by Robin Hobb
‘I know,’ Burrich said. ‘I know. He’s dead.’ He took a sudden deep breath, and straightened himself in that old familiar way. I saw him fold up his pains and weakness and hide them deep inside himself. I wanted to reach out and put a steadying hand on his shoulder. But that was truly me and not Molly. He started for the door, and then paused. ‘Oh. I have something.’ He fumbled inside his shirt. ‘This was his. I … took it from his body, after he died. You should keep it for her, so she has something of her father’s. He had this from King Shrewd.’
My heart turned over in my chest as Burrich stretched out his hand. There on his palm was my pin, with the ruby nestled in the silver. Molly just looked at it. Her lips were set in a flat line. Anger, or tight control of whatever she felt. So harsh a control even she did not know what she hid from. When she did not move toward him, Burrich set it carefully on the table.
It all came together for me suddenly. He’d gone up to the shepherd’s cabin, to try again to find me, to tell me I had a daughter. Instead, what had he found? A decayed body, probably not much more than bones by now, wearing my shirt with the pin still thrust safely into the lapel. The Forged boy had been dark-haired, about my height and age.
Burrich believed I was dead. Really and truly dead. And he mourned me.
Burrich. Burrich, please, I’m not dead. Burrich, Burrich!
I rattled and raged around him, battering at him with every bit of my Skill-sense, but as always, I could not reach him. I came suddenly awake trembling and clutching at myself, feeling as if I were a ghost. He’d probably already gone to Chade. They’d both think me dead. A strange dread filled me at that thought. It seemed terribly unlucky to have all of one’s friends believe one to be dead.
I rubbed gently at my temples, feeling the beginning of a Skill-headache. A moment later I realized my defences were down, that I’d been Skilling as fiercely as I was able toward Burrich. I slammed my walls up and then curled up shivering in the dusk. Will hadn’t stumbled onto my Skilling that time, but I could not afford to be so careless. Even if my friends believed me dead, my enemies knew better. I must keep those walls up, must never take a chance of letting Will into my head. The new pain of the headache pounded at me, but I was too weary to get up and make tea. Besides, I had no elfbark, only the Tradeford woman’s untried seeds. I drank the rest of Bolt’s brandy instead, and went back to sleep. At the edge of awareness, I dreamed of wolves running. I know you live. I shall come to you if you need me. You need but ask. The reaching was tentative but true. I clung to the thought like a friendly hand as sleep claimed me.
In the days that followed, I walked to Blue Lake. I walked through wind carrying scouring sand in it. The scenery was rocks and scree, crackly brush with leathery leaves, low-growing fat-leaved succulents and far ahead, the great lake itself. At first the trail was no more than a scarring in the crusty surface of the plain, the cuts of hooves and the long ridges of the wagon paths fading in the ever-present cold wind. But as I drew closer to the lake, the land gradually became greener and gentler. The trail became more of a road. Rain began to fall with the wind, hard pattering rain that pelted its way through my clothes. I never felt completely dry.
I tried to avoid contact with the folk that travelled the road. There was no hiding from them in that flat country, but I did my best to look uninteresting and forbidding. Hard-riding messengers passed me on that trail, some headed toward Blue Lake, others back toward Tradeford. They did not pause for me, but that was small comfort. Sooner or later, someone was going to find five unburied King’s Guards and wonder at that. And the tale of how the Bastard had been captured right in their midst would be too juicy a gossip for Creece or Starling to forbear telling. The closer I got to Blue Lake, the more folk were on the road, and I dared to hope I blended in with other travellers. For in the rich grassy pasture lands, there were holdings and even small settlements. One could see them from a great distance, the tiny hummock of a house and the wisp of smoke rising from a chimney. The land began to have more moisture in it, and brush gave way to bushes and trees. Soon I was passing orchards and then pastures with milk cows, and chickens scratching in the dirt by the side of the road. Finally I came to the town that shared the name of the lake itself.
Beyond Blue Lake was another stretch of flat land, and then the foothills. Beyond them, the Mountain Kingdom. And somewhere beyond the Mountain Kingdom was Verity.
