by Robin Hobb
‘And have not you just come from there yourself?’ Honey asked tartly.
‘No, my lady, in truth I had come cross country, from visiting some shepherd friends,’ I extemporized. Honey’s manner was beginning to wear on me.
‘My lady,’ she said softly to Piper and rolled her eyes. Piper giggled. Josh ignored them.
‘Downriver is much the same as up these days, only more so,’ he told me. ‘Hard times, and harder to come for those who farm. The food grain went to pay the taxes, so the seed grain went to feed the children. So only what was left went into the fields, and no man grows more by planting less. Same is true for the flocks and herds. And no signs that the taxes will be less this harvest. And even a goose-girl that can’t cipher her own age knows that less take away more leaves naught but hunger on the table. It’s worst along the salt water. If a person goes out fishing, who knows what will happen to home before he returns? A farmer plants a field, knowing it won’t yield enough both for taxes and family, and that there will be less than half of it left standing if the Red Ships come to pay a call. There’s been a clever song made about a farmer who tells the tax-collector that the Red Ships have already done his job for him.’
‘Save that clever minstrels don’t sing it,’ Honey reminded him tartly.
‘Red Ships raid Buck’s coast as well, then,’ I said quietly.
Josh gave a snort of bitter laughter. ‘Buck, Bearns, Rippon or Shoaks … I doubt the Red Ships care where one duchy ends and another begins. If the sea brushes up against it, they’ll raid there.’
‘And our ships?’ I asked softly.
‘The ones that have been taken away from us by the Raiders are doing very well. Those left defending us, well, they are as successful as gnats at bothering cattle.’
‘Does no one stand firm for Buck these days?’ I asked, and heard the despair in my own voice.
‘The Lady of Buckkeep does. Not only firmly, but loudly. There’s some as say all she does is cry out and scold, but others know that she doesn’t call on them to do what she hasn’t already done herself.’ Harper Josh spoke as if he knew this at first hand.
I was mystified, but did not wish to appear too ignorant. ‘Such as?’
‘Everything they can. She wears no jewellery at all any more. It’s all been sold and put toward paying patrol ships. She sold off her own ancestral lands, and put the money to paying mercenaries to man the towers. It’s said she sold the necklace given her by Prince Chivalry, his grandmother’s rubies, to King Regal himself, to buy grain and timber for Buck villages that wanted to rebuild.’
‘Patience,’ I whispered. I had seen those rubies once, long ago, when we had first been getting to know one another. She had deemed them too precious a thing even to wear, but she had shown them to me and told me some day my bride might wear them. Long ago. I turned my head aside and struggled to control my face.
‘Where have you been sleeping this past year … Cob, that you know none of this?’ Honey demanded sarcastically.
‘I have been away,’ I said quietly. I turned back to the table and managed to meet her eyes. I hoped my face showed nothing.
She cocked her head and smiled at me. ‘Where?’ she countered brightly.
I did not like her much at all. ‘I’ve been living by myself, in the forest,’ I said at last.
‘Why?’ She smiled at me as she pressed me. I was certain she knew how uncomfortable she was making me.
‘Obviously, because I wished to,’ I said. I sounded so much like Burrich when I said it, I almost looked over my shoulder for him.
She made a small mouth at me, totally unrepentant, but Harper Josh set his mug down on the table a bit firmly. He said nothing, and the look he gave her from his blind eyes was no more than a flicker, but she subsided abruptly. She folded her hands at the edge of the table like a rebuked child, and for a moment I thought her quashed, until she looked up at me from under her lashes. Her eyes met mine directly, and the little smile she shot me was defiant. I looked away from her, totally mystified as to why she wished to peck at me like this. I glanced at Piper, only to find her face bright red with suppressed laughter. I looked down at my hands on the table, hating the blush that suddenly flooded my face.
In an effort to start the conversation again, I asked, ‘Are there any other new tidings from Buckkeep?’
Harper Josh gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Not much new misery to tell. The tales are all the same, with only the names of the villages and towns different. Oh, but there is one small bit, a rich one. Word is now that King Regal will hang the Pocked Man himself.’
I had been swallowing a sip of ale. I choked abruptly and demanded, ‘What?’
‘It’s a stupid joke,’ Honey declared. ‘King Regal has had it cried about that he will give gold coin reward to any who can turn over to him a certain man, much scarred with the pox, or silver coin to any man who can give information as to where he may be found.’
‘A pox-scarred man? Is that all the description?’ I asked carefully.
‘He is said to be skinny, and grey-haired, and to sometimes disguise himself as a woman.’ Josh chuckled merrily, never guessing how his words turned my bowels to ice. ‘And his crime is high treason. Rumour says the King blames him for the disappearance of Queen-in-Waiting Kettricken and her unborn child. Some say he is just a cracked old man who claims to have been an adviser to Shrewd, and as such he has written to the Dukes of the Coastal Duchies, bidding them be brave, that Verity shall return and his child inherit the Farseer throne. But rumour also says, with as much wit, that King Regal hopes to hang the Pocked Man and thus end all bad luck in the Six Duchies.’ He chuckled again, and I plastered a sick smile on my face and nodded like a simpleton.
