Fool's Assassin - Страница 121

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And there it was, exposed in that single sentence. Despite Chade’s careless dropping of my name, she had not put the pieces together. She was glaring at me as if she expected me to stumble back from her, bowing and apologizing. While she might be illegitimate, she was confident of her superiority to me. Lant, though a bastard, had been acknowledged by a noble father, and was hence her equal.

But not the serving boy. Nor me, nor Riddle. Because in her eyes, I was as lowborn as my daughter.

“Shun. That’s enough.” That was all I said. Her eyes narrowed and grew cold with fury. I almost wanted to laugh as she decided to exercise her authority.

“You are not permitted to speak to me like that,” she warned me in a low voice.

I had almost thought of what I would reply when Riddle arrived at the table. He came bearing their dishes of food, cleverly balanced up one arm, and their mugs of cider in the other hand. With two thunks and a flourish, he set it all out before me. There was a glint in his eyes, his determination to put the events of the day behind him and be merry. Then his determined smile was suddenly replaced with a worried look and the question, “Where’s Bee?”

Alarm pierced me. I stood in the tight space between the bench and table. “She hasn’t come back. It’s been too long. I’ll go find her.”

“My cider’s barely warm!” I heard Shun exclaim as I stepped over the bench and away.

Chapter Twenty-Nine
Mist and Light

...

Then, from the gleaming mists that surrounded us, there burst a wolf, all black and silver. He was covered in scars and death clung to him like water clings to a dog’s coat after he has plunged through a river. My father was with him and in him and around him, and never had I realized him as he was. He bled from dozens of unhealable wounds and yet at the core of him, life burned like molten gold in a furnace.

It had all been ruined when the door of the tavern opened and banged shut again, and suddenly Shun and FitzVigilant were there. The way FitzVigilant looked at my father, I knew he had already heard the tale of what had happened in the town commons. I did not want him to speak of it to my father. We were past it now, and if he brought it up Riddle would have to think about it again. Riddle and my father were behaving as if all were well now, but I knew that my father’s actions would gnaw at Riddle’s heart like a worm. My father was his friend, but he gave his ultimate loyalty to Nettle, and he dreaded telling her this story and revealing to her his part in it.

But Shun, if she knew of it, made nothing of it, but only began to natter on about she-must-have-this and she-must-have-that, and if my father had coin, perhaps they could go get it right now, or perhaps she would eat first. She sat down beside my father and FitzVigilant sat on the other side of Riddle, and they reminded me of red-mouthed fledglings squawking in a nest as they spoke of needing this and wanting that. My father turned away from me to speak to Shun. I couldn’t stand it. I was suddenly too warm and the press of the myriad conversations felt like hands over my ears. I tugged on Riddle’s sleeve. “I need to go outside.”

“What? Oh. It’s behind the inn. And come right back, you hear me?” He twisted away to reply to something FitzVigilant had said to him. Odd, how I must never interrupt, but my tutor saw no reason to observe the same courtesy to me. “It’s country food, Lant. Different from what you’d find in a Buckkeep Town tavern, but not bad. Try the soup.”

I had to wiggle to turn on the bench and then get down from it. I do not think my father had even noticed me leaving. On my way to the door, a large woman nearly stepped on me, but I darted round her. The door was so heavy I had to wait until someone was coming in before I could slip out. The cooler air greeted me; it seemed as if the bustle of the street and merry atmosphere had increased as evening drew closer. I stepped just slightly away from the door so that I would not be hit if it opened, and then I had to move out of the way again because a man needed to unload a cart of firewood for the tavern next door. So I crossed the street and watched a man juggling three potatoes and an apple. He sang a merry little song as he juggled. When he was finished, I twisted to reach past my new market bag and dug deep into my new little pouch. In the bottom I found my half-copper. When I gave it to him, he smiled and gave me the apple to keep.

It was definitely time for me to go back to the tavern and find my father, much as I dreaded being dragged about on Shun’s errands now. But perhaps my father would send Riddle with her or just give her money to waste. A wagon full of cider kegs with a team of four horses had stopped in the street, so I had to go around it. To get back to the tavern, I must walk past the gray beggar.

