Royal Assassin (59 page)

“Will they be back, do you think?” Hands asked me quietly.

“Either that, or Regal must give Ram his coin back.”

We silently considered the likelihood of that.

“So. What must I do when they come back?”

“If it’s only Regal’s mark, nothing. If the King or Queen-in-Waiting’s mark is upon it, then you must give him the horses.”

“One of those mares is pregnant!” Hands protested. “Burrich has big plans for the foal. What will he say to me if he comes back and those horses are gone?”

“We have always had to remember that these horses belong to the King. He will not fault you for obeying a proper command.”

“I don’t like this.” He looked up at me with anxious eyes.
“I don’t think this would be happening if Burrich were still here.”

“I think it would, Hands. Don’t take any blame to yourself. I doubt that this is the worst that we’ll see before the winter is over. But, send me word if they do come back.”

He nodded gravely and I left him, my visit to the stables soured. I did not want to walk down the rows of stalls and wonder how many horses would still remain by the end of winter.

I walked slowly across the courtyard and then inside and up the stairs to my room. I paused on the landing.
Verity?
Nothing. I could sense his presence inside myself, he could convey his will to me and sometimes even his thoughts. But still, whenever I tried to reach out to him, there was nothing. It frustrated me. If only I had been able to Skill reliably, none of this would be happening. I paused to carefully curse Galen and all he had done to me. I had had the Skill, and he had burned it out of me, and left me with but this unpredictable form of it.

But what about Serene? Or Justin, or any of the others of the coterie? Why was not Verity using them to keep in touch with what was happening, and to let his will be known?

A creeping dread filled me. The messenger birds from Bearns. The signal lights, the Skilled ones in the towers. All the lines of communications within the kingdom and with the King seemed not to be working very well. They were what stitched the Six Duchies into one and made of us a kingdom rather than an alliance of Dukes. Now, in these troubled times, more than ever we needed them. Why were they failing?

I saved the question to ask Chade, and prayed that he would summon me soon. He called me less often than he had once, and I felt I was not as privy to his councils as I once had been. Well, and had not I excluded him from much of my life as well? Perhaps what I felt was only a reflection of all the secrets I kept from him. Perhaps it was the natural distance that grew between assassins.

I arrived at the door of my room just as Rosemary had given up knocking.

“Did you need me?” I asked her.

She dropped a grave curtsy. “Our lady, the Queen-in-Waiting
Kettricken, wishes you to attend her at your earliest convenience.”

“That’s right now, isn’t it?” I tried to get a smile out of her.

“No.” She frowned up at me. “I said ‘at your earliest convenience, sir.’ Isn’t that right?”

“Absolutely. Who has you practicing your manners so assiduously?”

She heaved a great sigh. “Fedwren.”

“Fedwren is back from his summer travels already?”

“He’s been back for two weeks, sir!”

“Well, see how little I know! I shall be sure to tell him of how well you spoke when next I see him.”

“Thank you, sir.” Forgetting her careful decorum, she was skipping by the time she reached the top of the stairs, and I heard her light footsteps go cascading down them like a tumble of pebbles. A likely child. I doubted not that Fedwren was grooming her to be a messenger. It was one of his duties as scribe. I went into my room briefly to put on a fresh shirt, and then took myself down to Kettricken’s chambers. I knocked on the door and Rosemary opened it.

“It is now my earliest convenience,” I told her, and this time was rewarded with a dimpled smile.

“Enter, sir. I shall tell my mistress you are here,” she informed me. She gestured me to a chair and vanished into the inner chamber. From within, I could hear a quiet muttering of ladies’ voices. Through the open door I glimpsed them at their needlework and chatter. Queen Kettricken tilted her head to Rosemary, and then excused herself to come to me.

In a moment Kettricken stood before me. For an instant I just looked at her. The blue of the robe picked up the blue of her eyes. The late-fall light finding its way through the whorled glass of the windows glinted off the gold of her hair. I stared, I realized, and lowered my eyes. I rose immediately and bowed. She didn’t wait for me to straighten up. “Have you been recently to visit the King?” she asked me without preamble.

“Not in the last few days, my lady queen.”

“Then I suggest you do so this evening. I am concerned for him.”

“As you wish, my queen.” I waited. Surely that was not what she had called me here to say.

After a moment she sighed. “Fitz. I am alone here as I have never been before. Cannot you call me Kettricken and treat me as a person for a bit?”

The sudden change in tone took me off balance. “Certainly,” I replied, but my voice was too formal.
Danger
, Nighteyes whispered.

Danger? How?

This is not your mate. This is the leader’s mate
.

It was like finding an aching tooth with your tongue. The knowledge jarred through me. There was a danger here, one to guard against. This was my queen, but I was not Verity and she was not my love, no matter how my heart set to beating at the sight of her.

But she was my friend. She had proven that in the Mountain Kingdom. I owed her the comfort that friends owe one another.

“I went to see the King,” she told me. She gestured me to sit and took a chair of her own across the hearth from me. Rosemary fetched her little stool to sit at Kettricken’s feet. Despite our being alone in the room, the Queen lowered her voice and leaned toward me as she spoke. “I asked him directly why I had not been summoned when the rider came in. He seemed puzzled by my question. But before he could even begin an answer, Regal came in. He had come in haste, I could tell. As if someone had run to tell him I was there, and he had immediately dropped everything to come.”

I nodded gravely.

