‘What I didn’t lose? What I didn’t lose?’ My anger rose like a covey of birds taking flight and likewise driven by panic. ‘I’m helpless, Burrich. I can’t go back to Buckkeep like this! I’m useless. I’m worse than useless, I’m a waiting victim. If I could go back and batter Regal into a pulp, that might be worth it. Instead, I will have to sit at table with Prince Regal, to be civil and deferential to a man who plotted to overthrow Verity and kill me as an added spice. I can’t endure him seeing me tremble with weakness, or suddenly fall in a seizure. I don’t want to see him smile at what he has made me; I don’t want to watch him savour his triumph. He will try to kill me again. We both know that. Perhaps he has learned he is no match for Verity, perhaps he will respect his older brother’s reign and new wife. But I doubt he will extend that to me. It’ll be one more way he can strike at Verity. And when he comes, what shall I be doing? Sitting by the fire like a palsied old man, doing nothing. Nothing! All I’ve been trained for, all Hod’s weaponry instruction, all Fedwren’s careful teachings about lettering, even all you’ve taught me about taking care of beasts! All a waste! I can do none of it. I’m just a bastard again, Burrich. And someone once told me that a royal bastard is kept alive only so long as he is useful.’ I was practically shouting, but even in my fury and despair, I did not speak aloud of Chade and my training as an assassin. At that, too, I was useless now. All my stealth and sleight of hand, all the precise ways to kill a man by touch, the painstaking mixing of poisons, all were denied me by my own rattling body.
Burrich sat quietly, hearing me out. When my breath and my anger ran out and I sat gasping in my bed, clasping my traitorously trembling hands together, he spoke calmly.
‘So. Are you saying we don’t go back to Buckkeep?’
That put me off balance. ‘We?’
‘My life is pledged to the man who wears that earring. There’s a long story behind that, one that perhaps I’ll tell you someday. Patience had no right to give it to you. I thought it had gone with Prince Chivalry to his grave. She probably thought it just a simple piece of jewellery her husband had worn, hers to keep or to give. In any wise, you wear it now. Where you go, I follow.’
I lifted my hand to the bauble. It was a tiny blue stone caught up in a web of silver net. I started to unfasten it.
‘Don’t do that,’ Burrich said. The words were quiet, deeper than a dog’s growl. But his voice held both threat and command. I dropped my hand away, unable to question him on this at least. I felt strange that the man who had watched over me since I was an abandoned child now put his future into my hands. Yet there he sat before the fire and waited for my words. I studied what I could see of him in the dance of the firelight. He had once seemed a surly giant to me, dark and threatening, but also a savage protector. Now, for perhaps the first time, I studied him as a man. The dark hair and eyes were prevalent in those who carried Outislander blood, and in this we resembled each other. But his eyes were brown, not black, and the wind brought a redness to his cheeks above his curling beard that bespoke a fairer ancestor somewhere. When he walked, he limped, very noticeably on cold days, the legacy of turning aside a boar that had been trying to kill Chivalry. He was not as big as he had once seemed to me. If I kept on growing, I would probably be taller than he was before another year was out. Nor was he massively muscled, but instead had a compactness to him that was a readiness of both muscle and mind. It was not his size that had made him both feared and respected at Buckkeep, but his black temper and his tenacity. Once, when I was very young, I had asked him if he had ever lost a fight. He had just subdued a wilful young stallion and was in the stall with him, calming him. Burrich had grinned, teeth showing white as a wolf’s. The sweat had stood out in droplets on his forehead and was running down his cheeks into his dark beard. He spoke to me over the side of the stall. ‘Lost a fight?’ he’d asked, still out of breath. ‘The fight isn’t over until you win it, Fitz. That’s all you have to remember. No matter what the other man thinks. Or the horse.’
I wondered if I were a fight he had to win. He’d often told me that I was the last task Chivalry had given him. My father had abdicated the throne, shamed by my existence. Yet he’d given me over to this man, and told him to raise me well. Maybe Burrich thought he hadn’t finished that task yet.
‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked humbly. Neither the words nor the humility came easily.
‘Heal,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Take the time to heal. It can’t be forced.’ He glanced down at his own legs stretched toward the fire. Something not a smile twisted his lips.
‘Do you think we should go back?’ I pressed.
He leaned back into the chair. He crossed his booted feet at the ankle and stared into the fire. He took a long time answering. But finally he said, almost reluctantly, ‘If we don’t, Regal will think he has won. And he will try to kill Verity. Or at least do whatever he thinks he must to make a grab for his brother’s crown. I am sworn to my king, Fitz, as are you. Right now that is King Shrewd. But Verity is King-in-Waiting. I don’t think it right that he should have waited in vain.’
‘He has other soldiers more capable than I.’
‘Does that free you from your promise?’
‘You argue like a priest.’
‘I don’t argue at all. I merely asked you a question. And one other. What do you forsake, if you leave Buckkeep behind?’
It was my turn to fall silent. I did think of my king, and all I had sworn to him. I thought of Prince Verity and his bluff heartiness and open ways with me. I recalled old Chade and his slow smile when I had finally mastered some arcane bit of lore. Lady Patience and her maid Lacey, Fedwren and Hod, even Cook and Mistress Hasty the seamstress. There were not so many folk that had cared for me, but that made them more significant, not less. I would miss all of them if I never went back to Buckkeep. But what leaped up in me like an ember rekindled was my memory of Molly. And somehow, I found myself speaking of her to Burrich, and him just nodding as I spilled out the whole story.
When he did speak, he told me only that he had heard that the Beebalm Chandlery had closed when the old drunkard that owned it had died in debt. His daughter had been forced to go to relatives in another town. He did not know what town, but he was certain I could find it out, if I were determined. ‘Know your heart before you do, Fitz,’ he added. ‘If you’ve nothing to offer her, let her go. Are you crippled? Only if you decide so. But if you’re determined that you’re a cripple now, then perhaps you’ve no right to go and seek her out. I don’t think you’d want her pity. It’s a poor substitute for love.’ And then he rose and left me to stare into the fire and think.
Was I a cripple? Had I lost? My body jangled like badly-tuned harp strings. That was true. But my will, not Regal’s, had prevailed. My Prince Verity was still in line for the Six Duchies throne, and the Mountain princess was his wife now. Did I dread him smirking over my trembling hands? Could I not smirk back at he who would never be king? A savage satisfaction welled up in me. Burrich was right. I had not lost. But I could make sure that Regal knew I had won.
If I had won against Regal, could I not win Molly as well? What stood between her and me? Jade? But Burrich had heard she had left Buckkeep Town, not wed. Gone penniless to live with relatives. Shame upon him, had Jade let her do so. I would seek her out, I would find her and win her. Molly, with her hair loose and blowing, Molly with her bright red skirts and cloak, bold as a red-robber bird, and eyes as bright. The thought of her sent a shiver down my spine. I smiled to myself, and then felt my lips set like a rictus, and the shiver became a shuddering. My body spasmed and the back of my head rebounded sharply off the bedstead. I cried out involuntarily, a gargling wordless cry.
In an instant Jonqui was there, calling Burrich back, and then they were both holding down my flailing limbs. Burrich’s body weight was flung on top of me as he strove to restrain my thrashing. And then I was gone.
I