“Then I suggest you do so this evening. I am concerned for him.”
“As you wish, my queen.” I waited. Surely that was not what she had called me here to say.
After a moment she sighed. “Fitz. I am alone here as I have never been before. Cannot you call me Kettricken and treat me as a person for a bit?”
The sudden change in tone took me off balance. “Certainly,” I replied, but my voice was too formal. Danger, Nighteyes whispered.
Danger? How?
This is not your mate. This is the leader’s mate.
It was like finding an aching tooth with your tongue. The knowledge jarred through me. There was a danger here, one to guard against. This was my queen, but I was not Verity and she was not my love, no matter how my heart set to beating at the sight of her.
But she was my friend. She had proven that in the Mountain Kingdom. I owed her the comfort that friends owe one another.
“I went to see the King,” she told me. She gestured me to sit and took a chair of her own across the hearth from me. Rosemary fetched her little stool to sit at Kettricken’s feet. Despite our being alone in the room, the Queen lowered her voice and leaned toward me as she spoke. “I asked him directly why I had not been summoned when the rider came in. He seemed puzzled by my question. But before he could even begin an answer, Regal came in. He had come in haste, I could tell. As if someone had run to tell him I was there, and he had immediately dropped everything to come.”
I nodded gravely.
“He made it impossible for me to speak to the King. Instead, he insisted on explaining it all to me. He claimed that the rider had been brought directly to the King’s chamber, and that he had encountered the messenger as he came to visit his father. He had sent the boy to rest while he talked with the King. And that together they had decided that nothing could be done now. Then Shrewd had sent him to announce that to the boy and the gathered nobles, and to explain to them the state of the treasury. According to Regal, we are very near on the brink of ruin, and every penny must be watched. Beam must look out for Beam’s own, he told me. And when I asked if Beam’s own were not Six Duchies folk, he told me that Beam had always stood more or less on its own. It was not rational, he said, to expect that Buck could guard a coast so far to the north of us, and so long. Fitz, did you know that the Near Islands had already been ceded to the Raiders?”