Fool’s Assassin

For the first part of the meal, I was silent. Father and Riddle were once more talking about his departure for Buckkeep. Shun and Lant immersed themselves in their own quiet conversation, frequently punctuated by her laughter. I had read a poem about a girl with “silvery laughter” but Shun’s sounded to me as if someone had fallen down a long flight of steps with a basket of cheap tin pans. After Father had spent some little time in conversation with Riddle, he turned to me and said, “So what did you think of Taker Farseer and his invasion of this land?”

“I had not thought of it that way,” I responded. Truly I had not. And in the next breath, I had to ask, “Then who was here before Taker and his men came and claimed the land around the mouth of the Buck River? The scroll says that the bones of the old stone keep were deserted. Were the folk who were living here the same ones who had once had a fortification there? You said it might have originally been built by Elderlings? So were they Elderlings he fought to take this land?”

“Well. They were mostly fishermen and farmers and goatherds, I believe. Lord Chade has tried to find more writings by those people, but they don’t seem to have entrusted their lore to letters and scrolls. Some of the bards say that our oldest songs are actually rooted in their songs. But we can’t really say ‘they’ and ‘them’ because we are actually the product of Taker and his invaders and the folk that were already here.”

Had he known? Did he deliberately give me that opening? “Then, in those days, people learned things from songs? Or poems?”

“Of course. The best minstrels still recite the longest genealogies from memory. They are, of course, entrusted to paper as well, now that paper is more abundant. But a minstrel learns them from the mouth of his master, not from a paper.”

Riddle was listening as raptly as I, and when Father paused, he jumped in. “So that song that Hap favored us with the last time I saw him, a very old song about Eld Silverskin, the dragon’s friend?” The next lines came into my mind and were out my mouth before I paused to consider. “ ‘Of precious things, he has no end. A stone that speaks, a drum that gleams, he’s pecksie-kissed or so it seems.’ ”

“What is ‘pecksie-kissed’?” Riddle demanded as my father simultaneously said, “Hap will be proud to know you have remembered his song so well!” Then he turned to Riddle. “ ‘Pecksie-kissed’ means lucky out in far Farrow. But I do not know if Silverskin is Hap’s own song, or a much older one.”

Shun interrupted abruptly. “You know Hap Gladheart? You’ve heard him sing?” She sounded scandalized. Or furiously jealous.

My father smiled. “Of course. I fostered Hap when he was an orphan. And I was never so glad myself as when I heard that he had taken that name for himself. Gladheart.” He turned back to Riddle. “But we are getting far afield from Bee’s question. Riddle, who do you think first built a fort on that cliff?”

Soon all three of us were speculating, with Riddle adding comments about things he had noticed in the lower reaches of Buckkeep Castle. He had seen what might have been runes, badly eroded, on the wall of one dungeon. My father spoke about the Witness Stones, and the Buck tradition of holding combats there, as well as weddings. Now that we knew the Witness Stones were actually portals that the highly trained Skill-user might use to cover great distances in a single stride, it was intriguing to speculate how they had come to be called the Witness Stones.

It was only when the meal was drawing to a close that I realized my father had staged our conversation as carefully as if it were a counterattack on a fortification. In talking with Riddle and him I had completely forgotten my bruised feelings. I became aware that FitzVigilant’s conversation with Shun had faltered to a halt and that he was listening in on our talk. She was picking a piece of bread to pieces, her mouth pursed in displeasure. I became aware of all this only when my father shifted in his seat and casually said, “Well, Scribe Lant, and what do you think of Riddle’s theory? Have you ever been in the lower reaches of Buckkeep Castle?”