quest toward her, but I encountered only a numbness frightening to touch minds with. She grieved with her master.
The winter storms cut and snarled around the cliffs. The days possessed a lifeless cold that denied any possibility of spring. Chivalry was buried at Withywoods. There was a Grieving Fast at the keep, but it was brief and subdued. It was more an observation of correct form than a true Grieving. Those who truly mourned him seemed to be judged guilty of poor taste. His public life should have ended with his abdication; how tactless of him to draw further attention to himself by actually dying.
A full week after my father died I awoke to the familiar draught from the secret staircase and the yellow light that beckoned me. I rose and hastened up the stairs to my refuge. It would be good to get away from all the strangeness, to mingle herbs and make strange smokes with Chade again. I needed no more of the odd suspension of self that I’d felt since I’d heard of Chivalry’s death.
But the worktable end of his chamber was dark, its hearth was cold. Instead, Chade was seated before his own fire. He beckoned to me to sit beside his chair. I sat and looked up at him, but he was staring at the fire. He lifted his scarred hand and let it come to rest on my quillish hair. For a while we just sat like that, watching the fire together.
‘Well, here we are, my boy,’ he said at last, and then nothing more, as if he had said all he needed to. He ruffled my short hair.
‘Burrich cut my hair,’ I told him suddenly.
‘So I see.’
‘I hate it. It prickles against my pillow and I can’t sleep. My hood won’t stay up. And I look stupid.’
‘You look like a boy mourning his father.’
I was silent a moment. I had thought of my hair as being a longer version of Burrich’s extreme cut. But Chade was right. It was the length for a boy mourning his father, not a subject mourning a king. That only made me angrier.
‘But why should I mourn him?’ I asked Chade as I hadn’t dared to ask Burrich. ‘I didn’t even know him.’
‘He was your father.’
‘He got me on some woman. When he found out about me, he left. A father. He never cared about me.’ I felt defiant finally saying it out loud. It made me furious, Burrich’s deep wild mourning and now Chade’s quiet sorrow.
‘You don’t know that. You only hear what the gossips say. You aren’t old enough to understand some things. You’ve never seen a wild bird lure predators away from its young by pretending to be injured.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ I said, but I suddenly felt less confident saying it. ‘He never did anything to make me think he cared about me.’
Chade turned to look at me and his eyes were older, sunken and red. ‘If you had known he’d cared, so would others. When you are a man, maybe you’ll understand just how much that cost him. To not know you in order to keep you safe. To make his enemies ignore you.’
‘Well, I’ll “not know” him to the end of my days, now,’ I said sulkily.
Chade sighed. ‘And the end of your days will come a great deal later than they would have had he acknowledged you as an heir.’ He paused, then asked cautiously, ‘What do you want to know about him, my boy?’
‘Everything. But how would you know?’ The more tolerant Chade was, the more surly I felt.
‘I’ve known him all his life. I’ve … worked with him. Many times. Hand in glove, as the saying goes.’
‘Were you the hand or the glove?’
No matter how rude I was, Chade refused to get angry. ‘The hand,’ he said after a brief consideration. ‘The hand that moves unseen, cloaked by the velvet glove of diplomacy.’
‘What do you mean?’ Despite myself, I was intrigued.
‘Things can be done.’ Chade cleared his throat. ‘Things can happen that make diplomacy easier. Or that make a party more willing to negotiate. Things can happen …’
My world turned over. Reality burst on me as suddenly as a vision, the fullness of what Chade was and what I was to be. ‘You mean one man can die, and his successor can be easier to negotiate with because of it. More amenable to our cause, because of fear or because of …’
‘Gratitude. Yes.’
A cold horror shook me as all the pieces suddenly fell into place. All the lessons and careful instructions and this is what they led to. I started to rise, but Chade’s hand suddenly gripped my shoulder.
‘Or a man can live, two years or five or a decade longer than any thought he could, and bring the wisdom and tolerance of age to the negotiations. Or a babe can be cured of a strangling cough, and the mother suddenly see with gratitude that what we offer can be beneficial to all involved. The hand doesn’t always deal death, my boy. Not always.’
‘Often enough.’
‘I never lied to you about that.’ I heard two things in Chade’s voice that I had never heard before. Defensiveness. And hurt. But youth is merciless.
‘I don’t think I want to learn any more from you. I think I’m going to go to Shrewd and tell him to find someone else to kill people for him.’
‘That is your decision to make. But I advise you against it, for now.’
His calmness caught me off-guard. ‘Why?’
‘Because it would negate all Chivalry tried to do for you. It would draw attention to you. And right now, that is not a good idea.’ His words came ponderously slow, freighted with truth.
‘Why?’ I found I was whispering.
‘Because some will be wanting to write finis to Chivalry’s story completely. And that would be best done by eliminating you. Those ones will be watching how you react to your father’s death. Does it give you ideas and make you restless? Will you become a problem now, the way he was?’
‘What?’
‘My boy,’ he said, and pulled me close against his side. For the first time I heard the possession in his words. ‘It is a time for you to be quiet and careful. I understand why Burrich cut your hair, but in truth I wish he had not. I wish no one had been reminded that Chivalry was your father. You are such a hatchling yet … but listen to me. For now, change nothing that you do. Wait six months, or a year. Then decide. But for now …’
‘How did my father die?’
Chade’s eyes searched my face. ‘Did you not hear that he fell from a horse?’
‘Yes. And I heard Burrich curse the man who told it, saying that Chivalry would not fall, nor would that horse throw him.’
‘Burrich needs to guard his tongue.’
‘Then how did my father die?’
‘I don’t know. But like Burrich, I do not believe he fell from a horse.’ Chade fell silent. I sank down to sit by his bony bare feet and stare into his fire.
‘Are
