“That’s good to know,” I admitted. Then I added, “The cat told me to kill her.” Despite my effort, the words sounded defensive.
“I know. I heard her.” He sniffed a little, then tried to disguise it as a cough. “And she would have forced you to kill her. She was completely determined.”
“I think I knew that,” I replied ruefully, and touched the renewed bandages at my throat. The Prince actually smiled, and I found myself returning the smile.
He asked the next question quickly, as if it were important to ask, so important that he feared the answer. “Will you be staying?”
“Staying?”
“Will I see you around Buckkeep Castle?” He sat down suddenly at the table across from me and met my eyes directly with Verity’s blunt stare. “Tom Badgerlock. Will you teach me?”
Chade, my old master, had asked me and I’d been able to say no. The Fool, my oldest friend, had asked me to return to Buckkeep, and I’d refused him. If the Queen herself had asked me, I could have said no. The best I could manage with this Farseer heir was, “I don’t know that much to teach. What your father taught me, he taught me in secret, and he seldom had time for lessons.”
He regarded me soberly. “Is there anyone who knows more of the Skill than you do?”
“No, my Prince.” I did not add that I’d killed them all. I could not have said why I suddenly added his title. Only that something in his manner demanded it. “Then you are Skillmaster now. By default.”
“No.” That I could answer, my tongue moving as swiftly as my thoughts. I took a breath. “I’ll teach you,” I said. “But it will be as your father taught me. When I can and what I can. And in secret.”
Without a word, he reached his hand across the table to me, to seal the agreement with a touching of hands. Two things happened as our hands met. “The Wit and the Skill,” he stipulated. As the skin of my palm touched his, the leap of Skill-spark between us sang. Please.
His plea was sloppily done, pushed by the Wit, not the Skill. “We’ll see,” I said aloud. I was already regretting it. “You may change your mind. I’m neither a good teacher, nor a patient one.”
“But you treat me like a man, not the Prince. As if your expectations of a man were higher than those for a prince.”
I didn’t reply. I looked at him, waiting. He spoke hesitantly, as if the answer shamed him. “To my mother, I am a son. But I am also, always, the Prince and Sacrifice for my people. And to all others, always, I am the Prince. Always. I am no one’s brother. I am no man’s son. I am not anyone’s best friend.” He laughed, a small strangled laugh. “People treat me very well as my Prince. But there is always a wall there. No one speaks to me as, well, as me.” He shrugged one shoulder and his mouth twisted to one side wryly. “No one except you has ever told me I was stupid, even when I was most definitely being stupid.”
I understood suddenly why he had so swiftly succumbed to the Piebalds’ plot. To be loved, in a familiar, unfearing way. To be someone’s best friend, even if that someone was only a cat. I could recall a time when I thought Chade was the only one in the world who would give me that. I recalled how terrifying the threat of losing that had been. I knew that any boy, prince or beggar, needed that from a man. But I wasn’t sure I was a wise choice for that. Chade, why couldn’t he have chosen Chade? I was still formulating an answer to that when there was a knock at the door.
I opened it to discover Laurel. Reflexively, I looked past her for Lord Golden. He wasn’t there. She glanced over her own shoulder with a small frown, and then back to my face. “May I come in?” she asked pointedly.
“Of course, my lady. I just thought—”
She entered and I closed the door behind her. She considered Prince Dutiful for a moment, and something almost like relief dawned on her face as she made a courtesy to him. She smiled as she greeted him with, “Good morning, my Prince.”
“Good morning, Huntswoman.” His reply was solemn, but he did reply. I glanced at the boy, and realized what she saw. The Prince had come back to himself. His face was somber, his eyes shadowed, but he was with us. He no longer stared within himself to a distance no one else could see.
“It is good to see you so well recovered, my Prince. I came to inquire as to when you wished to depart for Buckkeep. The sun is climbing and the day looks fair, if cold.”
“I am pleased to leave that decision to Lord Golden.”
“An excellent decision, my Prince.” She glanced about the room and then asked, “Lord Golden is not here?”
“He said he was going out,” I replied. My words startled her. It was almost as if a chair had spoken, and then I realized fully my error. In the presence of the Prince, a mere servant like myself would not presume to speak out. I glanced down at my feet so no one would see the chagrin in my eyes. Yet again, I resolved to focus more closely on the role I must play. Had I forgotten all of Chade’s earlier training?
She glanced at Dutiful, but when he added nothing to my words, she said slowly, “I see.”
“You are, of course, welcome to wait here for his return, Huntswoman.” His words said one thing, his tone another. I had not heard it done so well since Shrewd was King.
“Thank you, my Prince. But if I may, I think I will seek my own room until I am sent for.”
“As you wish, Huntswoman.” He had turned to look out the window.
“Thank you, my Prince.” She dipped a courtesy to his back. Our eyes met for a fleeting moment as she went to the door, but I read nothing there. When the door had closed behind her, the Prince turned back to me.
“There. Do you see what I mean, Tom Badgerlock?”
“She was not unkind to you, my Prince.”
He motioned me to the table. As I took a chair opposite him, he said, “She was not anything to me. She treats me as they all do. ‘As it please you, my Prince’. But in all the Six Duchies, I haven’t a true friend.”
I took a breath, then asked, “What of your companions? Your friends who ride and hunt with you?”
“I have far too many of them. I must call each one a friend, and to none of them may I show favor, lest the father of another one feel slighted. And Eda forbid that I should smile at a young woman. At my slightest attempt to form a friendship, she is whisked away, lest my attention be interpreted as courtship. No. I am alone, Tom Badgerlock. Forever alone.” He sighed heavily and looked down at his hands on the table’s edge. It was a bit too dramatic to befit the young man.
I spoke before I thought. “Oh, poor deprived lad.” He lifted his head and glowered at me. I returned his look levelly. Then a slow smile came to his face. “Spoken like a true friend,” he said.
A moment later Lord Golden came through the door. In a flicker of his long fingers, he showed me a bird’s message-tube. In the next instant, it had vanished up his sleeve. Of course. He’d gone to see Starling, to see if we’d received word back from Buckkeep. And we had. No doubt Chade would have all in readiness for our return. In the next moment, his eyes took in the Prince seated at the other end of the table. If he thought it odd to find the Farseer heir sitting at table with me, watching me mend the sleeve of my shirt, he did not show it.
Not even a flick of his eyes betrayed that he had greeted me first. Instead, all his attention seemed fixed on the Prince as he addressed him. “Good day, my Prince. If it please you, we can ride as soon as we may.”
The Prince drew a long breath. “It would please me, Lord Golden.”
Now Lord Golden turned to me, and gave me a smile such as I had not seen on his face for days. “You have heard our Prince, Tom Badgerlock. Stir yourself to readiness and pack our things. And you can leave off mending that, my good man, at least for now. Never can it be said that I am a niggardly master, even to such a wretched servant as yourself. Put this on, lest you shame us all riding back into Buckkeep.” He tossed me a bundled packet. It proved to be a shirt of homespun, far sturdier than the tattered garment in my hands. So much for a pocket up my sleeve today.