“Better far than I,” I said sourly. “Care you not at all that Verity is dead?”
“Care you not at all that the flowers are blooming beneath the summer sun?”
“Fool, it is winter outside.”
“The one is as true as the other. Believe me.” The Fool stood suddenly still. “I have come to ask a favor of you, if you can believe that.”
“The second as easily as the first. What is it?”
“Do not slay my king with your ambitions for your own.”
I looked at him in horror. “I would never slay my king! How dare you say it!”
“Oh, I dare much, these days.” He put his hands behind him and paced about the room. With his elegant clothes and unaccustomed postures, he frightened me. It was as if another being inhabited his body, one I knew not at all.
“Not even if the King had killed your mother?”
A terrible sick feeling rose in me. “What are you trying to tell me?” I whispered.
The Fool whirled at the pain in my voice. “No. No! You mistake me entirely!” There was sincerity in his voice, and for an instant I could see my friend again. “But,” he continued in a softer, almost sly tone, “if you believed the King had killed your mother, your much-cherished, loving, indulgent mother, had killed her and snatched her forever away from you. Do you think you might then kill him?”
I had been blind for so long that it took me a moment to understand him. I knew Regal believed his mother had been poisoned. I knew it was one source of his hatred for me, and for “Lady Thyme.” He believed we had carried out the killing. At the behest of the King. I knew it all to be false. Queen Desire had poisoned herself. Regal’s mother had been overly fond of both drink and those herbs that bring surcease from worry. When she `had not been able to rise to the power she believed was her right, she had taken refuge in those pleasures. Shrewd had tried several times to stop her, had even applied to Chade for herbs and potions that would end her cravings. Nothing had worked. Queen Desire had been poisoned, it was true, but it was her own self-indulgent hand that had administered it. I had always known that. And knowing it, I had discounted the hate that would breed in the heart of a coddled son, suddenly bereft of his mother.