Fool's Assassin - Страница 55

She had moved closer to me, but I knew better than to try to pick her up. Instead I addressed her directly.

“Bee. Do you want to stay here with me?”

No words came from her, only a single sharp nod of her head.

“Let her stay,” I told Nettle, and with a sigh my elder daughter rose.

She rolled her shoulders, stretched, and added with a sigh, “Perhaps it’s better this way. Let her wear herself out and fall asleep. Once she’s bundled up tomorrow, she can catch up on her rest for part of the journey.”

Nettle had not accepted her sister’s response. I had to make it clear for her. I leaned down toward my younger daughter.

“Bee? Do you want to go on a journey with Nettle tomorrow, to Buckkeep Castle? Or do you want to stay here at Withywoods with me?”

Bee turned her head, and her pale glance slipped past both of us. She looked up into the dark recesses of the ceiling. Her eyes darted to me once and then away. She took a long slow breath. She spoke each word distinctly. “I do not wish to go to Buckkeep Castle. Thank you, Nettle, for your kind offer. But I will be staying home here, at Withywoods.”

I looked at Nettle and turned a hand up. “She says she wants to stay here.”

“I heard her,” she replied sharply. She looked jolted at hearing her sister speak, but I maintained a calm façade. I would not betray that this was more talking than she usually did in a week, let alone that her enunciation was unusually clear. Bee and I were in this together, I sensed. Allies. So I looked at Nettle calmly as if I were not startled at all.

For a moment Nettle resembled her mother right before she would fly into a temper. I looked at her and my heart smote me. Why had I so often provoked that look from Molly when she had been alive? Couldn’t I have been kinder, gentler? Couldn’t I have let her have her way more often? Black and utter loneliness rose in me. I felt sick with it, as if the emptiness were something I needed to vomit out of my body.

Nettle spoke in a low voice. “It’s not a decision that she is competent to make for herself. Think of the days ahead. How are you going to take care of her, when you’ve barely taken care of yourself these last two weeks? Do you think she can go without eating, as you have? Do you think she can stay up until dawn, sleep a few hours, and then drag herself through the day as you do? She’s a child, Tom. She needs regular meals, and a routine and discipline. And, yes, you are right, she does need lessons. And her first lessons need to be in how not to be strange! If she can speak, as she just so clearly did, then she needs to be taught to speak more often, so that people know she has a mind. She needs to be taught all that is needful for her to know. And she needs to be encouraged to speak, not let everyone think she is a mute or an idiot! She needs to be cared for, not just day-to-day food and clothing, but month to month and year to year, learning and growing. She can’t run about Withywoods like a stray kitten while you soak yourself in old books and brandy.”

“I can teach her,” I asserted, and wondered if I could. I remembered the hours I had spent with Fedwren and the other children of Buckkeep. I wondered if I could find the patience and tenacity he had possessed in teaching us. Well, as I must, I would, I decided silently. I had taught Hap, hadn’t I? My mind leapt sideways to Chade’s offer. He had said he would send me FitzVigilant. He had not told me yet that it was time, but certainly it must be soon.

Nettle was shaking her head. Her eyes were pink from both tears and weariness. “There is another thing you are ignoring. She looks like a six-year-old, but she is nine. When she is fifteen, will she still look like a much younger child? How will that affect her life? And how will you tell her about what it is to be a woman?”

How, indeed? “That is years away,” I asserted with a calmness I did not feel. I realized that my Skill-walls were up and tight, keeping Nettle from feeling any doubts that I had. Yet by the very impenetrability of my walls, she would know I was keeping something from her. That could not be changed. She and I shared the Skill-magic and had been able to reach each other since she was a little girl. That unforgiving access to each other’s dreams and experiences was one reason I had refrained from using the Skill to know Bee’s mind. I glanced at her now, and to my shock she was staring directly at me. For a moment our gazes met and held, as they had not for years.

My instinctive response surprised me. I dropped my eyes. From somewhere in my heart, an old wolf warned me, “Staring into someone’s eyes is rude. Don’t provoke a challenge.”

An instant later I looked back at Bee, but she, too, had cast her gaze aside. I watched her and thought I saw her sneak a glance at me from the corner of her eye. She reminded me so much of a wild creature that I knew a lurch of fear. Had she inherited the Wit from me? I had left her mind untouched by mine, but in many ways that meant I had left it unguarded as well. In her innocence, had she already bonded with an animal? One of the kitchen cats, perhaps? Yet her mannerisms did not mirror a cat’s. No. If anything, she mimicked the behavior of a wolf cub, and it was impossible that she would have bonded to one of those. Yet another mystery from my peculiar child.

