Fool’s Quest

‘Are you hungry?’

‘A bit. Fitz. I don’t remember the end of last night. We were talking at the table, and now I’m waking up in the bed.’ His hand groped toward his lower back and cautiously touched the dressings there. ‘What’s this?’

‘An abscess on your back opened. You fainted, and while you could not feel the pain, I cleaned it out and bandaged it. And a few others.’

‘They hurt less. The pressure is gone,’ he admitted. It was painful to watch his progress as he manoeuvred his body to the edge of the bed. He worked to get out of the bed with as few motions as possible. ‘If you would put the food out?’ he asked quietly, and I heard his unvoiced request that I leave him to care for himself.

Under the hopping kettle lid I found a layer of pale dumplings over a thick gravy containing chunks of venison and root vegetables. I recognized one of Kettricken’s favourite dishes and wondered if she were personally selecting the Fool’s menus. It would be like her.

By the time I had set out the Fool’s food, he was making his way to the hearth and his chair. He moved with more certainty, still sliding his feet lest there be an obstacle, still leading with an outstretched hand, tottering and wavering, but not needing nor asking my help. He found the chair and lowered himself into it. He did not allow his back to rest against the chair. As his fingers butterflied over the cutlery, I said quietly, ‘After you’ve eaten, I’d like to change the dressings on your back.’

‘You won’t really “like” to do it, and I won’t enjoy it, but I can no longer have the luxury of refusing such things.’

‘That’s true,’ I said after his words had fallen down a well of silence. ‘Your life still hangs in the balance, Fool.’

He smiled. It did not look pretty: it stretched the scars on his face. ‘If it were only my life, old friend, I would have lain down beside the road and let go of it long ago.’

I waited. He began to eat. ‘Vengeance?’ I asked quietly. ‘It’s a poor motive for doing anything. If you take vengeance it doesn’t undo what they did. Doesn’t restore whatever they destroyed.’ My mind went back through the years. I spoke slowly, not sure if I wanted to share this even with him. ‘One drunken night of ranting, of shouting at people that were not there,’ I swallowed the lump in my throat, ‘and I realized that no one could go back in time and undo what they’d done to me. No one could unhurt me. And I forgave them.’

‘But the difference, Fitz, is that Burrich and Molly never meant to hurt you. What they did, they did for themselves, believing you dead and gone. And for them, life had to go on.’

He took another bite of dumpling and chewed it slowly. He drank a bit of yellow wine and cleared his throat. ‘Once we were a good distance offshore, the crew did what I had known they would. They took whatever we had that they thought was of value. All the little cubes of memory-stone that Prilkop had painstakingly selected and carried so far were lost to him then. The crew had no idea what they were. Most could not hear the poetry and music and history that were stored in them. Those who could were alarmed. The captain ordered all the cubes thrown overboard. Then they worked us like the slaves they intended us to become once they found a place to sell us.’

I sat silent and transfixed. The words came from the usually reticent Fool in a smooth flow. I wondered if he had rehearsed his tale during his hours alone. Did his blindness accentuate his loneliness and propel him toward this openness?

‘I was in despair. Prilkop seemed to harden every day, muscled by the work, but I was too recently healed. I grew sicker and weaker. At night, huddled on the open deck, in the wind and rain, he would look up at the stars and remind me that we were travelling in the correct direction. ‘We no longer look like White Prophets, we two, but when we make shore, it will be in a place where people value us. Endure, and we will get there.’

He drank a bit more wine. I sat quietly and waited while he ate some food. ‘We got there,’ he said at last. ‘And Prilkop was almost correct. When we reached port, he was sold at the slave auction and I …’ His voice trickled away. ‘Oh, Fitz. This telling wearies me. I do not wish to remember it all. It was not a good time for me. But Prilkop found someone who would believe him, and before many days had passed, he came back for me. They bought me, quite cheaply, and his patron helped us complete our journey back to Clerres and our school.’

