He had scarcely finished speaking when the door opened to admit Charim with a tray. I nodded to Verity’s serving man, who not only seemed unsurprised to see me, but had added to Verity’s request a certain type of spice bread that I had always enjoyed. He moved about the room briefly, making perfunctory tidying motions as he shifted a few books and scrolls to free a chair for me, and then vanished again. Verity was so accustomed to him he scarce seemed to notice him, save for the brief smile they exchanged as Charim left.
“So,” he said, as soon as the door was fairly shut. “Let’s have a full report. From the time you left Buckkeep.”
This was not a simple recounting of my journey and the events of it. I had been trained by Chade to be a spy as well as an assassin. And since my earliest days Burrich had always demanded that I be able to give a detailed account of anything that went on in the stables in his absence. So as we ate and drank I gave Verity an accounting of all I had seen and done since I had left Buckkeep. This was followed by my summation of what I had concluded from my experiences, and then by what I suspected from what I had learned. By then, Charim had returned with another meal. While we consumed this Verity limited our talk to his warships. He could not conceal his enthusiasm for them. “Mastfish has come down to supervise the building. I went up to Highdowns myself to fetch him. He claimed to be an old man now. `The cold would stiffen my bones; I can’t build a boat in winter anymore, that was the word he sent me. So I set the apprentices work, and I myself went to fetch him. He could not refuse me to my face. When he got here, I took him down to the shipyards. And I showed him the heated shed, big enough to house a warship, built so he might work and not be cold. But that was not what convinced him. It was the white oak that Kettricken brought me. When he saw the timber, he could not wait to put a drawknife to it. The grain is straight and true throughout. The planking is well begun already. They will be lovely ships, swan-necked, sinuous as snakes upon the water.” Enthusiasm spilled from him. I could already imagine the rising and falling of the oars, the bellying of the square masts when they were under way.