“And how could I possibly dare to say I made sense of your last statement and have it be true?” Molly wondered aloud.
Something in her voice made me turn around. For a moment we just looked at one another. Then she burst out laughing. I stood, affronted and grim, as she came to me, still laughing. Then she put her arms around me. “Newboy. You take a most roundabout path to finally declare you love me. To break into my room, and then to stand there, tying your tongue in knots about the word `love.’ Could not you simply have said it, a long time ago?”
I stood stupid in the circle of her arms. I looked down at her. Yes, I realized dully, I had grown that much taller than she.
“Well?” she prompted, and for a moment I was puzzled.
“I love you, Molly.” So easy to say, after all. And such a relief. Slowly, cautiously, I put my arms around her.
She smiled up at me. “And I love you.”
So, finally, I kissed her. In the moment of that kiss, somewhere near Buckkeep, a wolf lifted up his voice in a joyous ululation that set every hound to baying and every dog to barking in a chorus that rang against the brittle night sky.
CHAPTER NINE
Guards and Bonds
OFTENTIMES I UNDERSTAND and commend Fedwren’s stated dream. Had he his way, paper would be as common as bread, and every child would learn his letters before he was thirteen. But even were it so, I do not think this would bring to pass all he hopes. He mourns of all the knowledge that goes into a grave each time a man dies, even the commonest of men. He speaks of a time to come when a blacksmith’s way of setting a shoe, or a shipwright’s knack for pulling a drawknife would be set down in letters, that any who could read could learn to do as well. I do not believe it is so, or ever will be. Some things may be learned from words on a page, but some skills are learned first by a man’s hands and heart, and later by his head. I have believed this ever since I saw Mastfish set the fish-shaped block of wood that he was named after into Verity’s first ship. His eyes had seen that mastfish before it existed, and he set his hands to shaping what his heart knew must be. This is not a thing that can be learned from words on a page. Perhaps it cannot be learned at all, but comes, as does the Skill or the Wit, from the blood of one’s forebears.