Читать книгу Assassin’s Apprentice - Робин Хобб - Страница 10

A story is told of King Victor, he who conquered the inland territories that became eventually the Duchy of Farrow. Very shortly after adding the lands of Sandsedge to his rulings, he sent for the woman who would, had Victor not conquered her land, have been the Queen of Sandsedge. She travelled to Buckkeep in much trepidation, fearing to go, but fearing more the consequences to her people if she appealed to them to hide her. When she arrived, she was both amazed and somewhat chagrined that Victor intended to use her, not as a servant, but as a tutor to his children, that they might learn both the language and customs of her folk. When she asked him why he chose to have them learn of her folk’s ways, he replied, ‘A ruler must be ruler of all his people, for one can only rule what one knows.’ Later, she became the willing wife of his eldest son, and took the name Queen Graciousness at her coronation.

I awoke to sunlight in my face. Someone had entered my chamber and opened the window shutters to the day. A basin, cloth and jug of water had been left on top of the chest. I was grateful for them, but not even washing my face refreshed me. Sleep had left me sodden and I recall feeling uneasy that someone could enter my chamber and move freely about without awakening me.

As I had guessed, the window looked out over the sea, but I didn’t have much time to devote to the view. A glance at the sun told me that I had overslept. I flung on my clothes and hastened down to the stables without pausing for breakfast.

But Burrich had little time for me that morning. ‘Get back up to the keep,’ he advised me. ‘Mistress Hasty already sent Brant down here to look for you. She’s to measure you for clothing. Best go find her quickly; she lives up to her name, and won’t appreciate your upsetting her morning routine.’

My trot back up to the keep reawakened all my aches of the day before. Much as I dreaded seeking out this Mistress Hasty and being measured for clothing I was certain I didn’t need, I was relieved not to be on horseback again this morning.

After querying my way up from the kitchens, I finally found Mistress Hasty in a room several doors down from my bedchamber. I paused shyly at the door and peered in. Three tall windows were flooding the room with sunlight and a mild salt breeze. Baskets of yarn and dyed wool were stacked against one wall, while a tall shelf on another wall held a rainbow of cloth goods. Two young women were talking over a loom, and in the far corner a lad not much older than I was rocking to the gentle pace of a spinningwheel. I had no doubt that the woman with her broad back to me was Mistress Hasty.

The two young women noticed me and paused in their conversation. Mistress Hasty turned to see where they stared, and a moment later I was in her clutches. She didn’t bother with names or explaining what she was about. I found myself up on a stool, being turned and measured and hummed over, with no regard for my dignity or indeed my humanity. She disparaged my clothes to the young women, remarked very calmly that I quite reminded her of young Chivalry, and that my measurements and colouring were much the same as his had been when he was my age. She then demanded their opinions as she held up bolts of different goods against me.

‘That one,’ said one of the loom-women. ‘That blue quite flatters his darkness. It would have looked well on his father. Quite a mercy that Patience never has to see the boy. Chivalry’s stamp is much too plain on his face to leave her any pride at all.’

And as I stood there, draped in woolgoods, I heard for the first time what every other person in Buckkeep knew full well. The weaving-women discussed in detail how the word of my existence reached Buckkeep and Patience long before my father could tell her himself, and of the deep anguish it caused her. For Patience was barren, and though Chivalry had never spoken a word against her, all guessed how difficult it must be for an heir such as he to have no child eventually to assume his title. Patience took my existence as the ultimate rebuke, and her health, never sound after so many miscarriages, completely broke along with her spirit. It was for her sake as well as for propriety that Chivalry had given up his throne, and taken his invalid wife back to the warm and gentle lands that were her home province. Word was that they lived well and comfortably there, that Patience’s health was slowly mending, and that Chivalry, substantially quieter a man than he had been before, was gradually learning stewardship of his vineyard-rich valley. A pity that Patience blamed Burrich as well for Chivalry’s lapse in morals, and had declared she could no longer abide the sight of him. For between the injury to his leg and Chivalry’s abandonment of him, old Burrich just wasn’t the man he had been. Was a time when no woman of the keep walked quickly past him; to catch his eye was to make yourself the envy of nearly anyone old enough to wear skirts. And now? Old Burrich, they called him, and him still in his prime – so unfair, as if any manservant had any say over what his master did. But it was all to the good anyway, they supposed. And didn’t Verity, after all, make a much better King-in-Waiting than had Chivalry? So rigorously noble was Chivalry that he made all others feel slatternly and stingy in his presence; he’d never allowed himself a moment’s respite from what was right, and while he was too chivalrous to sneer at those who did, one always had the feeling that his perfect behaviour was a silent reproach to those with less self-discipline. Ah, but then here was the bastard, now, though, after all those years, and well, here was the proof that he hadn’t been the man he’d pretended to be. Verity, now there was a man among men, a king folk could look to and see as royalty. He rode hard, and soldiered alongside his men, and if he was occasionally drunk or had at times been less than discreet, well, he owned up to it, honest as his name. Folk could understand a man like that, and follow him.