He sipped his wine. I wondered at the gap in his story. What was too terrible for him to remember?

He spoke to my thought. ‘I must finish this tale quickly. I have no heart for the details. We arrived at Clerres, and when the tide went out, we crossed to the White Island. There our patron delivered us to the gates of the school. The Servants who opened the doors to us were astonished for they immediately recognized what we were. They thanked our patron and rewarded him and quickly took us in. Collator Pierec was the Servant who was in charge, now. They took us to the Room of the Records, and there they leafed through scrolls and scripts and bound pages until they found Prilkop.’ The Fool shook his head slowly, marvelling. ‘They tried to reckon how old he was, and failed. He was old, Fitz, very old indeed, a White Prophet who had lived far past the end of his time of making changes. They were astonished.

‘And more astonished when they discovered who I was.’

His spoon chased food around his bowl. He found and ate a piece of dumpling, and then a piece of venison. I thought he was making me wait for the tale, and taking pleasure in my suspense. I didn’t begrudge him this.

‘I was the White Prophet they had discarded. The boy who had been told he was mistaken, that there was already a White Prophet for this time, and that she had already gone north to bring about the changes that must be.’ He clattered his spoon down suddenly. ‘Fitz, I was far more stupid than the Fool you have always named me. I was an idiot, a fatuous mindless …’ He strangled on his sudden anger, knotting his scarred hands and pounding them on the table. ‘How could I have expected them to greet me with anything except horror? For all the years they had kept me at the school, confined me, drugged me that I might dream more clearly for them … For the hours they spent needling her insidious images into my skin to make me unWhite! For all the days they tried to confuse and confound me, showing me dozens, hundreds of prophecies and dreams that they thought would convince me I was not what I knew myself to be! How could I have gone back there, thinking they would be glad to see me, and quick to acknowledge how wrong they had been? How could I think they would want to know they had made such an immense error?’

He began to weep as he spoke, his blinded eyes streaming tears that were diverted by the scars on his face. Some detached part of me noted that his tears seemed clearer than they had been and wondered if this meant some infection had been conquered. Another, saner part of me was saying softly, ‘Fool. Fool. It’s all right. You are here with me now, and they cannot hurt you any more. You are safe here. Oh, Fool. You are safe. Beloved.’

When I gave him his old name, he gasped. He had half-risen to stand over the table. Now he sank back down into Chade’s old chair, and heedless of his bowl and the sticky table, put his head down on his folded arms and wept like a child. For a moment, his rage flared again and he shouted, ‘I was so stupid!’ Then the sobbing stole his voice again. For a time, I let him weep. There is nothing useful anyone can say to a man when such despair is on him. Shudders ran over him like convulsions of sorrow. His sobs came slower and softer and finally ceased, but he did not lift his head. He spoke to the table in a thick, dead voice.

‘I had always believed they were mistaken. That they truly had not known.’ He gave a final sniff, a sigh and lifted his head. He groped for his napkin and wiped his eyes with it. ‘Fitz, they knew. They had always known I was the one. They knew I was the true White Prophet. The Pale Woman was the one they had made. They made her, Fitz, as if they were trying to breed a pigeon with a light head and tail. Or as if you and Burrich were breeding for a colt with the stamina of the stud and the temperament of the dam. They’d created her, there in the school, and they’d taught her and filled her with the prophecies and dreams that suited their purposes. They’d made her believe and twisted her dreams to make them foretell what they wanted to happen. And they’d sent her out. And held me back.’ His head sank down. He pillowed his brow on his forearms and fell silent.

One of Chade’s exercises when he was training me was to put the pieces of something back together. It began with simple things: he’d drop a plate, and I would have to reassemble it to the best of my ability. The challenges advanced. The plate would fall, and I had to look at the pieces and mentally assemble it. Then I would be presented with a bag of pieces of something, broken crockery or cut harness or something of that ilk, and I had to put it back into a whole. After a time, the bag would hold not just the destroyed item but other random bits of things that looked as if they belonged with it. It was a physical exercise to teach my mind to assemble bits of facts and random gossip into a comprehensible whole.

