“Civil.”
“What?” The lad’s mind hopped like a flea. He’d have to learn to focus.
“Civil has been well instructed in the Wit, since he was a small child. Perhaps he would be willing to teach me. As he already knows I am Witted, it is not spreading my secret about. And . . .”
I think the look on my face made him falter into silence. I waited until I trusted myself to speak. Then, I pretended to be a wiser man than I was. I tried to listen before I spoke to him. “Tell me about Civil,” I suggested. Then, because I could not quite control my tongue, I added, “Tell me why you think it is safe to trust him.”
I liked that he did not answer immediately. His brow furrowed, and then he spoke as if he were recounting events from a lifetime ago. “I first met Civil when he presented me with my cat. As you know, she was a gift from the Bresingas. I think Lady Bresinga had come to Buckkeep Castle before, but I don’t recall ever seeing Civil. There was something about the way he gave me the cat . . . I think it was that he obviously cared for her welfare; he did not present her to me as if she were a thing, but as if she were a friend. Perhaps that is because he is Witted, also. He told me that he would teach me how to hunt with her, and the very next morning, we went out together. We went alone, Tom, so there would be no distractions for her. And he truly taught me how to hunt with her, paying more attention to that than to the fact that he had time alone with Prince Dutiful.” Dutiful halted and a slight flush rose on his face.
“That may sound conceited to you, but it is a thing I must always deal with. I accept an invitation to something that sounds interesting, only to find that the person who invited me is more fixed on gaining my attention than on sharing something with me. Lady Wess invited me to a puppet show performed by masters of the art from Tilth. Then she sat beside me and chattered at me about a land dispute with her neighbor all the way through the play.
“Civil was not like that. He taught me how to hunt with a cat. Don’t you think that if he had intended ill to me, he could have done it then? Hunting accidents are not that rare. He could have arranged a tumble down a cliff. But we hunted, not just that morning, but every dawn for the week he was in Buckkeep, and each day it was the same. Only better, as I became more skilled at it. And it became best of all when he brought his own cat along with us. I really thought I had finally discovered a true friend.”
Chade’s old trick served me well. Silence asks the questions that are too awkward to phrase. It even asks the questions one does not know to ask.