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

And then there was no more time. ‘Too late now!’ a man shouted up at us. The line of men and horses had curved to surround us. ‘Send us the lad, and we’ll end you quick! If not –’ And he laughed aloud.

Don’t fear for us. I’ll force them to kill us quickly.

The Fool rolled his shoulders. He lifted his sword in a two-handed grip. He swung it once, experimentally. ‘Go quickly, Beloved.’ Poised, he looked more a dancer than a warrior.

I could either draw my sword or keep a grip on the Prince. The standing stone was right behind me. I gave it one hasty glance over my shoulder. I could not identify the wind-eroded symbol carved in this face of it. Wherever it took me would have to be good enough. I did not recognize my voice as I demanded of the world, ‘How can the hardest thing I have ever done in my life also be the most cowardly?’

‘What are you doing?’ the boy demanded. He sensed something was about to happen, and though he could not have guessed what it was, he began to struggle wildly. ‘Help me!’ he cried to the encircling Piebalds. ‘Free me now!’

The thunder of charging horses was his answer.

Inspiration struck me. As I tightened my grip on the struggling boy, I spoke to the Fool. ‘I’ll come back. I’ll take him through and come back.’

‘Don’t risk the Prince!’ The Fool was horrified. ‘Stay with him and guard him. If you came back for us and were killed, he’d be alone in … wherever. Go! Now!’ The last smile he gave me was his old Fool’s smile, tremulous and yet mocking the world’s ability to hurt him. There was a wildness in his golden eyes that was not fear of death, but acceptance of it. I could not bear to look at it. The closing circle of horsemen engulfed us. The Fool swung his sword and it cut a gleaming arc in the blue day. Then a Piebald charged between us, swinging his blade and yelling. I dragged the Prince back with me.

I caught a last glimpse of the Fool standing over the wolf, a sword in his hands. It was the first time I had ever seen him hold a weapon as if he actually intended to use it. I heard the clash of metal on metal and the wolf’s rising snarl as he sprang for a horseman’s leg.

The Prince yelled wildly, a wordless cry of fury that was more cat than human. A rider charged straight at us, blade lifted high. But the towering black stone was at my back. ‘I’ll return!’ I promised them. Then I tightened one arm around Dutiful, clasping him to my chest. I spoke right by his ear. ‘Hold tight to who you are!’ It was the only warning I could give him. Then I twisted, and pressed my hand against the stone’s graven symbol.

TWENTY-THREE The Beach (#ulink_af44d5df-b17b-5790-9e65-fa3b801c8d67)

The Skill is infinitely large, and yet intimately small. It is as large as the world and the sky above it, and as small as a man’s secret heart. The way the Skill flows means that one can ride it, or experience its passage, or encompass the whole of it within one’s self. The same sense of immediacy pervades all.

This is why, to master the Skill, one must first master the self.

Hailfire, Skillmaster to Queen Frugal

I had expected darkness and disorientation. I had expected the Skill pulling at me, and a struggle to hold the Prince and myself together. I forced myself to be aware of both of us, and to keep him intact. Holding onto him within my Skill-barriers was much like clutching a handful of salt in a deluge. There was the same sensation that if I relaxed my grip at all, he would trickle away from me. There was all that, and an illogical sensation that we fell upwards. I clutched Dutiful to me, promising myself that it would soon be over. I was not prepared to fall from the pillar into icy seawater.

Salt water flooded my mouth and nose as I gasped in shock. We tumbled together in the water. My shoulder struck something. Dutiful struggled wildly, and I nearly lost my grip on him. The water sucked at us, and then, just as I saw light through a layer of murky green and deduced which way was up, a wave gathered us and flung us against a rocky beach.

The impact broke my grip on the Prince. The wave rolled us on the rocky shore without letting us reach air. The mussel-and-barnacle-encrusted rocks tore at me. Then, as the wave retreated, my body snagged on the rocks hooking my sword-belt and the water stranded me there. I lifted my head, choking and gagging out water and sand. I blinked, trying to see Dutiful, and spotted him still in the water. He was belly-down on the beach, scrabbling to catch hold of rocks as the outgoing wave sucked at him. He slid backwards towards deeper water, then managed to find a grip and lay still, gasping. I found a breath.

‘Get up!’ I yelled. It came out as a hoarse caw. ‘Before the next wave. Get up.’

He looked at me without comprehension. I staggered upright and flung myself towards him. Catching the back of his collar, I dragged him over the shredding barnacles and up the rocky beach towards the higher shoreline. A wave still caught us and flung me to my knees, but the water was not powerful enough to drag us out again. The next time the wave went out, Dutiful managed to get to his feet. Holding on to one another, we staggered up past the toothy rocks and into a belt of black sand festooned with squelching strands of tangled kelp. When we reached the loose dry sand, I let go of Prince Dutiful. He took perhaps three more steps and then dropped to the ground. For a time he just lay on his side, breathing. Then he sat up, spat out sand and wiped his nose on his wet sleeve. He looked all around us with no comprehension, and when his eyes came back to me, his expression was that of a confused child.

‘What happened?’

The sand in my teeth gritted whenever I moved my mouth. I spat. ‘We came through a Skill-pillar.’ I spat again.

‘A what?’

‘A Skill-pillar,’ I repeated. I looked back to point it out to him.

