Royal Assassin

We left the tower and I followed him down the stairs, speaking of inconsequential things. He told me to tell Mistress Hasty I needed new clothes; I asked after Leon, his wolfhound. He stopped a lad in the corridor and asked him to bring wine and meat pies to his study. I followed him, not up to his chambers, but to a lower room at once familiar and strange. The last time I had been in it, Fedwren the scribe had been using it to sort and dry herbs and shells and roots for the making of his inks. All signs of that had been cleared from it. A fire burned low in the small hearth. Verity poked this up and added wood as I looked around. There was a large carved oak table and two smaller ones, a variety of chairs, a scroll rack, and a battered shelf littered with miscellaneous objects. Spread out on the table was the beginnings of a map of the Chalced States. The corners of it were weighted with a dagger and three stones. Various scraps of parchment that littered the tabletop were covered with Verity's hand and preliminary sketches with notes scratched across them. The friendly litter that covered the two smaller tables and several of the chairs seemed familiar. After a moment I recognized it as the layer of Verity's possessions that had previously been scattered about his bedchamber. Verity rose from awakening the fire and smiled ruefully at my raised eyebrows. "My queen-in-waiting has small patience with clutter. `How,' she asked me, `can you hope to create precise lines in the midst of such disorder?' Her own chamber has the precision of a military encampment. So I hide myself away down here, for I quickly found that in a clean and sparse chamber I could get no work done at all. Besides, it gives me a place for quiet talk, where not all know to seek me."

He had scarcely finished speaking when the door opened to admit Charim with a tray. I nodded to Verity's serving man, who not only seemed unsurprised to see me, but had added to Verity's request a certain type of spice bread that I had always enjoyed. He moved about the room briefly, making perfunctory tidying motions as he shifted a few books and scrolls to free a chair for me, and then vanished again. Verity was so accustomed to him he scarce seemed to notice him, save for the brief smile they exchanged as Charim left.

"So," he said, as soon as the door was fairly shut. "Let's have a full report. From the time you left Buckkeep."

This was not a simple recounting of my journey and the events of it. I had been trained by Chade to be a spy as well as an assassin. And since my earliest days Burrich had always demanded that I be able to give a detailed account of anything that went on in the stables in his absence. So as we ate and drank I gave Verity an accounting of all I had seen and done since I had left Buckkeep. This was followed by my summation of what I had concluded from my experiences, and then by what I suspected from what I had learned. By then, Charim had returned with another meal. While we consumed this Verity limited our talk to his warships. He could not conceal his enthusiasm for them. "Mastfish has come down to supervise the building. I went up to Highdowns myself to fetch him. He claimed to be an old man now. `The cold would stiffen my bones; I can't build a boat in winter anymore, that was the word he sent me. So I set the apprentices work, and I myself went to fetch him. He could not refuse me to my face. When he got here, I took him down to the shipyards. And I showed him the heated shed, big enough to house a warship, built so he might work and not be cold. But that was not what convinced him. It was the white oak that Kettricken brought me. When he saw the timber, he could not wait to put a drawknife to it. The grain is straight and true throughout. The planking is well begun already. They will be lovely ships, swan-necked, sinuous as snakes upon the water." Enthusiasm spilled from him. I could already imagine the rising and falling of the oars, the bellying of the square masts when they were under way.

Then the dishes and oddments were pushed to one side, and he began to quiz me upon the events in Jhaampe. He forced me to reconsider each separate incident from every possible perspective. By the time he was finished with me, I had relived the entire episode and my anger at my betrayal was fresh and vivid once more.

Verity was not blind to it. He leaned back in his chair to reach for another log. He flipped it onto the fire, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. "You have questions," he observed. "This time you may ask them." He folded his hands quietly into his lap and waited.