“Well, here we are, my boy,” he said at last, and then nothing more, as if he had said all he needed to. He ruffled my short hair.
“Burrich cut my hair,” I told him suddenly.
“So I see.”
“I hate it. It prickles against my pillow and I can’t sleep. My hood won’t stay up. And I look stupid.”
“You look like a boy mourning his father.”
I was silent a moment. I had thought of my hair as being a longer version of Burrich’s extreme cut. But Chade was right. It was the length for a boy mourning his father, not a subject mourning a king. That only made me angrier.
“But why should I mourn him?” I asked Chade as I hadn’t dared to ask Burrich. “I didn’t even know him.”
“He was your father.”
“He got me on some woman. When he found out about me, he left. A father. He never cared about me.” I felt defiant finally saying it out loud. It made me furious, Burrich’s deep wild mourning and now Chade’s quiet sorrow.
“You don’t know that. You only hear what the gossips say. You aren’t old enough to understand some things. You’ve never seen a wild bird lure predators away from its young by pretending to be injured.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said, but I suddenly felt less confident saying it. “He never did anything to make me think he cared about me.”
Chade turned to look at me and his eyes were older, sunken and red. “If you had known he’d cared, so would others. When you are a man, maybe you’ll understand just how much that cost him. To not know you in order to keep you safe. To make his enemies ignore you.”
“Well, I’ll ‘not know’ him to the end of my days, now,” I said sulkily.
Chade sighed. “And the end of your days will come a great deal later than they would have had he acknowledged you as an heir.” He paused, then asked cautiously, “What do you want to know about him, my boy?”
“Everything. But how would you know?” The more tolerant Chade was, the more surly I felt.
“I’ve known him all his life. I’ve … worked with him. Many times. Hand in glove, as the saying goes.”
“Were you the hand or the glove?”
No matter how rude I was, Chade refused to get angry. “The hand,” he said after a brief consideration. “The hand that moves unseen, cloaked by the velvet glove of diplomacy.”
“What do you mean?” Despite myself, I was intrigued.
“Things can be done.” Chade cleared his throat. “Things can happen that make diplomacy easier. Or that make a party more willing to negotiate. Things can happen ….
My world turned over. Reality burst on me as suddenly as a vision, the fullness of what Chade was and what I was to be. “You mean one man can die, and his successor can be easier to negotiate with because of it. More amenable to our cause, because of fear or because of …”
“Gratitude. Yes.”
A cold horror shook me as all the pieces suddenly fell into place. All the lessons and careful instructions and this is what they led to. I started to rise, but Chade’s hand suddenly gripped my shoulder.
“Or a man can live, two years or five or a decade longer than any thought he could, and bring the wisdom and tolerance of age to the negotiations. Or a babe can be cured of a strangling cough, and the mother suddenly see with gratitude that what we offer can be beneficial to all involved. The hand doesn’t always deal death, my boy. Not always.”
“Often enough.”
“I never lied to you about that.” I heard two things in Chade’s voice that I had never heard before. Defensiveness. And hurt. But youth is merciless.
“I don’t think I want to learn anymore from you. I think I’m going to go to Shrewd and tell him to find someone else to kill people for him.”
“That is your decision to make. But I advise you against it, for now.”
His calmness caught me off guard. “Why?”