Free Assassin's Quest by Hobb Robin Page A

strategies. Then the rest of the day, he’d have me at his heels. Like a dog, as you say. I don’t know why. Maybe he was lonely for someone his own age. Maybe he missed Verity. Maybe . . . I don’t know.
    “He taught me numbers first, then reading. He put me in charge of his horse. Then his hounds and hawk. Then in general charge of the pack beasts and wagon animals. But it wasn’t just work he taught me. Cleanliness. Honesty. He put a value on what my mother and grandmother had tried to instill in me so long ago. He showed them to me as a man’s values, not just manners for inside a woman’s house. He taught me to be a man, not a beast in a man’s shape. He made me see it was more than rules, it was a way of being. A life, rather than a living.”
    He stopped talking. I heard him get up. He went to the table and picked up the bottle of elderberry wine that Chade had left. I watched him as he turned it several times in his hands. Then he set it down. He sat down on one of the chairs and stared into the fire.
    “Chade said I should leave you tomorrow,” he said quietly. He looked down at me. “I think he’s right.”
    I sat up and looked up at him. The dwindling light of the fire made a shadowy landscape of his face. I could not read his eyes.
    “Chade says you have been my boy too long. Chade’s boy, Verity’s boy, even Patience’s boy. That we kept you a boy and looked after you too much. He believes that when a man’s decisions came to you, you made them as a boy. Impulsively. Intending to be right, intending to be good. But intentions are not good enough.”
    “Sending me out to kill people was keeping me a boy?” I asked incredulously.
    “Did you listen to me at all? I killed people as a boy. It didn’t make me a man. Nor you.”
    “So what am I to do?” I asked sarcastically. “Go looking for a prince to educate me?”
    “There. You see? A boy’s reply. You don’t understand, so you get angry. And venomous. You ask me that question but you already know you won’t like my answer.”
    “Which is?”
    “It might be to tell you that you could do worse than to go looking for a prince. But I’m not going to tell you what to do. Chade has advised me not to. And I think he is right. But not because I think you make your decisions as a boy would. No more than I did at your age. I think you decide as an animal would. Always in the now, with never a thought for tomorrow, or what you recall from yesterday. I know you know what I’m speaking of. You stopped living as a wolf because I forced you to. Now I must leave you alone, for you to find out if you want to live as a wolf or a man.”
    He met my gaze. There was too much understanding in his eyes. It frightened me to think that he might actually know what I was facing. I denied that possibility, pushed it aside entirely. I turned a shoulder to him, almost hoping my anger would come back. But Burrich sat silently.
    I finally looked up at him. He was staring into the fire. It took me a long time to swallow my pride and ask, “So, what are you going to do?”
    “I told you. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
    Harder still to ask the next question. “Where will you go?”
    He cleared his throat and looked uncomfortable. “I’ve a friend. She’s alone. She could use a man’s strength about her place. Her roof needs mending, and there’s planting to do. I’ll go there, for a time.”
    “ “She’?” I dared to ask, raising an eyebrow.
    His voice was flat. “Nothing like that. A friend. You would probably say that I’ve found someone else to look after. Perhaps I have. Perhaps it’s time to give that where it is truly needed.”
    I looked into the fire, now. “Burrich. I truly needed you. You brought me back from the edge, back to being a man.”
    He snorted. “If I’d done right by you in the first place, you’d never have gone to the edge.”
    “No. I’d have gone to my grave instead.”
    “Would you? Regal would have had no charges of Wit