Under Chade’s strict directions, I ate a nourishing meal of bland and healthful food every noon. I might have taken control of his Skill magic, but he still remained my mentor and believed he knew best where my physical health was concerned. It was at this time that he confronted me about the elfbark and carryme that he had found and removed from my room when I was recovering from my “healing.” It was a sharp quarrel between us, and uncomfortable for us both. He maintained that I had a duty not to do anything that might injure or inhibit my Skill, especially now that I was Skillmaster to the Prince and his coterie. I maintained that I had a right to the privacy of my possessions. Neither of us either conceded or apologized. It simply became an area we avoided discussing.

Lord Golden had dismissed me from his service shortly after Chade had suggested he might. I was offered employment with the Queen’s Guard and accepted it with alacrity. They accepted me into their midst with an equanimity that surprised me. Evidently I was not the first odd man that Chade had slipped into their ranks. I wondered how many of them were more than what they seemed. They asked me few questions, but measured me instead with their routine drills and practices. Early afternoons I spent with the Queen’s Guard on the practice grounds. I was often found lacking, and wore the bruises to show for it.

Ostensibly, I had a bunk in the barracks with the rest of the guards but as often I slept in my workroom. If anyone wondered at my oddly loose attachment to the Queen’s Guard, no one commented on it to me. When I encountered Wim at the practice court, he congratulated me on “being an honest fighter again.” In dress, I went back to the plain blue of a Buck Guardsman, with a purple and white tunic for the times when I must show myself as belonging to the Queen. I derived an inordinate amount of pleasure from openly wearing her Fox badge on my breast. It matched the fox pin I wore within my shirt and above my heart.

I seemed to weary more swiftly and heal much more slowly than I ever had before, but despite Chade’s suggestions I did not attempt to use the Skill to speed that process. Late afternoons, while Chade was busy with diplomacy, Thick raided the kitchens for me. Together we gorged ourselves on sweets and rich pastries and fat meat. We discovered that Gilly loved raisins as much as Thick did. The ferret’s pleading dance for them could reduce Thick to tears of laughter. We all began to put on flesh, Thick probably more than was good for him. He became as round and his hair as glossy as a noble lady’s fat little lapdog. Blessed as he was now with food, care, and acceptance, a placid and sweet nature sometimes showed in the little man. I enjoyed those simple hours with him.

I even managed several evenings with Hap. We did not go to the Stuck Pig, but to a quiet alehouse, relatively new, called the Wrecked Red Ship. There we ate cheap and greasy tavern food and talked like the old friends we were becoming. It reminded me of my days with Burrich in the time just before Regal killed me. We recognized one another as men now. On our best evening, he regaled me with a long account of how Starling had swept into the woodshop, dazzled Master Gindast with her charm and fame, and carried Hap off to a day of her Buckkeep Town. “It was so strange, Tom,” he told me in a sort of wonder. “She behaved as if there had never been any quarrel or hard words between us. And so what could I do, save do the same? Do you think she has actually forgotten what she said to me?”

“I doubt she has forgotten,” I told him thoughtfully. “A forgetful minstrel soon starves to death. No. With our Starling, I think she believes that if she pretends hard enough that something is so, it becomes so. And, as you have seen, sometimes it works for her. Have you forgiven her, then?”

He looked nonplussed for a moment. Then, with a wry grin, he asked, “Would she notice if I hadn’t? She was so adept at persuading Gindast that she was all but a mother to me that I was half-convinced myself.”

I had to laugh and shrug to that. Starling had taken him to an inn frequented by traveling minstrels and there introduced him to a number of musical young ladies. They had fed him mincemeat pastries and filled him up with ale and their songs, vying for his attention. I immediately warned him facetiously about the soft and easy ways of minstrels and their stony hearts. It was a mistake. “I’ve no heart left to give to any girl,” he informed me soberly. Nonetheless, from his descriptions of several of them, it seemed to me that even if he did not have the heart, he still had an eye for them. And so I silently blessed Starling and prayed for a swift healing for my lad.

Both the Fool and Lord Golden assiduously avoided me. On several evenings when I quietly descended from the workroom to enter Lord Golden’s apartments through my old bedroom, I found him not at home. Dutiful told me that he gamed more frequently now, in Buckkeep Town where such amusements were gaining popularity as well as at private parties in the keep. I missed him, but also dreaded eventually confronting him. I did not want him to read in my eyes that I had betrayed him to Chade. It was for his own good, I excused myself. Dragons be damned. If simply keeping him away from Aslevjal would keep him alive, then his displeasure would be a small cost. That was what I told myself at the times when I found myself believing his wild prophecies. At other times, I was sure there was no frozen dragon and no Pale Woman and hence no reason for him to go to Aslevjal at all. And thus I justified it that I plotted with Chade against him. As for why he avoided me, I suspected he harbored some odd sense of shame about the tattoos that I now knew he bore. I knew I could not demand his company, nor force mine upon him. I could only hope that as days passed, the healing rift between us would further close.