by Robin Hobb
‘So Chivalry might yet become King?’ The question sent a queer thrill through me. Instantly I was imagining his triumphant return to Buckkeep, our eventual meeting, and … What then?
Chade seemed to be reading my face. ‘No, boy. Not likely at all. Even if the folk all wanted him to, I doubt that he’d go against what he set upon himself, or against the King’s wishes. But it would cause mumblings and grumblings, and those could lead to riots and skirmishes, oh, and a generally bad climate for a bastard to be running around free in. You’d have to be settled one way or another. Either as a corpse, or as the King’s tool.’
‘The King’s tool. I see.’ An oppression settled over me. My brief glimpse of blue skies arching over yellow roads and me travelling down them astride Sooty suddenly vanished. I thought of the hounds in their kennels instead, or of the hawk, hooded and strapped, that rode on the King’s wrist and was loosed only to do the King’s will.
‘It doesn’t have to be that bad,’ Chade said quietly. ‘Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.’
‘I’m never going to get to go anywhere, am I?’ Despite the newness of the idea, travelling suddenly seemed immensely important to me.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Chade was rummaging about for something to use as a stopper on the dish full of seeds. He finally contented himself with putting a saucer on top of it. ‘You’ll go to many places. Quietly, and when the family interests require you to go there. But that’s not all that different for any prince of the blood. Do you think Chivalry got to choose where he would go to work his diplomacy? Do you think Verity likes being sent off to view towns raided by Outislanders, to hear the complaints of folks who insist that if only they’d been better fortified or better manned, none of this would have happened? A true prince has very little freedom when it comes to where he will go or how he will spend his time. Chivalry has probably more of both now than he ever had before.’
‘Except that he can’t come back to Buckkeep?’ The flash of insight made me freeze, my hands full of shards.
‘Except he can’t come back to Buckkeep. It doesn’t do to stir folks up with visits from a former King-in-Waiting. Better he faded quietly away.’
I tossed the shards into the hearth. ‘At least he gets to go somewhere,’ I muttered. ‘I can’t even go to town …’
‘And it’s that important to you? To go down to a grubby, greasy little port like Buckkeep Town?’
‘There are other people there …’ I hesitated. Not even Chade knew of my town friends. I plunged ahead. ‘They call me Newboy. And they don’t think “the bastard” every time they look at me.’ I had never put it into words before, but suddenly the attraction of town was quite clear to me.
‘Ah,’ said Chade, and his shoulders moved as if he sighed, but he was silent. And a moment later he was telling me how one could sicken a man just by feeding him rhubarb and spinach at the same sitting, sicken him even to death if the portions were sufficient, and never set a bit of poison on the table at all. I asked him how to keep others at the same table from also being sickened, and our discussion wandered from there. Only later did it seem to me that his words regarding Chivalry had been almost prophetic.
Two days later I was surprised to be told that Fedwren had requested my services for a day or so. I was surprised even more when he gave me a list of supplies he required from town, and enough silver to buy them, with two extra coppers for myself. I held my breath, expecting that Burrich or one of my other masters would forbid it, but instead I was told to hurry on my way. I went out of the gates with a basket on my arm and my brain giddy with sudden freedom. I counted up the months since I had last been able to slip away from Buckkeep, and was shocked to find it had been a year or better. Immediately I planned to renew my old familiarity with the town. No one had told me when I had to return, and I was confident I could snatch an hour or two to myself and no one the wiser.
The disparity of the items on Fedwren’s list took me all over the town. I had no idea what use a scribe had for dried Sea-Maid’s Hair, or for a peck of forester’s nuts. Perhaps he used them to make his coloured inks, I decided, and when I could not find them in the usual shops, I took myself down to the harbour bazaar, where anyone with a blanket and something to sell could declare himself a merchant. The seaweed I found swiftly enough there, and learned it was a common ingredient in chowder. The nuts took longer, for those were something that would have come from inland rather than from the sea, and there were fewer traders who dealt in such things.
