“You can't afford that kind of pride,” she said bluntly. She pushed her hair back from her face. “Look around you, Fitz. A dozen years on your own, and what do you have? A cottage in the forest, and a handful of chickens. What do you have for brightness or warmth or sweetness? Only me. Perhaps it's only a day or two of my life, here and there, but I'm the only real person in your life.” Her voice grew harder. “Crumbs from another man's table are better than starving. You need me.”

“Hap. Nighteyes,” I pointed out coldly.

She dismissed them. “An orphan boy I brought you and a decrepit wolf.”

That she should disparage them so not only affronted me, it forced me to face how differently we perceived things. I suppose that if we had lived together, day in and day out, such disagreements would have manifested themselves long ago. But the interludes we had shared had not been ones of philosophical discussions, or even practical considerations. We had come together at her convenience, to share my bed and my table. She had slept and eaten and sung and watched me at my tasks in a life she didn't share. The minor disagreements we had were forgotten between one visit and the next. She had brought me Hap as if he were a stray kitten, and given no thought since then as to what we might have become to one another. This quarrel was not only ending what we had shared, but exposing that we had truly shared very little at all. I felt twice devastated by it. Bitter words from a past life came back to me. The Fool had warned me: “She has no true affection for Fitz, you know, only for being able to say she knew FitzChivalry.” Perhaps, despite all the years we'd shared, that was still true.

I held my tongue for fear of all I might say; I think she mistook my silence for a wavering in my resolve. She suddenly took a deep breath. She smiled at me wearily. “Oh, Fitz. We need one another in ways neither of us likes to admit.” She gave a small sigh. “Make breakfast. I'm going to get dressed. Things always seem worst in the morning on an empty stomach.” She left the room.

A fatalistic patience came over me. I set out the breakfast things as she dressed. I knew I had reached my decision. It was as if Hap's words last night had extinguished a candle inside me. My feelings for Starling had changed that completely. We sat at table together, and she tried to make all seem as it had before; but I kept thinking, This is probably the last time I'll watch how she swirls her tea to cool it, or how she waves her bread about as she talks. I let her talk, and she kept her words to inconsequential things, trying to fix my interest on where she planned to go next, and what Lady Amity had worn to some occasion. The more she talked, the farther away she seemed from me. As I watched her, I had the strangest sense of something forgotten, something missed. She took another piece of cheese, alternating bites of it and the bread.

A sudden realization trickled through me like a drop of cold water down the spine. I interrupted her.

“You knew Chade was coming to see me.”

A fraction of a second too late, she lifted her brows in surprise. “Chade? Here?”

These were habits of mind I thought I had discarded. Ways of thinking, taught to me painstakingly by a skilled mentor in the hours between dusk and dawn during the years of my youth. It was a way of sifting facts and assembling them, a training that let the mind make swift leaps to conclusions that were not conjectures. Begin with a simple observation. Starling had not commented on the cheese. Any cheese was a luxury for the boy and me, let alone a fine ripe cheese like this one. She should have been surprised to see it on my table, but she was not. She had said nothing of the Sandsedge brandy last night. Because neither had surprised her. I was both astonished and pleased, in a horrified way, at how swiftly my mind leapt from point to point, until I suddenly looked down on the inevitable landscape the facts formed. “You've never offered to take Hap anywhere before this. You took the boy off to Buckkeep so that Chade could see me alone.” One possible conclusion from that chilled me. “In case he had to kill me. There would be no witnesses.”

“Fitz!” she rebuked me, both angry and shocked.

I almost didn't hear her. Once the pebbles of thought had started bouncing, the avalanche of conclusions was bound to follow. “All these years. All your visits. You've been his eyes on me, haven't you? Tell me. Do you check on Burrich and Nettle several times a year as well?”

She looked at me coldly, denying nothing. “I had to seek them out. To give Burrich the horses. You wanted me to do that.”

Yes. My mind raced on. The horses would have served as a perfect introduction. Any other gift, Burrich would have refused. But Ruddy was rightfully his, a gift from Verity. All those years ago, Starling had told him that the Queen had sent Sooty 's colt as well, in token of services done for the Farseers. I looked at her, waiting for the rest. She was a minstrel. She loved to talk. All I need do was provide the silence.