To all this I listened avidly, if mutely, while several fabrics were held against me, debated and selected. I gained a much deeper understanding of why the keep children left me to play alone. If the women considered that I might have thoughts or feelings about their conversation, they showed no sign of it. The only remark I remember Mistress Hasty making to me specifically was that I should take greater care in washing my neck. Then Mistress Hasty shooed me from the room as if I were an annoying chicken, and I found myself finally heading to the kitchens for some food.

That afternoon I was back with Hod, practising until I was sure my stave had mysteriously doubled its weight. Then food, and bed, and up again in the morning and back to Burrich’s tutelage. My learning filled my days, and any spare time I found was swallowed up with the chores associated with my learning, whether it was tack-care for Burrich, or sweeping the armoury and putting it back in order for Hod. In due time I found not one, or even two, but three entire sets of clothing, including stockings, set out one afternoon on my bed. Two were of fairly ordinary stuff, in a familiar brown that most of the children my age seemed to wear, but one was of thin blue cloth, and on the breast was a buck’s head, done in silver thread. Burrich and the other men-at-arms wore a leaping buck as their emblem. I had only seen the buck’s head on the jerkins of Regal and Royal. So I looked at it and wondered, but wondered too, at the slash of red stitching that cut it diagonally, marching right over the design.

‘It means you’re a bastard,’ Burrich told me bluntly when I asked him about it. ‘Of acknowledged royal blood, but a bastard all the same. That’s all. It’s just a quick way of showing you’ve royal blood, but aren’t of the true line. If you don’t like it, you can change it. I am sure the King would grant it. A name and a crest of your own.’

‘A name?’

‘Certainly. It’s a simple enough request. Bastards are rare in the noble houses, especially so in the King’s own. But they aren’t unheard of.’ Under the guise of teaching me the proper care of a saddle, we were going through the tack room, looking over all the old and unused tack. Maintaining and salvaging old tack was one of Burrich’s odder fixations. ‘Devise a name and a crest for yourself, and then ask the King …’

‘What name?’

‘Why, any name you like. This looks as if it’s ruined; someone put it away damp and it mildewed. But we’ll see what we can do with it.’

‘It wouldn’t feel real.’

‘What?’

He held an armload of smelly leather out toward me. I took it.

‘A name I just put to myself. It wouldn’t feel as if it was really mine.’

‘Well, what do you intend to do, then?’

I took a breath. ‘The King should name me. Or you should.’ I steeled myself. ‘Or my father. Don’t you think?’

Burrich frowned. ‘You get the most peculiar notions. Just think about it yourself for a while. You’ll come up with a name that fits.’

‘Fitz,’ I said sarcastically, and I saw Burrich clamp his jaw.

‘Let’s just mend this leather,’ he suggested quietly.

We carried it to his workbench and started wiping it down. ‘Bastards aren’t that rare,’ I observed. ‘And in town, their parents name them.’

‘In town, bastards aren’t so rare,’ Burrich agreed after a moment. ‘Soldiers and sailors whore around. It’s a common way for common folk. But not for royalty. Or for anyone with a bit of pride. What would you have thought of me, when you were younger, if I’d gone out whoring at night, or brought women up to the room? How would you see women now? Or men? It’s fine to fall in love, Fitz, and no one begrudges a young woman or man a kiss or two. But I’ve seen what it’s like down in Bingtown. Traders bring pretty girls or well-made youths to the market like so many chickens or potatoes. And the children they end up bearing may have names, but they don’t have much else. And even when they marry, they don’t stop their … habits. If ever I find the right woman, I’ll want her to know I won’t be looking at another. And I’ll want to know all my children are mine.’ Burrich was almost impassioned.

