Fool’s Quest

Yes, I do. Set your walls, Da. You are singing your grief like one of Thick’s melodies.

The children of Withywoods need a new tutor. Someone very gentle and kind.

You are right. I will find one for them.

Does all go well with you and the babe?

It does. I have not vomited for two days. I can eat with pleasure once more.

I am so glad to hear it. Good night, then.

So I set my walls and felt my heart batter and break against them like a storm on the seawalls of a shuttered town. I wondered in that dark night if I would ever again feel something other than pain and guilt.

I rose before dawn and followed my old habits to the kitchen. Tavia and Mild were hard at work, as was a youngster named Lea. There was a new kitchen girl, Chestnut. When I commented on this, Tavia recounted that after Elm drank “the remembering tea” she had lost her mind. She was mortally afraid of men now, even her father and brothers. On her quiet days, they kept her in the inglenook, peeling potatoes or doing any undemanding chore. Today, knowing that I might walk into the kitchen, they’d sent her elsewhere, since the sight of grown men made her scream. Lea began to weep. I wished to hear no more.

But Nutmeg, our old cook, had come in to help with last night’s meal and she gossiped ruthlessly about the various servants. Shepherd Lin had shocked everyone when he tried to take his own life, but he’d been cut down just in time by one of his own sons. They watched him more closely now even though he claimed it had been a moment of despair and nothing he would attempt again. He had nightmares of throwing bodies into the burning stables. Slight, one of the orchard women, had drowned. Some were saying she’d walked on the thin ice on purpose and others that she was slightly daft after what she’d endured. Servants had quit, and others had been hired. Nutmeg was full of every dreadful detail and I forced myself to sit still and listen long after I longed to flee. These were things I deserved to hear. These things were the fuel that would fire me if my own resolve faltered.

Tavia was white-faced and silent as Nutmeg spoke on. Lea continued to stir something bubbling in a kettle. I did not know if her face was red from the heat of the fire or suppressed emotion. One of the gardeners had been raped by the raiders. He had taken to drink and was almost completely useless now. “Buggered him bloody,” Nutmeg reported darkly. “Man stopped eating for fear he’d have to shit. But he drinks. Oh, does that man drink! The town men, they don’t understand. His own brother said to him, he said, ‘I’d have died fighting before they did that to me.’ But they weren’t here. We’re the only ones who can understand.” She was kneading bread dough and she suddenly surprised me with the force with which she slammed it down on the board. She turned her gaze to me, and her old eyes were full of tears.

“We know you’ll make them pay, sir. We heard what you done to that Ellik, him on his high horse, looking down on us all. And that pretty boy, with his yellow hair braided like a bride, raping the girls like he couldn’t get enough of it. You done them both good, so we heard, and they deserved every bit of it, and more!”

Her voice seemed to be coming from very far away. Who . . . of course. He had been with me. He’d seen the bodies. And the boy would talk, here at home, among his friends. And my guard would embellish, as all guardsmen did.

“We’re proud of you, that we are, and we know you’ll go after the rest of them. Track them back to their lair and smoke them out and kill them. Young Per might have finished that Ellik but he told us that you made him pay before he put a blade in him.”

Proud of me. I felt queasy.

Tavia took mercy on me, I think, reminding me that Foxglove would expect me to join her for breakfast. She shooed me out of the kitchen and I went gratefully. In the hall I encountered Perseverance. He looked pallid and his eyes were red-rimmed. I told him he would eat with us and took him to the table to wait for Foxglove. I didn’t ask him what tales he had told the Withywoods folk. Instead I asked him how his mother was.