"Easy. Easy now." Burrich crossed swiftly to me, put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down in a chair. "You're shaking as if you're going into a seizure. Calm yourself."

I could not speak.

"This is what Chade and I could not puzzle out," Burrich told me. "Who had betrayed our plan? We thought of everyone. Even the Fool. For a time we feared we had sent Kettricken off in the care of a traitor."

"How could you think that? The Fool loved King Shrewd as no one else did."

"We could think of no one else who knew all our plans," Burrich said simply.

"It was not the Fool who was our downfall. It was I." And that, I think, was the moment when I came fully back to myself. I had said the most unsayable thing, faced my most unfaceable truth. I had betrayed them all. "The Fool warned me. He said I would be the death of kings, if I did not learn to leave things alone. Chade warned me. He tried to make me promise I would set no more wheels in motion. But I would not. So my actions killed my king. If I had not been helping him to Skill, he would not have been so open to his killers. I opened him up, reaching for Verity. But those two leeches came in instead. The King's assassin. Oh, in so many, many ways, Shrewd. I am so sorry, my king. So sorry. But for me, Regal would have had no reason to kill you."

"Fitz." Burrich's voice was firm. "Regal never needed a reason to kill his father. He needed only to run out of reasons to keep him alive. And you had no control over that." A sudden frown creased his brow. "Why did they kill him right then? Why did they not wait until they had the Queen as well?"

I smiled at him. "You saved her. Regal thought he had the Queen. They thought they'd stopped us when they kept you from getting horses out of the stables. Regal even bragged of it to me, when I was in my cell. That she'd had to leave with no horses. And with no warm winter things."