by Robin Hobb
‘Prince Regal said specifically that you were not to be admitted.’
‘But that was before …’ And I let my voice drop lower as I muttered a few meaningless syllables.
‘What did you say?’
I muttered again.
‘Speak up.’
‘This is not for all the keep to hear!’ I retorted indignantly. ‘This is not time to spread a panic.’
That did it. The door opened a tiny crack. ‘What is it?’ the man hissed.
I leaned in close to the door, looked up and down the corridor. I peered past him through the crack. ‘Are you alone?’ I asked suspiciously.
‘Yes!’ Impatiently. ‘Now what is it? It had better be good!’
I lifted my hands to my mouth as I leaned toward the door, unwilling to let the slightest breath of my secret escape. The guard leaned closer to the crack. I gave a quick puff of my lips and a white powder misted his face. He staggered back, clawing at his eyes and strangling. In an instant he was down. Nightmist: it was quick, it was effective. It was also often deadly. I could not find it in myself to care. It was not so much that this was my shoulder-wrenching friend. This guard could not have stood in the antechamber of Shrewd’s room and been totally unaware of what went on within.
I had reached in through the crack and was struggling to undo the chains that secured the door when I heard a familiar hiss. ‘Get out of here. Leave the door alone, just go away. Don’t unlatch it, you fool!’ I had a brief glimpse of a pocked visage and then the door was shut firmly in my face. Chade was right. It would be best for Regal to encounter a fully-latched door, and to spend his time having his men chop through it. Every moment Regal was shut out was another moment that Chade had with the King.
What followed was harder to do than what I had already done. I went down the stairs to the kitchen, made friendly with the Cook, and then asked her what the commotion upstairs had been. Had the Queen lost her baby? She banished me quickly to find folk to talk to who would know more. I made my way into the watch-room off the kitchen, to consume a small beer and force myself to eat as if I wanted to. The food lay in my stomach like so much gravel. No one spoke to me much, but I was a presence. The gossip about the Queen’s fall ebbed and flowed around me. There were Tilth and Farrow guards here now, big, slow-moving men, part of their dukes’ retinues, hobnobbing with the Buckkeep counterparts. It was more bitter than bile to hear them speak avidly of what the loss of the child would mean to Regal’s chances for the throne. It was as if they bet on a horse race.
The only other gossip that could compete with it was a rumour that a boy had seen the Pocked Man by the castle well in the courtyard. It was supposed to have been nearly midnight when the lad saw him. Not one had the sense to wonder what the boy was doing out there, or what light his eyes had used to see his vision of ill omen. Instead they were vowing to stay well away from water, for surely this omen meant the well had gone bad. At the rate at which they were drinking beer, I decided they had little to worry about. I stayed until word was sent down that Regal wanted three strong men with axes sent immediately to the King’s chambers. That excited a fresh round of talk, and during it I quietly left the room and went to the stables.
I had intended to seek out Burrich and see if the Fool had found him yet. Instead I encountered Molly coming down his steep stairs just as I had begun to climb them. She looked down at the astounded look on my face and laughed. But it was a short laugh, and it never reached her eyes.
‘Why did you go to see Burrich?’ I demanded, and instantly realized how rude my question was. I had feared she had gone seeking help.
‘He is my friend,’ she said succinctly. She started to push past me. Without thinking, I stood firm. ‘Let me past!’ she hissed savagely.
Instead I put my arms around her. ‘Molly, Molly, please,’ I said hoarsely, as she pushed at me without heart. ‘Let us find a place to talk, if only for a moment. I cannot bear to have you look at me that way, when I swear I have done you no wrong. You act as if I have cast you off, but you are in my heart always. If I cannot be with you, it is not because I do not wish to.’
She stopped struggling suddenly.
‘Please?’ I begged her.
She glanced about the dim barn. ‘We will stand and we will talk. Briefly. Right here.’
‘Why are you so angry with me?’
She nearly answered me. I saw her bite back words, then turn suddenly cold. ‘Why do you think that what I feel about you is the centremost pillar of my life?’ she retorted. ‘Why do you think I have no other concerns but you?’
I gaped at her. ‘Perhaps because it is how I feel about you,’ I said gravely.
‘It is not.’ She was exasperated, correcting me the way she would correct a child who insisted the sky was green.
‘It is,’ I insisted. I tried to gather her to me, but she was wooden in my arms.
‘Your King-in-Waiting Verity was more important. King Shrewd is more important. Queen Kettricken and her unborn child are more important.’ She ticked them off on her fingers as if she were numbering my faults.
‘I know my duty,’ I said quietly.
‘I know where your heart is,’ she said flatly. ‘And it is not first with me.’
‘Verity is … is no longer here to protect his queen, his child, or his father,’ I said reasonably. ‘So, for this time, I must put them ahead of my own life. Ahead of everything I hold dear. Not because I love them more but …’ I floundered uselessly after words. ‘I am a King’s Man,’ I said helplessly.
‘I am my own woman.’ Molly made it the loneliest statement in the world. ‘I will take care of myself.’
