“Except that he can’t come back to Buckkeep?” The flash of insight made me freeze, my hands full of shards.
“Except he can’t come back to Buckkeep. It doesn’t do to stir folks up with visits from a former king-in-waiting. Better he faded quietly away.”
I tossed the shards into the hearth. “At least he gets to go somewhere,” I muttered. “I can’t even go to town …”
“And it’s that important to you? To go down to a grubby, greasy little port like Buckkeep Town?”
“There are other people there ….” I hesitated. Not even Chade knew of my town friends. I plunged ahead. “They call me Newboy. And they don’t think `the bastard’ every time they look at me.” I had never put it into words before, but suddenly the attraction of town was quite clear to me.
“Ah,” said Chade, and his shoulders moved as if he sighed, but he was silent. And a moment later he was telling me how one could sicken a man just by feeding him rhubarb and spinach at the same sitting, sicken him even to death if the portions were sufficient, and never set a bit of poison on the table at all. I asked him how to keep others at the same table from also being sickened, and our discussion wandered from there. Only later did it seem to me that his words regarding Chivalry had been almost prophetic.
It was two days later when I was surprised to be told that Fedwren had requested my services for a day or so. I was surprised even more when he gave me a list of supplies he required from town, and enough silver to buy them, with two extra coppers for myself. I held my breath, expecting that Burrich or one of my other masters would forbid it, but instead I was told to hurry on my way. I went out of the gates with a basket on my arm and my brain giddy with sudden freedom. I counted up the months since I had last been able to slip away from Buckkeep and was shocked to find it had been a year or better. I immediately planned to renew my old familiarity with the town. No one had told me when I had to return, and I was confident I could snatch an hour or two to myself and no one the wiser.
The variety of the items on Fedwren’s list took me all over the town. I had no idea what use a scribe had for dried seamaid’s hair, or for a peck of forester’s nuts. Perhaps he used them to make his colored inks, I decided, and when I could not find them in the regular shops, I took myself down to the harbor bazaar, where anyone with a blanket and something to sell could declare himself a merchant. The seaweed I found swiftly enough there, and learned it was a common ingredient in chowder. The nuts took longer, for those were something that would have come from inland rather than from the sea, and there were fewer traders who dealt in such things.
But find them I did, alongside baskets of porcupine quills and carved wooden beads and nut cones and pounded bark fabric. The woman who presided over the blanket was old, and her hair had gone silver rather than white or gray. She had a strong straight nose and her eyes were on bony shelves over her cheeks. It was a racial heritage both strange and oddly familiar to me, and a shiver walked down my back when I suddenly knew she was from the mountains.
“Keppet,” said the woman at the next mat as I completed my purchase. I glanced at her, thinking she was addressing the woman I had just paid. But she was staring at me. “Keppet,” she said, quite insistently, and I wondered what it meant in her language. It seemed a request for something, but the older woman only stared coldly out into the street, so I shrugged at her younger neighbor apologetically and turned away as I stowed the nuts in my basket.
I hadn’t got more than a dozen steps away when I heard her shriek “Keppet!” yet again. I looked back to see the two women engaged in a struggle. The older one gripped the younger one’s wrists and the younger one struggled and thrashed and kicked to get free of her. Around her, other merchants were standing to their feet in alarm and snatching their own merchandise out of harm’s way. I might have turned back to watch had not another more familiar face met my eyes.