Assassin's Apprentice

And I left, as the others had, but regretfully. Privately I wondered if he had made a real attempt to use the Skill on me. I had felt no brush of it. I descended the stairs, aching and bitter, wondering why I was trying.

I went to my room, and then to the stables. I gave Sooty a cursory brushing while Smithy watched. Still I felt restless and dissatisfied. I knew I should rest, that I would regret it if I did not. Stone walk? Smithy suggested, and I agreed to take him into town. He galloped and snuffled circles around me as I made my way down from the keep. It was a blustery afternoon after a calm morning; a storm was building offshore. But the wind was unseasonably warm, and I felt the fresh air clearing my head, and the steady rhythm of walking soothed and stretched the muscles that Galen’s exercises had left bunched and aching. Smithy’s sensory prattle grounded me firmly in the immediate world, so that I could not dwell on my frustrations.

I told myself it was Smithy who led us so directly to Molly’s shop. Puppylike, he had returned to where he had been welcomed before. Molly’s father had kept his bed that day, and the shop was fairly quiet. A single customer lingered, talking to Molly. Molly introduced him to me as Jade. He was a mate off some Sealbay trading vessel, not quite twenty, and he spoke to me as if I were ten, smiling past me at Molly all the while. He was full of tales of Red-Ships and sea storms. He had a red stone earring in one ear, and a new beard curled along his jaw. He took far too long to select candles and a new brass lamp, but he finally left.

“Close the store for a bit,” I urged Molly. “Let’s go down to the beach. The wind is lovely today.”

She shook her head regretfully. “I’m behind in my work. I should dip tapers all this afternoon if I have no customers. And if I do have customers, I should be here.”

I felt unreasonably disappointed. I quested toward her and discovered how much she actually wished to go. “There’s not that much daylight left,” I said persuasively. “You can always dip tapers this evening. And your customers will come back tomorrow if they find you closed today.”

She cocked her head, looked thoughtful, and abruptly set aside the wicking she held. “You’re right, you know. The fresh air will do me good.” And she took up her cloak with an alacrity that delighted Smithy and surprised me. We closed up the shop and left.

Molly set her usual brisk pace. Smithy frolicked about her, delighted. We talked, in a cursory way. The wind put roses in her cheeks, and her eyes seemed brighter in the cold. And I thought she looked at me more often, and more pensively than she usually did.

The town was quiet, and the market all but deserted. We went to the beach and walked sedately where we had raced and shrieked but a few years before. She asked me if I had learned to light a lantern before going down steps at night, and that mystified me, until I remembered that I had explained my injuries as a fall down a dark staircase. She asked me if the schoolteacher and the horsemaster were still at odds, and by this I discerned that Burrich and Galen’s challenge at the Witness Stones had become something of a local legend already. I assured her that peace had been restored. We spent some little time gathering a certain kind of seaweed that she wanted to flavor her chowder that evening. Then, for I was winded, we sat in the lee of some rocks and watched Smithy make numerous attempts to clear the beach of all gulls.

“So. I hear Prince Verity is to wed,” she began conversationally.

“What?” I asked, amazed.

She laughed heartily. “Newboy, I have never met anyone as immune to gossip as you seem to be. How can you live right up there in the keep and know nothing of that which is the common talk of the town? Verity has agreed to take a bride, to assure the succession. But the story in town is that he is too busy to do his courting himself, so Regal will find him a lady.”

“Oh, no.” My dismay was honest. I was picturing big bluff Verity paired with one of Regal’s sugar-crystal women. Whenever there was a festival of any kind in the keep, Spring’s Edge or Winterheart or Harvestday, here they came, from Chalced and Farrow and Bearns, in carriages or on richly caparisoned palfreys or riding in litters. They wore gowns like butterflies’ wings, and ate as daintily as sparrows, and seemed to flutter about and perch always in Regal’s vicinity. And he would sit in their midst, in his own silk-and-velvet hues, and preen while their musical voices tinkled around him and their fans and fancywork trembled in their fingers. “Prince catchers,” I’d heard them called, noblewomen who displayed themselves like goods in a store window in the hopes of wedding one of the royals. Their behavior was not improper, not quite. But to me it seemed desperate, and Regal cruel as he smiled first on this one and then danced all evening with that one, only to rise to a late breakfast and walk yet another through the gardens. They were Regal’s worshipers. I tried to picture one on Verity’s arm as he stood watching the dancers at a ball, or quietly weaving in his study while Verity pondered and sketched at the maps he so loved. No garden strolls; Verity took his walks along the docks and through the crops, stopping often to talk to the seafolk and farmers behind their plows. Dainty slippers and embroidered skirts would surely not follow him there.