Fool’s Quest

He kept you safe.

He did. Her words were relentless. And it kept you safe, when you chose to pretend you were dead. It kept the Farseer reputation safe, too. No inconvenient bastards to muddle the line of succession. Safe. As if ‘safe’ were more important than anything else.

I hemmed my thoughts tightly from her. I was not sure what she was trying to tell me, but I was certain of one thing. I didn’t want to hear it.

Well, my child will know who her parents are! And she will know who her grandparents were! I will see to that, I will give her that, and no one will ever be able to take it away from her!

Nettle, I— But she was gone. I didn’t reach after her. There was another daughter I had failed. I’d let her grow up believing she was the daughter of another man. I’d let her mother and Burrich believe I was dead. I’d told myself, all those years, that I was keeping her safe. But she had felt denied. And abandoned.

I thought of my own father as I seldom did. I’d never even looked in his eyes. What had I felt, that he had abandoned me in Buckkeep to the care of his stablemaster? I stared at nothing. Why had I done the same to my elder daughter?

Bee. It wasn’t too late for me to be a good father to her. I knew where I should be right now, and if I used the Skill-pillar, I could be there before nightfall. It was a little dangerous, but hadn’t I risked more than that bringing the Fool through? It would be days before I dared risk any more healing on him. I should go home, gather Bee, and bring her back to Buckkeep with me. Not to give her up to Nettle, not for us to stay here, but to have her by me while I had to be here to tend the Fool. It made sense. It was what I should do.

The upper chamber was dark save for the reddish light from the fire. The Fool sat in the chair in front of it. I bit my tongue before I could ask him why he was sitting in the dark. He turned his face toward me as I approached. ‘There’s a message for you. On the table.’

‘Thank you.’

‘A young man brought it. I’m afraid that when he walked in, I was half-asleep. I screamed. I don’t know which of us was more terrified.’ His voice reached for a note of mockery, and failed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, trying to rein in my wayward thoughts. There was no sense in sharing my anguish with him. There was nothing he could do to help me, except feel ashamed that he had pulled me away from my child.

I made myself focus on his string of anxious words.

‘And now I’m afraid to go back to sleep. I didn’t think of other people coming and going from here. I don’t know how it could have escaped me. I know they must. But I can’t stop thinking about them. What if they talk to others? People will know I’m hiding here. It won’t be safe.’

‘I’m going to light some candles,’ I told him. I did not say that I needed to see his face because I could not tell how serious he was. As I kindled the first one, I asked him, ‘How are you feeling? Better than yesterday?’

‘I can’t tell, Fitz. I can’t tell yesterday from early this morning. I can’t tell early this morning from midnight. It’s all the same for me, here in the dark. You come and you go. I have food, I shit, I sleep. And I’m frightened. I suppose that means that I’m better. I remember when all I could think about was how badly every part of my body hurt. And now the pain has subsided to where I can think about how scared I am.’

I lit a second candle from the first one and set them in the holders on the table.

‘You don’t know what to say,’ he observed.

‘I don’t,’ I admitted. I tried to set my own fears aside to deal with his. ‘I know you are safe here. But I also know that no matter how often I say that, it won’t change how you feel. Fool, what can I do? What would make you feel better?’

He turned his face away from me. After a long moment, he said, ‘You should read your message. The boy blurted out it was important before he ran away.’

I picked up the small scroll on the table. Chade’s spy-seal was on it. I broke the wax free and unrolled it.

‘Fitz. Do I look that frightful? When I sat up in my chair and screamed, the boy screamed, too. As if he’d seen a corpse rise from the grave and shriek at him.’

I set the scroll aside. ‘You look like a very ill man who was deliberately starved and tortured. And your colour is … odd. Not tawny, as you were in the days of Lord Golden, nor white as you were when you were King Shrewd’s jester. You are grey. It’s not a colour one would expect a living man to be.’