It was a little unsettling when I considered how long it had taken me to come this far afoot compared to the first time when I had travelled with a royal caravan to claim Kettricken as bride for Verity. Out on the coast, summer was over and the winds of the winter storms had begun their lashing. Even here, it would not be long before the harsh cold of an inland winter seized the plains in the grip of the winter blizzards. I supposed the snow had already begun to fall in the Mountains. It would be deep before I reached the Mountains, and I did not know what conditions I would face as I travelled up into the heights to find Verity in the lands beyond. I did not truly know if he still lived; he had spent much strength helping me win free of Regal. Yet, Come to me, come to me, seemed to echo with the beating of my heart, and I caught myself keeping step to that rhythm. I would find Verity or his bones. But I knew I would not truly belong to myself again until I had done so.
Blue Lake town seems a larger city than it is because it sprawls so. I saw few dwellings of more than one storey. Most were low, long houses, with more wings added to the building as sons and daughters married and brought spouses home. Timber was plentiful on the other side of Blue Lake, so the poorer houses were of mud brick while those of veteran traders and fishers were of cedar plank roofed with wide shingles. Most of the houses were painted white or grey or a light blue, which made the structures seem even larger. Many had windows with thick, whorled panes of glass in them. But I walked past them and went to where I always felt more at home.
The waterfront was both like and unlike a seaport town. There were no high and low tides to contend with, only storm-driven waves, so many more houses and businesses were built out on pilings quite a way into the lake itself. Some fisherfolk were able to tie up literally at their own doorsteps, and others delivered their catch to a back door so that the fish merchant might sell it out the front. It seemed strange to smell water without salt or iodine riding the wind; to me the lake air smelled greenish and mossy. The gulls were different, with black-tipped wings, but in all other ways as greedy and thieving as any gulls I’d ever known. There were also entirely too many guardsmen for my liking. They prowled about like trapped cats in Farrow’s gold and brown livery. I did not look in their faces, nor give them reason to notice me.
I had a total of fifteen silvers and twelve coppers, the sum of my funds and what Bolt had been carrying in his own purse. Some of the coins were a style I did not recognize, but the weights felt good in my hand. I assumed they’d be accepted. They were all I had to get me as far as the Mountains, and all I had that I might ever take home to Molly. So they were doubly valuable to me and I did not intend to part with any more than I must. But neither was I so foolish as to even consider heading into the Mountains without some provisions and some heavier clothes. So spend some I must, but I also hoped to find a way to work my passage across Blue Lake, and perhaps beyond.
In every town, there are always poorer parts, and shops or carts where folk deal in the cast-off goods of others. I wandered Blue Lake for a bit, staying always to the waterfront where trade seemed the liveliest, and eventually I came to streets where most of the shops were of mud brick even if they were roofed with shingles. Here I found weary tinkers selling mended pots and rag-pickers with their carts of well-worn wares and shops where one might buy odd crockery and the like.
From now on, I knew, my pack would be heavier, but it could not be helped. One of the first things I bought was a sturdy basket plaited from lake reeds with carry straps to go over my shoulders. I placed my present bundle inside it. Before the day was out, I had added padded trousers,
a quilted jacket such as the Mountain folk wore and a pair of loose boots, like soft leather socks. They had leather lacing to secure them tightly to my calves. I also bought some woollen stockings, mismatched in colour but very thick, to wear beneath the boots. From another cart I purchased a snug woollen cap and a scarf. I bought a pair of mittens that were too large for me, obviously made by some Mountain wife to fit her husband’s hands.
At a tiny herb stall, I was able to find elfbark, and so secured a small store of that for myself. In a nearby market, I bought strips of dried smoked fish, dried apples and flat cakes of very hard bread that the vendor assured me would keep well no matter how far I might travel.
