Royal Assassin

(My heart stood still, my breath was ice in my lungs.)

“— then let him use. Because that is what we are about now. Survival. Because—”

“They are my people.” I did not realize I had spoken until they both swung to stare at me. Sudden silence in the room. I took a breath. “A long time ago an old man told me that I would someday understand something. He said that the Six Duchies people were my people, that it was in my blood to care about them, to feel their hurts as my own.” I blinked my eyes, to clear Chade and that day at Forge from my vision. “He was right,” I managed to say after a moment. “They killed my child today, Burrich. And my smith, and two other men. Not the Forged ones. The Red-Ship Raiders. And I must have their blood in return, I must drive them from my coast. It is as simple now as eating or breathing. It is a thing I must do.”

Their eyes met over my head. “Blood will tell,” Verity observed quietly. But there was a fierceness in his voice, and a pride that stilled the daylong trembling of my body. A deep calm rose in me. I had done the right thing today. I suddenly knew it as a physical fact. Ugly, demeaning work, but it was mine, and I had done it well. For my people. I turned to Burrich, and he was looking at me with that considering gaze usually reserved for when the runt of a litter showed unusual promise.

“I’ll teach him,” he promised Verity. “What few tricks I know with an ax. And a few other things. Shall we begin tomorrow, before first light?”

“Fine,” Verity agreed before I could object. “Now let us eat.”

I was suddenly famished. I rose to go to the table, but Burrich was suddenly beside me. “Wash your face and hands, Fitz,” he reminded me gently.

The scented water in Verity’s basin was dark with the smith’s blood when I was through.

14 Winterfest

WINTERFEST IS AS much a celebration of the darkest part of the year as a festival of the returning light. For the first three days of Winterfest, we pay homage to the darkness. The tales told and puppet shows presented are those that tell of resting times and happy endings. The foods are salt fish and smoked flesh, harvested roots and fruit from last summer. Then, on the midday of the festival, there is a hunt. New blood is shed to celebrate the breaking point of the year, and new meat is brought fresh to the table, to be eaten with grain harvested from the year before. The next three days are days that look toward the coming summer. The looms are threaded with gayer thread, and the weavers take over an end of the Great Hall to vie among themselves for the brightest patterns and lightest weave. The tales told are ones that tell of beginnings of things, and of how things came to be.

*

I tried to see the King that afternoon. Despite all that had transpired, I had not forgotten my promise to myself. Wallace turned me away, saying that King Shrewd felt poorly and was seeing no one. I longed to hammer on the door and shout for the Fool to make Wallace admit me. But I did not. I was not so sure of the Fool’s friendship as I had once been. We’d had no contact since that last mocking song of his. Thinking of him put me in mind of his words, and when I went back to my room, I once more rooted through Verity’s manuscripts.