Fool's Assassin - Страница 58

“We are supposed to do it together,” she rebuked me. She took a deep breath and squared her little shoulders. “Mama told me that I must always be able to take care of myself, for few in this world will make allowances that I am small.”

Yes. Molly would have thought of that.

“Then let’s make it together,” I offered, and followed her very precise directions to do so. I did not tell her that I could simply tell one of the housemaids that this was now her task. What Molly had carefully built in our small daughter, I would not tear down.

She shooed me out of the room while she dressed herself. I was standing outside her door, waiting for her, when I heard the tap of Nettle’s boots on the stone-flagged floor. She halted in front of me, and it was not flattering that she was obviously startled to see me there. “Good morning,” I greeted her, and before she could respond the door swung open to reveal Bee dressed and ready to meet the day.

“I did brush my hair,” she told me as if I had asked. “But it’s too short to lie flat.”

“Mine, too,” I assured her. Not that I had even attempted to make it do so.

She looked up at me and asked, “Does it make it hard to trim your beard, too?”

Nettle laughed, as much to hear her sister speak as to see me uncomfortable.

“No. It does not,” I admitted gravely. “I’ve just neglected it.”

“I’ll help you before I go,” Nettle offered, and I wondered how she knew it was a task Molly had often undertaken.

Bee looked up at me solemnly. She shook her head slowly. “There’s no reason for your beard anymore. You should just shave it off.”

That gave me a twinge. How had she known? Had Molly told her that I had grown it in an attempt to look closer to my true years? “Perhaps later. But now, we should go down to breakfast, for your sister wishes to make an early start.”

Bee walked between us, and at table she essayed a few words to the staff, but mostly muttered to her plate. Still, it was a start, and I think even Nettle saw the wisdom of letting her reveal herself slowly.

The farewell was hard for all of us. Bee endured a hug from Nettle, but I would have held my elder daughter longer in my arms if she would have allowed it. Her eyes were bright as she bid us farewell, and I promised that she would hear from me regularly. She looked down at Bee and charged her to “Learn some letters, and write to me, little Bee. I expect you to try as hard as your papa to make this work.” It was well for me that Nettle did not see the guilty look Bee and I exchanged behind her back.

Riddle had stood silent and watched us make our partings. He approached me then with a grave face, and I thought he would offer me awkward words. Instead he suddenly engulfed me in a hug that nearly cracked my ribs. “Be brave,” he said by my ear, and then released me, walked to his horse, and mounted, and they all rode away.

We stood in the carriageway of Withywoods and watched until Nettle and her party were out of sight. A time longer we stood there. Steward Revel and several of the other servants had turned out to bid Nettle farewell. They ebbed away from us until only Bee and I were left standing there. Birds called from the woodland. A light morning breeze stirred the leaves of the white paper birches that lined the carriageway. After a time Bee ventured a single word. “Well.”

“Yes.” I looked down at her. What was I to do with this tiny girl? I cleared my throat. “I usually begin my rounds with a walk through the stables.”

She looked up at me and then quickly away. I knew she feared the large animals of the manor. Would she go with me? I could scarcely blame her if she refused. But I waited. After a moment, the small blond head nodded once.

And so we began a new pattern that day. I wished I could carry her but knew that she dreaded my touch, and why. And so she trotted at my heels and I walked more sedately so she could keep up with me. We walked the stables and conferred with Tallerman. He was visibly relieved to see the guests departed and his workload returned to normal. Lin the shepherd glanced once at my small follower and then spoke to me while his dog gravely poked Bee under the chin with her nose until Bee petted her.

The vineyard required a horseback trip. When I told Bee this, she seemed to consider it for a longer time before informing me, “I have not checked on my mother’s beehives for some days. I do have tasks of my own, you know.”

“I don’t know how to help you with the hives,” I told her.

She lifted her head and again squared her small shoulders. “I know what must be done. And I’m stronger than I look,” she told me.

And so we parted, but came back together for a noon meal. I reported to her that the grapes had an excellent set, and that I had seen many of her bees busy at their work. She nodded gravely to that and said that all had appeared well with the hives.

