affectionate man, often drawing her body close to his and boyishly stealing a kiss. Then she would gaily rebuke him for such unseemly public conduct, yet often enough manage to snatch a glance at me as she did so, as if to be sure I had noticed how passionately Lord Fisher still courted his wife. At times, it was all I could do to keep a stoic expression on my face. It was not that my heart or flesh burned for her. The pang that assaulted me at such a time was that she deliberately flaunted her happiness in a way calculated to remind me of how solitary a life I led. In the midst of the fine court with its merriment and elaborate entertainment, I stood, a silent servant, witness only to their pleasures.
In this way, the long dark of winter dawdled on. The constant whirl of activity took a toll on the young prince as well as myself. One early morning, we both arrived at the tower with absolutely no inclination for studies or tasks of any kind. The Prince had been up late the night before, gaming with Civil and the other young noblemen currently residing at the keep.
I had had the good sense to seek my own bed at a more reasonable hour, and had succeeded in several hours of deep sleep before Nettle had insinuated herself into my dreams. I was dreaming of catching river fish, sliding my hands into the water and abruptly flipping the lurking fish out onto the bank behind me. It was a good dream, a comforting dream. Unseen but felt, Nighteyes was with me. Then my groping fingers encountered a door handle under the chill water. I plunged my head under to look at it. As I stared at it through water-green light, it opened and pulled me in. Suddenly I stood, wet and dripping, in a small bedroom. I knew I was in the upper chambers of the house by the slanting ceiling. The house was silent around me, and only a guttering candle lighted the room. Wondering how I had arrived here, I turned back to the door. A girl stood there, her back pressed resolutely to the door, her arms spread wide to bar it from me. She wore a cotton nightdress and her dark hair hung in a single long braid over one shoulder. I stared at her in astonishment.
‘If you will not let me into your dreams, then I will trap you in mine,’ she observed triumphantly.
I stood very, very still and held my silence. On some level, I sensed that anything of myself I might give her, word or gesture or look, would only increase her hold on me. I took my gaze from her, for in recognizing her, I was entering into her dream more deeply. Instead, I forced my eyes down, to my own hands. With a curious elation, I realized they were not my own. She had trapped me here as she visualized me, not as I truly was. My fingers were short and stubby. The palms of my hands and the inside surface of my fingers were black and coarse as a wolf’s pads, and rough black hair coated the backs of my hands and my wrists.
‘This isn’t me.’ I spoke the words aloud, and they came out as a queer growl. I lifted my hands to my face, found a muzzle there.
‘Yes, it is!’ she asserted, but already I was fading, drifting out of the form she had thought would contain me. The trap was the wrong shape to hold me. She leapt towards me and seized me by one wrist, only to find she grasped an empty wolfskin.
‘I’ll catch you next time!’ she declared angrily.
‘No, Nettle. You won’t.’
My use of her name froze her. Even as she struggled to mouth the question, how did I know her name, I dissipated from her dream into my own wakefulness. I shifted on my hard bed, and briefly opened my eyes to the now-familiar blackness of my servant’s chamber. ‘No, Nettle. You won’t.’ I spoke the words aloud, reassuring myself that they were true. But I had not slept well the rest of the night.
And so the two of us, Dutiful and I, faced one another blearily over the table in the Skill-tower the next dawn. It was dawn in name only. The winter sky outside the tower window was black, and the candles on our table reached vainly towards the darkness in the corners of the room. I had kindled a fire in the hearth, but it had not yet taken the edge off the chill. ‘Is there anything so miserable as being sleepy and cold at the same time?’ I asked him rhetorically.
He sighed, and I had the feeling he had not even heard my question. The one he asked me sent a different sort of chill up my back. ‘Have you ever used the Skill to make someone forget something?’
‘I … no. No, I’ve never done anything like that.’ Then, dreading the answer, ‘Why do you ask?’
He heaved an even deeper sigh. ‘Because if it could be used that way, it could make my life much simpler right now. I fear that I … I said something last night, to someone, never intending that … I didn’t even mean it that way, but she …’ He faltered to a halt, looking miserable.
‘Start at the beginning,’ I suggested.
He took a deep breath, then puffed it out, exasperated with himself. ‘Civil and I were playing Stones and –’
‘Stones?’ I interrupted him.
He sighed again. ‘I made myself a game-cloth and playing pieces. I thought I could get better at it by playing against someone besides you.’
I strangled back an objection. Was there any reason why he should not introduce his friends to the game? None that I could think of. Yet it disgruntled me.
‘I had played a game or two with Civil, which he lost. As he should and did expect to, for no one plays a game well the first few times one is shown it. But he had declared he had had enough of it for now, that it was not the sort of game he relished, and he got up from the table and went over to the hearth to talk to someone else. Well, Lady Vance had been watching us play earlier in the evening, and had said she wanted to learn, but we were in the midst of the game then, so there had been no place for her. But she had been standing by our table, watching us play, and when Civil left, instead of following him as I thought she would, for she had seemed very attentive to him, she sat down in his place. I had been putting the cloth and pieces away, but she reached over and seized my hand and commanded that I should set the game out afresh, for now it was her turn.’
‘Lady Vance?’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t have met her. She’s, let me see, about seventeen and she’s quite nice. Her full name is Advantage, but she thinks it’s too long. She’s very friendly and tells funny stories and, well, I don’t know, she’s just more comfortable to be around than most girls. She doesn’t always seem to be, you know, so aware that she is a girl. She acts just like anybody else. Lord Shemshy of Shoaks is her uncle.’ He shrugged a shoulder, dismissing my concern over who she was. ‘Anyway, she wanted to play, and even when I warned her that she’d likely lose the first few games, she said she didn’t care, that in fact if I would play her five straight games, she’d wager she’d win at least two of them. One of her friends overheard that and came close to the table, and asked what the wager was on the bet. And Lady Vance said that if she won, she wanted me to go riding with her on the morrow – that’s today – and that if I won, well, I could name my own stakes. And the way she said it was, well, daring me to make her bet something that might be a bit, well, improper or …’
‘Like a kiss,’ I suggested, my heart sinking. ‘Or something of that sort.’
‘You know I wouldn’t go that far!’
‘So how far did you go?’ Did Chade know anything of this? Or Kettricken? How late last night had it happened? And how much wine had been involved?
‘I said if she lost, she had to bring breakfast for Civil and me to Mirror Hall and serve it to us herself, owning up that what had been said earlier was true, that Stones is not a game that a girl can master.’
‘What? Dutiful, this game was taught to me by a woman!’
‘Well
