Fool's Assassin - Страница 83

I hit it one more time, and then put the poker back. I didn’t look at her.

“I suppose it’s as well that you are not wearing skirts. You’d dirty them down there. Why are you sitting on the hearth instead of in a chair?”

The chairs were too tall. My feet dangled. I looked at the newly swept bricks. “It’s not dirty here.”

“Why are you dressed like a boy?”

I looked down at my tunic and leggings. I had a few spiderwebs on my ankle. I picked them free. “I’m dressed comfortably. Do you like wearing all those layers of skirts?”

Shun flounced them out around herself. They were pretty, like the spread petals of a flower. The outer skirts were a blue one shade lighter than Buckkeep blue. The petticoat beneath was an even lighter blue, and the lacy edge of it showed deliberately. It matched the pale blue of the bodice of her dress, and the lace was the same as the lace at her throat and cuffs. That dress and petticoat had not come from any crossroads market. They’d probably been made especially for her. She smoothed them with satisfaction. “They’re warm. And very pretty. They were expensive, too.” She lifted her hand and touched her earrings, as if I could have failed to notice them. “So were these. Pearls from Jamaillia. Lord Chade got them for me.”

I wore a simple tunic, sewn by my mother and made long enough to be modest, over a long-sleeved wool shirt. My tunic was belted at my waist with a leather belt and came to my knees. Below it, I wore only my woolen leggings and slippers. No one had ever suggested before that I was dressed like a boy, but now I recalled how the stable boys dressed. Not so different from me. Even the kitchen girls wore skirts, all the time. I looked at the cuffs of my sleeves. They were soiled with cobwebs and chalk from my earlier adventure. The knees of my leggings were dirty, too. I suddenly knew that my mother would have made me change my clothes before I came down to dinner with guests, into my red skirts perhaps. She would have put ribbons in my hair. I lifted my hand to my hair and smoothed down what was left of it.

Shun nodded. “That’s a little better. It was standing up like feathers on a bird’s head.”

“It’s too short to braid. I cut it because my mother died.” I looked at her directly for one instant.

Shun met my gaze coldly. Then she said, “I can only wish my mother were dead. I think it would make my life easier.”

I stared at her knees. Her words cut me and I tried to understand why. After a moment it came to me. She considered her pain more significant than mine. I felt she had said that her cruel mother’s life going on was a greater tragedy than my mother’s death. In that moment I hated her. But I also discovered another important thing. I could do as my father did: that is, lift my eyes and meet her gaze and let nothing of what I was thinking show in my face.

That thought surprised me. I studied her, saying nothing, and realized that she did not share my ability. Everything she felt at the moment was writ broad and plain on her face. Perhaps she thought I was too young to read her face, or that it was unimportant if I could. But she was not trying to hide anything from me. She had known her callous words would hurt me. She was miserable and resented being in my home and was irritated by being left with me. And in her misery, she was striking out at me because I was there. And because she thought I could not strike back.

I did not feel pity for her. She was too dangerous for me to pity. I suspected that in her thoughtless wretchedness she could employ cruelty such as I had never experienced from an adult. I suddenly feared that she could destroy all of us, and take whatever little peace my father and I had found. She sat there in her pretty clothes and pearl earrings and looked at me, so small and, she thought, very young, and dirty and common. Of course. She thought me the daughter of commoner Tom Badgerlock. Not the lost Princess of the Farseer family! Just the daughter of Withywoods’s widowed caretaker. Yet I had a home and a father who loved me and memories of a mother who had cherished me. None of that seemed fair to her.

“You’ve gone quiet,” she observed intently. She was like a bored cat poking at a mouse to see if it was dead all the way.

“It’s late, for me. I’m a child, you know. I go to bed quite early on most nights.” I yawned for her, not covering my mouth. In a softer voice, I added, “And self-pitying tales of woe always bore me, which makes me sleepy.”

She stared at me, her eyes going greener. She reached as if to tidy her hair and pulled out one of the long pins that secured it. She drew it between her thumb and forefinger as if to deliberately call my attention to it. Did she think to threaten me with it? She stood abruptly and I jumped to my feet. I bet I could outrun her, but dodging past her to the door might be a challenge. I heard a murmur in the hall and an instant later Riddle opened the door. My father was behind him. “Good night!” I called cheerily to them. I ran past a glowering Shun to hug my father briefly and then step back hastily. “It’s been such a long day, and so full of unexpected events. I’m quite weary. I think I shall take myself to bed now.”

