The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.
“Still, there is the line of blood,” Cort said, “revolt and witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your command and bow to it now—if never again—with all my heart.”
And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him, and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head.
The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder. “Rise, bondsman. In love.”
Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impassive mask of his reamed features. “This is waste. Cry off, you foolish boy. I break my own oath. Cry off and wait.”
The boy said nothing.
“Very well; if you say so, let it be so.” Cort’s voice became dry and business-like. “One hour. And the weapon of your choice.”
“You will bring your stick?”
“I always have.”
“How many sticks have been taken from you, Cort?” Which was tantamount to asking: How many boys have entered the square yard beyond the Great Hall and returned as gunslinger apprentices?
“No stick will be taken from me today,” Cort said slowly. “I regret it. There is only the once, boy. The penalty for overeagerness is the same as the penalty for unworthiness. Can you not wait?”
The boy recalled Marten standing over him. The smile. And the sound of the blow from behind the closed door. “No.”
“Very well. What weapon do you choose?”
The boy said nothing.
Cort’s smile showed a jagged ring of teeth. “Wise enough to begin. In an hour. You realize you will in all probability never see your father, your mother, or your ka-babbies again?”
“I know what exile means,” Roland said softly.
“Go now, and meditate on your father’s face. Much good will it do ya.”
The boy went, without looking back.
VI
The cellar of the barn was spuriously cool, dank, smelling of cobwebs and earthwater. The sun lit it in dusty rays from narrow windows, but here was none of the day’s heat. The boy kept the hawk here and the bird seemed comfortable enough.
David no longer hunted the sky. His feathers had lost the radiant animal brightness of three years ago, but the eyes were still as piercing and motionless as ever. You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are half a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to love or morals.
David was an old hawk now. The boy hoped that he himself was a young one.
“Hai,” he said softly and extended his arm to the tethered perch.
The hawk stepped onto the boy’s arm and stood motionless, unhooded. With his other hand the boy reached into his pocket and fished out a bit of dried jerky. The hawk snapped it deftly from between his fingers and made it disappear.
The boy began to stroke David very carefully. Cort most probably would not have believed it if he had seen it, but Cort did not believe the boy’s time had come, either.
“I think you die today,” he said, continuing to stroke. “I think you will be made a sacrifice, like all those little birds we trained you on. Do you remember? No? It doesn’t matter. After today I am the hawk and each year on this day I’ll shoot the sky in your memory.”
David stood on his arm, silent and unblinking, indifferent to his life or death.
“You are old,” the boy said reflectively. “And perhaps not my friend. Even a year ago you would have had my eyes instead of that little string of meat, isn’t it so? Cort would laugh. But if we get close enough... close enough to that chary man... if he don’t suspect... which will it be, David? Age or friendship?”
David did not say.
The boy hooded him and found the jesses, which were looped at the end of David’s perch. They left the barn.