“Are you listening?” Nettle demanded, and I startled. Her dark eyes could flash fire just as her mother’s had.

“No. I’m sorry, I wasn’t. I was thinking of all the things I’d need to teach her, and it distracted me.” And gave me more reason than ever to keep her safely at Withywoods with me. I recalled an incident with a horse and felt cold. If Bee was Witted, then home was the safest place for her. Feeling against the Witted was not as publicly hostile as it had been, but old habits of thinking died hard. There would still be plenty of folk at Buckkeep who would think even a Witted child was best served by hanging, burning, and being cut into pieces.

“And are you listening now?” Nettle persisted. With an effort I pulled my gaze from Bee and met her eyes.

“I am.”

She folded her lower lip into her mouth and chewed on it, thinking hard. She was going to offer me a bargain, one she didn’t much like. “I’m coming back here in three months. If she looks neglected in any way, I’m taking her with me. And that’s the end of it.” Her tone softened as she added, “But if anytime before then you realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, let me know and I’ll send for her immediately. Or you can bring her to Buckkeep Castle yourself. And I promise I will not say, I warned you. I’ll just take her over.”

I wanted to tell her, That is never going to happen. But over the years I’ve learned not to tempt fate, for it has always seemed to me that the very things I swore I would never do are the ones that I ended up doing. So I nodded to my formidable daughter and replied mildly, “That seems fair. And you should get to bed and get some sleep if you’re making an early start.”

“I should,” she agreed. She held out a hand to the child. “Come, Bee. Now it’s bedtime for us both, and no argument.”

Bee hung her head, her reluctance obvious. I intervened.

“I’ll put her to bed. I’ve said I can take care of her in all ways. It’s fitting that I begin now.”

Nettle rocked, hesitant. “I know what you’ll do. You intend to let her stay there until she falls asleep on the hearth, and then just trundle her into her bed as she is.”

I looked at her, knowing what we were both remembering. More than once I had fallen asleep on Burrich’s hearth in the stables, some bit of harness or simple toy in my hands. Always, I woke under a woolen blanket on my pallet near his bed. I suspected he had done the same for Nettle when she was small. “Neither of us took any harm from that,” I told her. She gave a quick nod, her eyes filling with tears, and turned and left.

I watched her go through misted eyes. Her shoulders were rounded and slumped. She was defeated. And orphaned. She was a woman grown, but her mother had died just as abruptly as the man who had raised her had. And though her father stood before her, she felt alone in the world.

Her loneliness amplified my own. Burrich. My heart yearned for him suddenly. He was the man I would have gone to, the one whose advice I would have trusted in dealing with my grief. Kettricken was too contained, Chade too pragmatic, Dutiful too young. The Fool was too gone.

I reined my heart away from exploring those losses. It was one of my faults, one that Molly had sometimes rebuked me for indulging. If one bad thing befell me, I immediately linked it to every bad thing that had happened in the last week or might happen in the coming week. And when I became sad, I was prone to wallow in grief, piling up my woes and sprawling on them like a dragon on a hoard. I needed to focus on what I had, not what I had lost. I needed to remember there was a tomorrow, and I had just committed myself to someone else’s tomorrow as well.

I looked at Bee, and she immediately looked away. Despite my aching heart, I smiled. “We two, we need to talk,” I told her.

She stared into the fire, still as stone. Then she nodded slowly. Her voice was small and high, but clear. Her diction was not a child’s. “You and I do need to talk.” She flickered a glance in my direction. “But I never needed to talk to Mama. She just understood.”

I truly had not expected any response from her. With her nod and earlier brief words, she had already exceeded most of her previous communication directed at me. She had spoken to me before, simple requests when she wanted more paper or needed me to cut a pen for her. But this, this was different. This time, looking at my small daughter, a cold realization filled me. She was profoundly different from what I had always assumed her to be. It was a very strange sensation as the familiar tipped away and I spilled into the unknown. This was my child, I reminded myself. The daughter Molly and I had dreamed of for so long. Since Molly’s strange pregnancy and Bee’s birth, I had been trying to reconcile myself to what I thought she was. In one night nine years ago, I had gone from fearing my beloved wife was delusional to being the father of a tiny but perfect infant. For the first few months of her life, I had allowed myself the wild dreams that any parent has for a child. She would be clever and kind and pretty. She would want to learn all Molly and I had to teach her. She would have a sense of humor and be curious and lively. She would be company for us as she grew, and, yes, that trite concept, a comfort to us in our old age.