little girl blamed by me for becoming what she was taught to be. A daily rebuke to me for my own neglect of her and my hardness of heart. If I had been all to her that a lady should be to her page, Regal could not have taken her heart from me.’
‘Unless he had it before she ever came to you.’
‘And even then, I should have known it. If I had not been so focused on my own life and problems.’
‘She was your page, not your daughter!’
She was silent for a time. ‘You forget, I was raised in the Mountains, to be Sacrifice to my people, Fitz. Not a queen, such as you expect. I demand more of myself.’
I stepped to the side of that argument. ‘So it was your decision to keep her.’
‘Chade said I must either keep her or be rid of her entirely. I was filled with horror at his words. Kill a child for doing what she had been taught? And then his words made me see all of it clearly. It would have been kinder to kill her outright than to torture and neglect her as I had been doing. So. That night I went to her chamber. Alone. She was terrified of me, and her room was cold and near bare, the bedding gone unwashed I don’t know how long. She had outgrown her nightgown; it was torn at the shoulders and far too short for her. She curled up on the bed as far from me as she could get and just stared at me. Then I asked her which she would prefer, to be fostered out to Lady Patience or to be my page again.’
‘And she chose to be your page.’
‘And she burst into tears and threw herself to the floor and clung to my skirts and said she had thought I didn’t like her any more. She sobbed so hard that before I could calm her, her hair was plastered flat to her skull with sweat and she was shaking all over. Fitz, I was ashamed to have been so cruel to a child, not by what I had done, but simply by ignoring her. Only Chade and I ever knew that we suspected her of trying to harm me. But my simple shunning of her had given the lesser folk of the keep permission to be cruel and callous to her. Her little slippers were all gone to tatters …’ Her voice trailed off, and despite myself, I felt a stab of pity for Rosemary. Kettricken took a deep breath and resumed her tale. ‘She begged to be allowed to serve me again. Fitz, she was not even seven years old when she did Regal’s bidding. She never hated me, or understood what she did. To her, I am sure it was a game, to listen in secret and repeat all that she heard.’
I tried to be pragmatic and hard. ‘And greasing the steps so you would fall?’
‘Would she be told the why of it, or simply told to put the grease on the steps after I had gone up to the roof garden? To a child, it might have been framed as a prank.’
‘Did you ask her?’
A pause. ‘Some things are best left alone. Even if she knew the intent was to make me fall, I do not think she realized the full import of it. I think perhaps that I was two people to her, the woman that Regal wanted to bring down, and Kettricken whom she served every day. The one who should be blamed for her conduct is dead. And ever since I took her back to my side, she has been nothing but a loyal and diligent subject to me.’ She sighed and stared past me as she went on, ‘The past must be left in the past, Fitz. This is especially true for those who rule. I must wed my son to a daughter of an Outislander. I must promote trade and alliance with the folk who doomed my king to death. Shall I quibble about taking a little spy under my wing and turning her into a lady of my court?’
I took a deep breath. If in fifteen years she had not regretted her decision, no words of mine would change it now. Nor should they, perhaps. ‘Well. I suppose I should have expected it. You did not quibble to take an assassin as your adviser when you came to court.’
‘As my first friend here,’ she corrected me gravely. She furrowed her forehead. When I had met her, she had not had those lines on her brow and between her eyes, but now use had set them there. ‘I am not happy with this charade we must keep. I would have you at my side to advise me, and to teach my son. I would have you honoured as my friend as well as a Farseer.’
‘It cannot be,’ I told her firmly. ‘And this is better. I am more use to you in this role, and less risk to you and the Prince.’
‘And more risk to yourself. Chade has told me that Piebalds threatened you, right upon our doorstep in Buckkeep Town.’
I discovered that I hadn’t wanted her to know that. ‘It is a thing best handled by me. Perhaps I can tease them out into the open.’
‘Well. Perhaps. But I am ashamed that you face such things seemingly alone. In truth, I hate that such bigotry still exists in the Six Duchies, and that our nobles turn a blind eye to it. I have done what I could for my Witted folk, but progress has been slow. When the Piebald postings first began to appear, they angered me. Chade urged me not to act in the heat of that anger. Now, I wonder if it would not have been wise to let my wrath be known. My second reaction was that I wished to let my Witted folk know that my justice was available to them. I wanted to send out a summons, inviting the leaders of the Witted to come to me, that together we might hammer out a shield for them against the cruelty of these Piebalds.’ She shook her head.
‘Again Chade intervened, telling me that the Witted had no recognized leaders, and that they would not trust the Farseers enough to come to such a meeting. We had no go-between that they would trust, and no sureties we could offer them that this was not a plan to lure them in and destroy them. He persuaded me to abandon the idea.’ Her words seemed to come more reluctantly as she added, ‘Chade is a good councillor, wise in politics and the ways of power. Yet I sometimes feel that he would steer us solely on the basis of what makes the Six Duchies most stable, with less thought for justice for all my people.’ Her fair brow wrinkled as she added, ‘He says that the greater the stability of the country, the more chance there is for justice to prosper. Perhaps he is right. But often and often I have longed for the way you and I used to discuss these things. There, too, I have missed you, FitzChivalry. I dislike that I cannot have you at my side when I wish it, but must send for you in secret. I wish that I could invite you to join Peottre and I for our game today, for I would value your opinion of him. He is a most intriguing man.’
‘Your game with Peottre today?’
‘I shared some talk with him last evening. In the course of discussing the chance that Dutiful and Elliania would be truly happy, other talk of ‘chance’ came up. And from there, we moved to games of chance. Do you recall a Mountain game played with cards and rune chips?’
I dredged through my memory. ‘I think you spoke of it to me once. And yes, I recall reading a scroll about it, when I was recovering from Regal’s first attempt on me.’
‘There are cards or tablets, either painted on heavy paper or carved on thin slabs of wood. They have emblems from our old tales, such as Old Weaver Man and Hunter in Hiding. The rune chips have runes on them, for Stone, Water and Pasture.’
‘Yes. I’m sure I’ve heard of it.’
‘Well, Peottre wants me to teach him to play it. He was very interested when I spoke of it. He says that in the Outislands they have a game played with rune cubes, where they are shaken and tumbled out. Then the players set out their markers onto a cloth or board that is painted with minor godlings, such as Wind and Smoke and Tree. It sounds as if it might be a similar game, does it not?’
‘Perhaps,’ I conceded. But her face had brightened at the prospect of teaching Peottre this new game in a way that was out of proportion to the pleasure I expected her to take in it. Did my queen find this bluff Outislander warrior attractive? ‘You must tell me more of this game later. I would like to hear if the runes on the
