Golden Fool (Tawny Man #2)

As it was, I contented myself with a message, drawn in the dust on the top of a small table beside the chair. “I was here; you were not.” Brief and succinct, a rebuke if he chose to take it that way. And anonymous. It could just as easily have been a sulky page’s note to a tardy chambermaid.

I closed the window shutters and let myself out by the way I had come, through a side panel in the decorative mantel around the hearth. It was a narrow squeeze and it was tricky to properly seal it closed behind me. My candle had gone out. I descended a long and gloomy stair, sparsely lit by tiny chinks in the outer wall that let in thin fingers of light and wind. There was a level section that I negotiated through the pitch-dark; it seemed far longer than I recalled it being, and I was glad when my groping foot found the next stair. I made a wrong turn at the bottom of it. The third time I walked into a faceful of cobwebs, I knew I was lost. I turned around and groped my way back. When, some time later, I emerged into Chade’s chamber from behind the wine rack, I was dusty and irritable and sweaty. I was ill prepared for what met me there.

Chade started up from his seat before the hearth, setting down a teacup as he did so. “There you are, FitzChivalry,” he exclaimed, even as a wave of Skill slammed into me.

Don’t see me, stinkdog man.

I staggered and then caught at the table to remain standing. I ignored Chade, who was scowling at me, to focus on Thick. The idiot serving man, his face smudged with soot, stood by the work hearth. His figure wavered before my eyes and I felt giddy. If I had not reset my walls the night before to guard against Nettle’s Skill tinkering, I think he would have been able to wipe all image of himself from my mind. As it was, I spoke through gritted teeth.

“I do see you. I will always see you. But that does not mean I will hurt you. Unless you try to hurt me. Or unless you are rude to me again.” I was sorely tempted to try the Wit on him, to repel at him with a burst of sheer animal energy, but I did not. I would not use the Skill. I would have had to open my walls to do so, and it would have revealed to him the limits of my strength. I was not yet ready for that. Remain calm, I told myself. You have to master yourself before you can master him.

“No, no, Thick! Stop that. He’s good. He can be here. I say so.”

Chade spoke to him as if he were three years old. And while I recognized that the small eyes in the round face that glowered at me were not the eyes of a man my intellectual equal, I also saw a flash of resentment there at being thus addressed. I seized on it. I kept my gaze on Thick’s face but spoke to Chade.

“You don’t need to talk to him like that. He isn’t stupid. He’s . . .” I groped for a word to express what I suddenly was certain of. Thick’s intelligence might be limited in some ways, but it was there. “Different,” I ended lamely. Different, I reflected, as a horse was different from a cat and they both were different from a man. But not lesser. Almost I could sense how his mind reached in another direction from mine, attaching significance to items I dismissed even as he dismissed whole areas that anchored my reality.

Thick scowled from me to Chade and back again. Then he took up his broom and a bucket of ash and cinders from the fireplace and scuttled from the room. After the scroll rack had swung back into place behind him, I caught the flung thought fragment. Dogstinker.

“He doesn’t like me. He knows I’m Witted, too,” I complained to Chade as I dropped into the other chair. Almost sulkily, I added, “Prince Dutiful didn’t meet me in Verity’s tower this morning. He had said he would.”

My remarks seemed to go past the old man. “The Queen wants to see you. Right away.” He was neatly if not elegantly attired in a simple robe of blue this morning with soft fur slippers on his feet. Did they ache from dancing?

“What about?” I asked as I rose and followed him. We went back to the wine rack, and as we triggered the concealed door, I remarked, “Thick didn’t seem surprised to see me enter from here.”

Chade shrugged one shoulder. “I do not think he is bright enough to be surprised by something like that. I doubt that he even noticed it.”

I considered and decided that it might be true. To him, it might have no significance. “And the Queen wanted to see me because?”

“Because she told me so,” he replied a bit testily. After that I kept silent and followed him. I suspected his head throbbed, as mine did. I knew he had an antidote to a night’s hard drinking, and knew also how difficult it was to compound. Sometimes it was easier to put up with the throbbing headache than to grind one’s way through creating a cure.