“He has become his father’s favorite,” Chade growled. “Shrewd has done nothing but spoil him since the Queen died. He tries to buy the boy’s heart with gifts, now that his mother is no longer around to claim his allegiance. And Regal takes full advantage. He speaks only what the old man loves to hear. And Shrewd gives him too much rein. He lets him wander about, squandering coin on useless visits to Farrow and Tilth, where his mother’s people fill Regal full of ideas of his self-importance. The boy should be kept at home and made to give some account for how he spends his time. And the King’s money. What he spends gallivanting about would have outfitted a warship.” And then, suddenly annoyed: “That’s too hot! You’ll lose it, fish it out quickly.”
But his words came too late, for the crucible cracked with a noise like breaking ice and its contents filled Chade’s tower room with an acrid smoke that brought all lessons and talk to an end for that night.
I was not soon summoned again. My other lessons went on, but I missed Chade as the weeks passed and he did not call for me. I knew he was not displeased with me, but only preoccupied. When, idle one day, I pushed my awareness toward him, I felt only secrecy and discordance. And a wallop to the back of my head when Burrich caught me at it.
“Stop it,” he hissed, and ignored my studied look of shocked innocence. He glanced about the stall I was mucking out as if he expected to find a dog or cat lurking.
“There’s nothing here!” he exclaimed.
“Just manure and straw,” I agreed, rubbing the back of my head.
“Then what were you doing?”
“Daydreaming,” I muttered. “That was all.”
“You can’t fool me, Fitz,” he growled. “And I won’t have it. Not in my stables. You won’t pervert my beasts that way. Or degrade Chivalry’s blood. Mind what I’ve told you.”
I clenched my jaws and lowered my eyes and kept on working. After a time I heard him sigh and move away. I went on raking, inwardly seething and resolving never to let Burrich come up on me unawares again.
The rest of that summer was such a whirlpool of events that I find it hard to recall their progression. Overnight, the very feeling of the air seemed to change. When I went into town, all of the talk was of fortifications and readiness. Only two more towns were Forged that summer, but it seemed a hundred, for the stories of it were repeated and enlarged from lip to lip.
“Until it seems as if that is all folk talk about anymore,” Molly complained to me.
We were walking on Long Beach, in the light of the summer evening sun. The wind off the water was a welcome bit of cool after a muggy day. Burrich had been called away to Springmouth to see if he could figure out why all the cattle there were developing huge hide sores. It meant no morning lessons for me, but many, many more chores with the horses and hounds in his absence, especially as Cob had gone to Turlake with Regal, to manage his horses and hounds for a summer hunt.
But the opposite weight of the balance was that my evenings were less supervised, and I had more time to visit town.
My evening walks with Molly were almost a routine now. Her father’s health was failing and he scarcely needed to drink to fall into an early and deep sleep each night. Molly would pack a bit of cheese and sausage for us, or a small loaf and some smoked fish, and we would take a basket and a bottle of cheap wine and walk out down the beach to the breakwater rocks. There we would sit on the rocks as they gave up the last heat of the day, and Molly would tell me about her day’s work and the day’s gossip and I would listen. Sometimes our elbows bumped as we walked.
“Sara, the butcher’s daughter, told me that she positively yearns for winter to come. The winds and ice will beat the Red-Ships back to their own shores for a bit, and give us a rest from fear, she says. But then Kelty up and says that maybe we’ll be able to stop fearing more Forging, but that we’ll still have to fear the Forged folk that are loose in our land. Rumor says that some from Forge have left there, now that there’s nothing left for them to steal, and that they travel about as bandits, robbing travelers.”
“I doubt it. More than likely it’s other folk doing the robbing, but trying to pass themselves off as Forged folk to send revenge looking elsewhere. Forged folk don’t have enough kinship left in them to be a band of anything,” I contradicted her lazily. I was looking out across the bay, my eyes almost closed against the glare of the sun on the water. I didn’t have to look at Molly to feel her there beside me. It was an interesting tension, one I didn’t fully understand. She was sixteen, and I about fourteen, and those two years loomed between us like an insurmountable wall. Yet she always made time for me and seemed to enjoy my company. She seemed as aware of me as I was of her. But if I quested toward her at all, she would draw back, halting to shake a pebble from her shoe or suddenly speaking of her father’s illness and how much he needed her. Yet if I drew my sensings back from that tension, she became uncertain and shyer of speech, and would try to look at my face and the set of my mouth and eyes. I didn’t understand it, but it was as if we held a string taut between us. But now I heard an edge of annoyance in her speech.