Royal Assassin

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“I know what I’m doing,” she said flatly. “Besides, what is the alternative?” she added with less heart.

“Disaster,” I conceded.

She nodded her head against me. “Fitz. If I had said yes tonight. If I were pregnant . . . what would you have done?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Think about it now,” she begged me.

I spoke slowly. “I suppose I’d . . . get a place for you, somehow, somewhere.” (I’d go to Chade, I’d go to Burrich, and I’d beg for help. Inwardly I blanched to think of it.) “A safe place. Away from Buckkeep. Upriver, maybe. I’d come to see you when I could. Somehow, I’d take care of you.”

“You’d set me aside is what you’re saying. Me, and our . . . my child.”

“No! I’d keep you safe, put you where no one would point shame at you or mock you for having a child alone. And when I could, I’d come to you and our child.”

“Have you ever considered that you could come with us? That we could leave Buckkeep, you and I, and go upriver now?”

“I can’t leave Buckkeep. I’ve explained that to you every way I know how.”

“I know you have. I’ve tried to understand it. But I don’t see why.”

“The work I do for the King is such that—”

“Stop doing it. Let someone else do it. Go away with me, to a life of our own.”

“I can’t. It’s not that simple. I wouldn’t be allowed to just leave like that.” Somehow, we had come uncoupled. Now she folded her arms across her chest.

“Verity’s gone. Almost no one believes he’s coming back. King Shrewd grows more feeble each day, and Regal prepares himself to inherit. If half of Regal’s feelings for you are what you say they are, why on earth would you wish to stay here with him as king? Why would he want to keep you here? Fitz, can’t you see that it’s all tumbling apart? The Near Islands and Ferry are just the beginning. The Raiders won’t stop there.”

“All the more reason for me to stay here. To work and, if need be, fight for our people.”

“One man can’t stop them,” Molly pointed out. “Not even a man as stubborn as you. Why not take all that stubbornness and fight for us instead? Why don’t we run away, up the river and inland, away from the Raiders, to a life of our own? Why should we have to give up everything for a hopeless cause?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from her. If I had said it, it would have been treason. But she said it as if it were the commonest sense. As if she and I and a child that didn’t exist yet were more important than the King and the Six Duchies combined. I said as much.

“Well,” she asked me, looking at me levelly. “It’s true. To me. If you were my husband and I had our child, that’s how important it would be to me. More important than the whole rest of the world.”

And what was I to say to that? I reached for the truth, knowing it wouldn’t satisfy her. “You would be that important to me. You are that important to me. But it’s also why I have to stay here. Because something that important isn’t something you run away and hide with. It’s something that you stand and defend.”

“Defend?” Her voice went up a notch. “When will you learn we aren’t strong enough to defend ourselves? I know. I’ve stood between Raiders and children of my own blood, and just barely survived. When you’ve done that, talk to me about defending!”

I was silent. Not just that her words cut me. They did, and deeply. But she brought back to me a memory of holding a child, studying the blood that had trickled down her cooling. arm. I couldn’t abide the thought of ever doing it again. But it could not be fled. “There is no running away, Molly. We either stand and fight here, or are slaughtered when the fighting overtakes us.”

“Really?” she asked me coldly. “It isn’t just your putting your loyalty to a King ahead of what we have?” I could not meet her eyes. She snorted. “You’re just like Burrich. You don’t even know how much you’re like him!”

“Like Burrich?” I was left floundering. I was startled that she said it at all, let alone that she said it as if it were a fault.

“Yes.” She was decisive.

“Because I am true to my King?” I was still grasping at straws.

“No! Because you put your King before your woman . . . or your love, or your own life.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“There! You see! You really don’t. And you go about, acting like you know all these great things and secrets and every important thing that ever happened. So answer me this. Why does Patience hate Burrich?”

I was completely at a loss now. I had no idea how this figured into what was wrong with me. But I knew somehow Molly would make a connection. Gingerly I tried: “She blames him for me. She thinks Burrich led Chivalry into bad ways . . . and hence into conceiving me.”