There was nothing out there but ocean. Another wave rushed in, reaching higher up the beach. Scummy white foam laced the sand as the water retreated. I came awkwardly to my feet and stared out over the incoming tide. Just water. Moving waves. Crying gulls above the waves. No Skill-pillar of black stone broke that heaving green surface. There was not even a clue as to where it had spat us out offshore.

No way back.

I had left my friends to die. Regardless of what the Fool had said, I had resolved to return immediately via the pillar. Otherwise, I would not have gone. I would not have done it if I had thought I was not going back to them. Telling myself that did not make me feel a shard less cowardly.

Nighteyes! I quested desperately, flinging the call with all my strength.

No one answered.

‘Fool!’ The word ripped out of me, a futile scream of Wit and Skill and voice. Distant gulls seemed to echo it mockingly. My hope faded with their dwindling cries over the windswept sea.

Unmoving, I stared out over the water until an incoming wave lapped against my feet. The Prince had not moved, except to fall back onto his side on the wet sand. He lay, staring blankly and shivering. I slowly turned away from the surf and surveyed the land. Black cliffs rose up before us. The tide was coming in. My mind put the pieces together.

‘Get up. We have to move before the tide traps us.’

To the south, the rocky cliffs gave way to a half-moon of black sand. A grassy tableland backed it. I reached down and seized the Prince’s arm. ‘Up,’ I repeated. ‘Unless you want to drown here.’

The lad lurched to his feet without protest. We trudged down the shore as the waves reached ever higher towards us. Desolation was a cold weight inside me. I dared not look at what I had just done. It was too monstrous to consider. While I walked down this beach, did their blood flow down swords? I stopped my mind. As if I were setting walls against an intrusive mind, I blocked all feelings from myself. I stopped all thoughts and became a wolf, concerned only with the ‘now’.

‘What was that?’ Dutiful demanded suddenly. ‘That … feeling. That pulling …’ Words failed him. ‘Was that the Skill?’

‘Part of it,’ I answered brusquely. He seemed entirely too interested in what he had just experienced. Had it called to him that strongly? The Skill’s attraction was a terrible trap for the unwary.

‘I … he tried to teach me, but he couldn’t tell me what it felt like. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it or not, and neither could he. But that!’

He expected a response to his excitement. I gave him none. The Skill was the last thing I wanted to talk about just now. I didn’t want to speak at all. I did not want to break the numbness that wrapped me.

When we reached the black sand, I kept Prince Dutiful walking. His wet clothes flapped around his body, and he hugged himself against the chill. I listened to his shivering breaths. A greenish sheen on the sand proved to be a flow of fresh water over the beach to the sea. I walked him upstream, away from the sandy beach and into a field of coarse sedge grasses until I reached a place where the trickle was deep enough for me to cup handfuls of it. I washed out my mouth several times and then drank. I was splashing water on my face to get sand out of my eyes and ears when the Prince spoke again.

‘What about Lord Golden and the wolf? Where are they, what happened to them?’ He looked out over the water as if he expected to see them there.

‘They couldn’t come. By now, I imagine your friends have killed them.’

It amazed me that I could speak the words so flatly. No choking tears, no gasping breath. It was a thought too terrible to be real. I could not allow myself to consider it. Instead, I flung the words at him, hoping to see him flinch from them. Instead he just shook his head, as if my words made no sense, then asked numbly ‘Where are we?’

‘We are here,’ I replied, and laughed. I had never known that anger and despair could make a man laugh. It was not a pleasant sound, and the Prince cowered away from me for an instant. Then in the next, he stood up very straight and pointed an accusing finger at me. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, as if he had suddenly discovered the one mystery that underlay all his questions.

I looked up from where I still crouched by the water. I drank another handful before I answered. ‘Tom Badgerlock.’ I slicked my hair back with my wet hands. ‘For this. I was born with this white streak at my temple, and so my parents named me.’

‘Liar.’ He spoke the word with flat contempt. ‘You’re a Farseer. You may not have the looks of a Farseer, but you have the Skill of one. Who are you? A distant cousin? Someone’s by-blow?’

I’d been called a bastard many times in my life, but never by someone I might call a son. I looked up at Dutiful, Verity’s and Kettricken’s heir from the seed of my body. Well, if I’m a bastard, I wonder what that makes you? What I said instead was ‘Does it matter?’

While he was still struggling to find an answer to that, I scanned our surroundings. I was stuck here with him, at least until the tide went out. If I was fortunate, it would bare the pillar that brought us here, and I could use it to return. If I was unfortunate, the water wouldn’t retreat that far, and then I’d have to discover just where we truly were and how to get back to Buckkeep from here.

The Prince spoke angrily to mask his sudden uncertainty. ‘We can’t be that far. It only took us a moment to get here.’

‘Magic such as we used makes little of distance. We may not even be in the Six Duchies any more.’ I abruptly decided he needed to know no more than that. Whatever I told him, the woman would likely know as well. The less said, the better.

Slowly he sat down on the ground. ‘But –’ he said, and then fell silent. After a time, I sensed his Wit-keening. The look on his face was that of an apprehensive child reaching out desperately for something familiar. But my heart did not go out to him. Instead, I repressed an urge to give him a firm whack on the back of the head. For this whimpering self-obsessed juvenile, I’d traded the lives of my wolf and my friend. It seemed the poorest bargain I’d ever made. Nettle, I reminded myself. Keeping him alive might keep her safe. Farseer heir or not, it was the only value that I could see in him just then.

I am disappointed in my son.