Do I look so poorly, then?
Not to her, I reminded him.
As Verity took her hand and drew her to sit down beside him on a bench near the fire, she looked at him with a hunger as deep as his Skill drive. Her fingers clung to his hand, and I looked aside as he lifted her hand to kiss it. Perhaps Verity was right about a Skill sensitivity. What Kettricken felt battered at me as roughly as the fury of my crew mates during battle.
I felt a flutter of astonishment from Verity. Then: Shield yourself, he commanded me brusquely, and I was suddenly alone inside my skull. I stood still a moment, dizzied by the abruptness of his departure. He really had no idea, I found myself thinking, and felt glad the thought remained private.
“My lord, I have come to ask a moment or two of your time for … an idea I have.” Kettricken’s eyes searched his face as she spoke quietly.
“Certainly,” Verity agreed. He glanced up at me. “FitzChivalry, will you join us?”
“If you will, my lord.” I took a seat on a stool on the opposite side of the hearth. Rosemary came and stood at my elbow with her armload of scrolls. Probably filched from my room by the Fool, I suspected. But as Kettricken began to talk to Verity she took up the scrolls one by one, in each case to illustrate her argument. Without exception, they were scrolls that dealt, not with the Elderlings, but with the Mountain Kingdom. “King Wisdom, you may recall, was the first of Six Duchies nobility to come to our land … to the land of the Mountain Kingdom, for anything other than the making of war upon us. So he is well remembered in our histories. These scrolls, copied from ones made in his time, deal with his doings and travels in the Mountain Kingdom. And thus, indirectly, with the Elderlings.” She unrolled the last scroll. Verity and I both leaned forward in amazement. A map. Faded with time, poorly copied probably, but a map. Of the Mountain Kingdom, with passes and trails marked on it. And a few straggling lines leading into the lands beyond.