“He made it impossible for me to speak to the King. Instead, he insisted on explaining it all to me. He claimed that the rider had been brought directly to the King’s chamber, and that he had encountered the messenger as he came to visit his father. He had sent the boy to rest while he talked with the King. And that together they had decided that nothing could be done now. Then Shrewd had sent him to announce that to the boy and the gathered nobles, and to explain to them the state of the treasury. According to Regal, we are very near on the brink of ruin, and every penny must be watched. Bearn must look out
for Bearn’s own, he told me. And when I asked if Bearn’s own were not Six Duchies folk, he told me that Bearn had always stood more or less on its own. It was not rational, he said, to expect that Buck could guard a coast so far to the north of us, and so long. Fitz, did you know that the Near Islands had already been ceded to the Raiders?”

I shot to my feet. “I know that no such thing is true!” I blurted in outrage.

“Regal claims it is so,” Kettricken continued implacably. “He says that Verity had decided before he left that there was no real hope of keeping them safe from the Raiders. And that is why he called back our ship
Constance
. He says Verity Skilled to Carrod, the coterie member on the ship, to order the ship back home for repairs.”

“That ship was refitted just after harvest. Then she was sent out, to keep the coast between Sealbay and Gulls, and to be ready should the Near Islands call for her. It is what her master asked for; more time to practice seamanship in winter waters. Verity would not leave that stretch of coast unwatched. If the Raiders establish a stronghold on the Near Islands, we shall never be free of them. They can raid winter and summer alike from there.”

“Regal claims that is what they have done already. He says our only hope now is to treat with them.” Her blue eyes searched my face.

I sank down slowly, near stunned. Could any of this be true? How could it have been kept from me? My sense of Verity within me mirrored my confusion. He knew nothing of this either. “I do not think the King-in-Waiting would ever treat with the Raiders. Save with the sharp of his sword.”

“This is not, then, a secret kept from me lest it distress me? Regal implied as much, that Verity would keep these things secret from me, as beyond my understanding.” There was a trembling in her voice. It went beyond her anger that the Near Islands might have been abandoned to the Raiders, to a more personal pain that her lord might have found her unworthy of his confidences. I longed so badly to take her in my arms and comfort her that I ached inside.

“My lady,” I said hoarsely. “Take this truth from my lips
as surely as it came from Verity’s own. All this is as false as you are true. I shall find the bottom of this net of lies and slash it wide open. We shall see what sort of fish falls out.”

“I can trust you to pursue this quietly, Fitz?”

“My lady, you are one of the few who knows the extent of my training in quiet undertakings.”

She nodded gravely. “The King, you understand, denied none of this. But neither did he seem to follow all that Regal said. He was … like a child, listening to his elders converse, nodding, but understanding little….” She glanced down fondly at Rosemary at her feet.

“I shall go to see the King as well. I promise, I shall have answers for you, and soon.”

“Before Duke Bearns arrives,” she cautioned me. “I must have the truth by then. I owe him at least that.”

“We shall have more than just the truth for him, my lady queen,” I promised her. The emeralds weighed heavy still in my pouch. I knew she would not begrudge them.

D
URING
THE
YEARS
of the Red-Ship raids, the Six Duchies suffered significantly from their atrocities. The folk of the Six Duchies at that time learned a greater hatred of the Outislanders than ever they had felt before
.

In their grandfathers’ and fathers’ times, Outislanders had been both traders and pirates. Raids were carried out by solitary ships. We had not had a raiding “war” such as this since the days of King Wisdom. Although pirate attacks were not rare occurrences, they were still far more infrequent than the Outisland ships that came to our shores to trade. The blood ties among the noble families to Outisland kin were openly acknowledged, and many a family owned to a “cousin” in the Outislands
.

But after the savage raiding that preceded Forge, and the atrocities at Forge, all friendly talk of the Outislands ceased. Their ships had always been more wont to visit our shores than our traders to seek out their ice-plagued harbors and swift-tided channels. Now trade ceased entirely. Thus our folk knew nothing of their Outisland kin during the days when we suffered the Red-Ships. “Outislander” became synonymous with “Raider,” and in our minds, all Outisland vessels had red hulls
.

But one, Chade Fallstar, a personal adviser to King
Shrewd, took it upon himself to travel to the Outislands in those perilous days. From his journals we have this:

Kebal Rawbread was not even a name known in the Six Duchies. It was a name not breathed in the Outislands. The independent folk of the scattered and isolated villages of the Outislands had never owed allegiance to any one King. Nor was Kebal Rawbread thought of as a King there. Rather he was a malevolent force, like a freezing wind that so coats a ship’s rigging with ice that in a hour she turns belly-up on the sea
.

The few folk I encountered that did not fear to talk said Kebal had founded his power by subduing the individual pirates and raiding ships to his control. With those in hand, he turned his efforts to “recruiting” the best navigators, the most capable captains, and the most skillful fighters the scattered villages had to offer. Those who refused his offers saw their families escralled, or Forged, as we have come to call it. Then they were left alive to cope with the shattered remnants of their lives. Most were forced to put family members to death with their own hands; Outislander customs are strict regarding a householder’s duty to maintain order amongst family members. As word of these incidents spread, fewer resisted the offers of Kebal Rawbread. Some few fled: their extended families still paid the price of escral. Others chose suicide, but again, the families were not spared. Such examples left few daring to defy Rawbread or his ships
.

Even to speak against him invited escral. Sparse as was the knowledge I gained on this visit, it was gained with great difficulty. Rumors I gathered as well, though they were as sparse as black lambs in a white flock. I list them here. A “white ship” is spoken of, a ship that comes to separate souls. Not to take them, or destroy them: to separate them. They whisper, too, of a pale woman whom even Kebal Rawbread fears and reveres. Many related the torments of their land to the unprecedented advances of the “ice whales” or glaciers. Always present in the upper reaches of their narrow valleys, they now advanced more swiftly than in the memory of any living man. They were rapidly covering what little arable soil the Outislands possessed and, in a way no one could or would explain to me, bringing a “change of water.”