I looked at him miserably. ‘So what happened with my father?’

He looked suddenly weary. ‘I don’t know, boy. I don’t know. He was young, just twenty or so. And far from home, and trying to shoulder a heavy burden. Those are neither reasons nor excuses. But it’s as much as either of us will ever know.’

And that was that.

My life went round in its settled routine. There were evenings that I spent in the stables, in Burrich’s company, and more rarely, evenings that I spent in the Great Hall when some travelling minstrel or puppet show arrived. Once in a great while, I could slip out for an evening down in town, but that meant paying the next day for missed sleep. Afternoons were inevitably spent with some tutor or instructor. I came to understand that these were my summer lessons, and that in winter I would be introduced to the kind of learning that came with pens and letters. I was kept busier than I had ever been in my young life. But despite my schedule, I found myself mostly alone.

Loneliness.

It found me every night as I vainly tried to find a small and cosy spot in my big bed. When I had slept above the stables in Burrich’s rooms, my nights had been muzzy, my dreams heathery with the warm and weary contentment of the well-used animals that slept and shifted and thudded in the night below me. Horses and dogs dream, as anyone who has ever watched a hound yipping and twitching in dream pursuit knows. Their dreams had been like the sweet-rising waft from a baking of good bread. But now, isolated in a room walled with stone, I finally had time for all those devouring, aching dreams that are the portion of humans. I had no warm dam to cosy against, no sense of siblings or kin stabled nearby. Instead I would lie awake and wonder about my father and my mother, and how both could have dismissed me from their lives so easily. I heard the talk that others exchanged so carelessly over my head, and interpreted their comments in my own terrifying way. I wondered what would become of me when I was grown and old King Shrewd dead and gone. I wondered, occasionally, if Molly Nosebleed and Kerry missed me, or if they accepted my sudden disappearance as easily as they had accepted my coming. But mostly I ached with loneliness, for in all that great keep, there were none I sensed as friend. None save the beasts, and Burrich had forbidden me to have any closeness with them.

One evening I had gone wearily to bed, only to torment myself with my fears until sleep grudgingly pulled me under. Light in my face awoke me, but I came awake knowing something was wrong. I hadn’t slept long enough, and this light was yellow and wavering, unlike the whiteness of the sunlight that usually spilled in my window. I stirred unwillingly and opened my eyes.

He stood at the foot of my bed, holding aloft a lamp. This in itself was a rarity at Buckkeep, but more than the buttery light from the lamp held my eyes. The man himself was strange. His robe was the colour of undyed sheep’s wool that had been washed, but only intermittently and not recently. His hair and beard were about the same hue and their untidiness gave the same impression. Despite the colour of his hair, I could not decide how old he was. There are some poxes that will scar a man’s face with their passage. But I had never seen a man marked as he was, with scores of tiny pox scars, angry pinks and reds like small burns, and livid even in the lamp’s yellow light. His hands were all bones and tendons wrapped in papery white skin. He was peering at me, and even in the lamplight his eyes were the most piercing green I had ever seen. They reminded me of a cat’s eyes when it is hunting; the same combination of joy and fierceness. I pulled my quilt up higher under my chin.

‘You’re awake,’ he said. ‘Good. Get up and follow me.’

He turned abruptly from my bedside and walked away from the door, to a shadowed corner of my room between the hearth and the wall. I didn’t move. He glanced back at me, held the lamp higher. ‘Hurry up, boy,’ he said irritably and rapped the stick he leaned on against my bed post.

I got out of bed, wincing as my bare feet hit the cold floor. I reached for my clothes and shoes, but he wasn’t waiting for me. He glanced back once, to see what was delaying me, and the piercing look was enough to make me drop my clothes and quake.

I followed, wordlessly, in my nightshirt, for no reason I could explain to myself, except that he had suggested it. I followed him to a door that had never been there, and up a narrow flight of winding steps that were lit only by the lamp he held above his head. His shadow fell behind him and over me, so that I walked in a shifting darkness, feeling each step with my feet. The stairs were cold stone, worn and smooth and remarkably even. And they went up, and up, and up, until it seemed to me that we had climbed past the height of any tower the keep possessed. A chill breeze flowed up those steps and up my nightshirt, shrivelling me with more than mere cold. And we went up, and then finally he was pushing open a substantial door that nonetheless moved silently and easily. We entered a chamber.