Chade, I thought to myself. Somehow Regal had picked up Chade’s trail. If he knew he was pock-scarred, what else might he know? He had obviously connected him to his masquerade as Lady Thyme. I wondered where Chade was now, and if he was all right. I wished with sudden desperation that I knew what his plans had been, what plot he had excluded me from. With a sudden sinking of heart, my perception of my actions flopped over. Had I driven Chade away from me, to protect him from my plans, or had I abandoned him just when he needed his apprentice?
‘Are you still there, Cob? I see your shadow still, but your place at the table’s gone very quiet.’
‘Oh, I’m here, Harper Josh!’ I tried to put some life into my words. ‘Just mulling over all you’ve told me, that’s all.’
‘Wondering what pocked old man he could sell to King Regal, by the look on his face,’ Honey put in tartly. I suddenly perceived that she saw her constant belittlement and stings as a sort of flirtation. I quickly decided I had had enough companionship and talk for an evening. I was too much out of practice at dealing with folk. I would leave now. Better they thought me odd and rude than that I stayed longer and made them curious.
‘Well, I thank you for your songs, and your conversation,’ I said as gracefully as I could. I fingered out a copper to leave under my mug for the boy. ‘And I had best take myself back to the road.’
‘But it’s full dark outside!’ Piper objected in surprise. She set down her mug and glanced at Honey, who looked shocked.
‘And cool, my lady,’ I observed blithely. ‘I prefer the night for walking. The moon’s close to full, which should be light enough on a road as wide as the river road.’
‘Have you no fear of the Forged ones?’ Harper Josh asked in consternation.
Now it was my turn to be surprised. ‘This far inland?’
‘You have been living in a tree,’ Honey ex�
�claimed. ‘All the roads have been plagued with them. Some travellers hire guards, archers and swordsmen. Others, such as we, travel in groups when we can, and only by day.’
‘Cannot the patrols at least keep them from the roads?’ I asked in astonishment.
‘The patrols?’ Honey sniffed disdainfully. ‘Most of us would as soon meet Forged ones as a pack of Farrow men with pikes. The Forged ones do not bother them, and so they do not bother the Forged ones.’
‘What, then, do they patrol for?’ I asked angrily.
‘Smugglers, mainly.’ Josh spoke before Honey could. ‘Or so they would have you believe. Many an honest traveller do they stop to search his belongings and take whatever they fancy, calling it contraband, or claiming it was reported stolen in the last town. Methinks Lord Bright does not pay them as well as they think they deserve, so they take whatever pay they are able.’
‘And Prince … King Regal, he does nothing?’ How the title and the question choked me.
‘Well, perhaps if you go so far as Tradeford, you might complain to him yourself,’ Honey told me sarcastically. ‘I am sure he would listen to you, as he has not the dozens of messengers who have gone before.’ She paused, and looked thoughtful. ‘Though I have heard that if any Forged ones do make it far enough inland to be a bother, he has ways of dealing with them.’
I felt sickened and wretched. It had always been a matter of pride to King Shrewd that there was little danger of highwaymen in Buck, so long as one kept to the main roads. Now, to hear that those who should guard the king’s roads were little more than highwaymen themselves was like a small blade twisted in me. Not enough that Regal had claimed the throne to himself, and then deserted Buckkeep. He did not keep up even the pretence of ruling wisely. I wondered numbly if he were capable of punishing all Buck for the lacklustre way he had been welcomed to the throne. Foolish wonder; I knew he was. ‘Well, Forged ones or Farrow men, I still must be on my way, I fear,’ I told them. I drank off the last of my mug and set it down.
‘Why not wait at least until the morning, lad, and then travel with us?’ Josh suddenly offered. ‘The days are not too hot for walking, for there’s always a breeze off the river. And four are safer than three, these days.’
‘I thank you kindly for the offer,’ I began, but Josh interrupted me.
‘Don’t thank me, for I wasn’t making an offer, but a request. I’m blind, man, or close enough. Certainly you’ve noticed that. Noticed, too, that my companions are comely young women, though from the way Honey’s nipped at you, I fancy you’ve smiled more at Piper than at her.’
‘Father!’ indignantly from Honey, but Josh ploughed on doggedly.
‘I was not offering you the protection of our numbers, but asking you to consider offering your right arm to us. We’re not rich folk; we’ve no coin to hire guards. And yet we must travel the roads, Forged ones or no.’
Josh’s fogged eyes met mine unerringly. Honey looked aside, lips folded tightly, while Piper openly watched me, a pleading look on her face. Forged ones. Pinned down, fists falling on me. I looked down at the table-top. ‘I’m not much for fighting,’ I told him bluntly.
‘At least you would see what you were swinging at,’ he replied stubbornly. ‘And you’d certainly see them coming before I did. Look, you’re going the same direction we are. Would it be that hard for you to walk by day for a few days rather than by night?’
‘Father, don’t beg him!’ Honey rebuked him.