But find them I did, alongside baskets of porcupine quills and carved wooden beads and nutcones and pounded bark fabric. The woman who presided over the blanket was old, and her hair had gone silver rather than white or grey. She had a strong, straight nose and her eyes were on bony shelves over her cheeks. It was a racial heritage both strange and oddly familiar to me, and a shiver walked down my back when I suddenly knew she was from the mountains.
‘Keppet,’ said the woman at the next mat as I completed my purchase. I glanced at her, thinking she was addressing the woman I had just paid. But she was staring at me. ‘Keppet,’ she said, quite insistently, and I wondered what it meant in her language. It seemed a request for something, but the older woman only stared coldly out into the street, so I shrugged at her younger neighbour apologetically and turned away as I stowed the nuts in my basket.
I hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when I heard her shriek, ‘Keppet!’ yet again. I looked back to see the two women engaged in a struggle. The older one gripped the younger one’s wrists and the younger one thrashed and kicked to be free of her. Around her, other merchants were getting to their feet in alarm and snatching their own merchandise out of harm’s way. I might have turned back to watch had not another more familiar face met my eyes.
‘Nosebleed!’ I exclaimed.
She turned to face me full-on, and for an instant I thought I had been mistaken. A year had passed since I’d last seen her. How could a person change so much? The dark hair that used to be in sensible braids behind her ears now fell free past her shoulders. And she was dressed not in a jerkin and loose trousers but in blouse and skirt. The adult garments put me at a loss for words. I might have turned aside and pretended I addressed someone else had her dark eyes not challenged me as she asked me coolly, ‘Nosebleed?’
I stood my ground. ‘Aren’t you Molly Nosebleed?’
She lifted a hand to brush some hair back from her cheek. ‘I’m Molly Chandler.’ I saw recognition in her eyes, but her voice was chill as she added, ‘I’m not sure that I know you. Your name, sir?’
Confused, I reacted without thinking. I quested toward her, found her nervousness, and was surprised by her fears. Thought and voice I sought to soothe it. ‘I’m Newboy,’ I said without hesitation.
Her eyes widened with surprise, and then she laughed at what she construed as a joke. The barrier she had erected between us burst like a soap bubble, and suddenly I knew her as I had before. There was the same warm kinship between us that reminded me of nothing so much as Nosy. All awkwardness disappeared. A crowd was forming about the struggling women, but we left it behind us as we strolled up the cobbled street. I admired her skirts, and she calmly informed that she had been wearing skirts for several months now and that she quite preferred them to trousers. This one had been her mother’s; she was told that one simply couldn’t get wool woven this fine any more, or a red as bright as it was dyed. She admired my clothes, and I suddenly realized that perhaps I appeared to her as different as she to me. I had my best shirt on, my trousers had been washed only a few days ago and I wore boots as fine as any man-at-arms, despite Burrich’s objections about how rapidly I outgrew them. She asked my business and I told her I was on errands for the writing master at the keep. I told her too that he was in need of two beeswax tapers, a total fabrication on my part, but one that allowed me to remain by her side as we strolled up the winding street. Our elbows bumped companionably and she talked. She was ca
rrying a basket of her own on her arm. It had several packets and bundles of herbs in it, for scenting candles, she told me. Beeswax took the scent much better than tallow, in her opinion. She made the best scented candles in Buckkeep; even the two other chandlers in town admitted it. This, smell this, this was lavender, wasn’t it lovely? Her mother’s favourite, and hers, too. This was crushsweet, and this bee-balm. This was thresher’s root, not her favourite, no, but some said it made a good candle to cure headaches and winter-glooms. Mavis Threadsnip had told her that Molly’s mother had mixed it with other herbs and made a wonderful candle, one that would calm even a colicky baby. So Molly had decided to try, by experimenting, to see if she could find the right herbs to re-create her mother’s recipe.
