The Tawny Man Series Books 2 and 3. Robin Hobb

road was clear nor circled back to see if we were followed. My own senses and my own sword were all I could rely on for protection. I felt naked and incomplete.

      The sun broke through the clouds on the afternoon when I reached the lane to my cabin. The snow had paused, and the day’s brief warmth was turning the most recent fall into heavy wet mush. Irregular ‘thumps’ from the forest were the sounds of trees dropping their heaped burdens. The lane to my cottage was smooth and undisturbed save with rabbit tracks and pits from fallen loads of snow. I doubted that any had passed here since the snow had begun falling. That was reassuring.

      Yet when I reached my cabin, all of my uneasiness returned. It was obvious that someone had been here, and recently. The door stood open. Uneven lumps beneath the snow were the rounded shapes of furniture and possessions thrown out into the yard in a heap. Fragments of vellum thrust up from the snow that here was trampled and uneven beneath the smoothness of the most recent fall. The pole fence around the kitchen garden had been torn down, as had Jinna’s charm on its post. I sat my horse a time in silence, trying to be impassive as my eyes and ears gathered information. Then I dismounted silently and approached the cabin.

      No one was inside. It was cold and dark. It reminded me of something, and then a prickling of foreboding helped me seize the memory; it reminded me of when I had returned to a cabin that had been raided by Forged Ones. The failing daylight showed me the muddy tracks of a pig’s trotters on the floor. Several curious animals had investigated the cabin. There were muddy boot-tracks as well, a criss-crossing passage that indicated someone had made many trips in and out.

      Everything portable and useful had been taken. The blankets from the beds, the smoked and preserved foods from the rafters, the pots from the cooking hearth; all were gone. Some scrolls had been used to kindle a fire in the hearth. Someone had eaten here, probably enjoying the supplies Hap and I had laid in for the winter. There was a scatter of fish bones still on the hearth. I felt I knew who had come here. The pig tracks were my best clue.

      My desk still remained; my unlettered neighbour would have little use for a writing desk. In my little study, inkpots had been overset, scrolls opened and then tossed aside. This gave me concern. In the current disorder, it was impossible for me to tell if any scrolls had been carried off. I could not tell if Piebalds had scavenged here as well as my pig-keeper neighbour. Verity’s map still hung crookedly on the wall; I was shocked at how my heart leapt with relief to find it intact. I had not realized I valued it so. I took it down and rolled it up, carrying it about with me as I explored the plundering of my home. I forced myself to make a careful survey of each room, and the stable and chicken house as well, before I allowed myself to gather what I would take away with me.

      The small store of grain and all the tools had been taken from the shed in the stable. My work-shed was a jumble of rejected plunder. It seemed unlikely that was the work of Piebalds. My suspicion of an unpleasant neighbour who lived in the next valley was all but certain now. He kept pigs, and had once accused me of stealing piglets from him. When I had so hastily left here, I had directed Hap to take our chickens to the man, not out of kindness to the neighbour but knowing that he would feed and keep them for the sake of the eggs. That had seemed a better course than letting predators slaughter them. But, of course, it would have let him know that we expected to be gone for an extended period. I stood with my fists clenched, looking about the small stable. I doubted that I would ever return here. Even if the tools had been here still, I would have left without them. What use had I now for a mattock or a hoe? But the theft was a violation that was hard to ignore. I ached for revenge even as I told myself that I had no time for it, that the thief had perhaps done me a favour in ransacking my home before Piebalds could.

      I put Myblack in the stable and gave her what poor hay had been left. I hauled her a bucket of water as well. Then I began my salvage and destruction.

      The heap of possessions under the snow proved to be a bedstead, my table and chairs and several shelves. Probably he intended to come back with a cart for them. I’d burn them. I knocked some of the snow from the heap, gazed regretfully on the charging buck that the Fool had carved into my table for me, and then went into the cabin for tinder to start the fire. The straw-stuffed mattress from my bed, discarded inside, worked admirably. In a very short time, I had a nice blaze going.

      I tried to be methodical. While daylight served me, I painstakingly gathered every scattered scroll that had been flung into the yard. Some were hopelessly ruined with damp, others torn and trampled with muddy hooves, and some were no more than fragments. Mindful of Chade’s words, some I tried to smooth and roll up, even when they were but fragments, but most I ruthlessly consigned to the fire. I kicked through the snow until I was as certain as I could possibly be that no writing of mine remained in the yard.

      Dusk was deep by then. Inside the cabin, I kindled a fire in the hearth, for light as well as heat. I began on the inside of the cabin. Most of my possessions went straight into the fire. Old work clothes, my writing tools, my bootjack, and other clutter and possessions burned in the hearth. I was kinder to Hap’s things, knowing that a spinning top, long outgrown as a plaything, could still have meaning to him. I made a sack of an old cloak and filled it with those sorts of items. Then I sat down by the flames and painstakingly went through the scrolls from my rack. There were far more of them than I had expected, and far more than I could have carried back with me.

      I chose first to save those I had not written myself. Verity’s map went into the case, of course, and was soon joined by scrolls I had acquired in my travels and some brought to me by Starling. A few of these were quite old and rare. I was grateful to find them intact and resolved to make copies of them when I returned to Buckkeep. But apart from those, my culling was fierce. Nothing that was the work of my pen was immune to my scrutiny. Scrolls of herbal knowledge with my meticulous illustrations fed the fire. That information was still in my head; if it was that important, I could write it down again. Into the bag, against my better judgement, went those scrolls that dealt not only with my time in the Mountains, but with my personal musings on my own life. A swift perusal of some of those left my cheeks burning. Juvenile and mawkish, self-pitying and full of grand assumptions about my own significance and declarations of things that I would never do again were these treatises. I wondered who I had been when I wrote them.

      My writing on the Skill and the Wit went into the bag, as did my lengthy account of our journey through the Mountain Kingdom and into the realm of the Elderlings and the rise of Verity-as-Dragon. My attempts at poetry about Molly went into the flames, to burn in a final burst of passion. Writing I had done to help Hap learn his letters and numbers went after them. I winnowed my writings, and still there were too many. They underwent a second, harsher culling, and finally the scroll case would close.

      Then I stood, closed my eyes, and tried to think: were there any still unaccounted for? I told myself it was a hopeless task. Some scrolls I had had the sense to destroy within days of writing them. Others I had given Starling to carry back to Chade. I could not decide if any were missing. Let any man try to recall all he might have written down over fifteen years of his life, and there would doubtless be some gaps. Had I ever committed to paper an account of my time with Black Rolf and the Old Bloods? I was sure I had written of those months, but had they been in a separate scroll, or was I recalling bits that had interjected themselves into other writings? I wasn’t sure. And I could not know what scrolls the pig-keeper had used to kindle his cookfire. I sighed. Surrender it. I had done as much as I could. In the future, I would be far more careful of what I entrusted to letters.

      I went back out into the yard, and flipped the ends of the burning furniture into the fire. The rising wind and falling snow would soon smother it, but the charging buck was scorched to obliteration. The rest of it little mattered. I walked again through the little cabin that had been my home for so many years. I had left intact no personal article of my own. My presence here was erased. I thought of burning the cabin itself, and decided against it. It had stood here before I had come; let it still stand after I was gone. Perhaps some other needy man might come to make use of it.

      I saddled Myblack again and led her out of the paddock. I loaded onto her the scroll case and Hap’s bundled possessions. The last items I included were two tightly stoppered pots, one of ground elfbark and the other of carryme. Then I mounted and rode away from that piece of my