The kettle began to puff clouds of steam and Dutiful got up to tend to it. Hastily, I blotted my eyes on my sleeve. He brought the grumbling kettle to the table and poured hot water over the herbs in the teapot. As he carried it back to the fire, he spoke over his shoulder. Something in his subdued voice told me that my stillness had not deceived him. I think he sensed how close he had come to breaking me and it distressed him. ‘My mother told me,’ he said, almost defensively. ‘She and Chade were both frantic over you being hurt and in prison. They were angry at one another and could not agree on anything. I was in the room when they had an argument. She told him that she was simply going to go down and take you out of there. He said she must not, that it would only put you and me into greater danger. So then she said she was going to tell me who was dying for me down there; he tried to forbid that. She said it was time I knew what it was to be Sacrifice for one’s people. Then they sent me out of the room while they argued about it.’ He set the kettle back by the hearth and came back to sit at the table with me. I didn’t meet his eyes.

‘Do you know what it means when she names you Sacrifice like that? Do you know how my mother thinks of you?’ He pushed the bread toward me. ‘You should eat. You look awful.’ He took a breath. ‘When she names you Sacrifice, it means that she thinks of you as the rightful king of the Six Duchies. She probably has since my father died. Or went into his dragon.’

That jerked my eyes to him. Truly, she had told him all, and it shocked me to my spine. I glanced over at Thick dozing before the fire. The Prince’s eyes followed mine. He said nothing, but Thick suddenly opened his eyes and turned to face him. ‘This is terrible food,’ the Prince observed to him. ‘Do you think you could get us better in the kitchens? Something sweet, perhaps?’

A wide grin spread over Thick’s face. ‘I can get that. I know what they got down there. Dried berry and apple pie.’ He licked his lips. When he stood, I saw with surprise the Farseer Buck sigil on the breast of his tunic.

‘Go the way we came, and come back the same way, please. It’s important to remember that.’

Thick nodded ponderously. ‘Important. I remember. I know that a long time now. Go through the pretty door, come back through the pretty door. And only when no one else can see.’

‘Good man, Thick. I don’t know how I ever got along without you.’ There was satisfaction in the Prince’s voice, and something else. Not condescension, but… ah. I grasped it. Pride in possession. He spoke to Thick as a man might speak to a prized wolfhound.

As the halfwit left, I asked him, ‘You’ve made Thick your man? Openly?’

‘If my grandfather could have a skinny albino boy as a jester and companion, why should I not have a half-wit as mine?’

I winced. ‘You do not let folk mock him, do you?

‘Of course not. Did you know he could sing? His voice gives the music an odd tone, but the notes are true. I do not keep him by me always, but often enough that no one remarks him any longer. And it helps that he and I can speak privately, so that he knows when I wish him by me and when I wish him to go.’ He nodded, well pleased with himself. ‘I think he is happier now. He has discovered the pleasures of a hot bath and clean clothes. And I give him simple toys that please him. Only one thing worries me. The woman who helps him take care of himself told me that she has known two others like him in her life. She says they do not live as long as an ordinary man does, that Thick might already be close to the end of his days. Do you know if that is true?’

‘I’ve no idea, my prince.’

I offered the honorific without thinking. It made him grin. ‘And what shall I call you, if you call me that? Honoured cousin? Lord FitzChivalry?’

‘Tom Badgerlock,’ I reminded him flatly.

‘Of course. And Lord Golden. I confess, it is much easier for me to accept you as Lord FitzChivalry than for me to imagine Lord Golden as a jester in motley.’

‘He has travelled a far journey from those days,’ I said, and tried to keep regret from my voice. ‘When did the Queen decide to tell you all the family secrets?’

‘The night after we healed you. She brought me back later through the secret corridors to your chamber, and we spent all night sitting by your bed. After a time, she just started talking. She told me that, with your scars erased, you looked very like my father. That sometimes, when she looked at you, she saw him in your eyes. And then she told me all of it. Not in one evening. I think it was three nights before the tale was told out. And all the while she sat by your bed on a cushion and held your hand. She made me sit on the floor. She allowed no one else in the room.’

