Royal Assassin

I was silent. Not just that her words cut me. They did, and deeply. But she brought back to me a memory of holding a child, studying the blood that had trickled down her cooling. arm. I couldn't abide the thought of ever doing it again. But it could not be fled. "There is no running away, Molly. We either stand and fight here, or are slaughtered when the fighting overtakes us."

"Really?" she asked me coldly. "It isn't just your putting your loyalty to a King ahead of what we have?" I could not meet her eyes. She snorted. "You're just like Burrich. You don't even know how much you're like him!"

"Like Burrich?" I was left floundering. I was startled that she said it at all, let alone that she said it as if it were a fault.

"Yes." She was decisive.

"Because I am true to my king?" I was still grasping at straws.

"No! Because you put your king before your woman ... or your love, or your own life."

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"There! You see! You really don't. And you go about, acting like you know all these great things and secrets and every important thing that ever happened. So answer me this. Why does Patience hate Burrich?"

I was completely at a loss now. I had no idea how this figured into what was wrong with me. But I knew somehow Molly would make a connection. Gingerly I tried: "She blames him for me. She thinks Burrich led Chivalry into bad ways ... and hence into conceiving me."

"There. You see. That's how stupid you are. It's nothing of the kind. Lacey told me one night. A bit too much elderberry wine, and I was talking of you and she of Burrich and Patience. Patience loved Burrich first, you idiot. But he wouldn't have her. He said he loved her, but he couldn't marry her, even if her father would give consent for her to wed beneath her station. Because he was already sworn, life and sword, to a lord of his own. And he didn't think he could do justice to both of them. Oh, he said he wished he were free to marry her, and that he wished he hadn't sworn before he'd met her. But all the same, he said he wasn't free to marry her just then. He said something stupid to her, about no matter how willing the horse, it can only wear one saddle. So she told him, well, go off, then, go follow this lord who's more important to you than I am. And he did. Just as you would, if I told you that you had to choose." There were two spots of high color on her cheeks. She tossed her head as she turned her back on me.

So there was the connection to my fault. But my mind was reeling as bits and pieces of stories and comments suddenly fell into place. Burrich's tale of first meeting Patience. She'd been sitting in an apple tree, and she'd demanded that he take a splinter out of her foot. Scarcely something a woman would ask of her lord's man. But something a direct young maid might ask of a young man who had caught her eye. And his reaction the night I had spoken to him about Molly and Patience, and repeated Patience's words about horses and saddles.

"Did Chivalry know anything of all this?" I asked.

Molly spun about to consider me. It was obviously not the question she had expected me to ask. But she couldn't resist finishing the story either. "No. Not at first. When Patience first came to know him, she had no idea he was Burrich's master. Burrich had never told her what lord he was sworn to. At first Patience would have nothing to do with Chivalry. Burrich still held her heart, you see. But Chivalry was stubborn. From what Lacey says, he loved her to distraction. He won her heart. It wasn't until after she had said yes, she'd marry him, that she found out he was Burrich's master. And only because Chivalry sent Burrich to deliver a special horse to her."

I suddenly remembered Burrich in the stable, looking at Patience's mount and saying, "I trained that horse." I wondered if he'd trained Silk, knowing she was to go to a woman he'd loved, as a gift from the man she'd marry. I'd bet it was so. I had always thought that Patience's disdain for Burrich was a sort of jealousy that Chivalry could care so much for him. Now the triangle was an even stranger one. And infinitely more painful. I closed my eyes and shook my head at the unfairness of the world. "Nothing is ever simple and good," I said to myself. "There is always a bitter peel, a sour pip somewhere."