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Als, and drank blood drawn from our mounts when our hunt failed to produce a meal for us He shared his water and dried ly We oftensuch lacks as a hardship He told stories every night and I began to have a sense of what passed for wrong and right aet another man’s ith child so that another warrior labored to feed your get was a riotously good jest upon that fellow To steal and not be caught was the ht were fools and deserved no man’s mercy or sympathy If a man had taldi, a wife, and children, then he ealthy and beloved of the gods, and the others of his tribe should pay heed to his counsel If a man was poor, or if his taldi or wife or children sickened or died, then he was either stupid or cursed by the gods, and in either case it was a waste of time to hark to hi, bereft of all the gentler virtues I could never accept his people’s ways, yet in so the world as he saw it By the harsh logic of the Kidona, my people had defeated his and forced them to settle They resented and hated us for it, and yet by their traditions, we could only do those things because the gods favored us over them Therefore, our wisdom was to be considered e spoke Dewara had been honored when my father sent word that he wished hi reat honor to him, one that all his fellow Kidona would envy Dewara had the son of his enemy at his mercy, and he would have no mercy for me Freely he rejoiced before me that I would carry a notch in my ear from his swanneck to the end ofme that I was not bad, for a Gernian cub, but no Gernian cub would ever grow to be as strong as a Kidona plateau bear Every day he taunted ht, several ti his full acceptance of ard when he began to teach ly conceded that I attained some skill with it, but would always add that that evil metal had ruined ain the purity of a true warrior

I challenged hiuns for what you are teaching ed "Your father ruined me when he shot me with an iron ball Then he bound rew still inside me It has never fully come back I think a little bit of his iron stayed in me" And here he slapped his shoulder, where I knew he still bore the scar of ic from me So, of course, I try to trick hiic froainst his people He said no this time He thinks he can keep it from me always But there are other men who trade We will see how it ends" Then he nodded to himself in a way I didn’t like In that moment, I was co Troven, and I resolved that when I returned, I would warn my father that Dewara still er I stayed with hi torlds, and that it would not taketo troopers or those who interacted too freely with the Plainspeople Our scouts routinely cae, dress, and custotools and salt and sugar for furs and handicrafts, spanned the boundaries of the cultures It was not uncoone too far and crossed over into Plainspeople ways So them and adopted their way of dress Such nized that they were useful as go-betweens, but they were accorded little respect, less trust, and als of polite company, and their half-breed children could never venture into society at all I wondered what had becohter

I had never before understood ould proside Dewara, with hie to do so to his own standards I even considered stealing so from him, in some clever way that would force hiainst all the ht, and yet I foundabout it as a way to win Dewara’s respect So with a jolt, surprised atfroard it as a sort of contest of wits? He made me want to cross that line In Dewara’s world, only a Kidona warrior was a whole h, of body and mind, and brave past any instinct for self-preservation Yet self-preservation was high on a warrior’s priority list, and no lie, theft, or cruelty was inexcusable if it was done with the goal of preserving one’s own life