Assassin 3 - Royal Assassin (15 page)

So. What should I do? I heard myself
ask.

He set down his work, drank off his brandy, and
then refilled his cup. He looked about his room. You ask me, of
course, because you have noted my rare success at providing myself
with a fond wife and many children?

The bitterness in his voice shocked me, but
before I could react to it, he gave a choked laugh. Forget I said
that. Ultimately, the decision was mine, and done a long time ago.
FitzChivalry, what do you think you should be doing?

I stared at him morosely.

What made things go wrong in the first place?
When I did not reply, he asked me, Did not you yourself just tell
me that you courted her as a boy, when she considered your offer a
man's? She was looking for a man. So don't go sulking about like a
thwarted child. Be a man. He drank down half his brandy, then
refilled both our cups.

How? I demanded.

The same way you've shown yourself a man
elsewhere. Accept the discipline, live up to the task. So you
cannot see her. If I know anything of women, it does not mean she
does not see you. Keep that in mind. Look at yourself. Your hair
looks like a pony's winter coat, I'll wager you've worn that shirt
a week straight, and you're thin as a winter foal. I doubt you'll
regain her respect that way. Feed yourself up, groom yourself
daily, and in Eda's name, get some exercise instead of moping about
the guardroom. Set yourself some tasks and get onto
them.

I nodded slowly to the advice. I knew he was
right. But I could not help protesting, But all of that will do me
no good if Patience will still not permit me to see
Molly.

In the long run, my boy, it is not about you and
Patience. It is about you and Molly.

And King Shrewd, I said wryly.

He glanced up at me quizzically.

According to Patience, a man cannot be sworn to
a King and give his heart fully to a woman as well. `You cannot put
two saddles on one horse,' she told me. This from a woman who
married a King-in-Waiting, and was content with whatever time he
had for her. I reached to hand Burrich the mended
halter.

He did not take it. He had been in the act of
lifting his brandy cup. He set it down on the table so sharply that
the liquid leaped and slopped over the edge. She said that to you?
he asked me hoarsely. His eyes bored into mine.

I nodded slowly. She said it would not be
honorable to expect Molly to be content with whatever time the King
left to me as my own.

Burrich leaned back in his chair. A chain of
conflicting emotions dragged across his features. He looked aside
into the hearth fire, and then back at me. For a moment he seemed
on the verge of speaking. Then he sat up, drank off his brandy in
one gulp, and abruptly stood. It's too quiet up here. Let's go down
to Buckkeep Town, shall we?

The next day I arose and ignored my pounding
head to set myself the task of not behaving like a lovesick boy. A
boy's impetuosity and carelessness were what had lost her to me. I
resolved to attempt a man's restraint. If biding my time was my
only path to her, I would take Burrich's advice and use that time
well.

So I arose each day early, before even the
morning cooks were up. In the privacy of my room, I stretched and
then worked through sparring drills with an old stave. I would work
myself into sweat and dizziness, and then go down to the baths to
steam myself. Slowly, very slowly, my stamina began to return. I
gained weight and began to rebuild the muscle on my bones. The new
clothing that Mistress Hasty had inflicted on me began to fit. I
was still not free of the tremors that sometimes assailed me. But I
had fewer seizures, and always managed to return to my rooms before
I could shame myself by falling. Patience told me that my color was
better, while Lacey delighted in feeding me at every opportunity. I
began to feel myself again.

I ate with the guards each morning, where
quantity consumed was always of more importance than manners.
Breakfast was followed with a trip to the stables, to take Sooty
out for a snowy canter to keep her in condition. When I returned
her to the stables, there was a homey comfort in taking care of her
myself. Before our misadventures in the Mountain Kingdom, Burrich
and I had been on bad terms over my use of the Wit. I had been all
but barred from the stables. So there was more than satisfaction in
rubbing her down and seeing to her grain myself. There was the
busyness of the stables, the warm smells of the beasts, and the
gossip of the Keep as only the stable hands could tell it. On
fortunate days, Hands or Burrich would take time to stop and talk
with me. And on other days, busy days, there was the bittersweet
satisfaction of seeing them conferring over a stallion's cough, or
doctoring the ailing boar that some farmer had brought up to the
Keep. On those days they had little time for pleasantries and,
without intending it, excluded me from their circle. It was as it
had to be. I had moved on to another life. I could not expect the
old one to be held ajar for me forever.

That thought did not prevent a pang of guilt as
I slipped away each day to the disused cottage behind the
granaries. Wariness always stalked me. My new peace with Burrich
had not existed so long that I took it for granted; it was only too
fresh in my memory exactly how painful losing his friendship had
been. If Burrich ever suspected that I had returned to using the
Wit, he would abandon me just as swiftly and completely as he had
before. Each day I asked myself exactly why I was willing to gamble
his friendship and respect for the sake of a wolf cub.

My only answer was, I had no choice. I could no
more have turned aside from Cub than I could have walked away from
a starved and caged child. To Burrich, the Wit that sometimes left
me open to the minds of animals was a perversion, a disgusting
weakness that no true man indulged. He had all but admitted to the
latent ability for it, but staunchly insisted that he never used it
himself. If he did, I had never caught him at it. The opposite was
never true. With uncanny perception, he had always known when I was
drawn to an animal. As a boy, my indulgence in the Wit with a beast
had usually led to a rap on the head or a sound cuff to rouse me
back to my duties. When I had lived with Burrich in the stables, he
had done everything in his power to keep me from bonding to any
animal. He had succeeded always, save twice. The keen pain of
losing my bond companions had convinced me Burrich was right. Only
a fool would indulge in something that inevitably led to such loss.
So I was a fool, rather than a man who could turn aside from the
plea of a beaten and starved cub.

