Fool’s Assassin

He breathes. But he will not wake and none of us have any sense of him being here. It’s as if I’m touching—

Dirt. I finished the thought for her. That was how Thick had expressed it years ago, when I had begged him and Dutiful to reach out with the Skill and help me heal the Fool. He had been dead to them. Dead and already turning back into earth. But he’s breathing?

I already told you he was! Frantic impatience bordering on anger tinged her words. Fitz, we would not have reached for you if this was a simple healing. And if he were dead, I’d tell you that. Dutiful wants you to come right now, as soon as possible. Even with Thick lending strength to them, the Skill-coterie has not been able to reach him. If we can’t reach him, we can’t heal him. You are our last hope.

I’m at Oaksbywater market. I’ll need to go back to Withywoods, pack a few things and get a saddle horse. I’ll be there in three days, or less.

That won’t do. Dutiful knows that you won’t like the idea but he wants you to come by the stone portals.

I don’t do that. I asserted it strongly, already knowing that, for Chade, I would risk it, as I had not in all the years since I had been lost in the stones. The thought of entering that gleaming blackness stood up the hair on the back of my neck and my arms. I was terrified to the point of illness just thinking of it. Terrified. And tempted.

Fitz.You have to. It’s the only hope we have. The healers we have called in are completely useless, but on one thing they agree. Chade is sinking. We cannot reach him with the Skill and they say that all their experience tells them that within a few days he will die, his eyes bulging from his face from the blow to his head. If you arrive here in three days, it will be to watch him burn on a pyre.

I will come. I formed the thought dully. Could I make myself do it? I had to.

Through the stones, she pressed me. If you are at Oaksbywater, you are not far from their Judgment Stone on Gallows Hill. The charts we have show that it has the glyph for our Witness Stones. You could be here easily before nightfall.

Through the stones. I tried to keep both bitterness and fear from my thought. Your mother is here at the market with me. We came in the high-wheeled cart. I will have to send her home alone. Parted yet again by Farseer business, the simple pleasure of a shared meal and an evening of a tavern minstrel’s songs snatched away from us.

She will understand, Nettle tried to comfort me.

She will. But she won’t be pleased by it. I broke my thoughts free of Nettle. I had not closed my eyes, but I felt as if I opened them. The fresh air and the clamour of the summer market, the bright sunlight dappling down through the oak’s leaves, even the girl in the red slippers seemed like a sudden intrusion into my grimmer reality. I realized that while I had been Skilling my unseeing gaze had been resting on her. She was now returning my stare with a querying smile. I lowered my eyes hastily. Time to go.

I drained the last of my cider, thudded my empty mug back on the board and stood, searching the milling market for Molly. I spotted her at the same time she saw me. Once she had been as slender as the girl in the red slippers. Now Molly was a woman easing past the middle years of her life. She was moving steadily if not swiftly through the crowd, a small, sturdy woman with bright dark eyes and a determined set to her mouth. She carried a fold of soft grey fabric over her arm as if it were a hard-won war trophy. For a moment, the sight of her drove all other considerations from my mind. I simply stood and watched her coming toward me. She smiled at me and patted her merchandise. I pitied the merchant who had been the victim of her bargaining. She had ever been a thrifty woman; becoming Lady Molly of Withywoods had changed none of that. The sunlight glinted on the silver that threaded her once-dark curls.

I stooped to retrieve her earlier purchases. There was a crock of a particular soft cheese that she enjoyed, and a pouch of culkey leaves for scenting candles and a carefully-wrapped parcel of bright red peppers that she had cautioned me not to touch with my bared hands. They were for our gardener’s granny: she claimed to know a potion formula that could ease the knots in old knuckles. Molly wanted to try it. Of late she suffered from an aching lower back. Beside it was a stoppered pot that held a blood-strengthening tea.

I loaded my arms and as I turned, I bumped into the red-slippers girl. ‘Beg pardon,’ I said, stepping back from her, but she looked up at me with a merry smile.

‘No harm done,’ she assured me, cocking her head. Then the curve of her smile deepened as she added, ‘But if you’d like to make up for nearly treading on my very new slippers, you might buy a mug of cider to share with me.’

I stared at her dumbfounded. She’d thought I’d been watching her when I was Skilling. Well, actually, yes, I had been staring at her, but she had mistaken it for a man’s interest in a pretty girl. Which she was. Pretty, and young, much younger than I’d realized when I first noticed her. Just as I was much older than her interested gaze assumed. Her request was both flattering and unnerving. ‘You’ll have to settle for accepting an apology from me. I’m on my way to meet my lady wife.’ I nodded toward Molly.

