Assassin's Apprentice (46 page)

I could hear little through the floor, but enough to know Regal’s voice. My evening’s plans were being divulged to Cob.
When I was certain of it, I wriggled out of my hiding place, clambered down, and retreated to my own room. There I made certain of some specialized supplies. I reminded myself, firmly, that I was a king’s man. I had told Verity so. I left my chamber and walked softly through the palace. In the Great Hall, the common folk slept on mats on the floor, in concentric circles around the dais, to have reserved the best viewing of their Princess’s pledging tomorrow. I walked among them and they did not stir. So much trust, so ill placed.

The chambers of the royals were at the extreme rear of the palace, farthest from the main entry. There were no guards. I walked past the door that led to the bedroom of the reclusive King, past Rurisk’s door, and to Kettricken’s. Her door was decorated with hummingbirds and honeysuckle. I thought how much the Fool would have liked it. I tapped lightly and waited. Slow moments passed. I tapped again.

I heard the scuff of bare feet on wood, and the painted screen slid open. Kettricken’s hair had been freshly braided, but fine strands had already pulled free around her face. Her long white night robe accented her fairness, so that she seemed pale as the Fool. “Did you need something?” she asked sleepily.

“Only the answer to a question.” The smoke still twined through my thoughts. I wanted to smile, to be witty and clever before her. Pale beauty, I thought. I pushed the impulse aside. She was waiting. “If I killed your brother tonight,” I said carefully, “what would you do?”

She did not even draw back from me. “I would kill you, of course. At least, I would demand it done, in justice. As I am pledged to your family now, I could not take your blood myself.”

“But would you go on with the wedding? Would you still marry Verity?”

“Would you like to come in?”

“I haven’t time. Would you marry Verity?”

“I am pledged to the Six Duchies, to be their queen. I am pledged to their people. Tomorrow, I pledge to the King-in-Waiting. Not to a man named Verity. But even were it otherwise, ask yourself, which is the most binding? I am bound already. It is not just my word, but my father’s. And my brother’s. I would not want to marry a man who had ordered my brother’s death. But it is not the man I am pledged to. It is the Six Duchies. I am given there, in the hopes of it benefiting my people. There I must go.”

I nodded. “Thank you, my lady. Forgive my disturbing your rest.”

“Where do you go now?”

“To your brother.”

She remained standing in her door as I turned and walked to her brother’s chamber. I tapped and waited. Rurisk must have been restive, for he opened the door much more quickly.

“May I come in?”

“Certainly.” Gracious, as I had expected. The edge of a giggle teased at my resolve. Chade would not be proud of you just now, I counseled myself, and refused to smile.

I entered and he closed the door behind me. “Shall we have
wine?” I asked him.

“If you wish it,” he said, puzzled but polite. I seated myself on a chair while he unstoppered a carafe and poured for us. There was a censer on his table, too, still warm. I had not seen him indulge earlier. He probably had thought it more safe to wait until he was alone in his chamber. But you never can tell when an assassin will come calling with a pocketful of death. I pushed down a silly smile. He filled two glasses. I leaned forward and showed him my twist of paper. Painstakingly, I tipped it into his wine, picked up the glass, and swirled it to see it well dissolved. I handed it to him.

“I’ve come to poison you, you see. You die. Then Kettricken kills me. Then she marries Verity.” I lifted my glass and sipped from it. Apple wine. From Farrow, I guessed. Probably part of the wedding gifts. “So what does Regal gain?”

Rurisk eyed his wine with distaste and set it aside. He took my glass from my hand. He drank from it. There was no shock in his voice as he said, “He’s rid of you. I gather he does not value your company. He has been very gracious to me, extending many gifts to me as well as to my kingdom. But if I were dead, Kettricken would be left sole heir to the Mountain Kingdom. That would benefit the Six Duchies, would it not?”

“We cannot protect the land we already have. And I think Regal would see it as benefiting Verity, not the kingdom.” I heard a noise outside the door. “That will be Cob, coming to catch me in the act of poisoning you,” I surmised. I rose, went to the door, and opened it. Kettricken pushed past me into the
room. I closed the screen quickly behind her.

“He’s come to poison you,” she warned Rurisk.

