“Verity did,” I said quietly. My voice tightened up a notch as I observed, “It’s just the charging buck. There is no slash across it to mark me a bastard.”
There was a very long silence. The candles burned and at the other end of the room a log slumped on the hearth. “Do you wish it had come to pass?” the Fool asked me.
“No! Of course not!” That would have been like wishing death on Shrewd and Kettricken and her then-unborn child. “But … I do wish I had known. There were times when it would have meant a great deal to me.” A tear tracked down my cheek. I let it fall.
“And not now?”
“Oh, and still now. To know he thought me worthy to guard his queen, and his child. And to step up and claim the throne after him.”
“Then you never wished to be king?”
“No.” Liar. But the lie was so old and so oft repeated that most of the time I believed it.
He gave a small sigh. When I realized it was of relief, not sadness for the smallness of my ambitions, I wondered why. He answered before I asked.
“When Chade told me you had been formally acknowledged, and that most of the folk there were inclined to lionize you and welcome you home, I worried. And when my fingers touched your crown, I feared.”
“Feared what?”
“That you would want to stay here at Buckkeep Castle. That you would enjoy being seen as what you have always been, not the king-in-waiting but the king-in-the-shadows.”
Such a title to give me. “And that made you fear … what?”
“That you would be reluctant to leave the acclaim you had finally earned. That you would go without heart to my errand.”
To deflect him from any thoughts of the murders he’d assigned me, I hastily referenced his other errand. “Fool, I will do all I can to find the son you suspect you have left somewhere. Doubtless it would make my task much easier if you could recall for me the women you have lain with who might have borne such a child, and when it might have happened.”
He gave a snort of displeasure. “Fitz! Have you listened not at all to what I told you? There is no such woman, nor a child conceived in that way. I told you that.”
My mind reeled. “No. No, you didn’t. I am sure that if you had told me such a thing, I would have remembered it. And that I would have immediately asked, as I do now, then how have you made a son?”
“You don’t listen,” he said sadly. “I explain things quite clearly, but if it’s not what you expect to hear, you set it aside. Fitz. This crown. Would it fit?”
“It’s not a crown, not really.” He had changed the subject again. I knew that he would not explain until he decided to. I tried to conceal my relief that he’d let me get away with my deflection as I turned the cold steel in my hands. The last time I’d worn a crown, it had been wooden and decorated with roosters. No. Don’t summon that memory now. I lifted the circlet and set it on my head. “It fits, I suppose. I’m not sure how it’s supposed to fit.”
“Let me touch it.” He rose and groped his way around the end of the table to where I sat. His hands felt for me, found a shoulder, the side of my face, and then fluttered up to my head and the crown there. He lifted it slightly, and then, with no self-consciousness at all, measured the length of my hair. He walked his fingers down my face, touching the break in my nose, the old scar, the scruff of beard on my chin. If anyone else had done it, it would have felt invasive. Insulting. But I knew he was comparing what I looked like now with what he recalled.
He cleared his throat then lifted the circlet in his hands. He spoke more gravely than I had ever heard him as he uttered the words, “FitzChivalry Farseer. I crown you King-in-the-Shadows of the Six Duchies.” He set the circlet on my head, settling it carefully. The steel was cold and heavy. It settled there as if it would never move again. He cleared his throat once more and after a pause he added, “You’re a handsome man still, Fitz. Not as pretty as before Regal broke your face. But you’ve aged well, I judge.”
“That old Skill-healing.” I shrugged. “My body just keeps repairing itself, whether I wish it or not.”
I took off the steel crown and set it on top of the oily canvas that had sheltered it. Light ran along the edge of it like blood on a sword blade.
“I wish that were my situation,” the Fool returned. His gaze went back to the candles. For a long time, we were both silent. Then he said softly, “Fitz. My eyes. Being blind … they used that. To make me fearful and cowering. I need to see. I dread the thought of setting out on our quest still blinded. I will if I must. But … Could you …”
So much for my deflection. I had told him I could not go on his quest, but he persisted in ignoring what I’d said. Let it go. “Tell me what they did to your eyes,” I said as quietly.