After our meal I retreated to the Withywoods study to go over the long-neglected accounts. There was a list from Steward Revel there of maintenance projects for Withywoods that he judged too important to ignore. There were small notes next to some of the suggestions, in Molly’s handwriting. I couldn’t bear to look at it. She’d put it there at least two months ago, and I had promised her, promised her that we’d get the most pressing work under way this summer. But I hadn’t. I’d set it aside, confident that she would nag me into action when it became urgent.

Well, she wouldn’t. Not ever again.

There were other messages on my desk, accounts that needed to be paid for supplies brought in from the outlying farms. There was a lot of tallying to do for men who had worked the hayfields in exchange for a share. Here was a note that we’d have to hire more workers for the grape harvest, and if we wanted good ones, we’d best secure them now. Everything needed to be done now.

And another list, poorly written and spelled worse, of various foodstuffs. I stared at it for a time. I must have looked perplexed because Bee wandered over to peer past my elbow at it. “Oh. Cook Nutmeg wrote that, I think. She always asked Mama what meals she would like for the week to come, so Cook could be sure she had all she needed on hand for them. Mama used to write the list for her to send to town.”

“I see. And this?”

She scowled at it for a minute. “I’m not sure. I think that word is meant to be ‘wool.’ And that might be ‘cobbler.’ Mama was talking of winter woolens for the help, and new boots for you and me.”

“But it’s summer!”

She cocked her head at me. “It’s like the garden, Papa. You have to plan now what you want to have three months from now.”

“I suppose.” I stared at the unintelligible scribbling, wondering if I could somehow persuade Revel to translate and assume command of whatever this was. It was suddenly all too much. I set it down and pushed away from the desk. “We should go look at the apple trees.”

And so we did, until evening.

Day by aching day, we groped toward a routine. We made our needless daily inspection of the stables, the sheep pens, and the grapes. I did not throw myself into the work; I did not have the focus—but the accounts did not go too late, and Revel seemed almost relieved to take up the meal planning. I didn’t care what he put before me; eating had become a task to accomplish. Sleep evaded me, only to ambush me at my desk in the middle of the afternoon. More and more often Bee followed me to my private study in the evenings, where she amused herself by pretending to read my discarded papers before drawing lavish illustrations on the backs of them. We talked little, even when we played games together. Most evenings ended with her asleep on the floor. I would carry her back to her bed, tumble her into it, and then return to my study. I let go of far too many things. I felt sometimes as if we were both waiting for something.

The evening that I realized I was waiting for Molly to come back, I put my head down on my arms and wept useless bitter tears. I only came back to myself when I felt a soft hand patting my shoulder and heard her voice saying, “It can’t be changed, dear. It can’t be changed. You must let go of the past.”

I lifted my head and looked at my little daughter. I had thought her asleep on the hearth. It was the first time she had touched me of her own volition. Her eyes were such a pale blue, like Kettricken’s, and sometimes she did seem—not blind, but as if she looked past me into another place. Her words were not ones I would have expected from a child. They were Molly’s words, the words she would have spoken to me to comfort me. My little child, trying to be strong for me. I blinked my eyes clear of tears, cleared my throat, and asked her, “Would you like to learn how to play Stones?”

“Of course,” she said, and even though I knew she didn’t mean it, I taught her that night and we played until it was almost morning. We both slept in until nearly noon the next day.

The message came, delivered in the usual way, as autumn was winding to a close. When I sat down at the breakfast table with Bee, there was a fat brown acorn with two oak leaves still attached to it on the table. Once, I had carved such a motif on the top of a little box where I kept my poisons, the kit of my trade as an assassin. The box was long gone, but the meaning was the same. Chade wished to meet with me. I scowled at the acorn. For as long as I’d lived at Withywoods, he’d been able to do this. No one on the staff would admit to putting the acorn on the table, nor to leaving a door unbarred or a window unlatched. Yet there it was, a reminder from my old mentor that no matter how clever and wary I thought myself, he could still steal through my defenses if he wished to. He’d be waiting for me by evening at an inn called the Oaken Staff at a crossroads near Gallows Hill. That was a two-hour ride away. Which meant that if I kept the rendezvous, I would be very late returning, perhaps not getting back until dawn if this was one of Chade’s convoluted discussions. Whatever it was, he was not going to Skill to me about it. That meant no one in the coterie knew of it. It was another of his damned secrets, then.