Royal Assassin - Страница 119

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“I don’t believe you!” she whispered. She spoke too quickly. The horror in her voice was as great as the contempt. A part of her knew I had spoken the truth to her. Finally. A terrible silence, brief but so cold, grew between us as she waited for me to admit a lie. A lie she knew was truth. At last she denied it for me. “You, a killer? You couldn’t even run past the guard that day to see why I was crying! You didn’t have the courage to defy them for me! But you want me to believe you kill people for the King.” She made a choking sound, of anger and despair. “Why do you say such things now? Why now, of all times? To impress me?”

“If I had thought it would impress you, I probably would have told you a long time ago,” I confessed. And it was true. My ability to keep my secrets had been soundly based on my fear that telling Molly would mean losing her. I was right.

“Lies,” she said, more to herself than me. “Lies, all lies. From the very beginning. I was so stupid. If a man hits you once, he’ll hit you again, they say. And the same is true for lying. But I stayed, and I listened and I believed. What a fool I’ve been!” This last, so savagely that I recoiled from it as from a blow. She stood clear of me. “Thank you, FitzChivalry,” she said coldly, formally. “You’ve made this so much easier for me.” She turned away from me.

“Molly,” I begged. I reached to take her arm, but she spun about, her hand raised to slap me.

“Don’t touch me,” she warned in a low voice. “Don’t you ever dare to touch me again!”

She left.

After a time I remembered I was standing under Burrich’s stairs in the dark. I shivered with cold and something more. No. Something less. My lips drew back from my teeth in something neither a smile nor a snarl. I had always feared that my lies would make me lose Molly. But the truth had severed in an instant what my lies had held together for a year. What must I learn from that? I wondered. Very slowly I climbed up the steps. I knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” Burrich’s voice.

“Me.” He unlatched the door and I came into the room. “What was Molly doing here?” I asked him, not caring how it might sound, not caring that the bandaged Fool sat still at Burrich’s table. “Did she need help?”

Burrich cleared his throat. “She came for herbs,” he said uneasily. “I could not help her, I did not have what she wanted. Then the Fool came, and she stayed to help me with him.”

“Patience and Lacey have herbs. Lots of them,” I pointed out.

“That is what I told her.” He turned away from me, and began clearing away the things he had used to work on the Fool. “She did not wish to go to them.” There was something in his voice, almost prodding, pushing me to the next question.

“She’s going away,” I said in a small voice. “She’s going away.” I sat down on a chair before Burrich’s fire and clenched my hands between my knees. I became aware I was rocking back and forth, tried to stop.

“Did you succeed?” the Fool asked quietly.

I stopped rocking. I swear that for an instant I had no idea what he was talking about. “Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, I think I did.” I had succeeded at losing Molly, too. Succeeded at wearing away her loyalty and her love, taking her for granted, succeeded at being so logical and practical and loyal to my King that I had just lost any chance of ever having a life of my own. I looked at Burrich. “Did you love Patience?” I asked suddenly. “When you decided to leave?”

The Fool started, then visibly goggled. So there were some secrets even he did not know. Burrich’s face went as dark as I had ever seen it. He crossed his arms on his chest, as if to restrain himself. He might kill me, I thought. Or maybe he sought only to hold some pain inside himself. “Please,” I added, “I have to know.”

He glared at me, then spoke carefully. “I am not a changeable man,” he told me. “If I had loved her, I would love her still.”

So. It would never go away. “But, still, you decided—”

“Someone had to decide. Patience would not see it could not be. Someone had to end the torment for us both.”

As Molly had decided for us. I tried to think just what I should do next. Nothing came to me. I looked at the Fool. “Are you all right?” I asked him.

“I’m better off than you are,” he replied sincerely.

“I meant, your shoulder. I had thought . . .”

“Wrenched, but not broken. Much better than your heart.”

A quick bantering of witty words. I had not known he could weight a jest with so much sympathy. The kindness pushed me to the edge of breaking. “I don’t know what to do,” I said brokenly. “How can I live with this?”

The brandy bottle made a very small thud as Burrich set it in the center of the table. He put out three cups around it. “We will have a drink,” he said. “To Molly finding happiness somewhere. We will wish it for her with all our hearts.”

