He brought back letters, one for me and one for Nettle, and the news that he’d eaten with the family and spent the night in the stables after a half-dozen games of Stones with Steady each evening. “I spoke you well, when Chivalry asked after you. Said you spent your nights at your scroll work and were fair to turn into a scribe if you didn’t watch yourself. So then Hearth asked, ‘What, is he fat, then?’ for I gather the scribe at their town is quite a portly man. So I said, no, quite the opposite, that I thought you’d lost flesh and grown quieter of late. And that you spent more time alone than was healthy for any man.” I tilted my head at him. “Could you have made me sound any more pathetic?” He mimicked the tip of my head. “Is there any of it not true?” The note was from Chivalry, thanking me for the liniment and recipe.
I don’t know what was in Molly’s note to Nettle. The next morning, she lingered after the Skill-lesson. Dutiful called to ask if she was coming, for he and Elliania and Civil and Sydel intended to go riding, if she’d care to come. She told him to go ahead and she would catch up easily, for it didn’t take her forever to primp her hair before riding out.
She turned back to catch me smiling, and said, “I speak him formal when others are about. It’s only here that I talk to him like that.”
“He likes it. He was elated when he first discovered he had a cousin. He said it was nice to know a girl who spoke her mind to him.”
That stopped her cold, and I regretted the remark, for I thought I had put her off whatever it was she was about to say. But she met my eyes and, lifting her chin, set her fists to her hips. “Oh. And should I speak my mind to you?”
I wasn’t sure. “You could,” I suggested.
“My mother writes that she is well, and that my little brothers quite enjoy Riddle’s visits. She wonders if you are afraid of my brothers, that you don’t come yourself.”
I slouched back in my chair and looked down at the tabletop. “I’m more likely to be afraid of her. Time was, she had quite a temper.” I picked at my thumbnail.
“Time was, I understand you were excellent at provoking it.”
“I suppose that is true. So. Do you think she would welcome a visit from me?”
She stood quite a time, not answering. Then she asked, “And are you afraid of my temper, as well?”
“A bit,” I admitted. “Why do you ask?”
She walked to Verity’s window and stared out over the sea as he used to. In that pose, she looked as much a Farseer as I did. She ran her hands back through her hair distractedly. Truly, she could have given a bit more care to “primping.” Her shortened hair stood up like the hair on an angry cat’s back. “Once, I thought we were going to be friends. Then I discovered that you were my father. From that moment on, you haven’t much tried even to speak to me.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to.”
“Perhaps I wanted to see how hard you’d try.” She turned back to look at me accusingly. “You didn’t try, at all.”
I sat a long time in silence. She turned and started toward the door.
I stood up. “You know, Nettle, I was raised by a man among men. Sometimes, I think that is the greatest disadvantage a man can have when it comes to dealing with women.”
She turned and looked back at me. I spoke from the heart. “I don’t know what to do. I want you to at least know me as a person. Burrich was your father and he did well at it. Perhaps it’s too late for me to have that place in your life. Nor can I find a place in your mother’s life for me. I love her still, just as much as I did when she left me. I thought then that, when all my tasks were done, I would find her and somehow we would be happy together. And here we are, sixteen years later, and I still haven’t managed to find my way back to her.” She stood, her hand on the door, looking uncomfortable. Then she said, “Perhaps you are telling these things to the wrong woman.” And she slipped quietly out of it, letting it close behind her.
A few days later, Riddle found me at the guards’ table eating breakfast. He slid onto the bench opposite me. “Nettle has given me a letter to deliver to her mother and brothers. She said to take it whenever I made my next journey for you.” He reached across the table and took a hunk of bread from my plate. He bit into it and asked with his mouth full, “Will that be soon?” I thought about it. “Tomorrow morning,” I suggested. He nodded. “I thought it might be about then.”
I rode Myblack down to the market in Buckkeep Town, chaffering with her all the way. She had had half a year with a stable boy whose idea of exercising her was to take her out and let her run as much as she wanted and then bring her back. She was willful and rude, tugging at her bit and ignoring the rein. I was ashamed of myself for neglecting her. I visited the winter market and rode home with sugared ginger and two arm lengths of red lace. I put them in a basket with a purloined bottle of dandelion wine. I sat all night with a piece of good paper in front of me and managed to find three sentences. “I remember you in red skirts. You climbed up the beach cliffs in front of me, and I saw your bare, sandy ankles. I thought my heart would leap out of my chest.” I wondered if she would even remember that long-ago picnic when I had not even dared to kiss her. I sealed the note with a blotch of wax. Four times I unsealed it, trying to think of better words. Eventually, I entrusted it to Riddle as it was, and walked about for the next four days wishing I hadn’t.
On the fourth night, I worked the lever that opened the door in Nettle’s bedchamber. I did not go in and summon her, as Chade had me. Instead, I went halfway down those steep steps and left a candle burning there. Then I went back up and waited.
The wait seemed to last forever. I do not know which wakened her at last, the light or the draft, but I finally heard her hesitant tread on the stair. I had built up the fire well in the comfortable end of the room. She peered round the corner of the concealed door, saw me, but still came in cautious as a cat. She walked slowly past the worktable with the stained scrolls stretched out on it, and more slowly past the work hearth with its racks of tongs and measures and stained pans. She came at last to the chairs by the fireside. She had on a nightgown and a woven shawl across her shoulders. She was shivering.
“Sit down,” I invited her, and she did, slowly. “This is where I work,” I told her. The kettle was just on the boil and I asked her, “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“In the middle of the night?”
“I do a lot of my work in the middle of the night.”
“Most people sleep then.”
“I am not like most people.”
“That’s so.” She stood up and studied the items on the mantel above the hearth. There was a carving of the wolf that the Fool had done, and next to it, the memory stone with a similar image turned face out. She touched the handle of the fruit knife embedded there and gave me a puzzled glance. Then she reached up and set her hand to the hilt of Chivalry’s sword.
“You can take it down if you like. It was your grandfather’s. Be careful. It’s heavy.” She took her hand away. “Tell me about him.”
“I can’t.”
“Is it another secret, then?”
“No. I can’t tell you because I never knew him. He gave me to Burrich when I was five or six. I never saw him, that I can recall. I believe he looked in on me with the Skill from time to time, through Verity’s eyes. But I knew nothing of that, then.”
“It sounds like you and me,” she said slowly.
“Yes, it does,” I admitted. “Except that I have a chance to know you now. If we are both bold enough to take it.”