Air stirred against my cheek. I opened my eyes wearily. I had dozed off, despite the open window and chill morning. Before and below me stretched a vista of water. Waves tipped with white wrinkled under a grey sky. I got up from Verity’s chair with a groan; two steps carried me to the tower window. From here, the view was wider, showing me the steep cliffs and the clinging forest below this aspect of Buckkeep castle. There was the taste of a storm in the air, and the wind was cutting its winter teeth. The sun was a hand’s-breadth above the far horizon, dawn long fled. The Prince had not come.
I was not surprised. Dutiful was probably still deeply asleep after last night’s festivities. No, it was no surprise that he should forget our meeting, or perhaps rouse just enough to decide it wasn’t that important and roll back into sleep. Yet I felt some disappointment, and it was not just that my prince had found sleep more important than meeting me. He had said he would meet me here, and then hadn’t. And had not even sent word to cancel the meeting and save me the time and trouble of being here. It was a trifling thing in a boy of his years, a bit of thoughtlessness. Yet what was minor in a boy was not so in a prince. I wanted to rebuke him for it, as Chade would have chastened me. Or Burrich. I grinned ruefully. In fairness, had I been any different at Dutiful’s age? Burrich had never trusted me to keep dawn appointments. I could well recall how he would thunder at my door to be sure I did not miss a lesson with the axe. Well, perhaps if our roles had been different, I would have gone and pounded on the Prince’s chamber door.
As it was, I contented myself with a message, drawn in the dust on the top of a small table beside the chair. ‘I was here; you were not.’ Brief and succinct, a rebuke if he chose to take it that way. And anonymous. It could just as easily have been a sulky page’s note to a tardy chambermaid.
I closed the window shutters and let myself out by the way I had come, through a side panel in the decorative mantel around the hearth. It was a narrow squeeze and it was tricky to properly seal it closed behind me. My candle had gone out. I descended a long and gloomy stair, sparsely lit by tiny chinks in the outer wall that let in thin fingers of light and wind. There was a level section that I negotiated through pitch dark; it seemed far longer than I recalled, and I was glad when my groping foot found the next stair. I made a wrong turn at the bottom of it. The third time I walked into a faceful of cobwebs, I knew I was lost. I turned around and groped my way back. When, some time later, I emerged into Chade’s chamber from behind the wine rack, I was dusty and irritable and sweaty. I was ill prepared for what met me there.
Chade started up from his seat before the hearth, setting down a teacup as he did so. ‘There you are, FitzChivalry,’ he exclaimed, even as a wave of Skill slammed into me.
Don’t see me, stink dog man.
I staggered and then caught at the table to remain standing. I ignored Chade, who was scowling at me, to focus on Thick. The idiot serving-man, his face smudged with soot, stood by the work-hearth. His figure wavered before my eyes and I felt giddy. If I had not reset my walls the night before to guard against Nettle’s Skill tinkering, I think he would have been able to wipe all image of himself from my mind. As it was, I spoke through gritted teeth.
‘I do see you. I will always see you. But that does not mean I will hurt you. Unless you try to hurt me. Or unless you are rude to me again.’ I was sorely tempted to try the Wit on him, to repel at him with a burst of sheer animal energy, but I did not. I would not use the Skill. I would have had to open my walls to do so, and it would have revealed to him what my strength was. I was not yet ready for that. Remain calm, I told myself. You have to master yourself before you can master him.
‘No, no, Thick! Stop that. He’s good. He can be here. I say so.’
Chade spoke to him as if he were three years old. And while I recognized that the small eyes in the round face that glowered at me were not the eyes of a man my intellectual equal, I also saw a flash of resentment there at being thus addressed. I seized on it, keeping my gaze on Thick’s face but speaking to Chade.
‘You don’t need to talk to him like that. He isn’t stupid. He’s …’ I groped for a word to express what I suddenly was certain of. Thick’s intelligence might be limited in some ways, but it was there. ‘… different,’ I ended lamely. Different, I reflected, as a horse was different from a cat and they both were different from a man. But not lesser. Almost I could sense how his mind reached in another direction from mine, attaching significance to items I dismissed even as he dismissed whole areas that anchored my reality.
Thick scowled from me to Chade and back again. Then he took up his broom and a bucket of ash and cinders from the fireplace and scuttled from the room. After the scroll rack had swung back into place behind him, I caught the flung thought-fragment. Dog-stinker.
‘He doesn’t like me. He knows I’m Witted, too,’ I complained to Chade as I dropped into the other chair. Almost sulkily, I added, ‘Prince Dutiful didn’t meet me in Verity’s tower this morning. He had said he would.’
My remarks seemed to drift past the old man. ‘The Queen wants to see you. Right away.’ He was neatly if not elegantly attired in a simple robe of blue this morning with soft fur slippers on his feet. Did they ache from dancing?
‘What about?’ I asked as I rose and followed him. We went back to the wine rack, and as we triggered the concealed door, I remarked, ‘Thick didn’t seem surprised to see me enter from here.’
Chade shrugged one shoulder. ‘I do not think he is bright enough to be surprised by something like that. I doubt that he even noticed it.’
I considered and decided that it might be true. To him, it might have no significance. ‘And the Queen wanted to see me because?’
‘Because she told me so,’ he replied a bit testily.
After that I kept silent and followed him. I suspected his head throbbed, as mine did. I knew he had an antidote to a night’s hard drinking, and knew also how difficult it was to compound. Sometimes it was easier to put up with the throbbing headache than to grind one’s way through creating a cure.
We entered the Queen’s private chambers as we had before. Chade paused to peer and listen to be sure there were no witnesses, then admitted us to a privy chamber, and from there to the Queen’s sitting room, where Kettricken awaited us. She looked up with a weary smile as we entered. She was alone.
We both bowed formally. ‘Good morning, my queen,’ Chade greeted her for us, and she held out her hands in welcome, gesturing us in. The last time I had been here, an anxious Kettricken had awaited us in an austere chamber, her thoughts centred solely on her missing son. This time, the room displayed her handiwork. In the middle of a small table, six golden leaves had been arranged on a tray of gleaming river pebbles. Three tall candles burning there gave off the scent of violets. Several rugs of wool eased the floor against winter’s oncoming chill, and the chairs were softened with sheepskins. A day-fire burned in the hearth, and a kettle puffed steam above it. It reminded me of her home in the Mountains. She had also arranged a small table of food. Hot tea exhaled from a fat pot. I noticed there were only two cups as Kettricken said, ‘Thank you for bringing FitzChivalry here, Lord Chade.’
It was a dismissal, smoothly done. Chade bowed again, perhaps a bit more stiffly than he had the first time, and retreated by way of the privy chamber. I was left standing alone before the Queen, wondering what all this was about. When the door closed behind Chade, she gave a sudden great sigh, sat down at the table and gestured at the other chair. ‘Please, Fitz,’ and her words were an invitation to drop all formality as well as to be seated.
As I took my place opposite her, I studied her. We were nearly of an age,
