Fool's Quest

The boy sat down as soddenly as an armful of wet laundry. He hunched there, staring at the fire. I left him and went to the brandy. I poured a jot, tossed it down, then poured another and took it to the boy. “Drink this,” I told him. He didn’t respond. I leaned down to look in his face. He shifted his eyes to meet mine. I put the glass in his hand.

“They said I was a beggar. And crazy. My own ma wouldn’t let me in the door. I was all blood and she sent me up to the manor and wouldn’t take me in.” His voice rose higher and higher on each word until it ended in a strangled squeak.

I said the only words I had to comfort him. “I know you,” I said. “You are Perseverance, son of Tallerman, grandson of Tallman, and you worked in my stables. You cared for my daughter’s horse and you’ve been teaching her to ride. Drink that.”

He lifted the glass and smelled it. He took a sip, shuddered, but at a look from me drank the rest in a gulp. He gasped and took three breaths before he could speak. “What happened to them? What’s wrong with them? All of them? I told them Steward Revel was dead and they said, ‘Who’s Revel?’ I said, ‘They took Bee. We have to go after her!’ and they said they didn’t know her. And when I tried to go after her by myself, they accused me of trying to steal her horse.”

I refilled his glass. “You went after them?” Did he know where they’d taken her?

“I tried, sir. But the snow and the wind erased everything. I had to turn back. I was still bleeding. I’m so sorry, sir. I’m sorry I didn’t bring her back.”

“Perseverance, I don’t know what happened here, but we will puzzle it out. First you have to think back to the very beginning. I saw you watching us as we left for Oaksbywater. You were about to exercise a horse. Tell me everything from there. Every single thing. As it happened. Each and every thing you remember from that moment on. Go on. Drink the brandy. One gulp and it’s down. There. Oh, it wasn’t that bad, was it? Now. Talk to me. Just talk.”

I thudded a chair down facing him and sat, our knees almost touching. I focused myself on him, Wit and Skill. I felt almost nothing from him with my Skill-sense. Some folk were like that. But all of us live inside animals and even though I did not know him well, we had both loved Bee. So I did as Burrich had done so often to me, breathing calmness and safety at him, willing that he would smell and sense that I was here to protect him and he was safe. I forced my own body to relax as well, and I slowed my breathing. In a few moments, I saw his shoulders ease. Brandy and the Wit. “Just talk to me,” I suggested again. He nodded slowly.

He was well into describing a day of ordinary stable work when Lant brought the bandages and salves. I motioned the scribe to be silent and sit down. He was grateful to do so. As Perseverance spoke of his routine day and the tears for things lost rolled down his cheeks, I opened his shirt and looked at his shoulder. I doubted the bandage had been changed today. He winced as I peeled it off him. The wound was ugly. The arrow had gone through his shoulder, but not as cleanly as I’d hoped. His injury had been given all the careful attention that I’d expect most healers to devote to a beggar child.

I set out salves and bandaging and washed the wound front and back with wine. He gritted his teeth when I picked at a scrap of his shirt fabric working out of the wound. I got a grip on it and tugged it out. Blood followed. He looked down at it and went paler. “Keep talking,” I told him, and he recounted how a man had come with a donkey and cart and some abused bull-pups. I nodded, and washed his shoulder again with the wine.

I was pushing salve into the wounds when he told me what I didn’t know, which was how Lant and Lady Shun and Bee had returned late that night. Lant had escorted Shun into the house and left my Bee in the cold and snowy wagon. Lant’s brow wrinkled at the tale, and when the boy told of the house steward coming to carry her inside, Lant stood up and said stiffly, “I don’t know why you are listening to the boy. He’s either mad or malicious beyond explaining. I know nothing of a Lady Shun, nor a child named Bee. Call the house steward and see what Dixon has to say of this wild tale.”

“Sit down,” I said to Lant through gritted teeth. Something had been done to his mind, and I could forgive him not recalling Bee or Shun, but I could not forgive how he had left my child to the care of a stable boy and a house steward after I had placed her in his care. “Be absolutely silent. And, no, you are not dismissed to your room. Stay until I tell you that you may go.”

“Do you speak this way to me because I am a bastard? For my blood is just as good as yours and—”