She flinched at my words, but I knew she prized honesty. She opened her hands and gestured to all of us. “What can we do?”
King Dutiful spoke. “Little to nothing. We can call the healers back, but they only seem to squabble with one another. One says to cool him with wet cloths, another to light the hearth and cover him with blankets. One wanted to bleed him. I do not think any of them truly has a remedy for this type of injury. If we do nothing, I suspect he will die before two more nights go by.” He lifted off his crown, ran his hands through his hair, and set it back on his head slightly ajar. “Oh, Chade,” he said, a combination of rebuke and plea in his voice. He turned to me. “Fitz, are you sure you’ve had no message from him, either on paper or by the Skill, that would hint at what key will open him to us?”
“Nothing. Not for months.”
Kettricken looked around the room. “One of us knows.” She spoke slowly and precisely. She considered each of us with another slow, sweeping gaze, and then said, “I think it is most likely you, Fitz.”
She was probably right. I looked at Steady. “How does one use this keyword, if one knows it?”
The young man looked uncertain. “He didn’t instruct me in that, but I suspect it is something you Skill to him, and it is what permits you in.”
My heart sank. Had Burrich had a keyword, something that would have allowed me to reach him? A key that Chivalry had taken to his grave after his riding “accident”? I suddenly felt ill to know that I might have saved Burrich from death if I’d known his key. Well, it wasn’t going to happen again. Kettricken was correct. Chade was far too clever a man to have closed a lock without entrusting one of us with a key.
I took Chade’s hand in both of mine. I looked at his sunken face, at his lips puffing slightly with every expelled breath. I focused on him and reached again with the Skill. My mental grip on him slid and slipped, as if I tried to grasp a glass orb with soapy hands. I set my teeth and did a thing he had always decried. I found him with my Wit, focused on the animal life that I felt ebbing through his body, and then I needled my Skill at him. I began with a list of names. Chivalry. Verity. Shrewd. Fallstar. Farseer. Burrich. Kettricken. I went through everyone dear to us, hoping for a twitch of response. There was nothing. I finished with Lady Thyme. Lord Golden. Slink.
I gave up on that list and opened my eyes. The room was quiet around me. King Dutiful still sat on the other side of the bed. In the window behind him, the sun was foundering on the horizon. “I sent the others away,” he said quietly.
“I had no luck.”
“I know. I was listening.”
I studied my King in that unguarded moment. He and Nettle were nearly of an age and resembled each other in small ways, if one knew to look for them. They had the dark curly hair typical of the Farseer line. She had a straight nose and a determined mouth, as did he. But Dutiful had grown taller than I while Nettle was not much taller than her mother. Dutiful sat now, his hands steepled with the fingertips touching his mouth and his eyes grave. My King. The third Farseer King I had served.
Dutiful rose, groaning as he stretched his back. His hound imitated him, rising and then bowing low to the floor. He walked to the door, opened it, and said, “Food, please. And a dish of water for Courser. And some of the good brandy. Two cups. Let my lady mother know that as of yet we’ve had no success.” He shut the door and turned back to me. “What? Why are you smiling?”
“Such a king you became, Dutiful! Verity would be proud of you. He was the same way, able to say ‘please’ to the lowliest servant with no trace of irony. So. We have not spoken in months. How sits the crown?”
In response, he took it off and gave his head a shake, and then ran his fingers through his hair. He set it on Chade’s bedside table and said, “Heavy, sometimes. Even this one, and the formal one I must wear when I sit in judgment is worse. But it has to be borne.”
I knew he was not speaking of the actual weight of it. “And your Queen, and the Princes?”