He was silent for so long that I turned my eyes back to the scroll. There was to be another festive gathering tonight, the final one of the Winterfest before our nobility once more dispersed to their own duchies. Queen Elliania urged everyone to attend and asked everyone to wear their best to celebrate turning toward the growing light. Chade suggested that perhaps Lord Feldspar should make a trip to town and purchase some finery for the occasion. He suggested a tailor’s shop, and by that I knew that the garments would have been ordered and rushed to be prepared for me.

‘You’re an honest man, Fitz.’ The Fool’s voice was dull.

I sighed. Had I been too honest? ‘What good would it serve for me to lie to you? Fool, you look terrible. It breaks my heart to see you this way. The only thing I can offer myself or you is that as you eat and rest and grow stronger, your health will improve. When you are stronger, I hope to use the Skill to urge your body to repair itself. That is the only comfort that either of us have. But it will take time. And demand our patience. Haste will not serve either of us.’

‘I don’t have time, Fitz. Rather, I do. I have time to get better or time to die. But somewhere, I am sure, there is a son who needs to be rescued before the Servants of the Whites find him. With every day, with every hour, I fear they have already secured him. And with every day and every hour, I am mindful of the continued captivity of a hundred souls in a faraway place. It may seem it has little to do with us and Buckkeep and the Six Duchies, but it does. The Servants use them with no more thought than we give to penning up a chicken, or wringing a rabbit’s neck. They breed them for their insights into the future, and they use those insights to make themselves omniscient. It bothers them not at all when a baby is born who will never walk or can barely see. As long as they are pale and have prescient dreams, that is all they care about. The power of the Servants reaches even to here, twisting and turning events, bending time and the world to their will. They have to be stopped, Fitz. We have to go back to Clerres and kill them. It must be done.’

I said what I knew was true. ‘One thing at a time, my friend. We can only attempt one thing at a time.’

He stared sightlessly at me as if I had said the cruellest thing in the world to him. Then his lower jaw trembled, he dropped his face into his broken hands and began to sob.

I felt sharp annoyance and then deep guilt that I’d felt it. He was in agony. I knew it. How could I feel annoyed at him when I knew exactly what he was experiencing? Hadn’t I felt that way myself? Had I forgotten the times when my experiences in Regal’s dungeons had washed over me like a wave, obliterating whatever was good and safe in my life and carrying me right back into that chaos and pain?

No. I tried to forget that, and in the last decade of years, for the most part I had. And my annoyance with the Fool was not annoyance but extreme uneasiness. ‘Please. Don’t make me remember that.’

I realized I’d said the betraying words out loud. His only response was to cry louder, in the hopeless way of a child who has no hope of comforting himself. This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.

‘Tears can’t undo it,’ I said and wondered why I uttered the useless words. I both wanted to hold him and feared to. Feared that it would alarm him to be touched and feared even more that it would draw me tighter into his misery and wake my own. But at last I took the three steps that carried me around the table. ‘Fool. You are safe here. I know you can’t believe it just yet, but it’s over. And you are safe.’ I stroked the broken hair on his head, rough as the coat of a sick dog, and then pulled him closer to cradle his head against my sternum. His clawlike hands came up and clutched my wrist and held himself tighter against me. I let him have his tears. They were the only things I could give him then. I thought of what I had wanted to tell him, that I had to leave him for a few days to get Bee.

I couldn’t. Not right now.

He was slow to quiet and even when his sobs ceased, the breath shuddered in and out of him. After a time, he patted my wrist tentatively and said, ‘I think I’m all right now.’

‘You aren’t. But you will be.’

‘Oh, Fitz,’ he said. He pulled away from me and sat up as straight as he could. He coughed, and cleared his throat. ‘What of your message? The lad said it was important.’

‘Oh, it is and it isn’t. The queen wishes us to be dressed in our finest for the last night of Winterfest revelry, and that means I must make a trip down to Buckkeep Town to secure some clothing.’ I scowled to myself as I reflected I would have to go as Lord Feldspar in his awful garb. But not in those shoes. Oh, no. I wasn’t walking on icy cobbles in those shoes.