Her calm flaunting of her knowledge and skills left me burning to distinguish myself in her eyes. ‘I know the thresher’s root,’ I told her. ‘Some use it to make an ointment for sore shoulders and backs. That’s where the name comes from. But if you distil a tincture from it and mix it well in wine it’s never tasted, and it will make a grown man sleep a day and a night and a day again, or make a child die in his sleep.’
Her eyes widened as I spoke, and at my last words a look of horror came over her face. I fell silent and felt the sharp awkwardness again. ‘How do you know such things?’ she demanded breathlessly.
‘I … I heard an old travelling midwife talking to our midwife up at the keep,’ I improvised. ‘It was … a sad story she told, of an injured man given some to help him rest, but his baby got into it as well. A very, very sad story.’ Her face was softening and I felt her warming toward me again. ‘I only tell it to be sure you are careful of the root. Don’t leave it about where any child can get at it.’
‘Thank you. I shan’t. Are you interested in herbs and roots? I didn’t know a scriber cared about such things.’
I suddenly realized that she thought I was the scriber’s help-boy. I didn’t see any reason to tell her otherwise. ‘Oh, Fedwren uses many things for his dyes and inks. Some copies he makes quite plain, but others are fancy, all done with birds and cats and turtles and fish. He showed me a Herbal with the greens and flowers of each herb done as the border for the page.’
‘That I should dearly love to see,’ she said in a heartfelt way, and I instantly began thinking of ways to purloin it for a few days.
‘I might be able to get you a copy to read … not to keep, but to study for a few days,’ I offered hesitantly.
She laughed, but there was a slight edge in it. ‘As if I could read! Oh, but I imagine you’ve picked up some letters, running about for the scribe’s errands.’
‘A few,’ I told her, and was surprised at the envy in her eyes when I showed her my list and confessed I could read all seven words on it.
A sudden shyness came over her. She walked more slowly, and I realized we were getting close to the chandlery. I wondered if her father still beat her, but dared not ask about it. Her face, at least, showed no sign of it. We reached the chandlery door and paused there. She made some sudden decision, for she put her hand on my sleeve, took a breath and then asked, ‘Do you think you could read something for me? Or even any part of it?’
‘I’ll try,’ I offered.
‘When I … now that I wear skirts, my father has given me my mother’s things. She had been dress-help to a lady up at the keep when she was a girl, and had letters taught her. I have some tablets she wrote. I’d like to know what they say.’
‘I’ll try,’ I repeated.
‘My father’s in the shop.’ She said no more than that, but something in the way her consciousness rang against mine was sufficient.
‘I’m to get Scribe Fedwren two beeswax tapers,’ I reminded her. ‘I dare not go back to the keep without them.’
‘Be not too familiar with me,’ she cautioned me, and then opened the door.
I followed her, but slowly, as if coincidence brought us to the door together. I need not have been so circumspect. Her father slept quite soundly in a chair beside the hearth. I was shocked at the change in him. His skinniness had become skeletal, the flesh on his face reminding me of an undercooked pastry over a lumpy fruit pie. Chade had taught me well. I looked to the man’s fingernails and lips, and even from across the room, I knew he could not live much longer. Perhaps he no longer beat Molly because he no longer had the strength. Molly motioned me to be quiet. She vanished behind the hangings that divided their home from their shop, leaving me to explore the store.
It was a pleasant place, not large, but the ceiling was higher than in most of the shops and dwellings in Buckkeep Town. I suspected it was Molly’s diligence that kept it swept and tidy. The pleasant smells and soft light of her industry filled the room. Her wares hung in pairs by their joined wicks from long dowels on a rack. Fat sensible candles for ships’ use filled another shelf. She even had three glazed, pottery lamps on display, for those able to afford such things. In addition to candles, I found she had pots of honey, a natural by-product of the beehives she tended behind the shop that furnished the wax for her finest products.
Then Molly reappeared and motioned to me to come and join her. She brought a branch of tapers and a set of tablets to a table and set them out on it. Then she stood back and pressed her lips together as if wondering if what she did were wise.
