‘I see. And how is he?’
‘Losing strength. I feel an ebbing in his vitality even in the short time I’ve been here.’
She flinched at my words but I knew she prized honesty. She opened her hands and gestured to all of us. ‘What can we do?’
King Dutiful spoke. ‘Little to nothing. We can call the healers back, but they only seem to squabble with one another. One says to cool him with wet cloths, another to light the hearth and cover him with blankets. One wanted to bleed him. I do not think any of them truly have a remedy for this type of injury. If we do nothing, I suspect he will die before two more nights go by.’ He lifted off his crown, ran his hands through his hair, and set it back on his head slightly ajar. ‘Oh, Chade,’ he said, a combination of rebuke and plea in his voice. He turned to me. ‘Fitz. Are you sure you’ve had no message from him, either on paper or by the Skill, that would hint to what key will open him to us?’
‘Nothing. Not for months.’
Kettricken looked around the room. ‘One of us knows.’ She spoke slowly and precisely. She considered each of us with another slow sweeping gaze, and then said, ‘I think it is most likely you, Fitz.’
She was probably right. I looked at Steady. ‘How does one use this key word, if one knows it?’
The young man looked uncertain. ‘He didn’t instruct me in that, but I suspect it is something you Skill to him, and it is what permits you in.’
My heart sank. Had Burrich had a key word, something that would have allowed me to reach him? A key that Chivalry had taken to his grave after his riding ‘accident’? I suddenly felt ill to know that I might have saved Burrich from death if I’d known his key. Well, it wasn’t going to happen again. Kettricken was correct. Chade was far too clever a man to have closed a lock without entrusting one of us with a key.
I took Chade’s hand in both of mine. I looked at his sunken face, at his lips puffing slightly with every expelled breath. I focused on him and reached again with the Skill. My mental grip on him slid and slipped, as if I tried to grasp a glass orb with soapy hands. I set my teeth and did a thing he had always decried. I found him with my Wit, focused on the animal life that I felt ebbing through his body, and then I needled my Skilled at him. I began with a list of names. Chivalry. Verity. Shrewd. Fallstar. Farseer. Burrich. Kettricken. I went through everyone dear to us, hoping for a twitch of response. There was nothing. I finished with Lady Thyme. Lord Golden. Slink.
I gave up on that list and opened my eyes. The room was quiet around me. King Dutiful still sat on the other side of the bed. In the window behind him, the sun was foundering on the horizon. ‘I sent the others away,’ he said quietly.
‘I had no luck.’
‘I know. I was listening.’
I studied my king in that unguarded moment. He and Nettle were nearly of an age and resembled one another in small ways, if one knew to look for them. They had the dark curly hair typical of the Farseer line. She had a straight nose and a determined mouth, as did he. But Dutiful had grown taller than I had while Nettle was not much taller than her mother. Dutiful sat now, his hands steepled with the fingertips touching his mouth and his eyes grave. My king. The third Farseer king I had served.
Dutiful rose, groaning as he stretched his back. His hound imitated him, rising and then bowing low to the floor. He walked to the door, opened it and said, ‘Food, please. And a dish of water for Courser. And some of the good brandy. Two cups. Let my lady mother know that as of yet we’ve had no success.’ He shut the door and turned back to me. ‘What? Why are you smiling?’
‘Such a king as you became, Dutiful! Verity would be proud of you. He was the same way, able to say “please” to the lowliest servant with no trace of irony. So. We have not spoken in months. How sits the crown?’
In response, he took it off and gave his head a shake. He set it on Chade’s bedside table and said, ‘Heavy, sometimes. Even this one, and the formal one I must wear when I sit in judgment is worse. But it has to be borne.’
I knew he was not speaking of the actual weight of it. ‘And your queen, and the princes?’
‘They are well.’ He sighed. ‘She misses her home, and the freedom of being the Narcheska rather than the Queen of the Six Duchies. She has taken the boys to visit her mothershouse yet again. I know it is the way of her folk, that the maternal lineage is the one that counts. But both my mother and Chade believe I am foolish to risk both sons on the sea so often.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Yet it is still hard for me to deny her anything she wants. And, as she points out, they are as much her sons as mine. After Prosper took a bad fall in a hunt last winter, she compared me doing that with them to her taking them across the water. And she frets that as yet she has not borne a daughter for her mothershouse. While for me, it has almost been a relief that we have only sons. If I never have to confront the issue of where my daughter would be raised, I would count it a blessing. But she frets that she has gone four years now with no pregnancy. Well.’ He sighed.
‘She’s young yet,’ I said boldly. ‘You are what, barely thirty? And she is younger still. You have time.’
‘But there have been two miscarriages …’ His words trickled away and he stared at a shadow in the corner. The dog at his feet whined and looked at me accusingly. Dutiful stooped to set a hand to him. For a moment, we all were quiet. Then, plainly changing the direction of our conversation, he tipped his head toward Chade. ‘He’s sinking, Fitz. What do we do now?’
A knock at the door interrupted us. This time I rose and went to open it. A page came in bearing a tray with food. Three others followed, one with a carafe of warmed water, a basin and cloths, and the other with the brandy and cups. The girl came in last, carrying a small table and puffing a bit with the effort. Dutiful and I were silent as our repast and washwater was set out for us. The pages lined up, bowed in unison, and waited to receive Dutiful’s thanks before retiring. When the door was shut, I gestured at the table. Courser was already at his bowl of water, lapping noisily.
