Easy now.’ Burrich crossed swiftly to me, put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down in a chair. ‘You’re shaking as if you’re going into a seizure. Calm yourself.’
I could not speak.
‘This is what Chade and I could not puzzle out,’ Burrich told me. ‘Who had betrayed our plan? We thought of everyone. Even the Fool. For a time we feared we had sent Kettricken off in the care of a traitor.’
‘How could you think that? The Fool loved King Shrewd as no one else did.’
‘We could think of no one else who knew all our plans,’ Burrich said simply.
‘It was not the Fool who was our downfall. It was I.’ And that, I think, was the moment when I came fully back to myself. I had said the most unsayable thing, faced my most unfaceable truth. I had betrayed them all. ‘The Fool warned me. He said I would be the death of kings, if I did not learn to leave things alone. Chade warned me. He tried to make me promise I would set no more wheels in motion. But I would not. So my actions killed my king. If I had not been helping him to Skill, he would not have been so open to his killers. I opened him up, reaching for Verity. But those two leeches came in instead. The King’s assassin. Oh, in so many, many ways, Shrewd. I am so sorry, my king. So sorry. But for me, Regal would have had no reason to kill you.’
‘Fitz.’ Burrich’s voice was firm. ‘Regal never needed a reason to kill his father. He needed only to run out of reasons to keep him alive. And you had no control over that.’ A sudden frown creased his brow. ‘Why did they kill him, right then? Why did they not wait until they had the Queen as well?’
I smiled at him. ‘You saved her. Regal thought he had the Queen. They thought they’d stopped us when they kept you from getting horses out of the stables. Regal even bragged of it to me, when I was in my cell. That she’d had to leave with no horses. And with no warm winter things.’
Burrich grinned hard. ‘She and the Fool took what had been packed for Shrewd. And they left on two of the best horses ever to come out of Buckkeep’s stables. I’ll wager they got to the Mountains safely, boy. Sooty and Rud are probably grazing in Mountain pastures now.’
It was too thin a comfort. That night I went out and ran with the wolf, and Burrich made no rebuke to me. But we could not run far enough, nor fast enough, and the blood we shed that night was not the blood I wished to see run, nor could the hot fresh meat fill the void inside me.
So I remembered my life and who I had been. As the days passed, Burrich and I began to speak openly, as friends again. He gave over his dominance of me, but not without mockingly expressing his regrets for that. We recalled our old ways with one another, old ways of laughing together, old ways of disagreeing. But as things steadied between us and became normal, we were both reminded, all the more sharply, of all we no longer had.
There was not enough work in a day to busy Burrich. This was a man who had had full authority over all of Buckkeep’s stables and the horses, hounds and hawks that inhabited them. I watched him invent tasks to fill the hours, and knew how much he pined for the beasts he had overseen for so long. I missed the bustle and folk of court, but hungered most keenly for Molly. I invented conversations I would have had with her, gathered meadowsweet and daysedge flowers because they smelled like her, and lay down at night recalling the touch of her hand on my face. But these were not the things we spoke of. Instead, we put our pieces together to make a whole, of sorts. Burrich fished and I hunted, there were hides to scrape, shirts to wash and mend, water to haul. It was a life. He tried to speak to me, once, of how he had come to see me in the dungeon, to bring me the poison. His hands worked with small twitching motions as he spoke of how he had had to walk away, to leave me inside that cell. I could not let him go on. ‘Let’s go fishing,’ I suddenly proposed. He took a deep breath and nodded. We went fishing and spoke no more that day.
But I had been caged, and starved, and beaten to death. From time to time, when he looked at me, I knew he saw the scars. I shaved around the seam down my cheek, and watched the hair grow in white above my brow where my scalp had been split. We never spoke about it. I refused to think about it. But no man could have come through that unchanged.
I began to dream at night. Short vivid dreams, frozen moments of fire, searing pain, hopeless fear. I awoke, cold sweat sleeking my hair, queasy with fear. Nothing remained of those dreams when I sat up in darkness, not the tiniest thread by which I could unravel them. Only the pain, the fear, the anger, the frustration. But above all, the fear. The overwhelming fear that left me shaking and gulping for air, my eyes tearing, sour bile up the back of my throat.
The first time it happened, the first time I sat bolt upright with a wordless cry, Burrich rolled from his bed and put his hand on my shoulder, to ask if I was all right. I shoved him away from me so savagely he crashed into the table and nearly overset it. Fear and anger crested into an instant of fury when I would have killed him simply because he was where I could reach him. At that moment I rejected and despised myself so completely that I desired only to destroy everything that was me, or bordered on myself. I repelled savagely at the entire world, almost displacing my own consciousness. Brother, brother, brother, Nighteyes yelped desperately within me, and Burrich staggered back with an inarticulate cry. After a moment I could swallow and mutter to Burrich, ‘A nightmare, that was all. Sorry. I was still dreaming, just a nightmare.’
‘I understand,’ he said brusquely, and then, more thoughtfully, ‘I understand.’ He went back to his bed. But I knew what he understood was that he could not help me with this, and that was all.
The nightmares did not come every night, but often enough to leave me dreading my bed. Burrich pretended to sleep through them, but I was aware of him lying awake as I fought my night battles alone. I had no recollection of the dreams, only the wrenching terror they brought me. I had felt fear before. Often. Fear when I had fought Forged ones, fear when we had battled Red Ship warriors, fear when I had confronted Serene. Fear that warned, that spurred, that gave one the edge to stay alive. But the night fear was an unmanning terror, a hope that death would come and end it, because I was broken and knew I would give them anything rather than face more pain.
There is no answer to a fear like that or the shame that comes after it. I tried anger, I tried hatred. Neither tears nor brandy could drown it. It permeated me like an evil smell and coloured every remembrance I had, shading my perception of who I had been. No moment of joy, or passion, or courage that I could recall was ever quite what it had been, for my mind always traitorously added, ‘yes, you had that, for a time, but after came this, and this is what you are now’. That debilitating fear was a cowering presence inside me. I knew, with a sick certainty, that if I were pressed I would become it. I was no longer FitzChivalry. I was what was left after fear had driven him from his body.
On the second day after Burrich had run out of brandy, I told him, ‘I’ll be fine here if you want to go into Buckkeep Town.’
‘We’ve no money to buy more supplies, and nothing left to sell off.’ He said it flatly, as if it were my fault. He was sitting by the fire. He folded his two hands together and clasped them between his knees. They had been shaking, just a little. ‘We’re going to have to manage on our own now. There’s game in plenty to be had. If we can’t feed ourselves up here, we deserve to starve.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’ I asked flatly.
He looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘Meaning what?’ he asked.
‘Meaning there’s no more brandy,’ I said as bluntly.
‘And you think I can’t get by without it?’ His temper was rising already. It had become increasingly short since the brandy