The tablets were done in the old style. Simple slabs of wood had been cut with the grain of the tree and sanded smooth. The letters had been brushed in carefully, and then sealed to the wood with a yellowing rosin layer. There were five, excellently lettered. Four were carefully precise accounts of herbal recipes for healing candles. As I read each one softly aloud to Molly, I could see her struggling to commit them to memory. At the fifth tablet, I hesitated. ‘This isn’t a recipe,’ I told her.
‘Well, what is it?’ she demanded in a whisper.
I shrugged and began to read it to her. ‘“On this day was born my Molly Nosegay, sweet as any bunch of posies. For her birth labours, I burned two tapers of bayberry and two cup-candles scented with two handfuls of the small violets that grow near Dowell’s Mill and one handful of redroot, chopped very fine. May she do likewise when her time comes to bear a child, and her labour will be as easy as mine, and the fruit of it as perfect. So I believe.”’
That was all, and when I had read it, the silence grew and blossomed. Molly took that last tablet from my hands and held it in her two hands and stared at it, as if reading things in the letters that I had not seen. I shifted my feet, and the scuffing recalled to her that I was there. Silently she gathered up all her tablets and disappeared with them once more.
When she came back, she walked swiftly to the shelf and took down two tall beeswax tapers, and then to another shelf whence she took two fat pink candles.
‘I only need …’
‘Shush. There’s no charge for any of these. The sweetberry blossom ones will give you calm dreams. I very much enjoy them, and I think you will, too.’ Her voice was friendly, but as she put them into my basket, I knew she was waiting for me to leave. Still, she walked to the door with me, and opened it softly lest it wake her father. ‘Good-bye, Newboy,’ she said, and then gave me one real smile. ‘Nosegay. I never knew she called me that. Nosebleed, they called me on the streets. I suppose the older ones who knew what name she had given me thought it was funny. And after a while they probably forgot it had ever been anything else. Well. I don’t care. I have it now. A name from my mother.’
‘It suits you,’ I said in a sudden burst of gallantry, and then, as she stared and the heat rose in my cheeks, I hurried away from the door. I was surprised to find that it was late afternoon, nearly evening. I raced through the rest of my errands, begging the last item on my list, a weasel’s skin, through the shutters of the merchant’s window. Grudgingly he opened his door to me, complaining that he liked to eat his supper hot, but I thanked him so profusely he must have believed me a little daft.
I was hurrying up the steepest part of the road back to the keep when I he
ard the unexpected sound of horses behind me. They were coming up from the dock section of town, ridden hard. It was ridiculous. No one kept horses in town, for the roads were too steep and rocky to make them of much use. Also, the town was crowded into such a small area as to make riding a horse a vanity rather than a convenience. So these must be horses from the keep’s stables. I stepped to one side of the road and waited, curious to see who would risk Burrich’s wrath by riding horses at such speed on slick and uneven cobbles in poor light.
To my shock it was Regal and Verity on the matched blacks that were Burrich’s pride. Verity carried a plumed baton, such as messengers to the keep carried when the news they bore was of the utmost importance. At the sight of me standing quietly beside the road they both pulled in their horses so violently that Regal’s spun aside and nearly went down on his knees.
‘Burrich will have fits if you break that colt’s knees!’ I cried out in dismay and ran toward him.
Regal gave an inarticulate cry, and a half-instant later, Verity laughed at him shakily. ‘You thought he was a ghost, same as I. Whoah, lad, you gave us a turn, standing so quiet as that. And looking so much like him. Eh, Regal?’
‘Verity, you’re a fool. Hold your tongue.’ Regal gave his mount’s mouth a vindictive jerk, and then tugged his jerkin smooth again. ‘What are you doing out on this road so late, bastard? Just what do you think you’re up to, sneaking away from the keep and into town at this hour?’
I was used to Regal’s disdain for me. This sharp rebuke was something new, however. Usually, he did little more than avoid me, or hold himself away from me as if I were fresh manure. The surprise made me answer quickly, ‘I’m on my way back, not to, sir. I’ve been running errands for Fedwren.’ And I held up my basket as proof.