“And all survived,” I said proudly, for the bitch had a history of difficult whelping.
“Let’s just hope we do as well for ourselves,” Burrich muttered as we walked through the stables, but when I glanced up at him, surprised, he seemed not to have been talking to me at all.
“I’d have thought you’d have the good sense to avoid her,” Chade grumbled at me.
It was not the greeting I had looked for after more than two months’ absence from his chambers. “I didn’t know it was the Lady Patience. I’m surprised there was not gossip about her arrival.”
“She strenuously objects to gossip,” Chade informed me. He sat in his chair before the small fire in the fireplace. Chade’s chambers were chilly, and he was ever vulnerable to cold. He looked weary as well tonight, worn by whatever he had been doing in the weeks since I’d last seen him. His hands, especially, looked old, bony and lumpy about the knuckles. He took a sip of his wine and continued. “And she has her eccentric little ways of dealing with those who talk about her behind her back. She has always insisted on privacy for herself. It is one reason she would have made a very poor queen. Not that Chivalry cared. That was a marriage he made for himself rather than for politics. I think it was the first major disappointment he dealt his father. After that, nothing he did ever completely pleased Shrewd.”
I sat still as a mouse. Slink came and perched on my knee. It was rare to hear Chade so talkative, especially about matters relating to the royal family. I scarcely breathed for fear of interrupting him.
“Sometimes I think there was something in Patience that Chivalry instinctively knew he needed. He was a thoughtful, orderly man, always correct in his manners, always aware of precisely what was going on around him. He was chivalrous, boy, in the best sense of that word. He did not give in to ugly or petty impulses. That meant he exuded a certain air of restraint at all times. So those who did not know him well thought him cold or cavalier.
“And then he met this girl … and she was scarcely more than a girl. And there was no more substance to her than to cobwebs and sea foam. Thoughts and tongue always flying from this to that, nitterdy-natterdy, with never a pause or connection I could see. It used to exhaust me just to listen to her. But Chivalry would smile, and marvel. Perhaps it was that she had absolutely no awe of him. Perhaps it was that she didn’t seem particularly eager to win him. But with a score of more eligible ladies, of better birth and brighter brains, pursuing him, he chose Patience.
And it wasn’t even timely for him to wed; when he took her to wife, he shut the gate on a dozen possible alliances that a wife could have brought him. There was no good reason for him to get married at that time. Not one.”
“Except that he wanted to,” I said, and then I could have bitten out my tongue. For Chade nodded, and then gave himself a bit of a shake. He took his gaze off the fire and looked at me.
“Well. Enough of that. I won’t ask you how you made such an impression on her, or what changed her heart toward you. But last week she came to Shrewd and demanded that you be recognized as Chivalry’s son and heir and given an education appropriate to a prince.”
I was dizzied. Did the wall tapestries move before me, or was it a trick of my eyes?
“Of course he refused,” Chade continued mercilessly. “He tried to explain to her why such a thing is totally impossible. All she kept saying was, `But you are the King. How can it be impossible for you?’ `The nobles would never accept him. It would mean civil war. And think what it would do to an unprepared boy, to plunge him suddenly into this.’ So he told her.”
“Oh,” I said quietly. I couldn’t remember what I had felt for the one instant. Elation? Anger? Fear? I only knew that the feeling was gone now, and I felt oddly stripped and humiliated that I had felt anything at all.