Fool's Assassin - Страница 42

Bee grew, but so slowly. She remained healthy, but Molly confided to me that she did not do what other babes of her age could do. At first I ignored this worrying. Bee was small but perfect in my eyes. When I looked down on her in her crib, she stared at the ceiling with a blue gaze that pierced my heart with love. “Give her time,” I told Molly. “She’ll get there. I’ve fed up many a weakling, and seen them become the sharpest hounds in the pack. She’ll do.”

“She isn’t a puppy!” Molly rebuked me, but she smiled and added, “She was long in the womb, and emerged small. Perhaps it will take her more time to grow outside me as well.”

I do not think she believed my words, but she took comfort all the same. As the days passed, however, I could not ignore that my baby was not changing. At a month, she was little bigger than when she had been born. At first the maids would remark on what a “good baby” she was, so calm and placid. But soon they stopped saying such things, and pity grew in their faces. The fear grew in me that our child was an idiot. She had none of the features of a half-wit child that all parents know. Her tongue fit her mouth, her eyes and ears were proportional to her little face. She was as pretty as a doll, and as small and unresponsive.

I did not face it, then.

Instead I focused on the spy that Chade had sent into my home. In quiet, my anger grew. Perhaps I fed it with the fear and dread that I did not admit to myself. I thought long about it. I did not want to confront Chade by way of the Skill. I told myself that I needed to stand before him and make him recognize that I was not a man to be toyed with, not when it concerned my child.

At the end of four months, satisfied that all had remained quiet at home, I invented an excuse to visit Brushbanks. My tale was that I wished to look at a stud horse I’d heard was there. I promised Molly to return as soon as I possibly could, packed warmly for a chilly journey, and chose an unremarkable chestnut mare named Sally from the stable. She was a rangy mount with an easy gait that ate up the miles and no ambition to challenge her rider. I thought her the perfect mount for my journey to Buckkeep Town.

I could have used the standing stones to make the journey, but I would have had to stable the horse somewhere. I told myself I did not wish to invite curiosity, and while my business with Chade was urgent, it was not an emergency. And I could admit to myself that I was afraid to do so. Since I had used the stones to travel to Chade’s sickbed, I had felt drawn to repeat the experiment. Had I been younger and less experienced with the Skill, I would have put it down to curiosity and a desire for knowledge. But I had felt that yearning before: it was the Skill-hunger, an urge to use the magic simply for the sake of feeling it thrill through me. No. I would not risk a Skill-pillar journey again. Especially since I suspected Chade now monitored them and would be aware of my coming.

I intended to surprise the old spider. Let him recall how it felt to discover that someone had penetrated his defenses.

I rode from early morning to late at night, eating dried meat or oatcakes as I rode, and sleeping well off the side of the road. I had not traveled so rough in years, and my aching back each morning reminded me that even when I was a young man, it had been uncomfortable. Nonetheless, I did not stop at any inns nor pause in any of the small towns I passed. A day away from Withywoods, I had donned the humbler garb of a tradesman. I did all I could to keep anyone from remarking on the passage of a lone traveler, let alone recognizing me as Tom Badgerlock.

I timed my journey so that I arrived at Buckkeep late in the evening. I found a tidy little inn among the outskirts of Buckkeep Town and bought myself a room for the night and stabling for my horse. I ate a fine meal of roast pork, stewed dried apples, and dark bread, and went up to my room.

When night was full and dark, I left the inn quietly and took a long walk up to Buckkeep Castle. I did not go to any of the gates, but to a very secret entrance that I had discovered as Chade’s apprentice. What had been a fault in the wall had been “repaired” to allow a covert route in and out of the keep. The masking thorn bushes around it were as thick as ever, and both my skin and my jerkin were torn before I reached the actual stone of the wall and squeezed though the deceptively narrow gap there, gaining entrance to Buckkeep.

But penetrating the outer wall was just the first step. I was inside the walls of the keep but not in the castle itself. This section of the keep’s grounds was reserved for protecting stock should we ever be besieged. During the Red-Ship Wars some animals had always been kept here, but I doubted it had seen much use in recent times. In the darkness behind some empty sheep pens I shed my homespun blouse and loose trousers, and concealed the garments in an unused wooden trough. Beneath them I was dressed in Buckkeep blue, in my old blue Buck guardsman’s uniform. It was a bit snugger about the middle than I recalled it being, and smelled of fleabane and cedar from the chest where I had stored it, but I trusted it would get me past any casual glance.

