Golden Fool (Tawny Man #2)

It seemed a good suggestion and bought me time to think without having to speak. Yet he sat watching me so intently that I felt like a mouse under a cat’s eye. When I scowled at him, he laughed aloud and shook his head. “You cannot imagine how it feels. I look at you, and wonder, will I be that tall when I am grown? Did my father scowl like that? I wish you had not put the scars back. It makes it harder for me to see myself in your face. You sitting there and me knowing who and what you are . . . it is as if my father has walked into my life for the first time.” The lad bounced and wiggled in his chair as he spoke, as if he were a puppy that longed to jump up on me. It was hard to meet his eyes. Something burned there that I was not prepared for. I did not deserve the Prince’s adulation.

“Your father was a far better man than I am,” I told him.

He took a deep breath. “Tell me something about him,” he begged. “Something that only you and he would know.”

I sensed the importance to him and could not refuse him. I cast about in my mind. Should I tell him that Verity had not loved Kettricken at first sight, but rather had grown to love her? It sounded too much like a comparison to his lack of feelings for Elliania. Verity had not been a man for secrets, but I didn’t think Dutiful was asking for a secret. “He loved good ink and paper,” I told him. “And cutting his pens himself. He was very particular about his pens. And . . . he was kind to me when I was small. For no reason at all. He gave me toys. A little wooden cart, and some carved soldiers and horses.”

“He did? That surprises me. I thought that he had to keep his distance from you. I knew he watched over you, but in his letters to your father, he complains that he scarce sees the little Tom-cat save when he is trotting at Burrich’s heels.”

I sat very still. It took a moment for me to recall how to breathe and then I asked, “Verity wrote about me? In letters to Chivalry?”

“Not directly, of course. Patience had to explain to me what it meant. She showed the letters to me, when I complained that I knew little of my father. They were very disappointing. Only four of them, and they were short and boring for the most part. He is fine; he hopes Chivalry and Lady Patience are well. Usually he is asking his brother to have a word with one duke or another, to smooth over some political difference. Once he asks him to send him an accounting of how the taxes were apportioned in a previous year. Then there would be a few lines about the harvest or how the hunting has been. But there was always a word or two about you at the end. ‘The Tom-cat that Burrich adopted seems to be making himself at home.’ ‘Near stepped on Burrich’s Tom-cat as he ran through the courtyard yesterday. He seems to get bigger every day.’ That’s how they named you in the letters, against spies and even, at first, against Patience reading them. In the last one, you are just ‘Tom.’ ‘Tom had crossed Burrich and been walloped for it. He seemed remarkably unrepentant. In truth, Burrich is the one I pitied.’ And at the end of each letter, a few lines about looking forward to the new moon or hoping that the full-moon tides will be good for clamming. Patience explained that was how they set up a time to Skill to one another, when they could go apart from other people and be undisturbed. Our fathers were very close, you know. It was very difficult for them to be separated when Chivalry moved to Withywoods. They missed one another deeply.”

Tom. And Patience had, I thought, so carelessly hung that name on me. And I had kept it and little known its history. The Prince was right. Buckkeep Castle was stuffed full of secrets, and half of them were not secrets at all. They were only the things we dared not ask one another for fear the answers would be unbearably painful. I had never asked Patience to tell me about my father; never asked her or Verity what Chivalry had thought of me. Reluctance to ask metamorphosed into secrets. Silence had let me assume the worst of my father. He had never come to see me. Had he watched me through his brother’s eyes? Should I blame them for not telling me what they, perhaps, had assumed I knew? Or should I blame myself for never demanding to know?

“The tea is brewed,” Dutiful announced, and lifted the teapot. For the first time, I became aware that the boy was serving me, much as I would have served Chade or Shrewd at his age. With respect and deference. “Stop,” I said, and put out a hand to cover his. I forced the teapot back to the table. As I picked it up and poured my own tea, I warned him, “Dutiful, my prince. Listen to me. I must be Tom Badgerlock to you, in every way. Today, for now, we will speak of this. But after this, I must revert to my role as Tom Badgerlock. You must see me as him, and you must see Lord Golden only as Lord Golden. You have been handed a blade with no handle. There is no safe way to grip or wield this secret that you know now. You rejoice in knowing who I am, and in seeing me as a link to your father. I wish, with all my heart, that it were as simple and good as that. But this secret, breathed in the wrong company, brings us all down. We know that our queen would try to protect me. Think what it would do. I am not only a known user of the Wit, but also the supposed murderer of King Shrewd. Not to mention that I killed several of Galen’s Coterie, before a room full of witnesses. Nor am I as dead as many think I should be. For me to be revealed as living would stir the hatred and fear of the Witted to new heights just as our queen is trying to put an end to their persecution.”