“Who … ah. Fitz. Sit, then. Wallace, bring him a chair. A cup and plate, too.” As the servant moved to his bidding King Shrewd confided to me, “I do miss Cheffers. With me for so many years, and I never had to tell him anymore what I wanted done.”
“I remember him, my lord. Where is he, then?”
“A cough took him. He caught it in the fall, and it never left him. It slowly wore him away, until he couldn’t take a breath without wheezing.”
I recalled the servant. He had not been a young man, but not so old either. I was surprised to hear of his death. I stood silently, wordless, while Wallace brought the chair and a plate and cup for me. He frowned disapprovingly as I seated myself, but I ignored it. He would soon enough learn that King Shrewd designed his own protocol. “And you, my king? Are you well? I cannot recall that I ever knew you to keep to your bed in the morning?”
King Shrewd made an impatient noise. “It is most annoying. Not a sickness really. Just a giddiness, a sort of dizziness that sweeps down upon me if I move swiftly. Every morning I think it gone, but when I try to rise, the very stones of Buckkeep rock under me. So I keep to my bed, and eat and drink a bit, and then rise slowly. By midday I am myself. I think it has something to do with the winter cold, though the healer says it may be from an old sword cut, taken when I was not much older than you are now. See, I bear the scar still, though I thought the damage long healed.” King Shrewd leaned forward in his curtained bed, lifting with one shaky hand a sheaf of his graying hair from his left temple. I saw the pucker of the old scar and nodded.