So now my mind was at work, assembling bits so that I could almost hear the snicking of pieces of a teapot being put back together. The messenger’s tale of bearing children who were taken from her meshed with the Fool’s tale of the Servants creating their own White Prophets. The race of Whites with their gift of prescience had vanished from our world long ago; the Fool had told me that when we were still boys. He claimed the Whites had begun to intermarry with humans, diluting their bloodlines until those who carried that heritage showed no sign of it and often were unaware of it. And he had added that only rarely was a child born who, by chance, reflected that ancient heritage. He had been one such, and was fortunate enough that when he was born his parents knew what he was. And they knew there was a school at Clerres where children who showed the physical traits of Whites were taken and taught to record their dreams and their flashes or visions of the future. Vast libraries of recorded visions were held there and studied by the Servants so that they might learn the events that the future of the world would turn upon. And so, while he was very young, his parents had given him to the Servants to be taught to use his talents for the good of all mankind.

But the Servants had not believed he was the one true White Prophet. I had known a little of that. He had confided that they had held him there long past the time when he felt he needed to be out, changing the world’s events to set us all on a better path. I had known that he had escaped them and set out on his own, to become what he had believed he must be.

And now I knew the darker side of that place. I had helped Burrich to select breeding lines for dogs and horses. I knew how it was done. A white mare and a white stallion might not always yield a white foal, but if they did, chances were that if we bred that white offspring to another white horse, or bred it back to a sibling, we would get a white foal. And so, if King Shrewd desired it, he could have generations of white horses for his guard. Burrich had been too wise a horse-breeder to inbreed our stock too deeply. He would have been shamed to have a crippled or malformed foal born due to his negligence.

I wondered if the Servants shared his morality in that regard. Somehow I doubted it. So if the Servants desired it, they could likewise breed children with the pale skin and colourless eyes of White Prophets. And in some, prescience would manifest. Through those children, the Servants could gain the ability to glimpse the future and the various paths it might take, depending on events large and small. By the Fool’s account, they had been doing it for generations, possibly since before he was born. So now the Servants had a vast reservoir of possible futures to study. The future could be manipulated, not for the benefit of the world at large, but for the comfort and good fortune of the Servants alone. It was brilliant, and it was obscene.

My mind made the next leap. ‘How can you fight people who know your next move before you do?’

‘Ah.’ He sounded almost pleased. ‘You grasp it quickly. I knew you would. Even before I give you the final bits, you see it. And yet, Fitz, they don’t. They didn’t see me returning at all. Why? Why would they resort to something as crude as physical torture to find out what I knew? Because you made me, my Catalyst. You created me, a creature outside of any future ever seen. I left you because I knew how potent we were together. I knew that we could change the future of the world, and I feared that if we remained together, with me blind to the future, we might set terrible things in motion. Unintentionally, of course, but all the more powerful for that. So I left you, knowing it tore your heart as deeply as it tore mine. And blind, even then, to the fact that we had already done exactly that.’

He lifted his head and turned his face toward me. ‘We blinded them, Fitz. I came seeking you, a lost Farseer. In almost every future I could foresee you either never existed or you died. I knew, I knew that if I could see you through and keep you alive, you would be the Catalyst to set the world into a new and better path. And you did. The Six Duchies remained intact. Stone dragons rose into the air, the evil magic of Forging was ended, and true dragons were restored to the world. Because of you. Every time I snatched you back from the brink of death, we changed the world. Yet all those things the Servants had also glimpsed, even if they believed they were unlikely to come to pass. And when they sent out their Pale Woman to be the false White Prophet, and kept me confined to Clerres, they thought they had guaranteed the outcome they wished. You would not exist

‘But we thwarted them. And then you did the unthinkable. Fitz, I died. I knew I would die. In all the prophecies I’d ever read in the Clerres library, in all the dream-visions I’d ever had, I died there. And so I did. But in no future foreseen by anyone, ever, in all their trove of prophecies, was I pulled back alive from the other side.

