I slept that night. The next morning I breakfasted with the Fool, and then received an invitation to game with Integrity and Prosper. I did not wish to go but they would not let me refuse. I knew they meant well and hoped to distract me from my grief. I dressed in fussy clothing. I wore no hidden knives and carried no poison. I rolled dice made of jade and hematite and lost badly in games of chance that I’d never learned. My bets were made with small silver coins instead of the copper ones that crossed tables in the taverns of my youth. That evening I returned to visit the Fool, to find Hap already there entertaining Ash and Per with some very silly songs. I sat and listened with a pleasant expression on my face.

Decisions. No. A decision. The Fool had been right. If I did not choose what to do with what remained of my life, someone else would. I felt like ore, pounded to powder, heated until I’d melted and poured away. And now I was hardening into something I’d never been before. My awareness of what I would be came to me slowly, like numbness wearing off after a heavy blow. Inexorably. In my sleepless nights, my plans took shape. I knew what I would have to do, and in my cold evaluation, I knew I would have to do it alone.

Before I began, I would have to finish, I told myself. Late one night, I found myself smiling sourly as I recalled how the Fool had finished his role as Lord Golden. His plan to exit had not gone exactly as he’d imagined. He’d had to make a headlong flight from his creditors. Mine, I resolved, would be a gentler fading. A kinder vanishing than his had been.

Gradually I blundered into a peculiar normality. I looked at each person I would leave behind and considered well what each needed, as well as how I must prepare for my undertaking. I kept my word to the Fool: I took Ash down to the practice grounds and gave him over to Foxglove. When she demanded a training partner of a suitable size for him, I gave her Perseverance, and she started both of them with wooden swords. Foxglove penetrated Ash’s disguise far more swiftly than I had. The second day she had the lads she drew me aside and obliquely asked me if I had noticed anything “odd” about Ash. I replied that I knew how to mind my own business, and that made her smile and nod. If she varied Ash’s training at all, I did not notice.

I gave my guard over to Foxglove’s keeping. The few remaining Rousters accepted her hammering discipline and began to be useful. She demanded they surrender their Rouster colors and integrate with my guard. Privately, I asked her to make them available for any special duty that Lord Chade might require of them. With his network of spies and errand runners tattering away, I wondered if he might not require a guard of his own, something the old assassin had never supplied to himself. She nodded gravely and I left it in her very capable hands.

The next time Prosper and Integrity invited me to game, I countered with an invitation to the practice yards, and there I took my cousins’ measures. They were not the pampered castle cats that some might have thought them, and it was there, wooden blade against wooden blade, that I began to know them as men and kin. They were good men. Prosper had a sweetheart and looked forward to her being announced as his intended. Integrity did not bear the weight of the crown of the king-in-waiting, and had a dozen ladies vying to ride and game and drink with him. I gave to them as much as I could of what Verity had supplied to me. I became the man older than their father, telling them the stories of their grandfather that I thought they should hear.

I allowed myself my own farewells. Winter at Buckkeep Castle took me back to the days of my childhood. It was true that if I had wanted, I could have joined the lords and ladies elegantly attired and perfumed, rolling dice or playing other games of chance. There were singers from Jamaillia and poets from the Spice Islands. But still, in front of the Great Hearth, huntsmen fletched arrows and women brought their spinning or embroidery. There the working folk of the castle listened to the younger generation of minstrels or watched apprentices endlessly rehearse their puppetry while doing their tasks by firelight. When I was a lad, even a bastard had been welcomed there.

I took comfort there, coming and going quietly, enjoying the music, the awkward courtships among the younger staff, the pranks of the boys and girls, and the soft firelight and slower pace. More than once I saw Ash there and Perseverance, and twice I saw Spark, watching Ash’s friend from a distance with a pensive look on her face.

Chade remained genially vague. He took his meals in his room. He was welcoming when I called on him but never addressed me in a way that indicated he clearly recalled who I was and what we had been to each other. He always had an attendant. Often it was Steady or Shine. Sometimes it was a pretty Skill-apprentice named Welcome. He delighted in her attention and she seemed fond of him. I walked in once to find her combing out his white hair and singing a song about seven foxes. The few times I contrived to be alone with him by asking her to run some small errand, she went quickly and returned before I had more than the briefest opportunity to try to jostle some true response from Chade.