Fool's Assassin - Страница 56

Then, as week after month and then years passed, and she did not catch up her growth, nor speak, I had been forced to confront her differences. Like a worm slowly eating into an apple, the knowledge burrowed in and hollowed my heart. She did not grow, or laugh or smile. Bee would never be the child I had imagined.

The worst part was that I had already given my heart to that imaginary child, and it was so terribly hard to forgive Bee for not being her. Her existence turned my life into a gamut of emotions. It was hard to kill my hope. As she slowly developed skills that other children would have had years ago, my hope that somehow, now, she was getting better would flare up in me. Each crash of that vain hope was harder than the previous one. Deep sorrow and disappointment sometimes gave way to cold anger at fate. Through it all, I flattered myself that Molly was unaware of my ambivalence toward our child. To cover how hard it was to accept her as she was, I became fiercely protective of her. I would tolerate no one else speaking of her differences as shortcomings. Anything she desired, I got for her. I never expected her to attempt anything she was reluctant to try. Molly had been serenely unaware that Bee suffered in comparison with the imaginary child I had created. She had seemed content with our daughter, doting, even. I had never had the heart to ask her if she ever looked at Bee and wished for another child. I had refused to consider if I ever looked and her and wished that she had never been.

I had wondered what would become of her as she grew and we aged. I had thought that her sparse words meant she was simple in some way, and I had treated her as such, until the evening when she had astonished me at the memory game. Only in the last year had I found the wisdom to enjoy what she was. I had finally relaxed and taken pleasure in the joy she brought to her mother. The terrible storms of disappointment had given way to calm resignation. Bee was what she was.

But now Bee spoke clearly to me, and it woke shame in me. Before she had given me simple sentences, as sparing of her mumbled words as if they were gold coins. Tonight I had felt such a leap of relief when she spoke that first simple request to stay with me. Small she might be, but she could talk. Why shame? It shamed me that it was suddenly so much easier to love her than it had been when she was mute.

I thought of the old fable and decided I had no choice. I would grasp the nettle. Nonetheless, I approached it cautiously. “Do you dislike speaking?”

She gave a short shake of her head.

“So you held silent with me because …?”

Again a flash of her pale-blue glance. “No need to talk to you. I had Mama. We were together so much. She listened. Even when I could not speak plainly, she could make out what I meant. She understood without all the words you need.”

“And now?”

Her little shoulders twisted away from me, a squirming discomfort in this conversation. “When I have to. To stay safe. But before, it was safer to be quiet. To be what the servants are accustomed to me being. Mostly they treat me well. But if I suddenly spoke to them as I am speaking to you, if they overheard me speaking to you like this, they would fear me. And then they would consider me a threat. I would be in danger from the grown-ups, too.”

Too? I thought. I made the leap. “As you are from the children.”

A nod. No more than that, and of course that must be so. Of course.

She was so precocious. So adult. That tiny voice speaking such grown-up words. And so chilling to hear her assess the situation as if she were Chade rather than my little girl. I had hoped to hear her speak to me in simple sentences; I would have welcomed the uncomplicated logic of a child. Instead the pendulum swung the other way: From resignation that my daughter was mute and simple I suddenly felt dread that she was unnaturally complex and perhaps deceitful.

She looked at my feet. “You’re a little bit afraid of me now.” She bowed her head and folded her little hands on her crossed legs and waited for me to lie.

“Uneasy. Not afraid,” I admitted unwillingly. I tried to find the right words but could not. I settled on, “I am … amazed. And a bit unsettled that you can speak so well, and I never guessed you were capable of such thought. It is unnerving, Bee. Still, I love you a lot more than I fear you. And with time, I’ll get used to … how you really are.”

The little pink head with its haze of blond hair nodded slowly. “I think you can. I’m not sure Nettle could.”

I found I shared her reservations about that but felt obliged to defend my older daughter. “Well, but it’s not fair that you expect she could. Or even that I could! Why did you hold back? Why not begin talking as you learned to speak rather than keep silent?”