It was lit warmly by several lamps, suspended from an unseen ceiling on fine chains. The chamber was large, certainly three times the size of my own. One end of it beckoned me. It was dominated by a massive wooden bedframe fat with feather mattresses and cushions. There were carpets on the floor, overlapping one another with their scarlets and verdant greens and blues both deep and pale. There was a table made of wood the colour of wild honey, and on it sat a bowl of fruits so perfectly ripe that I could smell their fragrances. Parchment books and scrolls were scattered about carelessly as if their rarity were of no concern. All three walls were draped with tapestries that depicted open, rolling country with wooded foothills in the distance. I started toward it.

‘This way,’ said my guide, and relentlessly led me to the other end of the chamber.

Here was a different spectacle. A stone slab of a table dominated it, its surface much stained and scorched. Upon it were various tools, containers and implements, a scale, a mortar and pestle, and many things I couldn’t name. A fine layer of dust overlay much of it, as if projects had been abandoned in mid-course, months or even years ago. Beyond the table was a rack which held an untidy collection of scrolls, some edged in blue or gilt. The scent of the room was at once pungent and aromatic; bundles of herbs were drying on another rack. I heard a rustling and caught a glimpse of movement in a far corner, but the man gave me no time to investigate. The fireplace that should have warmed this end of the room gaped black and cold. The old embers in it looked damp and settled. I lifted my eyes from my perusal to look at my guide. The dismay on my face seemed to surprise him. He turned from me and slowly surveyed the room himself. He considered it for a bit, and then I sensed an embarrassed disgruntlement from him.

‘It is a mess. More than a mess, I suppose. But, well. It’s been a while, I suppose. And longer than a while. Well. It’s soon put to rights. But first, introductions are in order. And I suppose it is a bit nippy to be standing about in just a nightshirt. This way, boy.’

I followed him to the comfortable end of the room. He seated himself in a battered wooden chair that was overdraped with blankets. My bare toes dug gratefully into the nap of a woollen rug. I stood before him, waiting, as those green eyes prowled over me. For some minutes the silence held. Then he spoke.

‘First, let me introduce you to yourself. Your pedigree is written all over you. Shrewd chose to acknowledge it, for all his denials wouldn’t have sufficed to convince anyone otherwise.’ He paused for an instant, and smiled as if something amused him. ‘A shame Galen refuses to teach you the Skill; but years ago, it was restricted, for fear it would become too common a tool. I’ll wager if old Galen were to try to teach you, he’d find you apt. But we have no time to worry about what won’t happen.’ He sighed meditatively, and was silent for a moment. Abruptly he went on, ‘Burrich’s shown you how to work, and how to obey. Two things that Burrich himself excels at. You’re not especially strong, or fast, or bright. Don’t think you are. But you’ll have the stubbornness to wear down anyone stronger, or faster or brighter than yourself. And that’s more of a danger to you than to anyone else. But that is not what is now most important about you.

‘You are the King’s man now. And you must begin to understand, now, right now, that that is the most important thing about you. He feeds you, he clothes you, he sees you are educated. And all he asks in return, for now, is your loyalty. Later he will ask your service. Those are the conditions under which I will teach you. That you are the King’s man, and loyal to him completely. For if you are otherwise, it would be too dangerous to educate you in my art.’ He paused and for a long moment we simply looked at one another. ‘Do you agree?’ he asked, and it was not a simple question but the sealing of a bargain.

‘I do,’ I said, and then, as he waited, ‘I give you my word.’

‘Good.’ He spoke the word heartily. ‘Now. On to other things. Have you ever seen me before?’

‘No.’ I realized for an instant how strange that was. For, though there were often strangers in the keep, this man had obviously been a resident for a long, long time. And almost all those who lived there I knew by sight if not by name.

‘Do you know who I am, boy? Or why you’re here?’

I shook my head a quick negative to each question. ‘Well, no one else does either. So you mind it stays that way. Make yourself clear on that: you speak to no one of what we do here, nor of anything you learn. Understand that?’