“I know,” he said gravely. “He put it in my wine. That’s why I’m drinking his.” He refilled the glass from the carafe and offered it to her. “It’s apple,” he cajoled when she shook her head.

“I don’t see any humor in this,” she snapped. Rurisk and I looked at one another and grinned foolishly. Smoke.

Her brother smiled benignly. “It’s like this. FitzChivalry realized tonight he is a dead man. Too many people have been told he is an assassin. If he kills me, you kill him. If he doesn’t kill me, how can he go home and face his king? Even if his king forgives him, half the court will know he’s an assassin. That makes him useless. Useless bastards are a liability to royalty.” Rurisk finished his lecture by draining the rest of the glass.

“Kettricken told me that even if I killed you tonight, she would still pledge to Verity tomorrow.”

Again, he was not surprised. “What would she gain by refusing? Only the enmity of the Six Duchies. She would be forsworn to your people, a great shame to our people. She would become outcast, to the good of no one. It would not bring me back.”

“And would not your people rise up at the thought of giving her to such a man?”

“We would protect them from such knowledge. Eyod and my sister would, anyway. Shall a whole kingdom rise to war over the death of one man? Remember, I am Sacrifice here.”

For the first time I dimly understood what that meant.

“I may soon be an embarrassment to you,” I warned him. “I was told it was a slow poison. But I looked at it. It is not. It is a simple extract of deadroot, and actually rather swift, if given in sufficient quantity. First, it gives a man tremors.” Rurisk extended his hands on the table, and they trembled. Kettricken looked furious with both of us. “Death follows swiftly. And I expect I am supposed to be caught in the act and disposed of along with you.”

Rurisk clutched at his throat, then let his head loll forward on his chest. “I am poisoned!” he intoned theatrically.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Kettricken spat, just as Cob tore the door open.

“ ’Ware treachery!” he cried. He went white at the sight of Kettricken. “My lady princess, tell me you have not drunk of the wine! This traitorous bastard has poisoned it!”

I think his drama was rather spoiled by the lack of response. Kettricken and I exchanged looks. Rurisk rolled from his chair onto the floor. “Oh, stop it,” she hissed at him.

“I put the poison in the wine,” I told Cob genially. “Just as I was charged to do.”

And then Rurisk’s back arched in his first convulsion.

The blinding realization of how I had been duped took but an instant. Poison in the wine. A gift of Farrow apple wine, probably given this very evening. Regal had not trusted me to put it there, but it was easy enough to accomplish, in this trusting place. I watched Rurisk arch again, knowing there was
nothing I could do. Already, there was the spreading numbness in my own mouth. I wondered, almost idly, how strong the dose had been. I had only had a sip. Would I die here, or on a scaffold?

Kettricken herself understood, a moment later, that her brother was truly dying. “You soulless filth!” she spat at me, and then sank down at Rurisk’s side. “To lull him with jests and smoke, to smile with him as he dies!” Her eyes flashed to Cob. “I demand his death. Tell Regal to come here, now!”

I was moving for the door, but Cob was faster. Of course. No smoke for Cob this night. He was faster and more muscular than I, clearer of head. His arms closed around me and he bore me down to the floor. His face was close to mine as he drove his fist into my belly. I knew this breath, this scent of sweat. Smithy had scented this, before he died. But this time the knife was in my sleeve and very sharp and treated with the swiftest poison Chade knew. After I put it into him, he managed to hit me twice, good solid punches, before he fell back, dying. Good-bye, Cob. As he fell I suddenly saw a freckly stable boy saying, “Come along now, there’s some good fellows.” It could have gone so many different ways. I had known this man; killing him killed a part of my own life.

Burrich was going to be very upset with me.

All those thoughts had taken but a fraction of a second. Cob’s outflung hand had not struck the floor before I was moving for the door.

Kettricken was even faster. I think it was a brass water ewer. I saw it as a white burst of light.

When I came to myself, everything hurt. The most immediate pain was in my wrists, for the cords that knotted them together behind my back were unbearably tight. I was being carried. Sort of. Neither Rowd nor Sevrens seemed to much care if parts of me dragged. Regal was there, with a torch, and a Chyurda I didn’t know leading the way with another. I didn’t know where I was, either, except that we were outdoors.

