anyone reached back to me.”
He shook his head at that. “Had I possessed the Skill in truth, you would have known I was there. At your very fingertips, but mute.”
I felt an odd easing in my heart at his words, for no reason I could name. Then he made an odd sound, between a cluck and a chirrup, and the horse immediately came to him to nuzzle his outstretched hand. He passed her reins to me, knowing I was itching to handle her. “Take her. Ride her to the end of your lane and back. I'll wager you've never ridden her like in your life.”
The moment her reins were in my hands, the mare came to me. She put her nose against my chest, and took my scent in and out of her flaring nostrils. Then she lifted her muzzle to my jaw and gave me a slight push, as if urging me to give in to the Fool's temptation. “Do you know how long it has been since I was astride any kind of a horse?” I asked them both.
“Too long. Take her,” he urged me. It was a boy's thing to do, this immediate offering to share a prized possession, and my heart answered it, knowing that no matter how long or how far apart we had been, nothing important had changed between us.
I did not wait to be invited again. I set my foot to the stirrup and mounted her, and despite all the years, I could feel every difference there was between this mare and my old horse, Sooty. She was smaller, finerboned, and narrower between my thighs. I felt clumsy and heavyhanded as I urged her forward, then spun her about with a touch of the rein. I shifted my weight and took in the rein and she backed without hesitation. A foolish grin came over my face. “She could equal Buckkeep's best when Burrich had the stables prime,” I admitted to him. I set my hand to her withers, and felt the dancing flame of her eager little mind. There was no apprehension in her, only curiosity. The wolf sat on the porch watching me gravely.
“Take her down the lane,” the Fool urged me, his grin mirroring mine. “And give her a free head. Let her show you what she can do.”
“What's her name?”
“Malta. I named her myself. I bought her in Shoaks, on my way here.”
I nodded to myself. In Shoaks, they bred their horses small and light for traveling their broad and windswept plains. She'd be an easy keeper, requiring little feed to keep her moving day after day. I leaned forward slightly. “Malta,” I said, and she heard permission in her name. She sprang forward and we were off.
If her day's journey to reach my cabin had wearied her, she did not show it. Rather it was as if she had grown restive with her steady pace and now relished the chance to stretch her muscles. We flowed beneath the overarching trees, and her hooves making music on the hardpacked earth woke a like song in my heart.
Where my lane met the road, I pulled her in. She was not even blowing; instead she arched her neck and gave the tiniest tug at her bit to let me know she would be glad to continue. I held her still, and looked both up and down the road. Odd, how that small change in perspective altered my whole sense of the world around me. Astride this fine animal, the road was like a ribbon unfurled before me. The day was fading, but even so I blinked in the gentling light, seeing possibilities in the blueing hills and the mountains edging into the evening horizon. The horse between my thighs brought the whole world closer to my door. I sat her quietly, and let my eyes travel a road that could eventually take me back to Buckkeep, or indeed to anywhere in the entire world. My quiet life in the cabin with Hap seemed as tight and confining as an outworn skin. I longed to writhe like a snake and cast it off, to emerge gleaming and new into a wider world.
Malta shook her head, mane and tassels flying, awakening me to how long I had sat and stared. The sun was kissing the horizon. The horse ventured a step or two against my firm rein. She had a will of her own, and was as willing to gallop down the road as to walk sedately back to my cabin. So we compromised; I turned her back up my lane, but let her set her own pace. This proved to be a rhythmic canter. When I pulled her in before my cabin, the Fool peeked out the door at me. “I've put the kettle on,” he called. “Bring in my saddle pack, would you? There's Bingtown coffee in it.”
I stabled Malta beside the pony and gave her fresh water and such hay as I had. It was not much; the pony was an adept forager, and did not mind the scrubby pasturage on the hillside behind the cabin. The Fool's sumptuous tack gleamed oddly against the rough walls. I slung his saddle pack over my shoulder. The summer dusk was thickening as I made my way back to my cabin. There were lights in the windows and the pleasant clatter of cooking pots. As I entered to set the pack on my table, the wolf was sprawled before the fire drying his damp fur and the Fool was stepping around him to set a kettle on the hook. I blinked my eyes, and for an instant I was back in the Fool's hut in the Mountains, healing from my old injury while he stood between the world and me that I might rest. Then as now he created reality around himself, bringing order and peace to a small island of warm firelight and the simple smell of hearth bread cooking.
