The hem of it grazed her thighs. She halted when I turned to look at her and stared back at me. She drew herself up, as if to be sure I must see all I was refusing. ‘What does it hurt?’ she demanded.
‘Your husband, if he ever gets word of it,’ I said quietly. ‘Hap gave me to understand he’s a noble of some kind. Gossip can do more damage to that kind of man than a knife. Consider his dignity, the dignity of his house. Don’t make him some old fool taken with a lively younger woman …’
‘Old fool?’ She looked perplexed. ‘I don’t … Hap told you he was old?’
I felt off balance. ‘He said he was a grand man …’
‘Grand, yes, but scarcely old. Quite the opposite.’ She smiled oddly, caught between pride and embarrassment. ‘He’s twenty-four, Fitz. A fine dancer and strong as a young bull. What did you think, that I’d pastured myself out to warm some elderly lord’s bed?’
I had. ‘I thought –’
She was suddenly almost defiant, as if I had belittled her. ‘He’s handsome and he’s charming, and he could have had his pick of any number of women. He chose me. And in my own way, I do, truly, love him. He makes me feel young and desirable and capable of real passion.’
‘What did I make you feel?’ I asked unwillingly, my voice low. I knew I was inviting more pain but I couldn’t stop myself.
That puzzled her for a moment. ‘Comfortable,’ she said at last, with no thought for my feelings. ‘Accepted and valued.’ She smiled suddenly, and her expression cut me. ‘Generous, giving you what no one else would. And more. Worldly and adventurous. Like a bright songbird come to visit a wren.’
‘You were that,’ I conceded. I looked away from her, towards the window. ‘But no more, Starling. Never again. Perhaps you think my life a poor thing, but it is mine. I won’t steal the crumbs from another man’s table. I have that much pride.’
‘You can’t afford that kind of pride,’ she said bluntly. She pushed her hair back from her face. ‘Look around you, Fitz. A dozen years on your own, and what do you have? A cottage in the forest, and a handful of chickens. What do you have for brightness or warmth or sweetness? Only me. Perhaps it’s only a day or two of my life, here and there, but I’m the only real person in your life.’ Her voice grew harder. ‘Crumbs from another man’s table are better than starving. You need me.’
‘Hap. Nighteyes.’ I pointed out coldly.
She dismissed them. ‘An orphan boy I brought you and a decrepit wolf.’
That she should disparage them so not only affronted me, it forced me to face how differently we perceived things. I suppose that if we had lived together, day in and day out, such disagreements would have manifested themselves long ago. But the interludes we had shared had not been ones of philosophical discussions, or even practical considerations. We had come together at her convenience, to share my bed and my table. She had slept and eaten and sung and watched me at my tasks in a life she didn’t share. The minor disagreements we had were forgotten between one visit and the next. She had brought me Hap as if he were a stray kitten, and given no thought since then as to what we might have become to one another. This quarrel was not only ending what we had shared, but exposing that we had truly shared very little at all. I felt twice devastated by it. Bitter words from a past life came back to me. The Fool had warned me: ‘She has no true affection for Fitz, you know, only for being able to say she knew FitzChivalry.’ Perhaps, despite all the years we’d shared, that was still true.
I held my tongue for fear of all I might say; I think she mistook my silence for a wavering in my resolve. She suddenly took a deep breath. She smiled at me wearily. ‘Oh, Fitz. We need one another in ways neither of us likes to admit.’ She gave a small sigh. ‘Make breakfast. I’m going to get dressed. Things always seem worst in the morning on an empty stomach.’ She left the room.
A fatalistic patience came over me. I set out the breakfast things as she dressed. I knew I had reached my decision. It was as if Hap’s words last night had extinguished a candle inside me. My feelings for Starling had changed that completely. We sat at table together, and she tried to make all seem as it had before, but I kept thinking, ‘this is probably the last time I’ll watch how she swirls her tea to cool it, or how she waves her bread about as she talks.’ I let her talk, and she kept her words to inconsequential things, trying to fix my interest on where she planned to go next, and what Lady Amity had worn to some occasion. The more she talked, the farther away she seemed from me. As I watched her, I had the strangest sense of something forgotten, something missed. She took another piece of cheese, alternating bites of it and the bread.
A sudden realization trickled through me like a drop of cold water down the spine. I interrupted her.
‘You knew Chade was coming to see me.’
A fraction of a second too late, she lifted her brows in surprise. ‘Chade? Here?’
These were habits of mind I thought I had discarded. Ways of thinking, taught to me painstakingly by a skilled mentor in the hours between dusk and dawn during the years of my youth. It was a way of sifting facts and assembling them, a training that let the mind make swift leaps to conclusions that were not conjectures. Begin with a simple observation. Starling had not commented on the cheese. Any cheese was a luxury for the boy and me, let alone a fine ripe cheese like this one. She should have been surprised to see it on my table, but she was not. She had said nothing of the Sandsedge brandy last night. Because neither had surprised her. I was both astonished and pleased, in a horrified way, at how swiftly my mind leapt from point to point, until I suddenly looked down on the inevitable landscape the facts formed. ‘You’ve never offered to take Hap anywhere before this. You took the boy off to Buckkeep so that Chade could see me alone.’ One possible conclusion from that chilled me. ‘In case he had to kill me. There would be no witnesses.’
‘Fitz!’ she rebuked me, both angry and shocked.
I almost didn’t hear her. Once the pebbles of thought had started bounding, the avalanche of conclusions was bound to follow. ‘All these years. All your visits. You’ve been his eyes on me, haven’t you? Tell me. Do you check on Burrich and Nettle several times a year as well?’
She looked at me coldly, denying nothing. ‘I had to seek them out. To give Burrich the horses. You wanted me to do that.’
Yes. My mind raced on. The horses would have served as a perfect introduction. Any other gift, Burrich would have refused. But Ruddy was rightfully his, a gift from Verity. All those years ago, Starling had told him that the Queen had sent Sooty’s colt as well, in token of services done for the Farseers. I looked at her, waiting for the rest. She was a minstrel. She loved to talk. All I need do was provide the silence.
She set her bread down. ‘When I am in that area, I visit them, yes. And when I return to Buckkeep, if Chade knows I have been there, he asks after them. Just as he asks after you.’
‘And the Fool? Do you know his whereabouts as well?’
‘No.’ The answer was succinct, and I believed it true. But she was a minstrel, and for her the power of a secret was always in the telling of it. She had to add, ‘But I think that Burrich does. Once or twice, when I have visited there, there have been toys about, far finer than anything Burrich could afford for Nettle. One was a doll that put me very much in mind of the Fool’s puppets. Another time, there was a string of wooden beads, each carved like a little face.’
That was interesting, but I did not let it show in my
