“I think a healer should look at you. Poisons I know, and the sort of medicines that have kept me alive when no one else was near to help me. But I am no healer.”
I saw him almost give way. Then he bartered, “Bring me something for the pain. Then we will try to reach Shine. And after that, you may summon a healer.”
“Agreed!” I said, and hastened out the door before he could tie any strings to our bargain.
Back to my room I went, locking the door behind me and opening the secret stair. A tap, tap, tap startled me. I pushed back the curtain to find the crow clinging to the stone sill of my window. The moment I opened it, she was in. She hopped to the floor of my room, looked around, then spread her wings and flew up the stairs. Up I went, two steps at a time.
There a curious sight met my eyes. The Fool was at table with a young girl of about fourteen. Her hair was gathered back and pinned neatly under a ruffled cap. Humble as it was, it still boasted three buttons. Her neat servant’s tunic of Buckkeep blue covered her modest bust. She was watching intently as the Fool moved a small, sharp knife against a piece of wood.
“… more difficult without my sight, but it was always my fingers that read the wood for me when I was carving. I’m afraid that I’d grown more dependent on my fingertips than I realized. I can still feel the wood, but it’s not the same as when …”
“Who are you, and who let you into this chamber?” I demanded. I moved immediately to put myself between the Fool and the girl. She looked up at me with a woebegone expression. Then Ash spoke from her lips.
“I’ve been careless. Lord Chade will not be pleased with me.”
“What is it? What has alarmed you so?” The Fool was breathless with anxiety, his golden eyes wide. The carving tool in his hand he now gripped as a weapon.
“It’s nothing. Just more of Chade’s mummery! I’ve walked in on Ash dressed as a serving girl. I didn’t recognize him at first, and it gave me a turn. It’s all right, Fool. You are safe.”
“What?” he asked in a flustered voice, and then managed a nervous laugh. “Oh. If that’s all, then …” But when he set the tool to the wood, his hand trembled. Wordlessly, he set it down. Then, swift as a snake striking, his hand shot across the table to grip Ash’s arm. The boy cried out but the Fool held fast as he seized his other wrist as well. “Why would you disguise yourself so? Who pays you?” Then, as his hand traveled farther down the boy’s arm to his wrist and then hand, he sat back suddenly in his chair. He did not release Ash’s arm but said in a shaking voice, “Not Ash in a serving girl’s dress, but a serving girl who has masqueraded as Chade’s young apprentice. What goes on here, Fitz? How could we have been so stupid as to have trusted so quickly!”
“Your trust was not misplaced, sir. Possibly I would have shared my secret sooner if Lord Chade had not forbidden it.” In a lower voice she added, “You are hurting me. Please loosen your grip.”
The flesh of the girl’s forearm stood up in white ridges between the Fool’s fingers. I spoke. “Fool. I have her. You can let her go.”
He did, but reluctantly, a slow opening of his hands. He sat back on his chair. His golden eyes whirled and gleamed angrily in the low light. “And what have I done to deserve this deception from Lord Chade?”
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.