Fool’s Errand. Робин Хобб

sometimes it has been a near thing. I took a breath. ‘Tell me about it.’ I didn’t want to hear it, but I knew he had to tell it. Better to get it over with.

      Hap came with a sigh, to sit on the other side of Nighteyes. He picked up a twig from the ground beside him and teased the fire with it. ‘I don’t think she meant for me to find out. Her husband doesn’t live at Buckkeep. He travelled in to surprise her, to spend Springfest with her.’ As he spoke, the twig caught fire. He tossed it in. His fingers wandered to idly groom Nighteyes.

      I pictured some honest old farmer, wed to a minstrel in the quiet years of his life, perhaps with children grown from an earlier marriage. He loved her, then, to make a trip to Buckkeep to surprise her. Springfest was traditionally for lovers, old and new.

      ‘His name is Dewin,’ Hap went on. ‘And he’s some sort of kin to Prince Dutiful. A distant cousin or something. He’s a tall man, always dressed very grand. He wore a cloak, twice as big around as it need be, collared with fur. And he wears silver on both wrists. He’s strong, too. At the Springfest dancing, he lifted Starling right up and swung her around, and all the folk stood back to watch them.’ Hap was watching my face as he spoke. I think he found my obvious dismay comforting. ‘I should have known you didn’t know. You wouldn’t cuckold a grand man like that.’

      ‘I wouldn’t cuckold any man,’ I managed to say. ‘Not knowingly.’

      He sighed as if relieved. ‘So you’ve taught me.’ Boyishly, his mind instantly reverted to how it had affected him. ‘I was upset when I saw them kiss. I’d never seen anyone except you and Starling kiss like that. I thought she was betraying you, and then when I heard him introduced as her husband …’ He cocked his head at me. ‘It really hurt my feelings. I thought then that you knew and didn’t care. I thought that perhaps all these years you had taught me one thing, and done another. I wondered if you thought me so dull I’d never discover it, if you and Starling laughed about it as if it were a joke for me to be so stupid. It built up in my mind until I began to question everything you’d ever taught me about anything.’ He looked back at the fire. ‘It felt horrible, to be so betrayed.’

      I was glad to hear him sort it out this way. Better far that he consider only what it meant to him, rather than how it could cut me. Let him follow his own thoughts where they would lead. My own mind was moving in another direction, creaking like an old cart dragged out of a shed and newly greased for spring. I resisted the turning of the wheels that led me to an inevitable conclusion. Starling was married. Why not? She’d had nothing to lose and all to gain. A comfortable home with her grand lord, some minor title no doubt, wealth and security for her old age, and for him, a lovely and charming wife, a celebrated minstrel, and he could bask in her reflected glory and enjoy the envy of other men.

      And when she wearied of him, she could take to the road as minstrels always did, and have a fling with me, and neither man ever the wiser. Neither? Could I assume there were only two of us?

      ‘Did you think you were the only one she bedded?’

      A direct spoken lad, Hap. I wondered what questions he had asked Starling on the ride home.

      ‘I suppose I didn’t think about it at all,’ I admitted. So many things were easier to live with if you didn’t give them much thought. I suppose I had known that Starling shared herself with other men. She was a minstrel; they did such things. So I had excused my bedding with her to myself, and indirectly to Hap. She never spoke of it, I never asked, and her other lovers were hypothetical beings, faceless, and bodiless. They were certainly not husbands, however. She was vowed to him, and him to her. That made all the difference to me.

      ‘What will you do now?’

      An excellent question. One I had been carefully not considering. ‘I’m not sure,’ I lied.

      ‘Starling said that it was none of my business; that it hurt no one. She said that if I told you, I’d be the cruel one, hurting you, not her. She said that she’d always been careful not to hurt you, that you’d had enough pain in your life. When I said that you had a right to know, she said you had a greater right not to know.’

      Starling’s clever tongue. She’d left him no way to feel right about himself. Hap looked at me now, his mismatched eyes loyal as a hound’s, and waited for me to pass judgement on him. I told him the truth. ‘I’d rather know the truth from you than have you watch me be deceived.’

      ‘Have I hurt you, then?’

      I shook my head slowly. ‘I’ve hurt myself, boy.’ And I had. I’d never been a minstrel; I had no right to a minstrel’s ways. Those who make a living with their fingers and tongues have flintier hearts than the rest of us, I suppose. Sooner a kindly wolverine than a faithful minstrel, so the saying goes. I wondered if Starling’s husband paid heed to it.

      ‘I thought you would be angry. She warned me that you might get angry enough to hurt her.’

      ‘Did you believe that?’ That stung as sharply as the revelation.

      He took a quick breath, hesitated again, then said quickly, ‘You’ve a temper. And I’ve never had to tell you something that might hurt you. Something that might make you feel stupid.’

      Perceptive lad. More so than I had thought. ‘I am angry, Hap. I’m angry at myself.’

      He looked at the fire. ‘I feel selfish, because I feel better now.’

      ‘I’m glad you feel better. I’m glad things are easy between us again. Now. Set all that aside and tell me about the rest of Springfest. What did you think of Buckkeep Town?’

      So he talked and I listened. He’d seen Buckkeep and Springfest with a boy’s eyes, and as he spoke I realized how greatly both castle and town had changed since my days there. From his descriptions, I knew the city had managed to grow, clawing out building space from the harsh cliffs above it, and expanding out onto pilings. He described floating taverns and mercantiles. He talked, too, of traders from Bingtown and the islands beyond it, as well as those from the Out Islands. Buckkeep Town had increased its stature as a trade port. When he spoke of the Great Hall of Buckkeep and the room where he had stayed as Starling’s guest, I recognized that a great deal had changed up at the keep as well. He spoke of carpets and fountains, rich hangings on every wall, and cushioned chairs and glittering chandeliers. His descriptions put me more in mind of Regal’s fine manor at Tradeford than the stark fortress I had once called home. I suspected Chade’s influence there as much as Kettricken’s. The old assassin had always been fond of fine things, not to mention comfort. I had already resolved never to return to Buckkeep. Why should it be so daunting to learn that the place I recalled, that grim stronghold of black stone, did not really even exist any more?

      Hap had other tales, too, of the towns they had passed through on their way to Buckkeep and back again. One he told me put a cold chill in my belly. ‘I got scared near to death one morning at Hardin’s Spit,’ he began, and I did not recognize the name of the village. I had known, dimly, that many folk who had fled the coast during the Red Ship years had returned to found new towns, not always on the ashes of the old. I nodded as if I knew of the place. Probably the last time I had been through it, it had been no more than a wide place in the road. Hap’s eyes were wide as he spoke, and I knew he had, for the moment, forgotten all about Starling’s deception.

      ‘It was on our way to Springfest. We had spent the night at the inn there, Starling singing for our supper and a room, and they were all so kind and well spoken to us there that I thought Hardin’s Spit a very fine place. In the common room, when Starling was not singing, I heard angry talk about a Witted one who had been taken for magicking cows so they would not yield, but I paid little attention to it. It just seemed men talking too loud after too much beer. The inn gave us an upstairs room. I woke up early, much too early for Starling, but I could not sleep any more. So I sat by the window and watched the folk come and go in the streets below. Outside, in the square, folk began to gather. I thought it might be a market or a Spring fair. But then they dragged a woman out there, all bruised and bloody. They tied her to a whipping post, and I thought they would flog her. Then I noticed