My nod must have satisfied him, for he seemed to relax in the chair. His bony hands gripped the knobs of his knees through his woollen robe. ‘Good. Good. Now. You can call me Chade. And I shall call you?’ He paused and waited, but when I did not offer a name, he filled in, ‘Boy. Those are not names for either of us, but they’ll do, for the time we’ll have together. So. I’m Chade, and I’m yet another teacher that Shrewd has found for you. It took him a while to remember I was here, and then it took him a space to nerve himself to ask me. And it took me even longer to agree to teach you. But all that’s done now. As to what I’m to teach you … well.’

He rose and moved to the fire. He cocked his head as he stared into it, then stooped to take a poker and stir the embers to fresh flames. ‘It’s murder, more or less. Killing people. The fine art of diplomatic assassination. Or blinding, or deafening. Or a weakening of the limbs, or a paralysis or a debilitating cough or impotency. Or early senility, or insanity or … but it doesn’t matter. It’s all been my trade. And it will be yours, if you agree. Just know, from the beginning, that I’m going to be teaching you how to kill people. For your king. Not in the showy way Hod is teaching you, not on the battlefield where others see and cheer you on. No. I’ll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people. You’ll either develop a taste for it, or not. That isn’t something I’m in charge of. But I’ll make sure you know how. And I’ll make sure of one other thing, for that was the stipulation I made with King Shrewd: that you know what you are learning, as I never did when I was your age. So. I’m to teach you to be an assassin. Is that all right with you, boy?’

I nodded again, uncertain, but not knowing what else to do.

He peered at me. ‘You can speak, can’t you? You’re not a mute as well as a bastard, are you?’

I swallowed. ‘No, sir. I can speak.’

‘Well, then, do speak. Don’t just nod. Tell me what you think of all this. Of who I am and what I just proposed that we do.’

Invited to speak, I yet stood dumb. I stared at the poxed face, the papery skin of his hands, and felt the gleam of his green eyes on me. I moved my tongue inside my mouth, but found only silence. His manner invited words, but his visage was still more terrifying than anything I had ever imagined.

‘Boy,’ he said, and the gentleness in his voice startled me into meeting his eyes. ‘I can teach you even if you hate me, or if you despise the lessons. I can teach you if you are bored, or lazy or stupid. But I can’t teach you if you’re afraid to speak to me. At least, not the way I want to teach you. And I can’t teach you if you decide this is something you’d rather not learn. But you have to tell me. You’ve learned to guard your thoughts so well, you’re almost afraid to let yourself know what they are. But try speaking them aloud, now, to me. You won’t be punished.’

‘I don’t much like it,’ I blurted suddenly. ‘The idea of killing people.’

‘Ah.’ He paused. ‘Neither did I, when it came down to it. Nor do I, still.’ He sighed suddenly, deeply. ‘As each time comes, you’ll decide. The first time will be hardest. But know, for now, that that decision is many years away. And in the meantime, you have much to learn.’ He hesitated. ‘There is this, boy – and you should remember it in every situation, not just this one – learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn’t wrong. Or right. It’s just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That’s all. For now, do you think you could learn how to do it, and later decide if you wanted to do it?’

Such a question to put to a boy. Even then, something in me raised its hackles and sniffed at the idea, but child that I was, I could find no objection to raise. And curiosity was nibbling at me.

‘I can learn it.’

‘Good.’ He smiled, but there was a tiredness to his face and he didn’t seem as pleased as he might have. ‘That’s well enough, then. Well enough.’ He looked around the room. ‘We may as well begin tonight. Let’s start by tidying up. There’s a broom over there. Oh, but first, change out of your nightshirt into something … ah, there’s a ragged old robe over there. That’ll do for now. Can’t have the washerfolk wondering why your nightshirts smell of camphor and pain’s ease, can we? Now, you sweep up the floor a bit while I put away a few things.’

And so passed the next few hours. I swept, then mopped the stone floor. He directed me as I cleared the paraphernalia from the great table. I turned the herbs on their drying rack. I fed the three lizards he had caged in the corner, chopping up some sticky old meat into chunks that they gulped whole. I wiped clean a number of pots and bowls and stored them. And he worked alongside me, seeming grateful for the company, and chatted to me as if we were both old men. Or both young boys.