‘Well. You’d best be on your way, then.’

‘I should,’ I agreed reluctantly. I didn’t want to leave him alone in his darkness. Yet I didn’t want to stay where his despondency could infect me. I had come up the stairs thinking that I could safely confide Nettle’s news to him. For a moment, I had seen him as my friend and counsellor of our youth. Now the news was ash on my tongue. Here was another Farseer he had not foreseen. His talk of deformed babies had chilled me; how could I tell him my first grandchild was expected? It might plunge him into yet another dark spiral. Worse would be to tell him I had to be gone for six to eight days. I could not leave him to fetch Bee. But I could agree to having her brought here. I would talk to Kettricken about it tomorrow. Together we would arrange it.

You do your duty to your friends. How often had Nighteyes sat beside me when I had sought to lose myself in futile Skilling attempts? How often had Hap staggered me back to the cabin and deliberately given me less than the amount of stunning drugs I commanded him to fetch for me? I did not even want to think of the weeks, and then months, Burrich had spent trying to help me make the transition back from wolf to human. My friends had not abandoned me, and I would not abandon the Fool.

But he could still abandon me. And he did. He levered himself up from the table. ‘You should go and do your errand, Fitz,’ he said. He turned and almost as if he were sighted walked back to the bed.

As he clambered into it and drew up the blankets I asked him, ‘Are you certain you want to be alone now?’

He did not reply. And after a time I realized he wasn’t going to. I felt unreasonably hurt at this. A dozen scathing comments went unsaid by me. He had no idea of what I had given up for him. Then the moment of anger passed and I was grateful I had not spoken. I never wanted him to know what I had sacrificed for him.

And there was nothing left for me to do but my duty. I went back down the stairs, freshened my appearance as Feldspar and defiantly put my own boots back on.

Winterfest might celebrate the lengthening of the days but it did not mean that we were on the road to spring. Yesterday’s clouds had snowed themselves to nothing. The sky overhead was as deep and pure a blue as a Buck lady’s skirts but more clouds clustered on the horizon. Frost coated the festive garlands that festooned the shopfronts. The packed snow on the street squeaked under my boots. The cold had subdued the holiday spirit, but scattered vendors of winter sweets and toys still shouted their wares to hasty passers-by. I passed a miserable donkey with icy whiskers, and a hot-chestnut vendor who could barely keep his brazier lit. He warmed his hands over his wares, and I bought a dozen just to carry them in my chilled fingers. Overhead, the gulls wheeled and screamed as they always did. Crows were noisily mobbing a tardy owl they had found. By the time I reached the street of the tailors, my drunkard’s nose was as red from the cold as Chade could ever have wished it. My cheeks were stiff and my lashes clung together briefly each time I blinked. I gathered my cloak more closely around myself and hoped that the new clothing that awaited me was not as foolish as what I was wearing.

I had just located the correct shop when I heard a voice call, ‘Tom! Tom! Tom!’

I remembered in time that I was Lord Feldspar. So I did not turn, but a boy on the street shouted to his friends, ‘Look, it’s a talking crow! He said “Tom”.’

That gave me the excuse to turn and look where the lad was pointing. Perched on a signboard across the street was a bedraggled crow. It looked at me and screamed shrilly, ‘Tom, Tom!’

Before I could react, another crow dived on it, pecking and flapping and cawing. In response to that attack, a dozen other birds appeared as if from nowhere to join in the mobbing. As the beleaguered bird took flight, I caught a glimpse of white pinions among her black ones. To my horror, one of the other crows struck her in mid-air. She tumbled in her flight and then in her desperation took refuge under the eaves of a nearby shop. Two of her attackers made passes, but could not reach her. The others settled down on nearby rooftops to wait. With the instincts of all bullies, they knew that eventually she would have to emerge.

Then, in the way of their kind, they would peck her to death for being different.