Fool’s Assassin

“Oh, well, that isn’t quite decided yet.” He smiled evasively. I think the smile would have fooled anyone who did not know him as well as I did. “We’ll get to know her, and see what she’s good at doing, and then give those sorts of things to her to do,” he added brightly.

“Does she do beekeeping?” I asked in sudden alarm. When spring came, I did not want anyone except myself to touch my mother’s dormant hives.

“No. I’m quite sure of that.” My father sounded as emphatic in his response as I had been. I felt a sense of relief. He came and sat on the foot of my bed. It was a very large bed; it still felt as if he were across the room. My mother would have sat down beside me, close enough to touch me. Gone. The thought blew cold through me again. My father looked as if he felt that same chill wind, but he did not move closer to me.

“What happened to your pale friend?”

He flinched and then pasted a casual smile on his face. He shrugged stiffly. “He went away.”

“Where?”

“Back to the place where he had first come from. A land far to the south of here. Clerres, he called it. I don’t know exactly where. He never told me.”

I thought for a time. “Did you send him a message to say you missed him?”

He laughed. “Moppet, you have to know where a letter must go in order to send it.”

I hadn’t meant a letter. I meant that other kind of reaching out that he and my sister did. Since he had started holding himself inside his own mind, I heard far less of it than I once had. And ever since I had felt it tug at me and try to shred me away into nothing, I’d always hung back from trying to understand it. I’d felt him do it a dozen times at least in the last few days, but hadn’t really known to whom he reached or what he conveyed. Not his pale friend, though.

“Will he come back someday?” I wondered out loud. Would he come and take my father away from me?

My father fell into that stillness again. Then he slowly shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think if he was going to come back or send me a letter, he would have done it by now. He told me before he left that the work he and I were to do was done, and that if he stayed near me, we might accidentally undo it. And that would mean that all we had gone through would have been for naught.”

I tried to put this together in my mind. “Like the puppeteers’ mistake.”

“What?”

“That time the puppeteers came in the storm and Mother let them in. Remember? They set up a little stage in the Great Hall and even though they were very tired, they put on a show for us.”

“I do remember that. But what was the mistake?”

“At the end, when the Blue Soldier had slain the Boar with Red Tusks and freed the Rain Cloud so it could rain on the land and the crops would grow? The story was meant to stop there. But then, when they were folding the curtains, I saw the Blue Soldier dangling next to the Boar with Red Tusks, and his tusks were deep in the soldier’s vitals. So I knew that in the end, the Boar came back and slew the soldier after all.”

“Uh, no, Bee. That wasn’t part of the story at all! It was just something that happened when the puppets were put away.”

He didn’t understand at all. I explained to him. “No. It was the next story. Like your friend said could happen. An accident when it was all supposed to be over.”

He looked at me with his dark eyes. I could look into them to a deep place where things were still broken, never to be mended. My mother had always been able to make that broken part recede, but I didn’t know how. Maybe no one did now. “Well. It’s late,” he said suddenly. “And I’ve wakened you and kept you awake longer than I intended. I just wanted to make sure that you weren’t worrying about your cousin coming. I’m glad you’re fine with it.” He stood and stretched.

“Do I have to obey her?”

He dropped his arms suddenly. “What?”

“Must I obey Shun Fallstar when she comes?”

“Well, she’s a woman grown, so she is to be respected by you. Just as you respect Tavia or Mild.”

Respect. Not obey. I could do that. I nodded slowly and slid down in my bed. My mother would have come to tuck the covers more closely around me. He didn’t.

He walked softly to the door, and then paused. “Did you want a story? Or a song?”

I thought about it. Did I? No. I had his stories, his real ones, to think about until I fell asleep. “Not tonight,” I said, and yawned.

“Very well. Sleep, then. I’ll see you in the morning.” He yawned widely. “It’s going to be a big day for all of us,” he said, and to me it sounded more like dread than anticipation.

“Papa?”

He stopped just inside the door. “What is it?”