‘No letters as yet? No ciphering. Bagrash! What’s the old man thinking? Well, I shall see that remedied swiftly. You’ve your father’s brow, boy, and just his way of wrinkling it. Has anyone ever told you that before? Ah, there you are, Slink, you rascal! What mischief have you been up to now?’

A brown weasel appeared from behind a tapestry, and we were introduced to one another. Chade let me feed Slink quails’ eggs from a bowl on the table, and laughed when the little beast followed me about begging for more. He gave me a copper bracelet that I found under the table, warning that it might make my wrist green, and cautioning that if anyone asked me about it, I should say I had found it behind the stables.

At some time we stopped for honey cakes and hot, spiced wine. We sat together at a low table on some rugs before the fireplace, and I watched the firelight dancing over his scarred face and wondered why it had seemed so frightening. He noticed me watching him, and his face contorted in a smile. ‘Seems familiar, doesn’t it, boy? My face, I mean.’

It didn’t. I had been staring at the grotesque scars on the pasty white skin. I had no idea what he meant. I stared at him questioningly, trying to figure it out.

‘Don’t trouble yourself about it, boy. It leaves its tracks on all of us, and sooner or later, you’ll get the tumble of it. But now, well …’ He rose, stretching so that his cassock bared his skinny white calves. ‘Now it’s mostly later. Or earlier, depending on which end of the day you fancy most. Time you headed back to your bed. Now. You’ll remember that this is all a very dark secret, won’t you? Not just me and this room, but the whole thing, waking up at night and lessons in how to kill people, and all of it.’

‘I’ll remember,’ I told him, and then, sensing that it would mean something to him, I added, ‘You have my word.’

He chuckled, and then nodded almost sadly. I changed back into my nightshirt, and he saw me down the steps. He held his glowing light by my bed as I clambered in, and then smoothed the blankets over me as no one had done since I’d left Burrich’s chambers. I think I was asleep before he had even departed my bedside.

Brant was sent to wake me the next morning, so late was I in arising. I came awake groggy, my head pounding painfully. But as soon as he left the room, I sprang from my bed and raced to the corner of my room. Cold stone met my hands as I pushed against the wall there, and no crack in mortar or stone gave any sign of the secret door I felt sure must be there. Never for one instant did I think Chade had been a dream, and even if I had, there remained the simple copper bracelet on my wrist to prove he wasn’t.

I dressed hurriedly and passed through the kitchens for a slab of bread and cheese that I was still eating when I got to the stables. Burrich was out of sorts with my tardiness, and found fault with every aspect of my horsemanship and stable tasks. I remember well how he berated me: ‘Don’t think that because you’ve a room up in the castle, and a crest on your jerkin, you can turn into some sprawlabout rogue who snores in his bed until all hours and then only rises to fluff at his hair. I’ll not have it. Bastard you may be, but you’re Chivalry’s bastard, and I’ll make you a man he’ll be proud of.’

I paused, the grooming brushes still in my hands. ‘You mean Regal, don’t you?’

My unwonted question startled him. ‘What?’

‘When you talk about rogues who stay in bed all morning and do nothing except fuss about hair and garments, you mean how Regal is.’

Burrich opened his mouth and then shut it. His wind-reddened cheeks grew redder. ‘Neither you nor I,’ he muttered at last, ‘are in a position to criticize any of the princes. I meant only as a general rule, that sleeping the morning away ill befits a man, and even less so a boy.’

‘And never a prince.’ I said this, and then stopped, to wonder where the thought had come from.