‘That changed everything. You flung us into a future unseen. They grope now, wondering what will become of all their plans. For the Servants do not plan for decades, but for generations. Knowing the times and means of their own deaths, they have extended their lives. But we have taken much of that power from them. The White children born since my “death” are the only ones who can look into the future from that time. They grope through the futures where once they galloped. And so they must seek that which they most fear now: the true White Prophet for this generation. They know he is out there, somewhere, beyond their knowledge and control. They know they must seize him soon, or all they have built may come tumbling down.’

His words rang with his conviction. And yet I could not keep a smile from my face. ‘So you changed their world. You are the Catalyst now. Not I.’

All expression fled his face. He stared past me, his filmed eyes fixed and distant. ‘Could such a thing be?’ he asked in wonder. ‘Is that what I glimpsed, once, in the dreams where I was not a White Prophet?’

‘I have no answer for that. I may no longer be your Catalyst, but I am certain I am not a prophet either. Come, Fool. The dressings on your back have to be changed.’

For a time he was very silent and still. Then, ‘Very well,’ he acceded.

I led him across the room to Chade’s table. He sat down on the bench there and his hands fluttered, settled and then explored the tabletop, finding the supplies Chade had set out for me. ‘I remember this,’ he said quietly.

‘Little has changed here over the years.’ I moved to the back of his seat and studied his nightshirt. ‘The wounds have oozed. I put a cloth on your back, but they’ve soaked through that as well. Your nightshirt is stuck to your back. I’m going to fetch warm water, soak it loose, and clean them again. I’ll fetch you a clean nightshirt now and set the water to warm.’

By the time I returned with the basin of water and the clean shirt, the Fool had arranged my supplies for me. ‘Lavender oil, by the scent of it,’ he said, touching the first pot. ‘Bear grease with garlic in here.’

‘Good choices,’ I said. ‘Here comes the water.’

He hissed as I sponged it onto his back. I gave the half-formed scabs time to soften and then gave him the choice. ‘Fast or slow?’

‘Slow,’ he said, and so I began with the lowest one on his back, a puncture far too close to his spine. By the time I had painstakingly freed the fabric from the oozing wound, sweat had plastered his hair to his skull. ‘Fitz,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Just do it.’

His knotty hands found the table’s edge and gripped it. I did not rip the shirt free, but I peeled it away from him, ignoring the sounds he made. At one point he hammered on the stone table with his fist, then yelped at that pain and dropped his fist to his lap and his brow to the table. ‘It’s done,’ I told him as I rolled the lifted shirt across his shoulders and let it drape there.

‘How bad are they?’

I pulled a branch of candles closer and studied his back. So thin. The bones of his spine were a row of hummocks down his back. The wounds gaped bloodlessly at me. ‘They’re clean, but open. We want to keep them open so that they heal from the inside out. Brace yourself again.’ He kept silent as I wiped each injury with the lavender oil. When I added the bear grease with garlic, the scents did not blend well. I held my breath. When each had been tended, I put a clean cloth over his back, trusting the grease to hold it in place. ‘There’s a clean shirt here,’ I said. ‘Try not to displace the dressing as you put it on.’

I walked to the other end of the room. His injuries had spotted his bedding with blood and fluid. I would leave a note asking Ash to bring fresh linens. Then I wondered if the boy could read, and decided it was likely so. Even if his mother had not demanded it of him for her business, Chade would have immediately set him to learning. For now, I turned his pillows and tugged the bedding straight.

‘Fitz?’ he called from the worktable.

‘I’m here. Just straightening your bedding.’

‘You’d have made a fine valet.’