“Oh,” said Verity again, and I lay still and wondered if he were trying to sort out the King’s words, or refraining from replying to his brother’s complaint.
“You discern his real reasons, of course,” Regal informed him.
“Which is?”
“He still favors Chivalry.” Regal sounded disgusted. “Despite everything. Despite his foolish marriage and his eccentric wife. Despite this mess. And now he thinks this will sway the people, make them warmer toward him. Prove he’s a man, that Chivalry can father a child. Or maybe prove he’s a human, and can make mistakes like the rest of them.” Regal’s tone betrayed that he agreed with none of this.
“And this will make the people like him more, support his future kingship more? That he fathered a child on some wild woman before he married his queen?” Verity sounded confused by the logic.
I heard the sourness in Regal’s voice. “So the King seems to think. Does he care nothing for the disgrace? But I suspect Chivalry will feel differently about using his bastard in such a way. Especially as it regards dear Patience. But the King has ordered that the bastard be brought to Buckkeep when you return.” Regal looked down on me as if ill satisfied.
Verity looked briefly troubled, but nodded. A shadow lay over Burrich’s features that the yellow lamplight could not lift.
“Has my master no say in this?” Burrich ventured to protest. “It seems to me that if he wants to settle a portion on the family of the boy’s mother, and set him aside, then, why surely for the sake of my Lady Patience’s sensibilities, he should be allowed that discretion-”
Prince Regal broke in with a snort of disdain. “The time for discretion was before he rolled the wench. The Lady Patience is not the first woman to have to face her husband’s bastard. Everyone here knows of his existence; Verity’s clumsiness saw to that. There’s no point to trying to hide him. And as far as a royal bastard is concerned, none of us can afford to have such sensibilities, Burrich. To leave such a boy in a place like this is like leaving a weapon hovering over the King’s throat. Surely even a houndsman can see that. And even if you can’t, your master will.”
An icy harshness had come into Regal’s voice, and I saw Burrich flinch from his voice as I had seen him cower from nothing else. It made me afraid, and I drew the blanket up over my head and burrowed deeper into the straw. Beside me, Vixen growled lightly in the back of her throat. I think it made Regal step back, but I cannot be sure. The men left soon after, and if they spoke any more than that, no memory of it lies within me.
Time passed, and I think it was two, or perhaps three weeks later that I found myself clinging to Burrich’s belt and trying to wrap my short legs around a horse behind him as we left that chill village and began what seemed to me an endless journey down to warmer lands. I suppose at some point Chivalry must have come to see the bastard he had sired and must have passed some sort of judgment on himself as regarded me. But I have no memory of such a meeting with my father. The only image I carry of him in my mind is from his portrait on the wall in Buckkeep. Years later I was given to understand that his diplomacy had gone well indeed, securing a treaty and peace that lasted well into my teens and earning the respect and even fondness of the Chyurda.
In truth, I was his only failure that year, but I was a monumental one. He preceded us home to Buckkeep, where he abdicated his claim to the throne. By the time we arrived, he and Lady Patience were gone from court, to live as the Lord and Lady of Withywoods. I have been to Withywoods. Its name bears no relationship to its appearance. It is a warm valley, centered on a gently flowing river that carves a wide plain that nestles between gently rising and rolling foothills. A place to grow grapes and grain and plump children. It is a soft holding, far from the borders, far from the politics of court, far from anything that had been Chivalry’s life up to then. It was a pasturing out, a gentle and genteel exile for a man who would have been King. A velvet smothering for a warrior and a silencing of a rare and skilled diplomat.