Royal Assassin

We stared at one another, and after a time I managed to speak what she was almost willing to accept as an apology. But then I made the mistake of suggesting that perhaps he had given them to her solely because he knew it would vex me. And then she wanted to know how Regal might know what was between us; and did I think her work so poor that a largesse such as the earrings was not due her? Suffice to say that we mended our quarrels as well as we could in the short time we had left together. But a mended pot is never as sound as a whole one, and I returned to the ship as lonely as if I had had no time at all with her.

In the times when I leaned on my oar and kept perfect rhythm and tried to think of nothing at all, I often found myself missing Patience and Lacey, Chade, Kettricken, or even Burrich. The few times I was able to call on our queen-in-waiting that summer, I always found her on her tower-top garden. It was a beautiful place, but despite her efforts, it was nothing like the other Buckkeep gardens had ever been. There was too much of the Mountains in her for her ever to convert entirely to our ways. There was a honed simplicity to how she arranged and trained the plants. Simple stones had been added, and bare driftwood branches twisted and smoothed by the sea rested against them in stark beauty. I could have meditated calmly there, but it was not a place to loll in the warm wind of summer, and I suspected that was how Verity had recalled it. She kept herself busy there, and enjoyed it, but it did not bond her to Verity as she had once believed it would. She was as beautiful as ever, but always her blue eyes were clouded gray with a preoccupation and a worry. Her brow was furrowed so often that when she did relax her face, one saw the pale lines of the skin the sun had never reached. In the times I spent with her there, she often dismissed most of her ladies, and then quizzed me about the Rurisk's activities as thoroughly as if she were Verity himself. When I had finished reporting to her, often she folded her lips into a firm line and went to stare out over the top of the tower wall and beyond to the sea touching the edge of the sky. Toward the end of summer, as she was staring so one afternoon, I ventured close to her to ask to be excused from her presence to return to my ship. She scarcely seemed to hear what I had asked. Instead, she said softly, "There has to be a final solution. Nothing, no one can go on like this. There must be a way to make an end of this."

"Autumn storms come soon, my lady queen. Already, frost has touched some of your vines. Storms are never far behind the first chilling, and with them comes peace for us."

"Peace? Ha." She snorted in disbelief. "Is it peace to lie awake and wonder who will die next, where will they attack next year? That is not peace. That is a torture. There must be a way to put an end to the Red-Ships. And I intend to find it."

Her words sounded almost like a threat.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN. Interludes

OF STONE WERE their bones made, of the sparkling veined stone of the Mountains. Their flesh was made of the shining salts of the earth. But their hearts were made of the hearts of wise men.

They came from afar, those men, a long and trying way. They did not hesitate to lay down the lives that had become a weariness to them. They ended their days and began eternities, they put aside flesh and donned stone, they let fall their weapons and rose on new wings. Elderlings.

When the King finally summoned me, I went to him. True to my promise to myself, I had not voluntarily gone to his chambers since that afternoon. Bitterness still ate at me over his arrangements with Duke Brawndy concerning Celerity and me. But a summons from one's king was not a thing to be ignored, regardless of what anger churned inside me still.

He sent for me on an autumn morning. It had been at least two months since I had last stood before King Shrewd. I had ignored the wounded looks the Fool flung at me when I encountered him, and turned aside Verity's occasional query as to why I had not sought out Shrewd's chamber. It was easy enough. Wallace still guarded his door like a serpent on the hearth, and the King's poor health was no secret from anyone. No one was admitted to his rooms before noon anymore. So I told myself this morning summons betokened something important.