The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy. Robin Hobb

knight of olden times should have guarded a river ford or bridge, if it had been my dream. Those were the challengers of my legends. And my own reaction had been wrong. I felt puzzled, as if I’d read a tale from a distant land and not understood the hero or the ending. I could not even decide why the dream seemed so important to me. I wanted it to fade as my other dreams did when I woke, but this one lingered with me for days.

      As the dreary days of my convalescence passed, the dream merged with recollections of my days with Dewara until all of it seemed unreal. It was hard for me to put the events of those days in consecutive order. I could show Sergeant Duril the skills the Kidona had taught me, but I could not recall the precise sequence of learning them. They had become a part of me, something written into my nerves and bones along with breathing or coughing … I did not want to carry the Kidona into my life with me, yet I did. Something of him had seeped into my very blood, the way he accused my father’s iron shot of staying in his soul. Sometimes I would stand before my rock collection, staring at the coarse stone the doctor had dug out of my flesh, and try to decide how much of the experience had been real. The rock and my scars were the only physical evidence that I had that any of it had been real. Occasionally, I would touch the round bald spot on the crown of my head. I decided that I had been unconscious when Dewara struck me there, and my brain had incorporated the pain into my dream.

      Only once did I try to speak of my dream journey to anyone. It was about six weeks after I had been returned to my father’s house. I was up and about again and well on my way to full recovery. A few places, such as my forearms and the tops of my cheeks were dappled pink for many months after the rest of my body had healed, but I had progressed to once more rising and breakfasting daily with my family. Yaril, my younger sister, seemed to have a very vivid dream life, and often bored or annoyed the rest of the family by insisting on giving long accounts of her illogical imaginings at the breakfast table. That morning, midway through one such rambling tale of being rescued from the jaws of ravenous sheep by a horde of birds, my father banished her, breakfastless, to the drawing room. ‘A woman who has nothing sensible to say should not bother speaking at all!’ he told her sternly as he sent her from the room.

      After the rest of us were excused from the table, I sought her in the parlour, knowing that she was far more sensitive than her siblings, and wept over rebukes that Elisi or I would simply have shrugged off. My estimate of her temperament was correct. She was sitting on a settee, ostensibly working on some embroidery. Her head was bent and her eyes were red. She would not look up at me as I came in. I sat down next to her, held out the muffin I had filched from the table and said quietly, ‘Actually, I was quite looking forward to hearing what came next in your dream. Won’t you tell me?’

      She took the muffin from me, thanking me with a look. She broke off a piece and ate it, and then said huskily. ‘No. It’s foolish, as father says. A waste of time for me to prattle about my dreams or for you to listen to them.’

      I could not disagree with my father, not to my little sister. ‘Foolish, yes, but so are many things that amuse us. I think he feels the breakfast table is not the best place for stories of that sort. But I’d be happy to listen to them, when we have time together, like this.’

      My younger sister had enormous grey eyes. They always reminded me of a soot-cat’s eyes. Her gaze was very solemn. ‘You are so kind to me, Nevare. I can tell when you are just being kind, however. I do not think you have the slightest interest in what I dream at night, or in what I do or think by day. You are only trying to be sure my feelings were not hurt when father dismissed me.’

      She was absolutely correct about her dreams, but I tried to soften my practicality. ‘Actually, dreams do interest me, mostly because I have so few myself. You, on the other hand, seem to dream nearly every night.’

      ‘I’ve heard that we all dream, every night, but only some people can remember their dreams.’

      I smiled at that. ‘And if everyone forgot all their dreams, how could anyone prove such a thing? No. When my head touches my pillow and I close my eyes, all is quiet in my mind until morning. Unlike you. You seem to fill your sleeping hours with all sorts of adventures and fancies.’

      She glanced away from me. ‘Perhaps I adventure in my dreams because there is so little else in my life to distract me.’

      ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ve got such a hard life, little girl.’

      ‘No. I’ve hardly any sort of a life at all,’ she returned, almost bitterly. When I just looked at her, puzzled, she shook her head at me. A moment later she asked me, ‘Then you’ve never had a peculiar dream, Nevare? One that made you wake, heart racing, wondering which was more real, the dream world or this one?’

      ‘No,’ I said, and then added, ‘well, perhaps once.’

      She focused those kitten eyes on me. ‘Really? What did you dream, Nevare?’ She leaned toward me, as if such things were truly important.

      ‘Well.’ As I pondered where to begin the telling of the dream, I felt a strange sensation. The scar on the top of my head burned, and from there, the hot pain shot down through me, once more running along my spine. I shut my eyes and I turned hastily away from Yaril. I felt faint. The reality of the pain brought my dream back in shattering detail. The smell of the tree woman was in my nostrils and my hands clutched the slicing blade again. I took a shuddering breath and tried to speak. At first, no sounds came out until I said, ‘It was a disturbing dream, Yaril. I do not think I will speak of it.’ The pain ceased as suddenly as it had begun. It still took me a moment to catch my breath and force my hands to open. I turned back toward Yaril; she was regarding me with alarm.

      ‘Whatever could you have dreamed, that would frighten a man so?’ she asked me.

      Her childish naïveté that saw me, only a few years her senior, as a grown man, silenced me more effectively than the burst of pain had. For I deemed my sudden pain to be a sort of hallucination, a terrible re-experiencing of the dream that had been my downfall. Despite how badly that brief experience had rattled me, my sister had referred to me as a man, and I would not do or say anything to lessen her opinion of me at that moment. So I merely shook my head and added, ‘It would not be a fit topic to discuss in front of a lady anyway.’

      Her eyes widened in surprise that her brother Nevare might have dreams not fit to discuss with a lady, but I also saw her pleasure that I had referred to her as a ‘lady’ rather than as a ‘child’. She sat back in her seat and said, ‘Well, if it is so, Nevare, then I will not ask you any more about it.’

      Such innocents we both were then.

      Days piled on days to become months, like dead leaves heaping atop one another to become loam. I set my dream experience aside and forgot it as much as I could. My burns healed, the stitched ear healed more slowly, and the notches became scars I lived with. I kept a small bald spot on the crown of my head, scar tissue where once healthy scalp had been. I moved on with my life and my lessons and training. I carried inside me, small and sharp, the knowledge that my father, despite his encouraging words to me, doubted me. His doubt became my own, a competitor that I could never quite conquer.

      I made only one other concession to that experience. Late in the autumn, I told my father that I wished to go hunting alone, to test my prowess. He told me it was foolish, but I persevered in my stubborn request, and eventually he granted me six days to myself. I told him I would be hunting along the high banks of the river, and I did begin my journey in that direction. I first visited the spot where Dewara and his women had been camped when I first met him. The ashes and stones of a cookfire and the disturbances where he had pegged his tent were almost the only marks of his passage. The sheath of my old cavalry sword lay on the ground, the leather slowly rotting in the weather. Of the sword itself, there was no sign. Perhaps a passing traveller had discovered it. But it seemed unlikely that someone would come across a sword and its sheath, and carry off only the bare blade. I didn’t think so. I tossed the sheath back onto the ground and walked away from it. A man could not summon a weapon to come to him. Not in my world. I felt a touch of pain in the scar on my head. I rubbed at it, and then turned away from the campsite. I didn’t want to think about it just now.

      I