The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy: Fool’s Errand, The Golden Fool, Fool’s Fate

We followed, but more cautiously. We wanted to catch glimpses of them without being seen ourselves. As we did not know where they were going, we could not race ahead to intercept them, even if the rough and wild terrain had offered us that possibility. ‘Our best option may be to wait until they’ve settled for the night, and then go in after the Prince,’ the Fool suggested.

‘Two flaws,’ I replied. ‘By nightfall, we may reach wherever it is they’re going. If we do, we may find them in a fortified location, or with many more companions. The second is that if they camp again, they will post sentries, just as they did before. We’d have to get past them first.’

‘So your plan is?’

‘Wait until they camp tonight,’ I admitted gloomily. ‘Unless we see a better opportunity before then.’

My premonition of disaster grew as the afternoon passed. The trail we followed showed signs of use by more than deer and rabbits. Other people used this path; it led to somewhere, a town or village, or at the least, a meeting place. I dared not wait for nightfall and their camp.

We ghosted closer than we had before. The unevenness of the terrain we crossed favoured us, for as soon as they began a descent of a ridge, we could venture closer. Several times we had to leave the trodden path to keep hidden below the ridgeline, but those we followed seemed confident that they were now in safer territory. They did not often look back. I studied their marching order as trees hid and then revealed them. The man on the big horse led the way, followed by the two women. The second woman led the riderless horse. Our prince came fifth, with his cat behind him on the saddle. Following him were the two other men and their cats. They rode like folk determined to cover ground before nightfall.

‘He looks like you did as a boy,’ the Fool observed as we once more watched them wend out of sight.

‘He looks like Verity to me,’ I disagreed. It was true. The boy did look like Verity, but he looked even more like my father’s portrait. I could not say if he looked like me at that age. I had had little to do with looking-glasses then. He had dark, thick hair, as unruly as Verity’s and mine. I wondered, briefly, if my father had ever struggled to get a comb through his. His portrait was my only image of him, and in that he was faultlessly groomed. Like my father, the young prince was long of limb, rangier than stocky Verity, but he might fill out as he got older. He sat his horse well. And just as I had noted with the man on the large horse, I could see his bond with the cat that rode behind him. Dutiful held his head tipped back, as if to be aware always of the cat behind him. The cat was the smallest of the three, yet larger than I had expected her to be. She was long-legged and tawny, with a rippling pattern of pale and darker stripes. Sitting on her saddle cushion, her claws well dug in, the top of her head came to the nape of the Prince’s neck. Her head turned from side to side as they rode, taking in all that they passed. Her posture said that she was weary of riding, that she would have preferred to cross this ground on her own.

Getting rid of her might be the trickiest part of the whole ‘rescue’. Yet not for an instant did I consider taking her back to Buckkeep with the Prince. For his own good, he would have to be separated from his bond-beast, just as Burrich had once forced Nosey and me to part.

‘It just isn’t a sound bond. It feels not so much that he has bonded as that he has been captured. Or captivated, I suppose. The cat dominates him. Yet … it is not the cat. One of those women is involved in this, perhaps a Wit-mentor as Black Rolf was to me, encouraging him to plunge into his Wit-bond with an unnatural intensity. And the Prince is so infatuated that he has suspended all his own judgement. That is what worries me.’

I looked at the Fool. I had spoken the thought aloud, with no preamble, but as often seemed with us, his mind had followed the same track. ‘So. Will it be easier to unseat the cat and take both prince and horse, or snatch the Prince and hold him on Myblack with you?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll let you know after we’ve done it.’

It was agonizing to shadow after them, hoping for an opportunity that might not come. I was tired and hungry, and my headache from the night before had never completely abated. I hoped that Nighteyes had managed to catch some food for himself and was resting. I longed to reach out to him, but dared not, lest I make the Piebalds aware of me.

Our route had taken us up into the rugged foothills. The gentle river plain of the Buck River was far behind us now. As the late afternoon stole the strength of the sun from the day, I saw what might be our only chance. The Piebald party rode silhouetted against a ridgeline. Their trail led to a precipitous path that slashed steeply down and across the face of a sheer and rocky hill. Standing in my stirrups and staring through the thickening light, I decided the horses would have to go in single file. I pointed this out to the Fool.

‘We need to catch them up before the Prince begins the descent,’ I told him. It would be close. We had let them get almost too far ahead of us in an effort to remain hidden from them. Now I put my heels to Myblack, and she sprang forwards, with little Malta right on our heels.

