Return by Peter S. Beagle; Maurizio Manzieri Page B

wound on him, except for the gash on his forearm, suffered in the fight to restrain the second Hunter from a suicidal attack on me. I replied, “I am no betrayer. I have wished only to live free of that place, and have never been allowed that single mercy. So I do what I must, without joy. What plagues you now? I killed your fellows, but I have not touched you.” Which was true enough, yet he was certainly dying—it was plain in his smile, as well as his voice. I said, awkwardly, “If you have a message for friends, family, I will see to it,” but he laughed then, and I did not go on. As far as I had ever known Hunters had no friends, only each other. He was entirely right to laugh.
    But that took the last of his strength, whatever had drained it away so completely. He managed only to mumble, “ The Tree fails …”I tried to coax more out of him, but what he whispered next I could not hear, and then he was gone. I stayed kneeling beside him for a while.
    It took a long time to carry him back to the clearing, and longer still to bury all three of them, even with the soil still soft from recent rains. There are those who wouldn’t bother, but life on the run has taught me to clean up after myself; found remains mean more trouble than they are worth, almost always. I said, “Sunlight on your road” to them when I was done. Then I walked back to where my mare was peacefully cropping such yellow summer grass as she could reach, but I did not mount. I had thinking to do, and none of it at all the sort that I favor.
    As a general rule, I have never been overly comfortable with unpredictability. Lal’s own practice is to expect it in most circumstances; and the fox positively revels in it, since he is always likely to be the least predictable factor in any situation. It may seem odd, given all the patterns of the life I have lived since leaving the strange monastery where I was raised, but like a cat I prefer to know the ground before I put foot to it, to find people where and how I left them, and for them to behave as I am accustomed to have them behaving. Absurd, beyond a doubt—no one needs to tell me that, though those two constantly do—but such is my nature. The notion that a Hunter might go mad and struggle wildly with his superior over a chance to get at me, let alone that that same superior should die at my feet, rather than at my hand, slain by something unknown and muttering mysteriously all the while…none of it connected , none of it made any sort of sense. And I need things to make simple bloody sense, which makes me a fool. I know that.
    Hunters do not deal in frenzy. Hunters do not ever turn on their own. A Hunter does not simply lie down and cease to breathe, like a poisoned insect. I have been the intimate death of enough of them to know these facts to be inarguable. If it were no longer so—if they who had so tested me were now become as capricious as the rest of this mad world—then everything else I thought I knew had become equally indefinite, and every certainty well worth reconsidering. In which case…
    …in which case, returning to that place— as I called it even when I lived there—was unavoidable. All that I had just experienced must surely signify something . I had to know what it was—and only those who had so long ago been my masters and companions, and later my spurned and murderous enemies, would be able to tell me. I was simply going to have to persuade them to do so without dying in the process.
    And I knew I would have to go alone. I do not have so many friends that I can afford to waste any.
    Here, circumstance was my ally. Lal had made me swear never to return to that place without her and her swordcane, but both of us had shortly after been swept up into separate employments. I had been deep in the north, just short of the Barrens, a long way from the dark woods and swift, cold rivers of my own country, as bodyguard for a wealthy merchant whose fear of assassination