Fool’s Quest

She looked at me as she spoke, rubbing her arm. Her cheeks were very pink and now that the Fool had announced her as a girl, I wondered how I could have seen her as anything else, even in her lad’s guise. When she spoke, her voice was a notch higher. “Sirs, I beg you. There was no wish to deceive you, but only to remain as you had first seen me. As the boy, Ash. So I was when Lord Chade first met me, though he saw through my guise in less than an evening. He said it was in my throat and in the fineness of my hands. He has given me much scrubbing of floors to roughen them, which helps, but he says the bones give me away. Is that how you knew, Lord Golden? By the bones of my hands?”

“Don’t call me by that name. Don’t speak to me at all!” the Fool declared childishly. I wondered if he would have regretted his words if he had seen how they devastated her. I cleared my throat, and she turned her stricken gaze to me.

“Do speak to me, and give me the tale from the beginning. From the time you first met Lord Chade.”

She composed herself, folding her betraying hands on the table before her. I had forgotten the crow, and when Motley hopped closer, I startled. The crow bobbed and touched his beak to her hand, as if to reassure her. Ash-girl almost smiled. But when she spoke, I could hear how rattled she still was. “My tale goes back quite a bit before I met Lord Chade, sir. You know that my mother was prostituted. That is where my tale of deception begins. I was born a girl, but my mother made me a boy within minutes of my birth. She birthed me alone, biting a folded handkerchief to keep her cries from betraying her. When I was discovered, I was already swaddled, and she declared to the mistress of the establishment that she had borne a son. So I grew up in that house of women, believing myself a boy. My mother was fastidious in her insistence that only she might care for me, and enforcing on me privacy for any moment when my body might be bared. I had no playmates, left the house only in my mother’s company, and was severely schooled that when I was not with my mother, I must remain in her small and private dressing chamber and keep myself quiet. This I learned so long ago that I do not even remember how it was taught to me.

“I was nearly seven when she revealed the truth to me. Having never seen anyone naked but a woman, I knew nothing of how a man’s parts differed. I had believed myself a boy, all that time. I was shocked and distressed. And afraid. For in our house, there were girls not much older than me who toiled at my mother’s trade sadly, though they must always pretend to be merry and giddy. That, my mother told me, was why she had made me a boy and why I must remain a boy. My true name, she told me, is Spark. Ash is what covers a coal and hides its light, and so she made my names.”

Despite himself, the Fool was rapt in her tale, his mouth slightly ajar in either wonder or horror. I felt a deep sadness for her.

“How is it that women work that trade as if they were slaves? Slavery is not permitted in the Six Duchies.”

She shook her head at my ignorance. “No. But when you incur a debt you cannot pay, often the judgment is that you must labor to pay it off. When my mother was young and new to Buckkeep Town, she learned to love the gaming tables. She was pretty and clever, but not clever enough to see that the owner of the gaming establishment gave her credits too easily. And when she was deeply enmeshed, he closed his trap.” She cocked her head at me. “She is not, by far, the first woman or man to be so coerced. It is well known that there is a judge, Lord Sensible, who presides over many debtors’ judgments, and often sends comely men and women into the flesh trade. Discreet houses, such as the one where my mother worked, pay off the gambling debts and claim the new debt. If anyone complains, the owners threaten to sell the debt to the ones who put debtors on the docks and streets, to service their trade in the alleys. But once my mother was in the house, she was charged for the food she ate and her clothing and her bed and clean bedding. The whores can never emerge from their debts. When I was born and my mother kept me, I became an additional expense for her.”

“Lord Sensible.” I committed the name to my memory and vowed coldly that Dutiful would hear it from my lips. How had I lived so long in Buck and never known of such a thing?