I next endeavoured to book passage for myself on a barge across Blue Lake. Actually, I went to the waterfront hiring square, hoping to work my passage across. I swiftly found out no one was hiring. ‘Look, mate,’ a boy of thirteen loftily told me, ‘everyone knows the big barges don’t work the lake this time of year ’less there’s gold in it. And there ain’t this year. Mountain Witch shut down all the trade to the Mountains. Nothing to haul means no money worth taking the risk. And that’s it, plain and simple. But even if the trade was open, you’d not find much going back and forth in winter. Summers is when the big barges can cross from this side to that. Winds can be iffy even then, but a good crew can work a barge, sail and oar, there and back again. But this time of year, it’s a waste of time. The storms blow up every five days or so and the rest of the time the winds only blow one way, and if they aren’t full of water, they’re carrying ice and snow. It’s a fine time to come from the Mountain side to Blue Lake town, if you don’t mind getting wet and cold and chopping ice off your rigging all the way. But you won’t find any of the big freight barges making the run from here to there until next spring. There’s smaller boats that will take folk across, but passage on them is dear and for the daring. If you take ship on one of those, it’s because you’re willing to pay gold for the passage, and pay with your life if your skipper makes a mistake. You don’t look as if you’ve got the coin for it, man, let alone to pay the King’s tariff on the trip.’
Boy he might have been, but he knew what he spoke about. The more I listened, the more I heard the same thing. The Mountain Witch had closed the passes and innocent travellers were being attacked and robbed by Mountain brigands. For their own good, travellers and traders were being turned back at the border. War was looming. That chilled my heart, and made me all the more certain I must reach Verity. But when I insisted I had to get to the Mountains, and soon, I was advised to somehow avail myself of five gold pieces for the passage across the lake and good luck from there. In one instance, a man hinted he knew of a somewhat illegal endeavour in which I might gain that much in a month’s time or less, if I were interested. I was not. I already had enough difficulties to contend with.
Come to me.
I knew that somehow, I would.
I found a very cheap inn, run down and draughty, but at least not smelling too much of Smoke. The clientele could not afford it. I paid for a bed and got a pallet in an open loft above the common room. At least heat also rose with the errant smoke from the hearth below. By draping my cloak and clothes over a chair by my pallet, I was finally able to dry them completely for the first time in days. Song and conversation, both rowdy and quiet, were a constant chorus to my first effort at sleep. There was no privacy and I finally got the hot bath I longed for at a bath-and-steamhouse five doors away. But there was a certain weary pleasure in knowing where I would sleep at night, if not how well.
I had not planned it, but it was an excellent way also to listen to the common gossip of Blue Lake. The first night I was there, I learned much more than I wished to of a certain young noble who had got not one, but two serving women with child and the intimate details of a major brawl in a tavern two streets away that had left Jake Ruddy-Nose without his namesake portion of anatomy, having had it bitten off by Crookram the Scribe.
The second night I was at the inn, I heard the rumour that twelve King’s Guards had been found slaughtered by brigands half a day’s ride past Jernigan’s Spring. By the next night, someone had made the connection, and tales were told of how the bodies had been savaged and fed upon by a beast. I considered it quite likely that scavengers had found the bodies and fed from them. But as the tale was told, it was clearly the work of the Wit Bastard, who had changed himself into a wolf to escape his fetters of cold iron, and fallen upon the whole company by the light of a full moon to wreak his savage violence on them. As the teller described me, I had little fear of being discovered in their midst. My eyes did not glow red in firelight, nor did my fangs protrude from my mouth. I knew there would be other, more prosaic descriptions of me passed about. Regal’s treatment of me had left me with a singular set of scars that were difficult to conceal. I began to grasp how difficult it had been for Chade to work with a pock-scarred face.
The beard I had once found an irritant now seemed natural to me. It grew in wiry curls that reminded me of Verity’s and was just as unruly. The bruises and cuts Bolt had left on my face were mostly faded, though my shoulder still ached endlessly in the cold weather. The damp chill of the wintry air reddened my cheeks above my beard and fortunately made the edge of my scar less noticeable. The cut on my arm had long healed, but the broken nose I could do little about. It, too, no longer startled me when I saw it in a mirror. In a way, I reflected, I was as much Regal’s creation now as Chade’s. Chade had only taught me how to kill; Regal had made me a true assassin.
