“Cutting wood,” he said quietly. “For a funeral pyre. He’s been drinking since dawn, too.”
Almost this drove my quest from my mind. I had never known such a thing to be. Burrich drank, but in the evenings, when the day’s work was done. Hands read my face.
“Vixen. His old bitch hound. She died in the night. Yet I have never heard of a pyre for a dog. He’s out behind the exercise pen now.”
I turned toward the pen.
“Fitz!” Hands warned me urgently.
“It will be all right, Hands. I know what she meant to him. The first night he had care of me, he put me in a stall beside her, and told her to guard me. She had a pup beside her, Nosy …”
Hands shook his head. “He said he wanted to see no one. To send him no questions today. No one to talk to him. He’s never given me an order like that.”
“All right.” I sighed.
Hands looked disapproving. “As old as she was, he should have expected it. She couldn’t even hunt with him anymore. He should have replaced her a long time ago.”
I looked at Hands. For all his caring for the beasts, for all his gentleness and good instincts, he couldn’t really know. Once, I had been shocked to discover my Wit sense as a separate sense. Now to confront Hands’s total lack of it was to discover his blindness. I just shook my head and dragged my mind back to my original errand. “Hands, have you seen the Queen today?”
“Yes, but it was a while ago.” His eyes scanned my face anxiously. “She came to me and asked if Prince Verity had taken Truth out of the stables and down to town. I told her no, that the Prince had come to see him, but had left him in the stables today. I told her the streets would be all iced cobbles. Verity would not risk his favorite on a surface like that. He walks down to Buckkeep Town as often as not these days, though he comes through the stable almost every day. He told me it’s an excuse to be out in the air and the open.”