He nodded slowly. “Thinking is not always … comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Yes. I’ve killed against my own judgment. Again, it came down to faith. I had to believe that the folk who gave the order knew more than I did, and were wiser in the ways of the wider world.”
I was silent for a long moment. Chade started to relax. “Come in. Don’t stand there in the draft. Let’s have a glass of wine together, and then I need to talk to you about-”
“Have you ever killed solely on the basis of your own judgment? For the good of the kingdom?”
For a time Chade looked at me, troubled. I did not look away. He did, finally, staring down at his old hands, rubbing their papery-white skin against each other as he fingered the brilliant red pocks. “I do not make those judgments.” He looked up at me suddenly. “I never accepted that burden, nor wished to. It is not our place, boy. Those decisions are for the King.”
“I am not `boy,’,” I pointed out, surprising myself. “I am FitzChivalry. “
“With an emphasis on the Fitz,” Chade pointed out harshly. “You are the illegitimate get of a man who did not step up to become king. He abdicated. And in that abdication, he set aside from himself the making of judgments. You are not king, Fitz, nor even the son of a true King. We are assassins.”
“Why do we stand by while the true King is poisoned?” I asked bluntly then. “I see it, you see it. He is lured into using herbs that steal his mind and, while he cannot think well, lured to use ones that make him even more foolish. We know its immediate source, and I suspect its true source. And yet we watch him dwindle and grow feeble. Why? Where is the faith in that?”