My third evening in the inn, I heard the gossip that made me cold.
‘The King hisself, it was, aye, and the head Skill-wizard. Cloaks of fine wool with so much fur at the collar and hood you could scarcely see their faces. Riding black horses with gold saddles, fine as you please, and a score of brown and golds riding at their heels. Cleared the whole square so they might pass, did the guards. So I said to the fella next to me, hey, what’s all this, you know? And he told me King Regal has come to town to hear for himself what the Mountain Witch has been doing to us, and to put an end to it. And more. Says he, the King himself has come to track down the Pocked Man and the Witted Bastard, for it’s well known they work hand in glove with the Mountain Witch.’
I overheard this from a rheumy-eyed beggar who’d earned enough coin to buy a mug of hot cider and nurse it next to the inn fire. This bit of gossip earned him another round, while his patron told him yet again the tale of the Wit Bastard and how he had slaughtered a dozen of the King’s Guard and drunk their blood for his magic. I found myself a turmoil of emotions. Disappointment that my poisons had evidently done nothing to Regal. Fear that I might be discovered by him. And a savage hope that I might have one more chance at him before I found my way to Verity.
I scarcely needed to ask any questions. The next morning found all of Blue Lake abuzz with the King’s arrival. It had been many years since a crowned king had actually visited Blue Lake, and every merchant and minor noble intended to take advantage of the visit. Regal had commandeered the largest and finest inn in the town, blithely ordering that all the rooms be cleared for him and his retinue. I heard rumours that the innkeeper was both flattered and aghast at being chosen, for while it would certainly establish the reputation of his inn, there had been no mention of recompense, only a lengthy list of victuals and vintages that King Regal expected to be available.
I dressed in my new winter garments, pulled my wool cap down over my ears and set forth. The inn was found easily. No other inn at Blue Lake was three storeys high, nor could any boast so many balconies and windows. The streets outside the inn were thick with nobles attempting to present themselves to King Regal, many with comely daughters in tow. They were jostling elbow to elbow with minstrels and jugglers offering to entertain, merchants bearing samples of their finest wares as gifts, as well as those making deliveries of meat, ale, wine, bread, cheese and every other foodstuff imaginable. I did not attempt to get in, but listened mostly to those coming ou
t. The tap-room was packed with guardsmen, and a rude lot were they, badmouthing the local ale and whores as if they got better in Tradeford. And King Regal was not receiving today, no, he felt poorly after his hasty trip, and had sent for the best stocks of merrybud to settle his complaints. Yes, there was to be a dinner this evening, a most lavish affair, my dear, only the very finest of folk to be invited. And did you see him, with that one eye gone like a dead fish’s, fair give me the creeps, was I the King, I’d find a better made man to advise me, Skill or no. Such was the talk from a variety of folk leaving by front door and back, and I stored it all away as well as noting well which windows in the inn were curtained against the day’s brief light. Resting, was he? I could aid him with that.
But there I found my dilemma. A few weeks ago, I would simply have slipped in and done my best to plant a knife in Regal’s chest, and damn the consequences. But now I not only had Verity’s Skill-command eating at me, but also the knowledge that if I survived, I had a woman and child awaiting me. I was no longer willing to trade my life for Regal’s. This time, I needed a plan.
Nightfall found me on the roof of the inn. It was a cedar-shake roof, sharply peaked, and very slippery with frost. There were several wings to the inn, and I lay in the juncture of the pitched roofs between two of them, waiting. I was grateful to Regal for having chosen the largest and finest inn. I was up well above the level of the neighbouring buildings. No one was going to see me with a casual glance; they’d have to be looking for me. Even so, I waited till full dark before I half slid and half clambered down to the edge of the eaves. I lay there a time, calming my heart. There was nothing to hold on to. The roof had a generous eave, to shield the balcony below it. I would have to slide down, catch the eave with my hands in passing, and swing myself in if I was to land on the balcony. Otherwise, it was a three-storey drop to the street. I prayed I would not land upon the balcony’s decoratively spiked railing.