‘Not forever,’ I protested. ‘Someday, we will be free. Free to wed, to do …’
‘Whatever your king asks you to do,’ she finished for me. ‘No, Fitz.’ There was finality in her voice. Pain. She pushed away from me, stepped past me on the staircase. When she was two steps away and all of winter seemed to be blowing between us, she spoke.
‘I have to tell you something,’ she said, almost gently. ‘There is another in my life now. One who is for me what your king is for you. One who comes before my own life, who comes ahead of all else I hold dear. By your own words, you cannot fault me.’ She looked back up at me.
I do not know what I looked like, only that she looked aside as if she could not bear it.
‘For the sake of that one, I am going away,’ she told me. ‘To a safer place than this.’
‘Molly, please, he cannot love you as I do,’ I begged.
She did not look at me. ‘Nor can your king love you as I … used to. But. It is not a matter of what he feels for me,’ she said slowly. ‘It is what I feel for him. He must be first in my life. He needs that from me. Understand this. It is not that I no longer care for you. It is that I cannot put that feeling ahead of what is best for him.’ She went down two more steps. ‘Goodbye, Newboy.’ She no more than breathed those final words, but they sank into my heart as if branded there.
I stood on the steps, watching her go. And suddenly that feeling was too familiar, the pain too well known. I flung myself down the steps after her, I seized her arm, I pulled her under the loft stairs into the darkness there. ‘Molly,’ I said. ‘Please.’
She said nothing. She did not even resist my grip on her arm.
‘What can I give you, what can I tell you to make you understand what you are to me? I can’t just let you go!’
‘No more can you make me stay,’ she pointed out in a low voice. I felt something go out of her. Some anger, some spirit, some will. I have no word for it. ‘Please,’ she said, and the word hurt me, because she be
gged. ‘Just let me go. Don’t make it hard. Don’t make me cry.’
I let go of her arm, but she did not leave.
‘A long time ago,’ she said carefully. ‘I told you that you were like Burrich.’
I nodded in the darkness, not caring she could not see me.
‘In some ways you are. In others, you are not. I decide for us, now, as he once decided for Patience and himself. There is no future for us. Someone already fills your heart. And the gap between our stations is too great for any love to bridge. I know that you love me. But your love is … different from mine. I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do. I don’t even know what it is that you do, when you are not with me. You have never even shared that much with me.’
‘You wouldn’t like it,’ I told her. ‘You don’t really want to know.’
‘Don’t tell me that,’ she whispered angrily. ‘Don’t you see that that is what I cannot live with, that you do not let me even decide that for myself? You cannot make that decision for me. You have no right! If you cannot even tell me that, how can I believe you love me?’
‘I kill people,’ I heard myself say. ‘For my king. I’m an assassin, Molly.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ she hissed. She spoke too quickly. The horror in her voice was as great as the contempt. A part of her knew I had spoken the truth to her. Finally. A terrible silence, brief but so cold, grew between us as she waited for me to admit a lie. A lie she knew was truth. At last she denied it for me. ‘You, a killer? You couldn’t even run past the guard that day, to see why I was crying! You didn’t have the courage to defy them for me! But you want me to believe you kill people for the King.’ She made a choking sound, of anger and despair. ‘Why do you say such things now? Why now, of all times? To impress me?’
‘If I had thought it would impress you, I probably would have told you a long time ago,’ I confessed. And it was true. My ability to keep my secrets had been soundly based on my fear that telling Molly would mean losing her. I was right.
‘Lies,’ she said, more to herself than me. ‘Lies, all lies. From the beginning. I was so stupid. If a man hits you once, he’ll hit you again, they say. And the same is true for lying. But I stayed, and I listened and I believed. What a fool I’ve been!’ This last, so savagely that I recoiled from it as from a blow. She stood clear of me. ‘Thank you, FitzChivalry,’ she said coldly, formally. ‘You’ve made this so much easier for me.’ She turned away from me.
‘Molly,’ I begged. I reached to take her arm, but she spun about, her hand raised to slap me.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she hissed in a low voice. ‘Don’t you ever dare to touch me again!’
She left.
After a time, I remembered I was standing under Burrich’s stairs in the dark. I shivered with cold and something more. No. Something less. My lips drew back from my teeth in something neither a smile nor a snarl. I had always feared that my lies would make me lose Molly. But the truth had severed in an instant what my lies had held together for a year. What must I learn from that, I wondered? Very slowly I climbed up the steps. I knocked on the door.
‘Who is it?’ Burrich’s voice.
‘Me.’ He unlatched the door and I came into the room. ‘What was Molly doing here?’ I asked him, not caring how it might sound, not caring that the bandaged Fool sat still at Burrich’s table. ‘Did she need help?’
Burrich cleared his throat. ‘She came for herbs,’ he said uneasily, ‘I could not help her, I did not have what she wanted. Then the Fool came, and she stayed to help me with him.’
‘Patience and Lacey have herbs. Lots of them,’ I pointed out.
‘That is what I told her.’ He turned away from me, and began clearing away the things he had used to work on the Fool. ‘She did not wish to go to them.’ There was something in his voice, almost prodding, pushing me to the next question.
