The blood running down his chin had been shockingly red against his pasty face.
‘Go round, go round!’ one of the girls was shrieking, and yelping like hounds, the other children turned and poured back out of the garden. I heard the harsh clang of the gate as they flung it closed behind them, and the wild pattering of their feet on the path. They were laughing wildly as they ran. A moment later, I heard a shrill and desperate scream.
I awoke. I was breathing as harshly as if I’d just fought a bout. My nightshirt was sweated to my chest and twisted about me. Disoriented, I sat up and fought free of the blanket.
‘Fitz!’ Molly rebuked me as she flung a sheltering arm over our child. ‘What are you thinking?’
Abruptly I was myself again, a grown man, not a horrified child. I crouched in our bed, next to Molly, next to our tiny baby that I might have crushed in my thrashing. ‘Did I hurt her?’ I cried out in horror, and in response the baby began a thin wailing.
Molly reached across and seized my wrist. ‘Fitz. It’s all right. You just woke her, that’s all. Lie down. It was just a dream.’
After all our years together she was familiar with my nightmares. She knew, to my chagrin, that it could be hazardous to wake me from one. Now I felt shamed as a whipped dog. Did she think me a danger to our child? ‘I think I’d best sleep somewhere else,’ I offered.
Molly did not let go of my wrist. She rolled onto her side, snugging the baby closer to her. In response, the infant gave a small hiccup and immediately began to root for a nipple. ‘You will sleep right here beside us,’ Molly declared. Before I could say anything else, she laughed softly and said, ‘She thinks she’s hungry again.’ She released her grip on me to free her breast for the child. I lay very still as she arranged herself and then listened to the small, contented sounds of a young creature filling her belly. They both smelled so good, the baby with her infant smell and Molly’s femaleness. I suddenly felt large and brutal and male, an intruder in the safety and peace of domesticity.
I began to ease away from them. ‘I should—’
‘You should stay right where you are.’ She caught my wrist again, and tugged on it, pulling me nearer to both of them. She was not content until I was close enough that she could reach up and run her fingers through my hair. Her touch was light, lulling, as she lifted the sweaty curls from my brow. I closed my eyes to her touch, and after a few moments, my awareness drifted.
The dream that had faded into obscurity when I awoke painted itself into my mind again. I had to force myself to breathe gently and slowly despite how my chest constricted. A dream, I told myself. Not a memory. I had never hidden and watched as the other children of the keep tormented the Fool. Never.
But I might have, my conscience insisted. If I had been in such a place and time, I might have. Any child would. As one does at such an hour and after such a dream, I sieved my memories for connections, trying to discover why such an unsettling dream had invaded my sleep. There were none.
None except the memories of how the children of the keep had spoken of King Shrewd’s pale jester. The Fool was there, in my childhood memories, as far back as the first day I had arrived at Buckkeep. He had been there before I was, and if he were to be believed, he had been waiting for me, all that time. Yet it had been years before our encounters in Buckkeep Castle had progressed beyond a rude gesture from him in the hallway or unflattering imitations of me as he followed me down a corridor. I had avoided him as assiduously as the other children had. I had not, I thought as I granted myself an exemption from guilt, treated him with cruelty. I had never mocked him or even expressed abhorrence of him in any way. No. I had merely avoided him. I had believed him a nimble, silly fellow, a tumbler who delighted the king with his antics, but was, for all that, rather simple-minded. If anything, I had pitied him, I told myself. Because he was so different.
Just as my daughter would be so different from all her playmates.
Not all children in Buck were dark-eyed and dark-haired and warm-skinned, but the preponderance of playmates she would find would be so. And if she did not grow quickly to match them in size, if she remained tiny and pale, what then? What sort of a childhood would she have?
Cold began in my belly and radiated up to my heart. I moved even closer to Molly and my child. They both slept now, but I did not. Vigilant as a watching wolf, I put my arm lightly across both of them. I would protect her, I promised myself and Molly. No one would mock her or torment her in any way. Even if I had to keep her secret from the entire outside world, I would keep her safe.
Once upon a time there was a good man and his wife. They had both worked hard all their lives, and slowly fortune had favoured them with everything that they could desire save one. They had no child.
One day as the wife was walking in her garden and weeping that she had no child, a pecksie came out of the lavender bush and said to her, ‘Woman, why do you weep?’
‘I weep that I have no babe of my own,’ the woman said.
‘Oh, as to that, how foolish you are,’ said the pecksie. ‘If you but say the word, I can tell you how a babe can be in your arms before the year is out.’
‘Tell me then!’ the woman implored.
The pecksie smiled. ‘As to that, it is easily done. Tonight, just as the sun kisses the horizon, set out on the ground a square of silk, taking care that it rests flat on the ground with never a wrinkle in it. And tomorrow, whatever is under the silk is yours.’
The woman hastened to do as she was bid. As the sun touched the horizon, she set the silk flat to the ground, with never a wrinkle. But as the garden darkened and she hurried back to her house, a curious mouse came to the silk, sniffed it, and scampered across it, leaving a tiny wrinkle at the edge.
In the earliest light of dawn, the woman hastened to the garden. She heard small sounds and saw the silk moving. And when she lifted the square of silk, she found a perfect child with bright black eyes. But the babe was no bigger than the palm on her hand …
Old Buckkeep Tale
Ten days after our baby’s birth, I finally resolved that I must make confession to Molly. I dreaded it, but there was no avoiding it, and delaying it any longer was not going to make it easier.
Since both Nettle and I had doubted Molly’s pregnancy, we had not shared the news with anyone outside our immediate family. Nettle had informed her brothers, but only in the context that their mother was ageing and her mind had begun to wander. The lads all had busy lives of their own, and in Chivalry’s case, that meant three youngsters as well as a wife and a holding to tend to. They were far too caught up in their own lives and wives and children to give more than a passing worry that their mother might be losing her mind. Nettle and Tom, they were sure, would handle any crisis in that area, and in any case, what could any of them do about their mother’s increasing senility? It is the way of the young to accept the debilitations of old age very gracefully on behalf of their elderly parents. And now there was a baby to explain to them. And not just to them, but to the whole rest of the world.
I