Head still lowered, she lifted one shoulder and shook her head mutely. I had not expected any answer. In truth, I understood the keeping of such secrets. For years in my own childhood, I had hidden the secret of my bastardy from Molly, pretending I was no more than the scribe’s errand boy. Not to deceive her but because I had longed to be so unremarkable. I knew too well that the longer that sort of secret is kept, the harder it is to expose it without seeming deceitful. How could I not have seen this? How could I keep her from the mistakes I had made? I tried to speak to her as a father should.

“Well, it’s an odd secret you’ve kept. And I advise you to surrender it now. You should begin to speak to other people. Not like we are talking now, but with a few words here and there. Naming things you want when you point at them. Then moving on to simple requests.”

“You want me to practice a new sort of deception,” she said slowly. “You want me to pretend I’m just now learning to speak.”

And I realized I had sounded more like an assassin’s mentor than a loving father. I was giving her the sort of advice Chade would have given me. I felt uncomfortable at that thought and spoke more firmly because of it. “Well. Yes. I suppose I am. But I think it’s a necessary deception, based on the first one you chose. Why on earth would you pretend that you can barely speak at all? Why did you keep your words so hidden?”

She pulled her knees tighter to her chest, clasped her arms round them, and held herself tight and small. Holding her secret close, I guessed. Doubt dropped the floor of my belly. There was more here that I did not know. I consciously took my eyes off her. Don’t stare at her. She is only nine. How large a secret could such a tiny person conceal? I thought of myself at nine and grew still inside.

She didn’t answer my question. Instead she asked, “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

She rocked slightly, chewing on her lip. “You are holding it in now. Not spilling out everywhere.”

I rubbed my face and decided to let her lead the conversation, even if she carried me onto painful ground. Let her become accustomed to talking to me … and me to listening to her. “You mean, how sad I’ve been? That I’m not weeping today?”

An impatient shake of her head. “No. I mean everything.” Again that tilt of her little head and a look from the corners of her eyes.

I considered my words and spoke gently. “You’re going to have to explain better than that.”

“You … boil. Like the big kettle in the kitchen. When you come near, ideas and images and what you think come out of you like the steam from the pot. I feel your heat and smell what seethes inside you. I try to hold back but it drenches me and scalds me. And then, when my sister was here, suddenly you put a lid on. I could still feel the heat but you kept in the steam and the smells … There! Just now! You made the lid tighter and cooled the heat.”

She was right. I had. As she had spoken, dread had risen in me. She did not think of the Skill as I did, but the images she used could not apply to anything else. And the moment I realized that she had been privy to my thoughts and emotions, I had slammed my Skill-walls tighter, sealing myself behind them as Verity had taught me so many years ago. Verity had pleaded with me to learn to hold my walls tight because my adolescent dreams of Molly were spilling over into his sleep and infiltrating his own dreams and destroying his rest. And now I walled out my little daughter. I cast my thoughts back over not just that evening, but all the days and nights of the past nine years, wondering what she had heard and seen in her father’s thoughts. I recalled how she had always stiffened when I touched her, and how she averted her eyes from my glance. Even as she did now. I had suspected she disliked me, and it had grieved me. Never had I stopped to think that if she knew all my thoughts about her she had every right to dislike me, the man who had never been content with her, who had always wished his daughter to be someone else.

But now she looked up at me cautiously. For less than a wink, our gazes met. “It’s so much better,” she said quietly. “So much more peaceful when you are contained.”

“I wasn’t aware that you were … so beset by my, my thinking. I shall try to keep my walls closed when I am around you.”

“Oh, could you?” she begged, relief evident in her voice. “And Nettle? Can you ask her, also, to close her walls when she comes near me?”

No. I could not. To tell her sister that she must keep her Skill-walls tight when she was around Bee would betray to her how sensitive her sister was to that magic. And I was not prepared for Nettle to wonder, as I did now, just how much ability Bee would have for that Farseer magic. How “useful” might she be? I was suddenly Chade, seeing before me a child, apparently a very young child, but actually years older and Skilled. Rosemary had been an excellent child-spy. But Bee would outshine her as the sun outshines a candle. Walls tight, I did not betray that thought to her. Senseless to make her worry about such things just yet. I would do all the worrying for both of us. I made my voice calm.