‘And never a prince,’ Burrich agreed grimly. He was busy in the next stall with a gelding’s hot leg. The animal winced suddenly, and I heard Burrich grunt with the effort of holding him. ‘Your father never slept past the sun’s midpoint because he’d been drinking the night before. Of course, he had a head for wine such as I’ve never seen since, but there was discipline to it, too. Nor did he have some man standing by to rouse him. He got himself out of bed, and then expected those in his command to follow his example. It didn’t always make him popular, but his soldiers respected him. Men like that in a leader, that he demands of himself the same thing he expects of them. And I’ll tell you another thing: your father didn’t waste coin on decking himself out like a peacock. When he was a younger man, before he was wed to Lady Patience, he was at dinner one evening, at one of the lesser keeps. They’d seated me not too far below him, a great honour to me, and I overheard some of his conversation with the daughter they’d seated so hopefully next to the King-in-Waiting. She’d asked him what he thought of the emeralds she wore, and he had complimented her on them. “I had wondered, sir, if you enjoyed jewels, for you wear none of them yourself tonight,” she said flirtatiously. And he replied, quite seriously, that his jewels shone as brilliantly as hers, and much larger. “Oh, and where do you keep such gems, for I should dearly like to see them?” Well, he replied he’d be happy to show them to her later that evening, when it was darker. I saw her blush, expecting a tryst of some kind. And later he did invite her out onto the battlements with him, but he took with them half the dinner guests as well. And he pointed out the lights of the coast-watch towers, shining clearly in the dark, and told her that he considered those his best and dearest jewels, and that he spent the coin from her father’s taxes to keep them shining so. And then he pointed out to the guests the winking lights of that lord’s own watchmen in the fortifications of his keep, and told them that when they looked at their Duke, they should see those shining lights as the jewels on his brow. It was quite a compliment to the Duke and Duchess, and the other nobles there took note of it. The Outislanders had very few successful raids that summer. That was how Chivalry ruled. By example, and by the grace of his words. So should any real prince do.’

‘I’m not a real prince. I’m a bastard.’ It came oddly from my mouth, that word I heard so often and so seldom said.

Burrich sighed softly. ‘Be your blood, boy, and ignore what anyone else thinks of you.’

‘Sometimes I get tired of doing the hard things.’

‘So do I.’

I absorbed this in silence for a while as I worked my way down Sooty’s shoulder. Burrich, still kneeling by the grey, spoke suddenly. ‘I don’t ask any more of you than I ask of myself. You know that’s true.’

‘I know that,’ I replied, surprised that he’d mentioned it further.

‘I just want to do my best by you.’

This was a whole new idea to me. After a moment I asked, ‘Because if you could make Chivalry proud of me, of what you’d made me into, then maybe he would come back?’

The rhythmic sound of Burrich’s hands working liniment into the gelding’s leg slowed, then ceased abruptly. But he remained crouched down by the horse, and spoke quietly through the wall of the stall. ‘No. I don’t think that. I don’t suppose anything would make him come back. And even if he did,’ and Burrich spoke more slowly, ‘even if he did, he wouldn’t be who he was. Before, I mean.’

‘It’s all my fault he went away, isn’t it?’ The words of the weaving-women echoed in my head. But for the boy, he’d still be in line to be king.

Burrich paused long. ‘I don’t suppose it’s any man’s fault that he’s born …’ He sighed, and the words seemed to come more reluctantly. ‘And there’s certainly no way a babe can make itself not a bastard. No. Chivalry brought his downfall on himself, though that’s a hard thing for me to say.’ I heard his hands go back to work on the gelding’s leg.

‘And your downfall, too.’ I said it to Sooty’s shoulder, softly, never dreaming he’d hear.

But a moment or two later, I heard him mutter, ‘I do well enough for myself, Fitz. I do well enough.’

He finished his task and came around into Sooty’s stall. ‘Your tongue’s wagging like the town gossip today, Fitz. What’s got into you?’

It was my turn to pause and wonder. Something about Chade, I decided. Something about someone who wanted me to understand and have a say in what I was learning had freed up my tongue finally to ask all the questions I’d been carrying about for years. But because I couldn’t very well say so, I shrugged, and truthfully replied, ‘They’re just things I’ve wondered about for a long time.’

Burrich grunted his acceptance of the answer. ‘Well. It’s an improvement that you ask, though I won’t always promise you an answer. It’s good to hear you speak like a man. Makes me worry less about losing you to the beasts.’ He glared at me over the last words, and then gimped away. I watched him go, and remembered that first night I had seen him, and how a look from him had been enough to quell a whole room full of men. He wasn’t the same man. And it wasn’t just the limp that had changed the way he carried himself and how men looked at him. He was still the acknowledged master in the stables and no one questioned his authority there. But he was no longer the right hand of the King-in-Waiting. Other than watching over me, he wasn’t Chivalry’s man at all any more. No wonder he couldn’t look at me without resentment. He hadn’t sired the bastard that had been his downfall. For the first time since I had known him, my wariness of him was tinged with pity.