Some horses are fleet only on a level, straight stretch. Myblack proved herself as able on broken terrain. The Piebalds had taken the easiest route, following the ridgelines. A steep-sided gorge, thick with brush and trees, sliced between them and us. We could cut off a huge loop of trail by plunging down the steep slope to reach the next ascending jog in the trail. I kneed Myblack and she crashed down through the brushy slope, splashed through the creek at the bottom and then fought her way up the other side through mossy turf that gave way under her hooves. I did not look back to see how Malta and the Fool were faring. Instead, I rode low to her back, avoiding the branches that would have swept me from the saddle.

They heard us coming. Doubtless we sounded more like a herd of elk or a whole troop of guardsmen than a single horseman bent on catching up with them. In response to the sound of our pursuit, they fled. We caught them at the last possible moment. Three of their party had already ventured out onto the steep narrow trail across the hill-face. The led horse had just begun the descent. The three horses remaining all carried cats as well as riders. The last one wheeled to meet my charge with a shout, while the second to last chivvied the Prince along as if to hurry him out onto the escarpment.

I crashed into the one who had turned to confront us, more by accident than by any battle plan. The footing on the mountainous path was treacherous with small rolling stones. As Myblack slammed shoulder to shoulder with the smaller horse, the cat leapt from its cushion yowling a threat, landed downhill from us, and slid and scrabbled away from the plunging hooves of the struggling horses.

I had drawn my sword. I urged Myblack forwards, and she easily shouldered the smaller horse off the path. As I passed, I plunged my sword once into a man who was still attempting to draw a wicked toothed knife. He cried out, and the cat echoed his cry. He began a slow topple from his saddle. No time for regrets or second thoughts, for as we pressed past him, the second cat-rider turned to meet us. I could hear confused shouts from women, and overhead a crow circled, cawing wildly. The narrow passage had a sheer rockface above it, and a slippery scree-slope below it. The man on the big horse was shouting questions that no one was answering, interspersed with demands that the others back up and get out of his way so he could fight. The path was too narrow for him to wheel his horse. I had a glimpse of his warhorse trying to back along the cramped trail while the women on the smaller horses behind him were trying to ride forwards and escape the battle behind them. The riderless horse was between the women and the Prince. A woman screamed to Prince Dutiful to hurry up at the same moment that the man on the big horse demanded that they both back up and give him room. His horse obviously shared his opinion. His massive hindquarters were crowding the far smaller horse behind him. Someone would have to give way, and the likeliest direction was down.

‘Prince Dutiful!’ I bellowed as Myblack chested the rump of the next horse. As Dutiful turned towards me, the cat on the horse between us opened its mouth in a yowling snarl and struck out at Myblack’s head. Myblack, both insulted and alarmed, reared. I narrowly avoided her head as she threw it back. As we came down, she clattered her front hooves against the other horse’s hindquarters. It did little physical damage, but it unnerved the cat, who sprang from her cushion. The rider had turned to confront us, but could not reach me with his short-sword. The Prince’s horse, blocked in front, had halted half on the narrowing trail. The riderless horse in front of him was trying to back up, but the Prince had no room to yield to him. Dutiful’s cat was snarling angrily but had nowhere to vent her rage. I looked at her, and felt an odd doubling of vision. All the while, the man on the great horse was bellowing and cursing, demanding furiously that the others get out of his way. They could scarcely obey him.

The rider I had engaged managed to wheel his horse on the narrow apron of earth that led to the narrow path across the hillface, but he nearly trampled his cat in doing so. The beast hissed and made a wild swipe at Myblack, but she danced clear of the menacing claws. The cat seemed daunted; I was sure my horse and I were far larger than any game it might normally pursue. I took advantage of that hesitation, kicking Myblack forwards. The cat retreated right under the hooves of her partner’s horse. The horse, reluctant to trample the familiar creature, in turn backed up, crowding the Prince’s horse forwards.

On the narrow ledge of the path, a horse screamed in sudden panic, echoed by the owner’s cry as it went down in an effort to avoid being pushed off the ledge by the warhorse that was backing determinedly towards us. The young woman on the horse kicked free of the stirrups and scrambled to stand, her back pressed against the ledge as the panicky animal, in a frantic bid to regain its footing, wallowed to one side and then slid off the edge. The woman’s horse slid down the steep slope, slowly at first, its churning efforts to halt its fall only loosening more stone to cascade with it. Spindly saplings that had found a footing in the sparse soil and cracked rock were snapped off as the horse crashed through them. The animal screamed horribly as one sapling, stouter than the others, stabbed deep into it and arrested its fall briefly before its struggles tore it loose to slide again.

Behind me, there were other sounds. I gathered without looking that the Fool had arrived, and that he and Malta were busying the other cat. His partner, I trusted, would still be down. My sword-thrust had gone deep.