‘We eat. We drink. And we try again,’ I told him.
And we did.
In the deeps of night, by candlelight, I damped a cloth and moistened Chade’s lips. I felt I was keeping a death watch now. I had given up on specific words long ago, and simply begun a long conversation with him about all the things I recalled doing with him during my apprenticeship to be an assassin. I had wandered from a time of him teaching me the mixing of poisons to our wild ride to Forge. I had recited a number of learning poems about the healing properties of herbs. I had recalled our quarrels as well as the moments when we had been closest, all in the hopes that a random word might be the key. Nothing had worked. Dutiful had kept the vigil with me. The others had come and gone during the night, entering and leaving the room like shadows moving with the sun’s passage. Thick had sat with us for a time, unhelpfully offering words that we’d already tried. Nettle had visited Chade’s old study and rummaged through the scrolls and other items left on his table. She had brought them down to us to inspect. None of them had given us a clue. Hope had been peeled away from us like a sodden bandage covering a festering wound. I had moved from feeble optimism to wishing it were all over.
‘Did we try names of herbs?’
‘Yes. Remember?’
‘No.’ Dutiful admitted. ‘I’m too tired. I can’t think of what we have tried and what we haven’t tried.’
I set Chade’s hand down on his slowly rising and falling chest and moved to the table that now held the litter of items from his workbench. The half-spent candles showed me the Skill-scroll about imbuing stone with a message, a scroll about cheese making, and an old vellum about scrying the future in a bowl of water. In addition to these, there was a block of memory stone with nothing stored in it, a broken knife-blade, and a wine glass with some withered flowers in it. Dutiful drifted over to join me. ‘The broken blade?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Not significant. He was always getting in a hurry and trying to pry things open with a knife blade.’ I nudged the block of memory stone. ‘Where did this come from? Aslevjal?’
Dutiful nodded. ‘He has made a few trips there over the last five years. He was intensely curious about all you had told him about Kebal Rawbread’s stronghold, and the Elderlings who created it and occupied it ages ago. None of us approved of his adventuring, but you know Chade. He needs no one’s approval except his own. Then, abruptly, he stopped going. I suspect something happened to frighten him into having good sense, but he’s never spoken about it. Too proud, I suspect, and he didn’t want any of us to have the satisfaction of saying, “we warned you”. On one journey to the island he found a room with scattered blocks of memory stone and he brought back a small bag of cubes of the stuff. Some held memories, mostly poetry and songs. Others were empty.’
‘And he put something on one of them, and sent it to you recently.’
‘Yes.’
I stared at Dutiful. He straightened slowly, dismay vying with relief.
‘Oh. It’s the key, isn’t it?’
‘Do you remember what it said?’
‘Absolutely.’ He walked to Chade’s side, sat down and took his hand to make the Skill-contact easier. He spoke aloud. ‘Where violets bloom in a lady’s lap, the wise old spider spun his trap.’
We were both smiling. But as the smile faded from Dutiful’s face, I asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘No response. He’s as invisible to my Skill as he has been all day.’
I crossed the room quickly, sat, and took Chade’s hand. I focused myself at him, and used both voice and Skill. ‘Where violets bloom in a lady’s lap, the wise old spider spun his trap.’
There was nothing. Only Chade’s hand lax in mine.
‘Maybe he’s too weak to respond,’ Dutiful suggested.
‘Hush.’ I leaned back, not speaking. Violets in a lady’s lap. Violets in a lady’s lap. There was something, something from long ago. Then I had it. A statue in the Women’s Garden. It was in the back corner of the garden, overhung by a plum thicket. There, where the shadows were deep and cool even in the height of summer, was a statue of Eda. She was seated with her hands loose in her lap. She had been there a long time. I recalled tiny ferns growing in the mossy folds of her gown. And yes, violets in her lap.
‘I need a torch. I know where he hid the key. I have to go to the Women’s Garden and the statue of Eda.’
Chade took a sudden gasp of air. For an instant, I feared it was his final breath. Then Dutiful said fiercely, ‘That was the key. The old spider is Chade. Eda, in the Women’s Garden.’
As he said the goddess’s name, it was as if heavy draperies were parted and Chade opened to the Skill. Dutiful sent out a Skill-summoning for Nettle, Thick and Steady, but he did not wait for the rest of the king’s coterie to arrive.
‘Does he have the strength for this?’ I demanded, knowing well that a forced healing burns the reserves of a man’s body without mercy. The magic itself does not heal; it but forces the body to speed the process.
‘We can let what remains of his strength be slowly consumed by his dying, or we can burn it up trying to heal him. If you were Chade, which would you prefer?’
I set my teeth against my reply. I did not know. I did know that Chade and Dutiful had once made that decision for me and that I still lived with the consequences; a body that aggressively repaired every ill done to it, whether I would or no. But surely I could keep that fate from befalling Chade: I would know when to stop the healing. I made that resolution and refused to wonder if that was the choice Chade would have made for himself.
I secured my Skill-link with Dutiful and together we sank into Chade. Dimly I was aware of Nettle coming to join us, and then Thick, bewildered with sleepiness but obedient to the call, and finally Steady surging in to add his strength to our melded effort.