The girl turned, looked directly at Molly and turned back to me. ‘Your lady wife? Or did you mean to say your mother?’

I stared down at the girl. Any charm her youth and prettiness had held for me had vanished from my heart. ‘Excuse me,’ I said coldly and stepped away from her and toward my Molly. A familiar ache squeezed my heart. It was a fear I fought against every day. Molly was ageing away from me, the years carrying her further and further from me in a slow and inexorable current. I was nearing fifty years, but my body stubbornly persisted in holding the lines of a man of thirty-five. A Skill-enhanced healing from years before still had the power to waken and rage through me whenever I injured myself. Under its control, I was seldom ill, and cuts or bruises healed rapidly. Last spring, I’d fallen from a hayloft and broken my forearm. I’d gone to sleep that night with it splinted firmly, and awakened ravenously hungry and thin as a winter wolf. My arm had been sore but I could use it. The undesired magic had kept me fit and youthful, a terrible blessing as I watched Molly slowly stoop under the burden of the stacked years she bore. Since her fainting spell at that Winterfest, her ageing had seemed to accelerate. She tired more easily, and had occasional spells of dizziness and blurred vision. It saddened me, for her choice was to dismiss such things and refuse to discuss them afterwards.

As I advanced toward Molly, I noticed that her smile had become fixed. She had not missed the interplay between the girl and me. I spoke before she could, pitching my words for her ears only amidst the market’s din. ‘Nettle Skilled to me. It’s Chade. He’s badly injured. They want me to come to Buckkeep Castle.’

‘You have to leave tonight?’

‘No. Immediately.’

She looked at me. Emotions played over her face. Annoyance. Anger. And then, terribly, resignation. ‘You must go,’ she told me.

‘I’m afraid I must.’

She nodded tightly, and took several of her purchases from my laden arms. Together we walked through the market toward the inn. Our little two-wheeled cart was drawn up outside. I’d stabled our horse, rather hoping that we’d spend the night there. As I put the rest of her purchases under the seat, I said, ‘You don’t have to rush back home, you know. You can stay and enjoy the rest of the market day.’

She sighed. ‘No. I’ll call the ostler to have our horse brought out now. I didn’t come for the market, Fitz. I came for a day with you. And that’s over now. If we go home now, you can be on your way before evening.’

I cleared my throat and broke the news to her. ‘It’s too urgent for that. I’ll have to use the stone on Gallows Hill.’

She stared at me, her mouth ajar. I met that gaze, trying to hide my own fear. ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ she said breathlessly.

‘I wish I didn’t have to.’

A time longer, her eyes searched my face. For an instant, she folded her faded lips and I thought she would argue with me. Then she said stiffly, ‘Fetch the horse. I’ll drive you there.’

It was an easy walk, but I didn’t argue. She wanted to be there. She wanted to watch me enter the stone and disappear from her sight. She had never seen me do it, and had never wanted to see me do it. But if I must, she would watch me go. I knew her thoughts. It might be the last time she’d ever see me, if my Skill went awry. I offered her the only comfort I could. ‘I’ll have Nettle send a bird from Buckkeep as soon as I’m safely there. So you needn’t worry.’

‘Oh, I’ll worry. For a day and a half, until the bird reaches me. It’s what I’m best at.’

The shadows had just begun to lengthen when I handed her down from the cart at the top of Gallows Hill. She held my hand as we walked the steep trail to the top of the hill. Oaksbywater didn’t boast a circle of standing stones as Buckkeep did. There was only the old gallows, the splintery grey wood baking in the summer sunlight with daisies growing incongruously and cheerfully all round the legs of it. And behind it, on the very crest of the hill, the single standing stone, gleaming black and veined with silver: memory stone. It was easily the height of three men. It had five faces, and each had a single glyph chiselled into it. Since we had discovered the true use of the standing stones, King Dutiful had sent out teams of men to clean each stone and record the glyphs and orientation of each one. Each glyph signified a destination. Some we now knew; most we did not. Even after a decade of studying scrolls about the forgotten Skill-magic, most practitioners regarded travel via the portal stones as dangerous and debilitating.

Molly and I circled the stone together, looking up at it. The sun was shining into my eyes when I saw the glyph that would take me to the Witness Stones near Buckkeep. I stared at it, feeling fear forming cold in my belly. I did not want to do this. I had to.

The stone stood black and still, beckoning me like a still pond of water on a hot summer day. And like a deep pool, it could pull me into its depths and drown me forever.

