“He’s probably hungry, too, isn’t he, Lacey? I’ve heard that about boys. I think there’s some cheese and biscuits on the stand by my bed. Fetch them for him, would you, dear?”

Lady Patience stood slightly more than arm’s distance away from me as she spoke past me to her lady.

“I’m not hungry, really, thank you,” I blurted out before Lacey could lumber to her feet. “I’m here because I was told to make myself available to you, in the mornings, for as long as you wanted me.”

That was a careful rephrasing. What King Shrewd had actually said to me was, “Go to her chambers each morning, and do whatever it is she thinks you ought to be doing so she leaves me alone. And keep doing it until she is as weary of you as I am of her.” His bluntness had astounded me, for I had never seen him so beleaguered as that day. Verity came in the door of the chamber as I was scuttling out, and he, too, looked much the worse for wear. Both men spoke and moved as if suffering from too much wine the night before, and yet I had seen them both at table last night, and there had been a marked lack of either merriness or wine. Verity tousled my head as I went past him. “More like his father every day,” he remarked to a scowling Regal behind him. Regal glared at me as he entered the King’s chamber and loudly closed the door behind him.

So here I was, in my lady’s chamber, and she was skirting about me and talking past me as if I were an animal that might suddenly strike out at her or soil the carpets. I could tell that it afforded Lacey much amusement.

“Yes. I already knew that, you see, because I was the one who had asked the King that you be sent here,” Lady Patience explained carefully to me.

“Yes, ma’am.” I shifted on my bit of seat space and tried to look intelligent and well mannered. Recalling the earlier times we had met, I could scarcely blame her for treating me like a dolt.

A silence fell. I looked around at things in the room. Lady Patience looked toward a window. Lacey sat and smirked to herself and pretended to be tatting lace.

“Oh. Here.” Swift as a diving hawk, Lady Patience stooped down and seized the black terrier pup by the scruff of the neck. He yelped in surprise, and his mother looked up in annoyance as Lady Patience thrust him into my arms. “This one’s for you. He’s yours now. Every boy should have a pet.”

I caught the squirming puppy and managed to support his body before she let go of him. “Or maybe you’d rather have a bird? I have a cage of finches in my bedchamber. You could have one of them, if you’d rather.”

“Uh, no. A puppy’s fine. A puppy is wonderful.” The second half of the statement was made to the pup. My instinctive response to his high-pitched yi-yi-yi had been to quest out to him with calm. His mother had sensed my contact with him and approved. She settled back into her basket with the white pup with blithe unconcern. The puppy looked up at me and met my eyes directly. This, in my experience, was rather unusual. Most dogs avoided prolonged direct eye contact. But also unusual was his awareness. I knew from surreptitious experiments in the stable that most puppies his age had little more than fuzzy self-awareness, and were mostly tuned to mother and milk and immediate needs. This little fellow had a solidly established identity within himself, and a deep interest in all that was going on around him. He liked Lacey, who fed him bits of meat, and was wary of Patience, not because she was cruel, but because she stumbled over him and kept putting him back in the basket each time he laboriously clambered out. He thought I smelled very exciting, and the scents of horses and birds and other dogs were like colors in his mind, images of things that as yet had no shape or reality for him, but that he nonetheless found fascinating. I imaged the scents for him and he climbed my chest, wriggling, sniffing and licking me in his excitement. Take me, show me, take me.

“. . . even listening?”

I winced, expecting a rap from Burrich, then came back to awareness of where I was and of the small woman standing before me with her hands on her hips.

“I think something’s wrong with him,” she abruptly observed to Lacey. “Did you see how he was sitting there, staring at the puppy? I thought he was about to go off into some sort of fit.”

Lacey smiled benignly and went on with her tatting. “Fair reminded me of you, lady, when you start pottering about with your leaves and bits of plants and end up staring at the dirt.”

“Well,” said Patience, clearly displeased. “It is quite one thing for an adult to be pensive,” she observed firmly, “and another for a boy to stand about looking daft.”