He made no reply, so I replenished the main room’s hearth and my wash water. I left the remaining supplies outside the door of his room. Anger and pain simmered in my heart. A great deal of my anger was for me. Why hadn’t I realized he was truly ill? Why had I insisted on pursuing this discussion over all his objections? Above all, why had not I trusted the instincts of our own friendship over the gossip of know-nothings? And the pain that ate at me was the pain of knowing what Chade had told me so often; that saying I was sorry could not always mend everything. I greatly feared that the damage I had done today was not something I could repair; that, as the Fool had warned me, today’s conversation was something that we both must carry to the very end of our days. I could only hope that the sharp-edged memory of my words would eventually dull with time. His still sliced me like razors.
I recall the next three or four days as a time foggy with misery. I did not see the Fool at all. He still admitted his young serving-boy to his bedchamber, but as far as I was aware, he himself did not emerge at all. Evidently Jek saw him at least one more time before the Bingtown delegation departed, for she stopped me once on the stairs. With icy courtesy, she said that Lord Golden had completely cleared from her mind any erroneous opinions she might have formed about my relationship to my master. She begged my pardon if her assumptions had in any way distressed me. Then, in a low hiss, she added that I was the stupidest and cruellest person she had ever met. Those were the last words she said to me. The Bingtown delegation departed the next day. The Queen and her dukes had not given them any firm answer on an alliance, but had accepted from them a dozen messenger birds, and given into their care as many Bingtown pigeons. Those negotiations would continue.
On the heels of their departure, there was an uproar in the keep when the Queen herself rode out with a company of her guards late that night. Chade told me that even he had found her action rather extreme. Evidently her dukes found it even more so. The purpose of her ride was to halt an execution in Bidwell, a small hamlet near Buck’s border with Rippon. They rode out in the deep of night, evidently in response to some spy’s report that a woman was to be hanged and burned the following morning. Torches streaming and the horses’ breath smoking, they had departed in haste. The Queen, dressed in her purple cloak and white fox tunic, had ridden in their midst. I had stood at the window and impotently wished that I were riding at her stirrup. My role as Lord Golden’s servant always seemed to condemn me to be where I least wished to be
They had returned the following evening. A battered woman swaying in her saddle, rode with them. Evidently they had arrived at the last possible moment, literally plucking the rope from her neck. The lynch throng had made no physical resistance to the armed and mounted guardsmen. Kettricken had not been content with gathering the town elders for several hours of stern royal reprimand. She had commanded that every citizen of every cot be rousted out to stand in the town’s tiny square and attend to her. She herself had stood before them, to read aloud to them her royal proclamation that forbade the execution of folk solely for being Witted. Afterwards, every soul down to the smallest child that could hold a pen was required to make a sign on that copy of the proclamation, attesting that they had been present, had heard the royal command and would abide by it. As they lacked a town hall, Kettricken further decreed that the signed proclamation must be continuously displayed over the hearth of the sole tavern in the town. She assured the folk that her road guards would drop by often to be sure that it was still in place and intact. She also assured them that if any of the signers ever again participated in such an attempt against a Witted, he would forfeit all property and be banished, not just from Buck, but from the entire Six Duchies.
On the Queen’s return, the accused woman was taken to the guards’ infirmary and treated for her injuries. Her village had not been gentle with her. She was a newcomer there with few ties. She had come to visit her cousin, who had been the one to accuse her to the elders when she supposedly caught the woman conversing with pigeons. There was some talk of an inheritance dispute which left me wondering if the accused were Witted at all, or merely a threat to her cousin’s holdings. As soon as the woman was well enough to travel, Queen Kettricken furnished her with funds, a horse, and some said a deed to a bit of land far away from her cousin’s village. In any case, the woman took herself away from Buckkeep as soon as she could travel.
The incident became the centre of a swirl of controversy. Some said the Queen has overstepped her bounds, that Bidwell actually straddled the border of Buck and Rippon and that she should not have taken action without at least consulting the Duke of Rippon. The Duke seemed to take her personal intervention as a criticism and an affront. Although he himself did not utter such words, it was gossiped about that perhaps the Mountain queen was too eager to make ties with foreigners such as Outislanders and Bingtown Traders while not giving enough respect to the dukes of the Six Duchies. Did she not trust her own nobility to manage their own domestic affairs? From there, the rumours and grumbling wandered farther afield. Did she not think a Six Duchies bride would be good enough for her half-Mountain son? And even more insidious, the gossip that the bloodlines of Duke Shemshy had been slighted, for the Prince had shown an obvious interest in Lady Vance until his lady mother had crushed it. Why did she court the disdainful Outislander Narcheska when even the young prince could see that there was a worthier lady closer to hand?
Because no such complaints were never officially uttered, it was difficult for Kettricken to make any response to them. Yet she knew they could not be completely ignored, for that would feed the fires of Rippon’s and Shoak’s discontent and encourage its spread to her other dukes. Kettricken’s solution was to command that her dukes each send a representative to a council, with the objective of creating solutions to end the persecution of the Witted. That yielded her only the results I could have predicted; they suggested that all Witted enter their names on a roll, to be sure they were not unfairly persecuted. A second suggestion was that the Witted be removed to certain villages and encouraged to live only within their boundaries, for their own protection. And most generous of all, a proposal that any person found to be Witted should be given passage to either Chalced or Bingtown, where they would undoubtedly be more welcome than in the Six Duchies.
I knew my own reaction to such suggestions. The dullest could perceive that such a registration and resettlement within the Six Duchies could easily be a prelude to a wide-scale massacre. As for ‘passage’ to Bingtown of Chalced it was little different from banishment. The Queen tartly told these councillors that their solutions lacked imagination and bade them try again. This was when a young man from Tilth inadvertently gave the Queen a great advantage. He suggested facetiously that the executions of Witted ones ‘trouble most folks not at all. In truth, those who practice the beast-magic bring these disasters upon themselves. As it is only the Witted they bother; perhaps you should seek your solution from them’.
The Queen seized on his suggestion with alacrity. The smirk faded from his face and the chuckles of the other councillors died away as she announced, ‘Now this, at least, is a suggestion with both imagination and merit. As my councillors have suggested to me, so I will do in this matter.’ Perhaps only Chade and I knew it was an idea she had long cherished. She wrote up a royal proclamation and ordered couriers to bear it throughout the Six Duchies, where it was not only to be announced in the towns and cities but also to be posted prominently. The Queen invited the Witted ones, also known as those of Old Blood, to form a delegation to meet her, to discuss ways in which their unlawful persecution and murder might be ended. The Queen chose her words deliberately, despite Chade’s beseeching that she be more circumspect. Many a noble was incensed by her indirect accusation that they sanctioned murder within their holdings. Yet I appreciated the stance she took, and surmised that other Witted would as well, even as I doubted that any Witted delegation would ever come to speak out on their own behalf. Why would they risk their lives by becoming known?