I pilfered bones and meat scraps and crusts, and
did my best that no one, not even Cook or the Fool, knew of my
activity. I took elaborate pains to vary the times of my visits
each day, and to take every day a different path to avoid creating
too beaten a trail to the back cottage. Hardest had been smuggling
clean straw and an old horse blanket out of the stables. But I had
managed it.

No matter when I arrived, I found Cub waiting
for me. It was not just the watchfulness of an animal awaiting
food. He sensed when I began my daily hike to the back cottage
behind all the granaries and awaited me. He knew when I had ginger
cakes in my pocket, and too quickly became fond of them. Not that
his suspicions of me had vanished. No. I felt his wariness, and how
he shrank in on himself each time I stepped within reach of him.
But every day that I did not strike him, every bit of food I
brought him was one more plank of trust in the bridge between us.
It was a link I did not want to establish. I tried to be sternly
aloof from him, to know him through the Wit as little as possible.
I feared he might lose the wildness that he would need to survive
on his own. Over and over I warned him, You must keep yourself
hidden. Every man is a danger to you, as is every hound. You must
keep yourself within this structure, and make no sound if anyone is
near.

At first it was easy for him to obey. He was
sadly thin, and would fall immediately upon the food I brought and
devour it all. Usually he was asleep in his bedding before I left
the cottage, or jealously eyeing me as he lay gnawing a treasured
bone. But as he was fed adequately, and had room to move, and lost
his fear of me, the innate playfulness of a cub began to reassert
itself. He took to springing upon me in mock attacks as soon as the
door was opened, and expressing delight in knuckly beef bones with
snarls and tusslings inflicted on them. When I rebuked him for
being too noisy, or for the tracks that betrayed his night romp in
the snowy field behind the cottage, he would cower before my
displeasure.

But I noted as well the masked savagery in his
eyes at those times. He did not concede mastery to me. Only a sort
of pack seniority. He bided his time until his decisions should be
his own. Painful as it was sometimes, it was as it needed to be. I
had rescued him with the firm intent of returning him to freedom. A
year from now, he would be but one more wolf howling in the
distance at night. I told him this repeatedly. At first, he would
demand to know when he would be taken from the smelly Keep and the
confining stone walls that fenced it. I would promise him soon, as
soon as he was fed to strength again, as soon as the deepest snows
of winter were past and he could fend for himself. But as weeks
passed, and the storms outside reminded him of the snugness of his
bed and the good meat filled out on his bones, he asked less often.
Sometimes I forgot to remind him.

Loneliness ate at me from inside and out. At
night I would wonder what would happen if I crept upstairs and
knocked at Molly's door. By day I held myself back from bonding to
the small cub who depended so completely on me. There was only one
other creature in the Keep who was as lonely as I was.

I am sure you have other duties. Why do you come
to call on me each day? Kettricken asked me in the forthright
Mountain way. It was midmorning, on a day following a night of
storm. Snow was falling in fat flakes, and despite the chill,
Kettricken had ordered the window shutters opened so she might
watch it. Her sewing chamber overlooked the sea, and I thought she
was fascinated by the immense and restless waters. Her eyes were
much the same color as the water that day.

I had thought to help time pass more pleasantly
for you, my queen-in-waiting.

Passing time. She sighed. She cupped her chin in
her hand and leaned on her elbow to stare pensively out at the
falling snow. The sea wind tangled in her pale hair. It is an odd
language, yours. You speak of passing time as in the Mountains we
speak of passing wind. As if it were a thing to be gotten rid
of.

Her little maid Rosemary, seated at her feet,
giggled into her hands. Behind us, her two ladies tittered
apprehensively, then bent their heads industriously over their
needlework again. Kettricken herself had a large embroidery frame
set up, with the beginning of mountains and a waterfall in it. I
had not noticed her making much progress on it. Her other ladies
had not presented themselves today, but had sent pages with excuses
as to why they could not attend her. Headaches, mostly. She did not
seem to understand that she was being slighted by their
inattention. I did not know how to explain it to her, and on some
days I wondered if I should. Today was one of those
days.

I shifted in my chair and crossed my legs the
other way. I meant only that in winter, Buckkeep can become a
tedious place. The weather keeps us within doors so much; there is
little that is amusing.

That is not the case down at the shipwrights'
sheds, she informed me. Her eyes got a strangely hungry look. There
it is all a bustle, with every bit of daylight used in the setting
of the great timbers and the bending of the planks. Even when the
day is dim or wild with storm, within the sheds shipbuilders are
still hewing and shaping and planing wood. At the metal forges,
they make chains and anchors. Some weave stout canvas for sails,
and others cut and sew it. Verity walks about there, overseeing it
all. While I sit here with fancywork, and prick my fingers and
strain my eyes to knot in flowers and birds' eyes. So that when I
am finished, it can be set aside with a dozen other pretty
works.

Oh, not set aside, no, never, my lady, one of
her women burst in impulsively. Why, your needlework is much
treasured when you gift it out. In Shoaks there is a framed bit in
Lord Shemshy's private chambers, and Duke Kelvar of
Rippon-

Kettricken's sigh cut short the woman's
compliment. I would I worked at a sail instead, with a great iron
needle or a wooden fid, to grace one of my husband's ships. There
would be a work that was worthy of my time, and his respect.
Instead, I am given toys to amuse me, as if I were a spoiled child
that did not understand the value of time well spent. She turned
back to her window. I noticed then that the smoke rising from the
shipyards was as easily visible as the sea. Perhaps I had mistaken
the direction of her attention.

Shall I send for tea and cakes, my lady? one of
her ladies inquired hopefully. Both of them sat with their shawls
pulled up over their shoulders. Kettricken did not appear to notice
the chill sea air spilling in the open window, but it could not
have been pleasant for those two to sit and ply their needles in
it.