‘I’d rather beg him to walk with us, than beg Forged ones to let you go unharmed!’ he said harshly. He turned his face back to me as he added, ‘We met some Forged ones, a couple of weeks back. The girls had the sense to run when I shouted at them to do so, when I could not keep up with them any longer. But we lost our food to them, and they damaged my harp, and …’
‘And they beat him,’ Honey said quietly. ‘And so we have vowed, Piper and I, that the next time we will not run from them, no matter how many. Not if it means leaving Papa.’ All the playful teasing and mockery had gone out of her voice. I knew she meant what she said.
I will be delayed, I sighed to Nighteyes. Wait for me, watch for me, follow me unseen.
‘I will travel with you,’ I conceded. I cannot say I made the offer willingly. ‘Though I am not a man who does well at fighting.’
‘As if we couldn’t tell that from his face,’ Honey observed in an aside to Piper. The mockery was back in her voice, but I doubted that she knew how deeply her words cut me.
‘My thanks are all I have to pay you with, Cob.’ Josh reached across the table for me, and I gripped hands with him in the ancient sign of a bargain settled. He grinned suddenly, his relief plain. ‘So take my thanks, and a share of whatever we’re offered as minstrels. We’ve not enough coin for a room, but the innkeeper has offered us shelter in his barn. Not like it used to be, when a minstrel got a room and a meal for the asking. But at least the barn has a door that shuts between us and the night. And the innkeeper here has a good heart; he won’t begrudge extending shelter to you if I tell him you’re travelling with us as a guard.’
‘It will be more shelter than I’ve known for many a night,’ I told him, attempting to be gracious. My heart had sunk into a cold place in the pit of my belly.
What have you got yourself into now? Nighteyes wondered. As did I.
FIVE
Confrontations
What is the Wit? Some would say it is a perversion, a twisted indulgence of spirit by which men gain knowledge of the lives and tongues of the beasts, eventually to become little more than beasts themselves. My study of it and its practitioners has led me to a different conclusion, however. The Wit seems to be a form of mind linking, usually with a particular animal, which opens a way for the understanding of that animal’s thoughts and feelings. It does not, as some have claimed, give men the tongues of the birds and beasts. A Witted one does have an awareness of life all across its wide spectrum, including humans and even some of the mightier and more ancient of trees. But a Witted one cannot randomly engage a chance animal in ‘conversation’. He can sense an animal’s nearby presence, and perhaps know if the animal is wary or hostile or curious. But it does not give one command over the beasts of the land and the birds of the sky as some fanciful tales would have us believe. What the Wit may be is a man’s acceptance of the beast nature within himself, and hence an awareness of the element of humanity that every animal carries within it as well. The legendary loyalty that a bonded animal feels for his Witted one is not at all the same as what a loyal beast gives its master. Rather it is a reflection of the loyalty that the Witted one has pledged to his animal companion, like for like.
I did not sleep well, and it was not just that I was no longer accustomed to sleeping at night. What they had told me about Forged ones had put the wind up my back. The musicians all climbed up into the loft to sleep on the heaped straw there, but I found myself a corner where I could put my back to a wall and yet still have a clear view of the door. It felt strange to be inside a barn again at night. This was a good tight barn, built of river-rock and mortar and timber. The inn kept a cow and a handful of chickens in addition to their hire-horses and the beasts of their guests. The homely sounds and smells of the hay and animals put me sharply in mind of Burrich’s stables. I felt suddenly homesick for them as I never had for my own room up in the keep.
I wondered how Burrich was, and if he knew of Patience’s sacrifices. I thought of the love that had once been between them, and how it had foundered on Burrich’s sense of duty. Patience had gone on to marry my fathe
r, the very man to whom Burrich had pledged all that loyalty. Had he ever thought of going to her, attempting to reclaim her? No. I knew it instantly and without doubt. Chivalry’s ghost would stand forever between them. And now mine as well.
It was not a far jump from pondering this to thinking of Molly. She had made the same decision for us that Burrich had made for Patience and himself. Molly had told me that my obsessive loyalty to my king meant we could never belong to one another. So she had found someone she could care about as much as I cared for Verity. I hated everything about her decision except that it had saved her life. She had left me. She had not been at Buckkeep to share my fall and my disgrace.
I reached vaguely toward her with the Skill, then abruptly rebuked myself. Did I really want to see her as she probably was this night, sleeping in another man’s arms, his wife? I felt an almost physical pain in my chest at the thought. I did not have a right to spy on any happiness she had claimed for herself. Yet as I drowsed off, I thought of her, and longed hopelessly after what had been between us.
Some perverse fate brought me dreams of Burrich instead, a vivid dream that made no sense. I sat across from him. He was sitting at a table by a fire, mending harness as he often did of an evening. But a mug of tea had replaced his brandy cup, and the leather he worked at was a low soft shoe, much too small for him. He pushed the awl through the soft leather and it went through too easily, jabbing him in the hand. He swore at the blood, and then looked up abruptly, to awkwardly beg my pardon for using such language in my presence.
I woke up from the dream, disoriented and bemused. Burrich had often made shoes for me when I was small but I could not recall that he had ever apologized for swearing in my presence, though he had rapped me often enough when I was a boy if I had dared to use such language in his. Ridiculous. I pushed the dream aside, but sleep had fled with it.