Ruthlessness soared in me. I could not reach the cat’s owner with my blade, but the spitting cat menacing Myblack was within range. Leaning down, I slashed at him. The creature leapt wildly aside, but I had scored a long, shallow gash across his flank. Cries of anger and pain from both him and his human partner were my reward. The man reeled with his cat’s pain, and I experienced an odd moment of knowing the Wit-curses they flung at me. I closed my mind to them, kicked Myblack and we slammed together, horse to horse. I stabbed at the rider and when he tried to evade my blade, he tumbled from his saddle. Riderless and panicky, his horse was only too glad to flee the moment Myblack gave him room to get past her. In its turn, the Prince’s horse backed away from the struggle before her and off the steep trail onto the small apron of land that approached it.

The cat that rode behind the Prince had bristled its fur to full extension and now confronted me with an angry snarl. There was something wrong with it, something misshapen that appalled me. Even as I struggled to grasp what was awry, the Prince turned his horse and I came face to face with young Dutiful.

I have heard people describe instances when all time seemed to pause for them. Would that it had been so for me. I was confronted suddenly with a young man who, until this moment, had been to me little more than a name coupled with an idea.

He wore my face. He wore my face to the extent that I knew the spot under his chin where the hair grew in an odd direction and would be hard to shave, when he was old enough to shave. He had my jaw, and the nose I had had as a boy, before Regal had broken it. His teeth, like mine, were bared in a battle rictus. Verity’s soul had planted the seed in his young wife to conceive this boy, but his flesh had been shaped from my flesh. I looked into the face of the son I had never seen nor claimed, and a connection suddenly formed like the cold snap of a manacle.

If time had stood still for me, then I would have been ready for the great cut of his sword as he swung it towards me. But my son did not share my moment of stunned recognition. Dutiful attacked like seven kinds of demons, and his battle cry was a cat’s ululating cry. I all but fell out of my saddle leaning back to avoid his blade. Even so, it still sliced the fabric of my shirt and left a stinging thread of pain in its wake. As I sat up, his cat sprang at me, screaming like a woman. I turned to her onslaught, and caught the creature in midflight with the back of my elbow and arm. I yelled in revulsion as she struck me. Before she could lock onto me, I twisted violently, throwing her in the face of the cat-man I had just unseated. She yowled as they collided, and they fell together. She gave a sharp screech as he landed on top of her, then clawed her way out from under him, only to scrabble limpingly back from Myblack’s trampling hooves. The Prince’s gaze followed his cat, a look of horror on his face. It was all the opening I needed. I struck his sword from his unready grip.

Dutiful had expected me to fight him. He was not prepared for me to seize his reins and take control of his horse’s head. I kneed Myblack, and for a wonder she answered, wheeling. I kicked her and she sprang to a gallop. The Prince’s horse came eagerly. She was anxious to escape the noise and fighting, and following another horse suited her perfectly. I think I shouted to the Fool to flee. In some manner that I did not recognize, he seemed to be holding the clawed Piebald at bay. The man on the warhorse bellowed that we were stealing the Prince, but the cluster of struggling people, horses and cats could do nothing. My sword still in my hand, I fled. I could not afford to look back and see if the Fool followed. Myblack set a pace that kept the other horse’s neck stretched. The Prince’s horse could not keep up with Myblack’s best speed, but I forced her to go as fast as she possibly could. I reined Myblack from the trail and led Dutiful’s mount at breakneck speed down a steep hill and then cross-country. We rode through slapping brush, and clattered up steep rocky hills, and then down terrain where a sane man would have dismounted and led his horse. It would have been suicide for the Prince to leap from his horse. My sole plan was to put as much distance between Dutiful’s companions and us as I could.

The first time I spared a glance back at him, Dutiful was hanging on grimly, his mouth set in a snarling grimace and his eyes distant. Somewhere, I sensed, an angry cat followed us. As we came down one steep hillside in a series of leaps and slides, I heard a crashing in the brush behind and above us. I heard a shout of encouragement, and recognized the Fool’s voice as he urged Malta to greater speed. My heart leaped with relief that he still followed us. At the bottom of the hill, I pulled Myblack in for an instant. The Prince’s horse was already lathered, the white foam dripping from her bit. Behind her, the Fool reined Malta in.

‘You’re all in one piece?’ I asked hastily.

‘So it appears,’ he agreed. He tugged his shirt collar straight and fastened it at the throat. ‘And the Prince?’

We both looked at Dutiful. I expected anger and defiance. Instead, he reeled in his saddle, his eyes unfocused. His gaze swung from the Fool to me and back again. His eyes wandered over my face, and his brows furrowed as if he saw a puzzle there. ‘My prince?’ the Fool asked him worriedly, and for that instant, his tone was that of Lord Golden. ‘Are you well?’