Head down and walking slowly as if I were weary or perhaps a bit drunk, I wandered across the yards and in through the kitchen door that led to the guardsmen’s dining area. I felt a strange mixture of emotions at this secretive homecoming. Buckkeep Castle would always be home to me, and the kitchens especially so. So many boyhood memories surged back on the wave of aromas that welcomed me. Ale and smoked meats and fat cheeses, bread baking and hot soup bubbling and beckoning. I nearly yielded to the temptation to go in and sit down and eat. Not for hunger’s sake, but just to taste again the flavors of home.

Instead I wandered down the stone-flagged corridor, past two storage rooms; just short of the steps to the cellar I entered a certain pantry. There I let my self-discipline slip and helped myself to a short rope of linked sausage before triggering the panel of shelves that accessed the castle’s spy-ways. I pulled it closed behind me and stood for a moment in the utter darkness of those passages.

I ate a link of the sausage and idly wished there had been time for a tankard of Buckkeep ale to go with it. Then with a sigh I let my feet lead the way through the twisting corridors and narrow stairs that threaded the interior walls of Buckkeep Castle. This was a labyrinth I had known since my childhood. The only surprises I encountered were the few spiderwebs that were a familiar hazard of this maze.

I did not go to the secret chambers where Chade had first taught me the assassin’s trade. I knew he no longer lived and slept in that space as he once had. Instead I wormed my way through the narrow space behind the walls on the same level as the King’s bedchamber. I swiftly gained access to Chade’s grand bedchamber via a mirrored panel in his water closet and was a bit surprised that he had not blocked it in some way. I crept silently in, dreading that he would be waiting for me, having somehow divined my plan, but his room was empty and chill, the fire banked low on the hearth. Moving swiftly, I took a gleaming brown acorn from my pocket and left it in the center of his pillow. Then I retreated once more to the spy-labyrinth and sought his old murder laboratory.

Ah, but how it had changed since my childhood. The floors were swept and mopped clean of dirt and dust. The scarred stone table where we had conducted our experiments when I was a boy was immaculately clear of ingredients and apparatus. All was neatly stowed on shelves. The bowls and glassware had been cleaned and sorted by category. There was a specific place for each mortar and pestle, and for each spoon of wood and iron and brass. There were far fewer scroll racks than I recalled, and the ones that were there were neatly stocked. Another rack held the tools of my erstwhile trade. Small knives with grooved blades, some sheathed and some bare, rested beside neatly packaged and labeled powders and pellets, some soporific and some toxic. Gleaming needles of silver and brass were safely thrust through strips of soft leather. Coiled garrotes slumbered like deadly little snakes. Someone with a very methodical mind was in charge of this now. Not Chade. Brilliant and precise as the man was, he had never been tidy. Nor did I see signs of his ongoing scholarship; no tattered old manuscripts awaited translation or recopying. There were no scatters of spoiled pens, no open containers of ink. A sumptuous featherbed covered the old wooden bedstead, and the small fire in the neatly swept hearth burned cleanly. The bed looked as if it was for show rather than something that was regularly used. I wondered who tended these chambers now. Certainly not Thick. The simple little man was old now for one of his kind, and he had never cared for his housekeeping tasks. He would not have supplied a rack of wax tapers, standing tall and straight as ranked soldiers, ready to take their places in the candleholders. I lit two to replace the ones that had almost guttered out in the brass holders on the table.

I deduced this was Lady Rosemary’s domain now. I settled in her cushioned chair by the hearth after adding two logs to the fire. Little sweet biscuits in a covered bowl and a decanter of wine were on a small table close at hand. I helped myself and then kicked out my feet toward her fire and leaned back. I didn’t care which of them found me here. I had words for both of them. My gaze wandered over the mantel and I almost smiled to see that King Shrewd’s fruit knife was still embedded in the center of it. I wondered if Lady Rosemary knew the tale of how it had come to be there. I wondered if Chade recalled how coldly angry I had been when I drove the blade into the wood. The anger that burned in me now was colder and far more controlled. I’d have my say, and when I had finished, we would come to terms. My terms.