‘Come back to me as soon as you can,’ Molly whispered. And then she flung her arms around me and held me in a fierce hug. She spoke into my chest. ‘I hate the days when we must be parted. I hate the duties that still tug at you, and I hate how always they seem to tear us apart. I hate your dashing off at a moment’s notice to do them.’ She spoke the words savagely and each was a small knife plunged into me. Then she added, ‘But I love that you are the kind of man who still does what he must do. Our daughter calls, and you go to her. As we both know you must.’ She took a deep breath and shook her head at her flash of temper. ‘Fitz, Fitz, I am still so jealous of every minute of your time. And as I age, it seems that I wish to cling to you more, not less. But go. Go do what you must and come back to me as quickly as ever you can. But not by the stones. Come back to me safely, my dear.’

Simple words, and to this day, I do not know why they bolstered my courage as they did. I held her closer to me and stiffened my own spine. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I assured her. ‘The time I was lost in the stones, it was only because I’d used them so often in the days before. This will be easy. I’ll step in here and stumble out by the Witness Stones above Buckkeep Town. And first thing I’ll have a bird sent to Withywoods to tell you that I’m there.’

‘And it will take at least a day to get here. But I’ll be watching for it.’

I kissed her again, and then stepped free of her. My knees were shaking and abruptly I wished I had pissed earlier. Facing a sudden and unknown danger is different from deliberately plunging oneself into a previously experienced and known life-threatening task. Imagine deliberately walking into a bonfire. Or stepping over the railing of a ship in a storm. I could die. Or worse, not die, forever, in that cool black stillness.

Only four steps away. I could not faint. I could not let my terror show. I had to do this. The stone was only two steps away. I lifted a hand and gave Molly a final wave, but dared not look back at her. My mouth had gone dry in purest fear. With the same hand, I set my palm to the face of the standing stone, right under the glyph that would carry me to Buckkeep.

The stone’s face was cool. The Skill infused me in an indescribable way. I didn’t step into the stone; it engulfed me. A moment of black and sparkling nothing. An indefinable sense of well-being caressed and tempted me. I was on the cusp of understanding something wonderful; in a moment I would grasp it fully. I would not just comprehend it. I would be it. Complete. Unheeding of anything, or anyone, ever again. Fulfilled.

Then I tumbled out. The first coherent thought I had on falling out of the stone onto the wet and grassy hillside above Buckkeep was the same as my last thought before I entered. I wondered what Molly had seen as I left her.

I had dropped to my quivering knees as I emerged. I didn’t try to move. I looked out, breathing air that carried a hint of brine from Buckkeep Bay. It was cooler here and the air was moister. Rain had fallen recently. Sheep grazed the hillside before me. One had lifted its head to regard me; now it dropped it back to the grass. I could see the back walls of Buckkeep Castle across a rumpled distance of stony pasture and wind-gnarled trees. The fortress of black stone stood as it seemed it always had, its towers giving it a sweeping view of the sea. I could not see it, but I knew that on the steep cliffs below it, Buckkeep Town clung like a creeping lichen of people and structures. Home. I was home.

Slowly my heartbeat returned to normal. A creaking cart crested the hill and made its way toward the castle gates. With a critical eye, I approved the slow pace of a sentry along the castle walls above it. We were at peace now, but still Dutiful maintained the watch. Good. Chalced might seem to be preoccupied with its own civil war, but rumour said the duchess now controlled most of her wayward provinces. And as soon as it was at peace with itself, doubtless Chalced would once more seek war with its neighbours.

I looked back at the Skill-pillar. The sudden desire to re-enter it, to bathe again in that unsettling pleasure of sparkling darkness, seized me. There was something there that was immense and wonderful, something that I longed to join. I could step back inside and find it. It waited for me.

I drew a deep breath and reached out with the Skill to Nettle. Let fly a bird to Withywoods. Let Molly know I am here and safe. Choose the swiftest bird that will home there.

Done. And why didn’t you let me know before you entered the stone? I heard her speak to someone in the room. ‘He’s here. Send a lad with a horse for him, now.’ Then she focused on me again. What if you had emerged senseless and without words as you did all those years ago?

I let her rebuke flow past me. She was right, of course, and Chade would be furious with me. No. The thought came with freezing dismay. Chade might never be furious with me again. I started walking toward the keep, and then could not prevent myself from breaking into a trot. I Skilled to Nettle again. Do the guards on the gate know I’m coming?

King Dutiful himself ordered them to expect Holder Badgerlock, with an important message for me from my mother. No one will delay you. I’ll send a boy with a horse.

I’ll be there before he clears the stables. I broke into a run.