s [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

to somewhere. They did not look at me. By then, I was aware of the potter s predilection for
administering beatings at the least excuse. I already hated my new life, and I blamed the people who
raised me for giving me up. I did not want to see them anymore. After I fled the potter and the village of
my birth, I never did.
 Nor your brother or sister? Bremen asked.
She shook her head.  There was no need. Whatever ties we had formed while growing had long since
been broken. Thinking of them now only makes me sad.
 You had a difficult childhood. You ve come to understand that better now that you are grown,
haven t you?
The smile she gave him was cold and brittle.  I have come to understand many things that were hidden
from me as a child. But let me finish my story and you can judge for yourself. What matters in all of this is
that just before I left to apprentice to the potter, I began hearing things about my father. I was eleven by
then and already knew that I would be apprenticed at twelve. I knew I would be leaving my home, and I
suppose it made me consider seriously for the first time the scope and meaning of the wider world.
Traders and trappers and tinkers passed through our village, so I knew there were other places to see,
places far away. I wondered sometimes if my father was out there somewhere, waiting. I wondered if he
knew of me. I had determined in my own childlike way that my parents had not married and so had not
lived together as husband and wife. My mother bore me alone, my father already gone. What of him,
then? No one would say. I thought to ask more than once, but there was something in the way my
providers spoke of my mother and her life that made it clear I was not to ask. My mother had
transgressed in some way, and she was forgiven her transgression only because she had died giving birth
to me. I was a part of her transgression, but it was not clear to me how or why.
 When I was old enough to know that secrets were being kept from me, I began to want to uncover
them. I was eleven  old enough to recognize deception and old enough to practice it. I began to ask
questions about my mother, small and inconsequential questions that would not arouse anger or
suspicion. I asked them mostly of my foster mother, because she was the less taciturn of the pair. I would
ask the questions when we were alone, then listen at night at the door of my sleeping room to hear what
she would say to her husband. Sometimes she would say nothing. Sometimes the words were obscured
by the closed door. But once or twice I caught a sentence or two, a phrase, a word  some small
mention of my father. It was not the words themselves that revealed so much, but the way in which they
were spoken. My father was an outsider who passed through the village, stayed briefly, returned once or
twice, and then disappeared. The people of the village shunned him, all save my mother. She was
attracted to him. No reason for this was offered. Was she attracted to him for the way he looked or the
words he spoke or the life he led? I could not learn. But it was clear they feared and disliked him, and
some part of that fear and dislike had been transferred to me.
She went quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She seemed small and vulnerable, but Bremen
knew that impression  was false. He waited, letting her eyes continue to hold his in the deep night
silence.
 I knew even then that I was not like anyone else. I knew I had the magic, even though it was just
beginning to manifest itself in me, not yet come to maturity, so that it was mostly vague stirrings and small
mutterings in my child s body. It seemed logical to conclude that it was the magic that was feared and
disliked, and it was this that I had inherited from my father. Magic was mistrusted in general in my village
 it was the unwanted legacy of the First War of the Races, when Men had been subverted by the rebel
Druid Brona and defeated in a war with the other Races and driven south into exile. Magic had caused all
this, and it was a vast, dark unknown that lurked at the comers of the subconscious and threatened the
unwary. The people of my village were superstitious and not well educated and were frightened of many
things. Magic could be blamed for much of what they didn t understand. I think the people who raised
me believed that I might grow into some manifestation of my father, the bearer of his magic s seed, and
so they could never quite accept me as their child. In the eleventh year of my life, I began to understand
why this was so.
 The potter knew my history as well, though he did not speak of it to me in the beginning when I went
to work for him. He would not admit that he was afraid of a child, even one with my history, and he took
pride in the fact that he took me in when no one else would. I did not realize that at first, but he told me
later.
 No one would have you  that s why you re here. Be grateful to me. He would say that when he
had drunk too much and was thinking about beating me. His drinking loosened his tongue and gave him a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]