I stopped to look at him. He was so empty. Not just his dirty pleading hand on his knee, but all of him, as if he were a plum skin hanging on a tree after wasps had stolen all its sweet flesh and left only an empty shell. I looked at his empty hand, but I desperately wanted to keep my two coppers. So I said, “I’ve an apple. Would you like an apple, beggar?”

He shifted his eyes toward me as if he could see me. They were terrible, dead and clouded. I did not want him to look at me with such eyes. “You are kind,” he said, and I bravely stooped to set the apple in his hand.

Just then the door of the spice shop opened and the thin little woman who owned it stepped out. “You!” she exclaimed. “Are you still squatting here? Away! I told you, get away! A street full of customers and my shop is empty because no one wants to step over your smelly bones and rags. Away! Or my husband comes with his stick to teach you how to dance!”

“I go, I go,” the beggar said softly. His gray hand had closed on the red apple. He tucked the fruit into the breast of his ragged tunic and began the slow struggle to rise. The woman was glaring at him. I stooped, found the staff he was groping for, and put it into his hand. “You are kind,” he said again. He gripped the stick tight, one hand above the other, and levered himself to his feet. He swayed and turned his face slowly from side to side. “Is the street clear?” he asked piteously. “If I step out now, is the street clear?”

“Clear enough. Go now!” The spice woman spoke harshly as a team and wagon rounded the corner, heading our way, and I resolved never to buy anything in her store.

“Don’t step out,” I warned him. “You’ll be crushed. Wait and I’ll walk across with you.”

“Well, aren’t you the interfering little snippet!” She bent forward at the waist to mock me. Her heavy breasts lunged at me like chained dogs. “Does your mother know you are running wild on the street and talking to dirty beggars?”

I wanted to say something clever back to her, but she turned back into her shop, calling, “Heny? Heny, that beggar is still blocking our door! See him off, as I asked you to do hours ago!”

The rumbling wagon had passed. “Come with me now,” I said. He smelled very bad. I didn’t want to touch him. But I knew that my father would not have left him there at the mercy of the spice woman. It was time for me to begin behaving as my father’s daughter. I took hold of his staff below his grip. “I’ll guide you,” I told him. “Step now. Come.”

It was a slow business. Even with both hands grasping his stick, he could barely stand. He took two little steps, hopped his stick forward, and took two more little steps. As I guided him out into the street and away from the door of the spice shop, I realized suddenly I did not know where to put him. There, he had been sheltered from the wind. To either side of us, the doors of the shops were busy with customers coming and going. Ahead of us was only the town commons. We hitched along slowly toward it. No one had returned to the place where the dog had died. Someone had taken her body away and the bull’s head, and as my father had asked, they had spread clean snow there, but the blood had soaked up through it. Pink snow, almost pretty, if one did not know what it was. I do not know why I guided him there, except that it was an open space. The canvas that had covered the bull’s head was on the ground under the tree. Perhaps he could sit on that.

I glanced back at the tavern door, knowing that if I did not return soon, my father or Riddle would come after me. Perhaps both of them.

Or perhaps neither. Shun was there and she was fully capable of keeping both of them occupied to the point at which they would forget about me. A nasty feeling smothered my heart. Jealousy. I finally named it for what it was. I was jealous.

It fueled my desire to help the blind beggar. I would not go back. They would have to come and find me, and when they did, they would see that I could be as brave and kind as my father. Helping a beggar that no one else would touch. A man by a tinker’s cart was staring at us in distaste. Plainly he wanted us to move farther away from him. I steeled my resolve and shifted my bag to settle firmly on my shoulder. “Give me your arm,” I said boldly. “I can help you walk better.”

He hesitated, knowing how disgusting he was. Then his weariness won. “You are too kind,” he said, almost sadly, and held out his stick of an arm. I took it. He lurched a little. I was shorter than he had expected. His dirty hand gripped my forearm.

The world wheeled around us. The sky rainbowed. There had been a fog, but it had been a fog I had looked through all my life. Now it parted, as if a wind of joy had torn through it. I looked in awe at a beauty that tore my heart wide open. All of them, the scowling tinker, the holly-crowned girl kissing a boy behind a tree, the inn cat under the porch, the old man bartering for a new felted hat, all of them burst forth in glorious colors I had never imagined existed. Their flaws were overcome by the potential for beauty in each of them. I made a small sound and the beggar sobbed aloud.

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