“Well …” My father looked astonished. “If you’re tired. Shall I see you to your room?”

“Yes,” Riddle said strongly before I could reply. Shun was tidying her hair, smiling as she slid the pin back into her bound tresses. “She didn’t feel well earlier. You should see that she is tucked in warmly and that a nice fire is on her hearth.”

“Yes. I should,” he agreed. He was smiling and nodding, as if it were perfectly normal that I seek my bed at such an hour. Usually we stayed up late together, and often I fell asleep on the hearth in his study. Now he begged his guests to excuse him briefly, promised to return, and then took my hand as we left. I did not pull it free of his grip until the door was closed behind us. “What are you up to?” he demanded as we made our way toward the stairs and my bedchamber.

“Nothing. It’s night. I’m going to bed. It’s what children do, I am told.”

“Shun’s face was flushed.”

“I think she was sitting too close to the fire.”

“Bee.” My name was all he said, but there was rebuke in the word. I was silent. I did not feel I deserved it. Should I tell him of her hairpin? Doubtless he would think me silly.

We reached my door and I seized the door handle before he could. “I want only to go to bed tonight. Doubtless you need to hurry back to talk to the other adults.”

“Bee!” he exclaimed, and now my name meant that I had struck him, hurting him and also provoking a bit of anger. I didn’t care. Let him go fuss over poor pitiful Shun. She needed his sympathy, not me. His face went still. “Stay here while I check your room.”

I did as he told me, waiting by the open door. But the moment he came out, I slipped in through the door and shut it behind me. I waited, holding on to the door handle, to see if he would try to come in and talk to me.

But he didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. I walked across the room and put another log on the hearth fire. I wasn’t sleepy.

I peeled off my clothing, bunched it up, and sniffed it. Not just dirty, but definitely a mousy smell to it, probably from the spy-corridors. I thought of Stripy patrolling for rats and mice. I thought of stealthily leaving my room and going to my father’s study to see if the cat wanted to come out yet. But I would have to get dressed again, and if my father caught me wandering the halls tonight he would be angry. I’d get up very early, I decided. Both my winter nightshirts smelled a bit fusty. When my mother was alive clothing always smelled like cedar and herbs if taken right from the chest, or sunlight and lavender if freshly washed. I had suspected that the household staff had become more lax about their chores since my mother’s death, but this was the first time I had realized how directly it would affect me.

I blamed my father. Then I blamed myself. How could I even begin to imagine that he could know these things? He probably had no idea that it had been weeks since I had bathed my whole body or washed my hair. True, it was winter, but my mother had always made me wash my whole body in a tub at least once a week, even in winter. I wondered if the extra servants he had hired would mean that things would go back to the way they had been. I rather thought not. I doubted they would until someone took the reins.

Perhaps Shun? The thought made steel of my spine. No. Me. This was my household, really. I was the female here, standing in my sister’s stead, in my sister’s house. I imagined that the servants my father had always supervised were doing their work as they always had. Revel looked over his shoulder for those ones. But my mother had overseen the household staff. Revel was good at making things fancy, but I didn’t think he supervised the daily washing up and dusting and tidying. I would have to step up to that now.

I pulled on my least smelly nightshirt. I looked at my feet, and used what water was left in my ewer to wash my face, hands, and feet. I built up my fire and clambered into my bed. There was so much to think about that I thought I would never be able to fall asleep.

But I did because I woke to the colorless girl standing over my bed. Ruby tears were on her cheeks. Pink blood was frothing on her lips. She stared at me. “The message,” she said, spitting blood with the words, and then she fell upon me.

I shrieked and struggled out from under her. She clutched at me but I was off the bed and heading for the door in less than a breath. I was screaming but no sound was coming out. The door latch jiggled in my fumbling panic and then it swung open and I raced out into the dark hall. My bare feet slapped the floor and I was making little shrieks now. What if my father’s bedroom door was latched, what if he wasn’t there but down in his study or somewhere else in the house?