“Is there nowhere else we can put him? No place especially secure?” Regal was demanding. There was a muttered reply, and Regal said, “No, you are right. We do not want to raise a great outcry right now. Tomorrow is soon enough. Not that I think he will live that long.”

A door was opened and I was flung headlong to an earthen floor barely cushioned by straw. I breathed dust and chaff. I could not cough. Regal gestured with his torch. “Go to the Princess,” he instructed Sevrens. “Tell her I will be there shortly. See if there is anything we can do to make the Prince more comfortable. You, Rowd, summon August from his chambers. We will need his Skill so that King Shrewd may know how he has succored a scorpion. I will need his approval before the bastard dies. If he lives long enough to be condemned. Go on, now. Go.”

And they left, the Chyurda lighting their way for them. Regal remained, looking down on me. He waited until their footfalls were distant before he kicked me savagely in the ribs. I cried out wordlessly, for my mouth and throat were numb. “It seems to me we have been here before, have we not? You wallowing in
straw, and me looking down on you, wondering what misfortune had brought you into my life? Odd, how so many things end as they begin.

“And so much of justice is a circle, also. Consider how you fall to poison and treachery. Just as my mother did. Ah, you start. Did you think I did not know? I knew. I know much you do not think I know. Everything from the stench of Lady Thyme to how you lost your Skill when Burrich would no longer let you tap his strength. He was swift enough to abandon you when he saw it might otherwise cost him his life.”

A tremor shook me. Regal threw back his head and laughed. Then he gave a sigh and turned. “A pity I cannot stay and watch. But I have a princess to console. Poor thing, pledged to a man she already hates.”

Either Regal left then, or I did. I am not clear. It was as if the sky opened up and I flowed out into it. “Being open,” Verity told me, “is simply not being closed.” Then I dreamed, I think, of the Fool. And of Verity, sleeping with his arms wrapped around his head, as if to keep his thoughts in. And of Galen’s voice, echoing in a dark, cold chamber. “Tomorrow is better. When he Skills now, he scarce has any sense of the room he sits in. We do not have enough bond for me to do this from a distance. A touch will be required.”

There was a squeaking in the dark, a disagreeable mouse of a mind that I did not know. “Do it now,” it insisted.

“Do not be foolish,” Galen rebuked it. “Shall we lose it all now, for the sake of haste? Tomorrow is soon enough. Let me worry about that part. You must tidy things there. Rowd and
Sevrens know too much. And the stablemaster has annoyed us too long.”

“You leave me standing in a bloodbath,” the mouse squeaked angrily.

“Wade through it to a throne,” Galen suggested.

“And Cob is dead. Who will see to my horses on the way home?”

“Leave the stablemaster, then,” Galen said in disgust. And then, considering: “I will do him myself, when you get home. I shall not mind. But the others were better done quickly. Perhaps the bastard poisoned other wine, in your quarters. A pity your servants got into it.”

“I suppose. You must find me a new valet.”

“We will have your wife do that for you. You should be with her now. She has just lost her brother. You must be horrified at what has come to pass. Try to blame the bastard rather than Verity. But not too convincingly. And tomorrow, when you are as bereaved as she, well, we shall see what mutual sympathy leads to.”

“She is big as a cow and pale as a fish.”

“But with the mountain lands, you will have a defensible inland kingdom. You know the Coastal Duchies will not stand for you, and Farrow and Tilth cannot stand alone between the mountains and the Coastal Duchies. Besides, she need not live longer than her first child’s birth.”

“FitzChivalry Farseer,” Verity said in his sleep. King Shrewd and Chade played at dice bones together. Patience
stirred in her sleep. “Chivalry?” she asked softly. “Is that you?”

“No,” I said. “It’s no one. No one at all.”

She nodded and slept on.

When my eyes focused again, it was dark and I was alone. My jaws trembled, and my chin and shirtfront were wet with my own saliva. The numbness seemed less. I wondered if that meant the poison wouldn’t kill me. I doubted that it mattered; I would have small chance to speak in my own behalf. My hands had gone numb. At least they didn’t hurt anymore. I was horribly thirsty. I wondered if Rurisk was dead yet. He had taken a lot more of the wine than I had. And Chade had said it was quick.