Hours later the candles were guttering and the fire burned low. A change in the air of my room let me know that Chade had opened his soundless door to me. I arose and went to him. But with every step I took up that drafty staircase, my anger grew. It was not the kind of anger that led to ranting and blows between men. This was an anger born as much from weariness and frustration as from any hurt. This was the sort of anger that led a man to stop everything, to say simply, “I cannot bear this anymore.”

“Cannot bear what?” Chade asked me. He looked up from where he hunched over some concoction he was grinding on his stained stone table. There was genuine concern in his voice. It made me really stop and look at the man I addressed. A tall, skinny old assassin. Pox-scarred. Hair gone almost entirely white now. Wearing the familiar gray wool robe, always with stains or the tiny burns he inflicted on his clothes while he worked. I wondered how many men he had killed for his king, killed simply at a word or nod from Shrewd. Killed without question, true to his oath. For all those deaths, he was a gentle man. Suddenly I had a question, a question more pressing than answering his question.

“Chade,” I asked, “have you ever killed a man for your own sake?”

He looked startled. “For my own sake?”

“Yes.”

“To protect my own life?”

“Yes. I don’t mean when on the King’s business. I mean killed a man to … make your life simpler.”

He snorted. “Of course not.” He looked at me strangely.

“Why not?” I pressed.

He looked incredulous. “One simply does not go about killing people for convenience. It’s wrong. It’s called murder, boy.”

“Unless you do it for your king.”

“Unless you do it for your king,” he agreed easily.

“Chade. What’s the difference? If you do it for yourself, or if you do it for Shrewd?”

He sighed and gave up on the mixture he was making. He moved around the end of the table, sat on a tall stool there. “I remember asking these questions. But of myself, as my mentor was gone by the time I was your age.” He met my eyes firmly. “It comes down to faith, boy. Do you believe in your king? And your king has to be more to you than your half brother, or your grandfather. He has to be more than good old Shrewd, or fine honest Verity. He has to be the King. The heart of the kingdom, the center of the wheel. If he is that, and if you have faith that the Six Duchies are worth preserving, that the good of all our people are furthered by dispensing the King’s justice, then, well.”

“Then you can kill for him.”

“Exactly.”

“Have you ever killed against your own judgment?”

“You have many questions this night,” he warned me quietly.

“Perhaps you have left me alone too long to think of them all. When we met near nightly, and talked often and I was busy all the time, I did not think so much. But now I do.”

He nodded slowly. “Thinking is not always … comforting. It is always good, but not always comforting. Yes. I’ve killed against my own judgment. Again, it came down to faith. I had to believe that the folk who gave the order knew more than I did, and were wiser in the ways of the wider world.”

I was silent for a long moment. Chade started to relax. “Come in. Don’t stand there in the draft. Let’s have a glass of wine together, and then I need to talk to you about—”

“Have you ever killed solely on the basis of your own judgment? For the good of the kingdom?”

For a time Chade looked at me, troubled. I did not look away. He did, finally, staring down at his old hands, rubbing their papery-white skin against each other as he fingered the brilliant red pocks. “I do not make those judgments.” He looked up at me suddenly. “I never accepted that burden, nor wished to. It is not our place, boy. Those decisions are for the King.”

“I am not ‘boy,’” I pointed out, surprising myself. “I am FitzChivalry.”

“With an emphasis on the Fitz,” Chade pointed out harshly. “You are the illegitimate get of a man who did not step up to become king. He abdicated. And in that abdication, he set aside from himself the making of judgments. You are not king, Fitz, nor even the son of a true King. We are assassins.”

“Why do we stand by while the true King is poisoned?” I asked bluntly then. “I see it, you see it. He is lured into using herbs that steal his mind and, while he cannot think well, lured to use ones that make him even more foolish. We know its immediate source, and I suspect its true source. And yet we watch him dwindle and grow feeble. Why? Where is the faith in that?”