Brother, you are a wolf. Come back, come away from that, it will hurt you, Nighteyes warned me.

I leaped back from it.

Then Burrich went stamping about the room, cursing things, and letting the porridge burn. We had to eat it anyway, there was nothing else.

For a time, Burrich bothered me. "Do you remember?" he was always saying. He wouldn't leave me alone. He would tell me names, and make me try to say who they were. Sometimes I would know, a little. "A woman," I told him when he said Patience. "A woman in a room with plants." I had tried, but he still got angry with me.

If I slept at night, I had dreams. Dreams of a trembling light, a dancing light on a stone wall. And eyes at a small window. The dreams would hold me down and keep me from breathing. If I could get enough breath to scream, I could wake up. Sometimes it took a long time to get enough breath. Burrich would wake up, too, and grab the big knife off the table. "What is it, what is it?" he would ask me. But I could not tell him.

It was safer to sleep in the daylight, outside, smelling grass and earth. The dreams of stone walls did not come then. Instead, a woman came, to press herself sweetly against me. Her scent was the same as the meadow flowers', and her mouth tasted of honey. The pain of those dreams came when I awoke, and knew she was gone forever, taken by another. At night I sat and looked at the fire. I tried not to think of cold stone walls, nor of dark eyes weeping and a sweet mouth gone heavy with bitter words. I did not sleep. I dared not even lie down. Burrich did not make me.

Chade came back one day. He had grown his beard long and he wore a wide-brimmed hat like a peddler, but I knew him all the same. Burrich wasn't at home when he arrived, but I let him in. I did not know why he had come. "Do you want some brandy?" I asked, thinking perhaps that was why he had come. He looked closely at me and almost smiled.

"Fitz?" he said. He turned his head sideways to look into my face. "So. How have you been?"