‘I did not even know you had been there. Nor she.’

He lifted one shoulder. ‘Your body was healed, but the rest of you was as close to dead as makes no difference. I could not reach you with the Skill, and to my Wit you were like the spark at the end of a candlewick. At any moment, you could have winked out. But while she held your hand and spoke, you seemed to burn brighter. I think she sensed that as well. It was as if she tried to anchor you to life.’

I lifted my hands and let them fall helplessly back to the table. ‘I don’t know how to deal with this,’ I confessed abruptly. ‘I don’t know how to react to your knowing all these things.’

‘I should think you’d feel relieved. Even if we must still maintain the charade of Tom Badgerlock about the keep for some time yet. At least here, in private, you can be who you are and not worry so much about guarding your tongue. Which you don’t do very well in any case. Eat your soup. I don’t want to have to warm it again.’

It seemed a good suggestion and bought me time to think without having to speak. Yet he sat watching me so intently that I felt like a mouse under a cat’s eye. When I scowled at him, he laughed aloud and shook his head. ‘You cannot imagine how it feels. I look at you, and wonder, will I be that tall when I am grown? Did my father scowl like that? I wish you had not put the scars back. It makes it harder for me to see myself in your face. You sitting there and me knowing who and what you are… it is as if my father has walked into my life for the first time.’ The lad bounced and wiggled in his chair as he spoke, as if he were a puppy that longed to jump up on me. It was hard to meet his eyes. Something burned there which I was not prepared for. I did not deserve the Prince’s adulation.

‘Your father was a far better man than I am,’ I told him.

He took a deep breath. Tell me something about him,’ he begged. ‘Something that only you and he would know.’

I sensed the importance of this request and could not refuse him. I cast about in my mind. Should I tell him that Verity had not loved Kettricken at first sight, but rather had grown to love her? It sounded too much like a comparison to his lack of feelings for Elliania. Verity had not been a man for secrets, but I didn’t think Dutiful was asking for a secret. ‘He loved good ink and paper,’ I told him. ‘And cutting his pens himself. He was very particular about his pens. And… he was kind to me when I was small. For no reason at all. He gave me toys. A little wooden cart, and some carved soldiers and horses.’

‘He did? That surprises me. I thought that he had to keep his distance from you. I knew he watched over you, but in his letters to your father, he complains that he scarce sees the little Tom-cat save when he is trotting at Burrich’s heels.’

I sat very still. It took a moment for me to recall how to breathe and then I asked, ‘Verity wrote about me? In letters to Chivalry?’

‘Not directly, of course. Patience had to explain to me what it meant. She showed the letters to me when I complained that I knew little of my father. They were very disappointing. Only four of them, and they were short and boring for the most part. He is fine, he hopes Chivalry and Lady Patience are well. Usually he is asking his brother to have a word with one duke or another, to smooth over some political difference. Once he asks him to send him an accounting of how the taxes were apportioned in a previous year. Then there would be a few lines about the harvest or how the hunting has been. But there was always a word or two about you at the end. “The Tom-cat that Burrich adopted seems to be making himself at home.” “Near stepped on Burrich’s Tom-cat as he ran through the courtyard yesterday. He seems to get bigger every day.” That’s how they named you in the letters, against spies and even, at first, against Patience reading them. In the last one, you are just “Tom”. “Tom had crossed Burrich and been walloped for it. He seemed remarkably unrepentant. In truth, Burrich is the one I pitied.” And at the end of each letter, a few lines about looking forward to the new moon or hoping that the full moon tides will be good for clamming. Patience explained that was how they set up a time to Skill to one another, when they could go apart from other people and be undisturbed. Our fathers were very close, you know. It was very difficult for them to be separated when Chivalry moved to Withywoods. They missed one another deeply.’