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,
