Fool’s Assassin

None except the memories of how the children of the keep had spoken of King Shrewd’s pale jester. The Fool was there, in my childhood memories, as far back as the day I had arrived at Buckkeep. He had been there before I was, and if he was to be believed he had been waiting for me all that time. Yet it had been years before our encounters in Buckkeep Castle had progressed beyond a rude gesture from him in the hallway or unflattering imitations of me as he followed me down a corridor. I had avoided him as assiduously as the other children had. I had not, I thought as I granted myself an exemption from guilt, treated him with cruelty. I had never mocked him or even expressed abhorrence of him in any way. No. I had merely avoided him. I had believed him a nimble and silly fellow, a tumbler who delighted the King with his antics but was, for all that, rather simple-minded. If anything, I had pitied him, I told myself. Because he was so different.

Just as my daughter would be so different from all her playmates.

Not all children in Buck were dark-eyed and dark-haired and warm-skinned, but the preponderance of playmates she would find would be so. And if she did not grow quickly to match them in size, if she remained tiny and pale, what then? What sort of a childhood would she have?

Cold began in my belly and radiated up to my heart. I moved even closer to Molly and my child. They both slept now, but I did not. Vigilant as a watching wolf, I put my arm lightly across both of them. I would protect her, I promised myself and Molly. No one would mock her or torment her in any way. Even if I had to keep her secret from the entire outside world, I would keep her safe.

Chapter Seven The Presentation

Once upon a time there was a good man and his wife. They had both worked hard all their lives, and slowly fortune had favored them with everything that they could desire save one. They had no child.

One day as the wife was walking in her garden and weeping that she had no child, a pecksie came out of the lavender bush and said to her, “Woman, why do you weep?”

“I weep that I have no babe of my own,” the woman said.

“Oh, as to that, how foolish you are,” said the pecksie. “If you but say the word, I can tell you how a babe can be in your arms before the year is out.”

“Tell me, then!” the woman implored.

The pecksie smiled. “As to that, it is easily done. Tonight, just as the sun kisses the horizon, set out on the ground a square of silk, taking care that it rests flat on the ground with never a wrinkle in it. And tomorrow, whatever is under the silk is yours.”

The woman hastened to do as she was bid. As the sun touched the horizon, she set the silk flat to the ground, with never a wrinkle. But as the garden darkened and she hurried back to her house, a curious mouse came to the silk, sniffed it, and scampered across it, leaving a tiny wrinkle at the edge.

In the earliest light of dawn, the woman hastened to the garden. She heard small sounds and saw the silk moving. And when she lifted the square of silk, she found a perfect child with bright black eyes. But the babe was no bigger than the palm of her hand …

Old Buckkeep tale

Ten days after our baby’s birth I finally resolved that I must make confession to Molly. I dreaded it, but there was no avoiding it, and delaying it any longer was not going to make it easier.