For a moment, he just gazed at both of us. Then, life returned to his face and ‘I must go back!’ he suddenly shouted wildly. He started to pull his foot free of the stirrup. I kicked Myblack, and in that instant we were off again. I heard his cry of dismay, and looked back to see him clutching frantically at his saddle as he tried to regain his seat. With the Fool at our heels, we fled on.

TWENTY-TWO Choices (#ulink_03c6287d-9a89-5ec8-a941-5c484586ef75)

The legends of the Catalyst and the White Prophet are not Six Duchies’ legends. Although the writings and lore of that tradition are known to some scholars in the Six Duchies, it has its roots in the lands far to the south, beyond even the reaches of Jamaillia and the Spice Islands. It is not properly a religion, but is more a concept both of history and philosophy. According to those who believe such things, all of time is a great wheel that turns in a track of pre-determined events. Left to itself, time turns endlessly, and all the world is doomed to repeat the cycle of events that lead us all ever deeper into darkness and degradation. Those who follow the White Prophet believe that to each age is born one who has the vision to redirect time and history into a better path. This one is known by his white skin and colourless eyes. It is said that the blood of the ancient lines of the Whites find voice again in the White Prophet. To each White Prophet, there is a Catalyst. Only the White Prophet of that particular age can divine who the Catalyst is. The Catalyst is one who is born in a unique position to alter, however slightly, predetermined events, which in turn cascade time into other paths with possibilities that diverge ever wider. In partnership with this Catalyst, the White Prophet labours to divert the turning of time into a better path.

Caterhill’s Philosophies

We could not keep up the pace forever, of course. Long before I felt safe, the condition of the horses forced us to breathe them. The sounds of pursuit had faded behind us; a warhorse is not a courser. As the evening approached true dark around us, we walked the horses down a winding streambed. The Prince’s horse could barely hold her head up. As soon as the heat was walked off her, we would have to stop for a time. I rode crouched in my saddle to avoid the sweeping branches of the willows that lined the stream. The others followed. When we had first slowed the horses, I had feared that the Prince would try a leaping escape. But he had not. Instead he sat his horse in sullen silence as I led her on.

‘Mind this branch,’ I warned Dutiful and Lord Golden as a low limb snagged on me when Myblack pushed her way under it. I tried not to let it snap back in the Prince’s face.

‘Who are you?’ the Prince suddenly demanded in a low voice.

‘You do not recognize me, my lord?’ Lord Golden asked him anxiously. I recognized his effort to distract the Prince’s attention from me.

‘Not you. Him. Who is he? And why have you assaulted myself and my friends in this way?’ There was an amazing depth of accusation in his voice. Abruptly he sat up straighter in his saddle as if he were just discovering his anger.

‘Duck,’ I warned him as I released another branch. He did.

Lord Golden spoke. ‘That is my servant, Tom Badgerlock. We’ve come to take you home to Buckkeep, Prince Dutiful. The Queen, your mother, has been most worried about you.’

‘I do not wish to go.’ With every sentence, the young man was recovering himself. There was dignity in his voice as he spoke these words. I waited for Lord Golden to reply, but the splashing thuds of the horses’ hooves in the stream and the swish and crackle of the branches we passed through were the only sound. To our right, a meadow suddenly opened out. A few blackened, snaggly stumps in it were reminders of a forest fire in this area years ago. Tall grass with browned seedheads vied with fireweed with sprung and fluffy seedpods. I turned the horses out of the stream and onto the grass. When I looked up at the sky, it was dark enough to show a pricking of early stars. The dwindling moon would not show herself until night was deep. Even now, the gathering darkness was leaching colour from the day, making the surrounding forest an impenetrable tangle of blackness.

I led them out to the centre of the meadow, well away from the forest edge before I reined in. Any attackers would have to cross open ground before they reached us. ‘Best we rest until moon-rise,’ I observed to Lord Golden. ‘It will be difficult enough to make our way then.’

‘Is it safe to stop?’ he asked me.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Safe or not, I think we must. The horses are nearly spent, and it’s getting dark. I think we’ve gained a good lead. That warhorse is strong, but not swift nor nimble. The terrain we’ve covered will daunt him. And the Piebalds must either abandon their wounded, splitting their party, or come after us more slowly. We have a little breathing space.’

I looked back at the Prince before I dismounted. He sat, shoulders slumped, but the anger in his eyes proclaimed him far from defeated. I waited until he swung his dark eyes to meet mine, and then spoke to him. ‘It’s up to you. We can treat you well and simply return you to Buckkeep. Or you can behave like a wilful child and try to run away back to your Witted friends. In which case I will hunt you down, and take you back to Buckkeep with your hands bound behind you. Choose now.’

He stared at me, a flat, challenging stare, the rudest thing one animal can do to another. He didn’t speak. It offended me on so many levels that I could scarcely keep my temper.