Fool’s Assassin

He had to crouch to be in my hidey-hole. When I stood, he bent deeper to kiss me where my hair parted. He was still for a moment as if he were smelling me. “Are you all right?”

I nodded.

“Is this where you want to come when you are frightened?”

That I could answer truthfully. “Yes. This place is mine, more than anywhere else in Withywoods.”

He straightened and nodded back at me. “Very well.” He tried to roll his shoulders but could not in the cramped space. “Come with me now. We both need to get some sleep before dawn.”

He led the way and I followed him out of the secret corridors and back into his den. I watched him close the panel and open the tall doors. I followed his candle as we went back to the main part of Withywoods. At the foot of the grand staircase, he halted. He turned and looked down at me. “Your room will need to be thoroughly cleaned before you can sleep there again. And my room is too untidy. I suggest we sleep in your mother’s sitting room, where you were born.”

He did not wait for me to agree. I followed him as we went to the pleasant chamber that had once served as a nursery for me. It was cold and dark. My father lit a branch of candles and left me there while he went to get a scoop of coals from another hearth to start a fire. While he was gone, I brushed cobwebs from my new red nightdress. I stared about my mother’s dimly lit room. We had not spent much time here since she had died. Her presence was everywhere, from the candles ready in their holders to the emptied flower vases. No. Not her presence. It was her absence that I felt. Last winter the three of us had gathered here almost every night. My mother’s workbasket was still by her chair. I sat down in it and set the basket on my lap. I pulled my feet up under my nightgown and hugged the basket to me.

Chapter 19

THE BEATEN MAN

And in a time that no one expects, when hope is dead and White Prophets fled, in a place where he cannot be found, there will be discovered the Unexpected Son. He will not be known to his father, and motherless he will grow. He will be the pebble in the track that shifts the wheel from its course. Death will thirst for him, but time and again, that thirst will go unslaked. Buried and lifted, forgotten, unnamed, in isolation and disgrace, he will yet prevail in the hand of the White Prophet who wields him without compassion or mercy for the tool that must be dulled and chipped to shape a better world.

I set the scroll aside, wondering why I had bothered to take it out. I had brought it from my private den to Molly’s room, where Bee lay sleeping. It was the only bit of writing I’d ever read that mentioned the prophecy of the Unexpected Son. And it was only a fragment. There were no new answers there to the question I wanted to ask him. Why, after all these years? Why such a message, and such a messenger?

I turned it over, studying it for the thousandth time. It was an old piece of something … not vellum, not paper. Neither Chade nor I knew what it was. The ink was very black, the edges of each letter sharp. The substance it was written on was pliable and the color of honey. If I held it up to the fire, I could see light through it. Neither Chade nor I could read it, but it came with a translation that Chade assured me was accurate. At the time, he had muttered something like, “At that price, it had better be accurate.”