Yet Jinna was not why I had come here tonight. I needed to see Hap, my foster son. He had just arrived at Buckkeep Town and had been staying with Jinna. I wished to be sure his apprenticeship with Gindast the woodworker was going well. I must also, much as I dreaded it, give him the news of Nighteyes’ death. The wolf had raised the lad as much as I had. Yet even as I winced at the thought of telling him, I hoped it would, as the Fool had said, somehow ease the burden of my sorrow. With Hap, I could share my grief, however selfish a thing that might be. Hap had been mine for the last seven years. We had shared a life, and the wolf’s companionship. If I still belonged to anyone or anything, I belonged to my boy. I needed to feel the reality of that.

“More tea?” Jinna offered me.

I did not want more tea. We had already drunk three pots of it, and I had visited her backhouse twice. Yet she offered the tea to let me know I was welcome to stay, no matter how late, or early, the hour had become. So, “Please,” I said, and she set her knitting aside, to repeat the ritual of filling the kettle with fresh water from the cask and hanging it from the hook and swinging it over the fire again. Outside the storm rattled the shutters in a fresh surge of fury. Then it became, not the storm, but Hap’s rapping at the door. “Jinna?” he called unevenly. “Are you awake still?”

“I’m awake,” she replied. She turned from putting the kettle on. “And lucky for you that I am, or you’d be sleeping in the shed with your pony. I’m coming.”

As she lifted the latch, I stood up, gently dumping the cat off my lap.

Imbecile. The cat was comfortable. Fennel complained as he slid to the floor, but the big orange tom was too stupefied with warmth to make much of a protest. Instead he leapt onto Jinna’s chair and curled up in it without deigning me a backward glance.

The storm pushed in with Hap as he shoved the door open. A gust of wind carried rain into the room. “Whew. Put the wood in the hole, lad,” Jinna rebuked Hap as he lurched in. Obediently he shut the door behind him and latched it, and then stood dripping before it.

“It’s wild and wet out there,” he told her. His smile was beatifically drunken, but his eyes were lit with more than wine. Infatuation shone there, as unmistakable as the rain slipping from his lank hair and running down his face. It took him a moment or two to realize that I was there, watching him. Then, “Tom! Tom, you’ve finally come back!” He flung his arms wide in a drunkard’s ebullience for the ordinary, and I laughed and stepped forward to accept his wet hug.

“Don’t get water all over Jinna’s floor!” I rebuked him.