To all this I listened avidly, if mutely, while several fabrics were held against me, debated, and selected. I gained a much deeper understanding of why the keep children left me to play alone. If the women considered that I might have thoughts or feelings about their conversation, they showed no sign of it. The only remark I remember Mistress Hasty making to me specifically was that I should take greater care in washing my neck. Then Mistress Hasty shooed me from the room as if I were an annoying chicken, and I found myself finally heading to the kitchens for some food.
That afternoon I was back with Hod, practicing until I was sure my stave had mysteriously doubled its weight. Then food, and bed, and up again in the morning and back to Burrich’s tutelage. My learning filled my days, and any spare time I found was swallowed up with the chores associated with my learning, whether it was tack care for Burrich, or sweeping the armory and putting it back in order for Hod. In due time I found not one, or even two, but three entire sets of clothing, including stockings, set out one afternoon on my bed. Two were of fairly ordinary stuff, in a familiar brown that most of the children my age seemed to wear, but one was of thin blue cloth, and on the breast was a buck’s head, done in silver thread. Burrich and the other men-at-arms wore a leaping buck as their emblem. I had only seen the buck’s head on the jerkins of Regal and Verity. So I looked at it and wondered, but wondered, too, at the slash of red stitching that cut it diagonally, marching right over the design.
“It means you’re a bastard,” Burrich told me bluntly when I asked him about it. “Of acknowledged royal blood, but a bastard all the same. That’s all. It’s just a quick way of showing you’ve royal blood, but aren’t of the true line. If you don’t like it, you can change it. I am sure the King would grant it. A name and a crest of your own.”
“A name?”
“Certainly. It’s a simple enough request. Bastards are rare in the noble houses, especially so in the King’s own. But they aren’t unheard of.” Under guise of teaching me the proper care of a saddle, we were going through the tack room, looking over all the old and unused tack. Maintaining and salvaging old tack was one of Burrich’s odder fixations. “Devise a name and a crest for yourself, and then ask the King—”
“What name?”
“Why, any name you like. This looks like it’s ruined; someone put it away damp and it mildewed. But we’ll see what we can do with it.”
“It wouldn’t feel real.”
“What?” He held an armload of smelly leather out toward me. I took it.
“A name I just put to myself. It wouldn’t feel like it was really mine.”
“Well, what do you intend to do, then?”
I took a breath. “The King should name me. Or you should.” I steeled myself. “Or my father. Don’t you think?”
Burrich frowned. “You get the most peculiar notions. Just think about it yourself for a while. You’ll come up with a name that fits.”
“Fitz,” I said sarcastically, and I saw Burrich clamp his jaw.
“Let’s just mend this leather,” he suggested quietly.
We carried it to his workbench and started wiping it down. “Bastards aren’t that rare,” I observed. “And in town, their parents name them.”
“In town, bastards aren’t so rare,” Burrich agreed after a moment. “Soldiers and sailors whore around. It’s a common way for common folk. But not for royalty. Or for anyone with a bit of pride. What would you have thought of me, when you were younger, if I’d gone out whoring at night, or brought women up to the room? How would you see women now? Or men? It’s fine to fall in love, Fitz, and no one begrudges a young woman or man a kiss or two. But I’ve seen what it’s like down to Bingtown. Traders bring pretty girls or well-made youths to the market like so many chickens or so many potatoes. And the children they end up bearing may have names, but they don’t have much else. And even when they marry, they don’t stop their . . . habits. If ever I find the right woman, I’ll want her to know I won’t be looking at another. And I’ll want to know all my children are mine.” Burrich was almost impassioned.
I looked at him miserably. “So what happened with my father?”
He suddenly looked weary. “I don’t know, boy. I don’t know. He was young, just twenty or so. And far from home, and trying to shoulder a heavy burden. Those are neither reasons nor excuses. But it’s as much as either of us will ever know.”
And that was that.
My life went ’round in its settled routine. There were evenings that I spent in the stables, in Burrich’s company, and more rarely, evenings that I spent in the Great Hall when some traveling minstrel or puppet show arrived. Once in a great while I could slip out for an evening down in town, but that meant paying the next day for missed sleep. Afternoons were inevitably spent with some tutor or instructor. I came to understand that these were my summer lessons, and that in winter I would be introduced to the kind of learning that came with pens and letters. I was kept busier than I had ever been in my young life. But despite my schedule, I found myself mostly alone.
Loneliness.
It found me every night as I vainly tried to find a small and cozy spot in my big bed. When I had slept above the stables in Burrich’s rooms, my nights had been muzzy, my dreams heathery with the warm and weary contentment of the well-used animals that slept and shifted and thudded in the night below me. Horses and dogs dream, as anyone who has ever watched a hound yipping and twitching in dream pursuit well knows. Their dreams had been like the sweet rising waft from a baking of good bread. But now, isolated in a room walled with stone, I finally had time for all those devouring, aching dreams that are the portion of humans. I had no warm dam to cozy against, no sense of siblings or kin stabled nearby. Instead I would lie awake and wonder about my father and my mother, and how both could have dismissed me from their lives so easily. I heard the talk that others exchanged so carelessly over my head, and interpreted their comments in my own terrifying way. I wondered what would become of me when I was grown and old King Shrewd dead and gone. I wondered, occasionally, if Molly Nosebleed and Kerry missed me, or if they accepted my sudden disappearance as easily as they had accepted my coming. But mostly I ached with loneliness, for in all that great keep, there were none I sensed as friend. None save the beasts, and Burrich had forbidden me to have any closeness with them.