“I scarcely think that’s necessary,” I said firmly, and sensed his distant sigh.
“As you think best,” he finished and withdrew his mind from ours.
I did as he suggested, sending Riddle to the taverns, but he heard nothing. No message arrived asking what had become of a messenger. For a time I walked with my hackles up, alert to anything that might be the slightest bit out of the ordinary. But as days and then months passed, the incident faded from the foreground of my mind. Riddle’s premise that perhaps none of them were what they had claimed to be, and that we had been passing witnesses to someone settling an old debt, was as valid as any I could imagine.
Years later, I would marvel at my stupidity. How could I not have known? For years I had waited and longed for a message from the Fool. And when finally it came, I had not received it.
The Felling of Fallstar
A secret is only yours so long as you don’t share it. Tell it to one person, and it’s a secret no more.
Behind the tenth-day market stalls were the resident merchants of Oaksbywater. There was a cobbler’s shop, a weavers’ mercantile, a tinker, and a large smithy. The King’s Dogs Inn had set out benches and tables outside in the shade. The cloth merchant displayed racks of fabric and twisted hanks of dyed yarn for sale, the smith’s shop offered wares of tin and iron and copper, and the cobbler had brought his bench outside his shop and sat sewing a lady’s soft red slipper. The pleasant din of folks bargaining and gossiping ebbed and flowed in waves against my ears.
I was seated at one of the tavern’s benches under the oak, a mug of cider at my elbow. My errands were completed. We’d had a message from Just, the first to reach us in many a month. He and Hearth had left home almost three years ago. With youth’s fine disregard for the concerns of their elders, they’d sent messages only sporadically. Just had finished the first year of his apprenticeship with a wainwright in Highdowns, and his master was very pleased with him indeed. He wrote that Hearth had taken work on a river ferry and seemed content at that occupation. Molly and I had both rejoiced at the news that he was finally settled and doing well. But Just had added that he had lost his favorite belt-knife, a bone-handled one with a thin, slightly curved blade that the smith in Oaksbywater had made for him when he was thirteen. I’d put in the order for a replacement two weeks ago and picked it up today. That single small package was at my feet beside a huddle of Molly’s purchases.
I was watching the cobbler and wondering if Molly would like a pair of red slippers. But evidently that pair was spoken for; as I watched, a slender young woman with a mop of unruly dark curls sauntered from the market crowd to stand before the cobbler. I could not hear the words they spoke, but the man took three more stitches and a knot, bit off his thread, and offered the slipper and its mate to her. Her face alight with a saucy grin, she set her stacked coppers on his bench and sat down immediately to try on her new shoes. Freshly shod, she stood up, lifted her skirts almost to her knees, and tried a few dancing steps there in the dusty street.
I grinned and looked around for someone to share my enjoyment of her unabashed pleasure. But the two old plowmen on the other end of my bench were complaining to each other about the prospect of rain or the lack thereof, and my Molly was out among the other shoppers enjoying a day of haggling with merchants. In the past, when the boys were younger and Patience alive, market days had been far more complicated trips. But in the space of little more than a year we’d lost my stepmother and seen the lads venture out on their own. For most of a year, I think we were both stunned by the abrupt change in our lives. For almost two years after that, we had floundered about in a home that suddenly seemed much too large. Only recently had we cautiously begun to explore our new latitude. Today we had escaped the confines of our life as lady and holder of the estate to take a day to ourselves. We’d planned it well. Molly had a short list of items she wished to buy. I needed no list to remind me that this was my day for idleness. I was anticipating music during an evening meal at the inn. If we lingered too late, we might even stay the night and begin our journey back to Withywoods the next morning. I wondered idly why the thought of Molly and me alone overnight in an inn raised thoughts more worthy of a boy of fifteen than a man of fifty years. It made me smile.
Fear sent cold tendrils from my belly up to my heart. An old memory of Verity’s Queen, Kettricken, falling down those same steps—victim of a plot to kill her unborn child in the fall—filled my mind. I immediately wondered if Chade’s fall had been an accident at all. I tried to hide the thought from Nettle as I reached through her to grope for Chade. Nothing.
But he’s breathing?
Fitz, we would not have reached for you if this was a simple healing. And if he were dead, I’d tell you that. Dutiful wants you to come right now, as soon as possible. Even with Thick lending strength to them, the Skill-coterie has not been able to reach him. If we can’t reach him, we can’t heal him. You are our last hope.