We drank a round and Burrich refilled the cups.

The Fool swirled the brandy in his cup. “Is this wise, just now?” he asked.

“Just now, I am done with being wise,” I told him. “I would rather be a fool.”

“You do not know of what you speak,” he told me. All the same, he raised his glass alongside mine. To fools of all kinds. And a third time, to our King.

We made a sincere effort, but fate did not allow us sufficient time. A determined rapping at Burrich’s door proved to be Lacey with a basket on her arm. She came in quickly, shutting the door fast behind her. “Get rid of this for me, will you?” she asked, and tumbled the slain chicken out on the table before us.

“Dinner!” announced the Fool enthusiastically.

It took Lacey a moment to realize the state we were in. It took her less than that to be furious. “While we gamble our lives and reputations, you get drunk!” She rounded on Burrich. “In twenty years, you have not learned that it solves nothing!”

Burrich flinched not at all. “Some things cannot be solved,” he pointed out philosophically. “Drink makes those things much more tolerable.” He came to his feet easily, stood rock steady before her. Years of drinking seemed to have taught him the knack of handling it well. “What did you need?”

Lacey bit her lip a moment. She decided to follow where he had pointed the conversation. “I need that disposed of. And I need an ointment for bruises.”

“Does no one around here ever use the healer?” the Fool asked of no one in particular. Lacey ignored him.

“That is what I supposedly came here for, so I had best return with it, in case someone asks to see it. My real mission is to find the Fitz, and ask him if he knows there are guards chopping down King Shrewd’s door with axes.”

I nodded gravely. I wasn’t going to attempt Burrich’s graceful stance. The Fool leaped to his feet instead, crying, “What?” He rounded on me. “I thought you said you had succeeded! What success is this?”

“The best I could manage on very short notice,” I retorted. “It will either be all right, or it won’t. We’ve done all we can just now. Besides, think on it. That’s a good stout oaken door. It will take them a while to get through it. And when they do, I fancy they will find the inner door to the King’s bedchamber is likewise bolted and barred.”

“How did you manage that?” Burrich asked quietly.

“I didn’t,” I said brusquely. I looked at the Fool. “I have said enough, for now. It is time to have a bit of trust.” I turned to Lacey. “How are the Queen and Patience? How went our masquerade?”

“Well enough. The Queen is sore bruised from her fall, and for myself, I am not all that sure that the babe is out of danger of being lost. A miscarriage from a fall does not always happen immediately. But let us not borrow trouble. Wallace was concerned but ineffectual. For a man who claims to be a healer, he knows remarkably little of the true lore of herbs. As for the Prince . . .” Lacey snorted, but said no more.

“Does no one beside myself think there is a danger to letting a rumor of a miscarriage circulate?” the Fool asked airily.

“I had no time to devise anything else,” I retorted. “In a day or so, the Queen will deny the rumor, saying that all seems to be well with the child.”

“So. For the moment we are as secured as we may be,” Burrich observed. “But what comes next? Are we to see the King and Queen Kettricken carried off to Tradeford?”

“Trust. I ask for one day of trust,” I said carefully. I hoped it would be enough. “And now we must disperse and go about our lives as normally as we can.”

“A stablemaster with no horses and a Fool with no King,” the Fool observed. “Burrich and I can continue to drink. I believe that is a normal life under these circumstances. As for you, Fitz, I have no idea what title you give yourself these days, let alone what you normally do all day. Hence—”

“No one is going to sit about and drink,” Lacey intoned ominously. “Put the bottle aside and keep your wits sharp. And disperse, as Fitz here said. Enough has been said and done in this room to put us all swinging from a tree for treason. Save you, of course, FitzChivalry. It would have to be poison for you. Those of the royal blood are not allowed to swing.”

Her words had a chilling effect. Burrich picked up the cork and restoppered the bottle. Lacey left first, a pot of Burrich’s ointment in her basket. The Fool followed her a short time later. When I left Burrich, he had finished cleaning the fowl and was plucking the last stubborn feathers from it. The man wasted nothing.

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