‘She’s going away,’ I said in a small voice. ‘She’s going away.’ I sat down on a chair before Burrich’s fire and clenched my hands between my knees. I became aware I was rocking back and forth, tried to stop.
‘Did you succeed?’ The Fool asked quietly.
I stopped rocking. I swear that for an instant I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘Yes, I think I did.’ I had succeeded at losing Molly, too. Succeeded at wearing away her loyalty and her love, taking her for granted, succeeded at being so logical and practical and loyal to my king that I had just lost any chance of ever having a life of my own. I looked at Burrich. ‘Did you love Patience?’ I asked suddenly. ‘When you decided to leave?’
The Fool started, then visibly goggled. So there were some secrets even he did not know. Burrich’s face went as dark as I had ever seen it. He crossed his arms on his chest, as if to restrain himself. He might kill me, I thought. Or maybe he sought only to hold some pain inside himself. ‘Please,’ I added, ‘I have to know.’
He glared at me, then spoke carefully. ‘I am not a changeable man,’ he told me. ‘If I had loved her, I would love her still.’
So. It would never go away. ‘But, still, you decided …’
‘Someone had to decide. Patience would not see it could not be. Someone had to end the torment for us both.’
As Molly had decided for us. I tried to think just what I should do next. Nothing came to me. I looked at the Fool. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.
‘I’m better off than you are,’ he replied, sincerely.
‘I meant, your shoulder. I had thought …’
‘Wrenched, but not broken. Much better than your heart.’
A quick bantering of witty words. I had not known he could weight a jest with so much sympathy. The kindness pushed me to the edge of breaking. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said brokenly. ‘How can I live with this?’
The brandy bottle made a very small thud as Burrich set it in the centre of the table. He put out three cups around it. ‘We will have a drink,’ he said. ‘To Molly finding happiness somewhere. We will wish it for her with all our hearts.’
We drank a round and Burrich refilled the cups.
The Fool swirled the brandy in his cup. ‘Is this wise, just now?’ he asked.
‘Just now, I have finished with being wise,’ I told him. ‘I would rather be a fool.’
‘You do not know of what you speak,’ he told me. All the same, he raised his glass alongside mine. And a third time, to our king.
We made a sincere effort, but fate did not allow us sufficient time. A determined rapping at Burrich’s door proved to be Lacey with a basket on her arm. She came in quickly, shutting the door fast behind her. ‘Get rid of this for me, will you?’ she asked, and tumbled the slain chicken out on the table before us.
‘Dinner!’ announced the Fool enthusiastically.
It took Lacey a moment to realize the state we were in. It took her less than that to be furious. ‘While we gamble our lives and reputations, you get drunk!’ She rounded on Burrich. ‘In twenty years, you have not learned that it solves nothing!’
Burrich flinched not at all. ‘Some things cannot be solved,’ he pointed out philosophically. ‘Drink makes those things much more tolerable.’ He came to his feet easily, stood rocksteady before her. Years of drinking seemed to have taught him the knack of handling it well. ‘What did you need?’
Lacey bit her lip a moment. She decided to follow where he had pointed the conversation, ‘I need that disposed of. And I need an ointment for bruises.’
‘Does no one around here ever use the healer?’ the Fool asked of no one in partic�
�ular. Lacey ignored him.
‘That is what I supposedly came here for, so I had best return with it, in case someone asks to see it. My real mission is to find the Fitz, and ask him if he knows there are guards chopping down King Shrewd’s door with axes.’
I nodded gravely. I wasn’t going to attempt Burrich’s graceful stance. The Fool leapt to his feet instead, crying, ‘What?’ He rounded on me. ‘I thought you said you had succeeded! What success is this?’
‘The best I could manage on very short notice,’ I retorted. ‘It will either be all right, or it won’t. We’ve done all we can just now. Besides, think on it. That’s a good, stout, oaken door. It will take them a while to get through it. And when they do, I fancy they will find the inner door to the King’s bedchamber is likewise bolted and barred.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Burrich asked quietly.
‘I didn’t,’ I said brusquely. I looked at the Fool. ‘I have said enough, for now. It is time to have a bit of trust.’ I turned to Lacey. ‘How are the Queen and Patience? How went our masquerade?’
‘Well enough. The Queen is sore bruised from her fall, and for myself, I am not all that sure that the babe is out of danger of being lost. A miscarriage from a fall does not always happen immediately. But let us not borrow trouble. Wallace was concerned but ineffectual. For a man who claims to be a healer, he knows remarkably little of the true lore of herbs. As for the Prince …’ Lacey snorted, but said no more.
‘Does no one beside myself think there is a danger to letting a rumour of miscarriage circulate?’ the Fool asked airily.
‘I had no time to devise anything else,’ I retorted.
‘In a day or so, the Queen will deny the rumour, saying that all seems to be well with the child.’
‘So. For the moment, we are as secured as we may be,’ Burrich observed. ‘But what comes next? Are we to see the King and Queen Kettricken carried off to Tradeford?’
‘Trust. I ask for one day of trust,’ I said carefully. I hoped it would be enough. ‘And now we must disperse and go about our lives as normally as we can.’