“There. You see. That’s how stupid you are. It’s nothing of the kind. Lacey told me one night. A bit too much elderberry wine, and I was talking of you and she of Burrich and Patience. Patience loved Burrich first, you idiot. But he wouldn’t have her. He said he loved her, but he couldn’t marry her, even if her father would give consent for her to wed beneath her station. Because he was already sworn, life and sword, to a lord of his own. And he didn’t think he could do justice to both of them. Oh, he said he wished he were free to marry her, and that he wished he hadn’t sworn before he’d met her. But all the same, he said he wasn’t free to marry her just then. He said something stupid to her, about no matter how willing the horse, it can only wear one saddle. So she told him, well, go off, then, go follow this lord who’s more important to you than I am. And he did. Just as you would, if I told you that you had to choose.” There were two spots of high color on her cheeks. She tossed her head as she turned her back on me.

So there was the connection to my fault. But my mind was reeling as bits and pieces of stories and comments suddenly fell into place. Burrich’s tale of first meeting Patience. She’d been sitting in an apple tree, and she’d demanded that he take a splinter out of her foot. Scarcely something a woman would ask of her lord’s man. But something a direct young maid might ask of a young man who had caught her eye. And his reaction the night I had spoken to him about Molly and Patience, and repeated Patience’s words about horses and saddles.

“Did Chivalry know anything of all this?” I asked.

Molly spun about to consider me. It was obviously not the question she had expected me to ask. But she couldn’t resist finishing the story either. “No. Not at first. When Patience first came to know him, she had no idea he was Burrich’s master. Burrich had never told her what lord he was sworn to. At first Patience would have nothing to do with Chivalry. Burrich still held her heart, you see. But Chivalry was stubborn. From what Lacey says, he loved her to distraction. He won her heart. It wasn’t until after she had said yes, she’d marry him, that she found out he was Burrich’s master. And only because Chivalry sent Burrich to deliver a special horse to her.”

I suddenly remembered Burrich in the stable, looking at Patience’s mount and saying, “I trained that horse.” I wondered if he’d trained Silk, knowing she was to go to a woman he’d loved, as a gift from the man she’d marry. I’d bet it was so. I had always thought that Patience’s disdain for Burrich was a sort of jealousy that Chivalry could care so much for him. Now the triangle was an even stranger one. And infinitely more painful. I closed my eyes and shook my head at the unfairness of the world. “Nothing is ever simple and good,” I said to myself. “There is always a bitter peel, a sour pip somewhere.”

“Yes.” Molly’s anger seemed suddenly spent. She sat down on the bedside, and when I went and sat beside her, she didn’t push me away. I took her hand and held it. A thousand thoughts cluttered my mind. How Patience hated Burrich’s drinking. How Burrich had recalled her lapdog, and how she always carried it about in a basket. The care he always took with his own appearance and behavior. “Just because you cannot see a woman does not mean she does not see you.” Oh, Burrich. The extra time he still took, grooming a horse that she seldom rode anymore. At least Patience had had a marriage to a man she loved, and some years of happiness, complicated as they were by political intrigues. But some years of happiness, anyway. What would Molly and I ever have? Only what Burrich had now?

She leaned against me and I held her for a long time. That was all. But somehow in that melancholy holding that night, we were closer than we had been for a very long time.

21
Dark Days

KING EYOD OF the Mountains held the Mountain throne during the years of the Red-Ships. The death of his elder son, Rurisk, had left his daughter, Kettricken, sole heir to the Mountain throne. By their customs, she would become Queen of the Mountains, or “Sacrifice”, as that people call it, upon the demise of her father. Thus her marriage to Verity ensured not only that we had an ally at our back during those unstable years, but also promised the eventual joining of a “seventh duchy” to the Kingdom of the Six Duchies. That the Mountain Kingdom bordered only on the two Inland Duchies of Tilth and Farrow made the prospect of any civil sundering of the Six Duchies of especial concern to Kettricken. She had been raised to be “Sacrifice”. Her duty to her folk was of supreme importance in her life. When she became Verity’s Queen-in-Waiting, the Six Duchies folk became her own. But it could never have been far from her heart that on her father’s death, her Mountain folk would once more claim her as “Sacrifice” as well. How could she fulfill that obligation if Farrow and Tilth stood between her and her folk, not as part of the Six Duchies, but as a hostile nation?