The Golden Fool ttm-2

by Robin Hobb

  His hand was on the latch. He did not turn to look back at me. ‘You need your rest, Fitz, not to work yourself up like this. When you are feeling better, then we will discuss this again. You know I am a cautious man. Trust me in this.’ And then he was gone, closing the door behind him. He moved swiftly, like a child hurrying out of the room to escape a scolding. Or a man fleeing a truth he did not want to hear.

  I sagged back into the chair. My throat and mouth were dry, my head pounding. I lifted my hands to shut out the light from my eyes. Into that small darkness, I asked, ‘Have you ever suddenly realized that there was someone you loved, but presently did not like very much?’

  ‘Strange you should ask me that,’ the Fool observed dryly from close behind me. Then I heard him walk away.

  I must have fallen asleep there. When I awoke, it was afternoon, and I ached from my cramped position in the chair. There was a tray of food on a table beside the chair. Even covered, it had gone cold. Fat was congealed in little floating lumps on top of the broth. There was meat, but it had gone cold. After two bites, the chewing of it wearied me. I forced myself to finish it, but felt that it sat like a lump in my stomach. They had given me watered wine, and bread in milk again as well. I didn’t want it, yet could not have said what I did want. I forced myself to eat it.

  The terrible weakness that was on me made me feel childishly weepy. I tottered back to my room. I wanted to wash my face to see if I could rouse myself from my lethargy. There was water in, the pitcher, and a cloth to dry on, but my looking-glass was gone, probably tidied away when Kettricken changed my room. I washed, but felt no livelier for it. I went back to bed,

  Two more days passed in the same haze of weakness and lassitude. I ate and I slept, but my strength seemed terribly slow to return. Chade did not visit me. I was not surprised at that, but Dutiful did not come either. Had Chade ordered him to stay away from me? Lord Golden had little to say to me, and turned my visitors away with the warning that I was still not well enough to see them. Twice I heard Hap’s anxious tones, and once I heard Starling. I had no energy to move, but the inactivity made me ache. I lay alone in my bed, or sat on the chair near the fireside. I was both worried and bored. I thought about the Skill-scrolls up in Chade’s old chamber, but the challenge of all the stairs daunted me. Nor could I bring myself to ask that favor of the Fool. It was not just that he never ventured forth from Lord Golden’s facade. It was that we were both mired into coolly and correctly ignoring one another. It could only make our quarrel worse, and yet I could not bend enough to try any other way. It seemed to me I had already made enough efforts to mend things and been rebuffed by him. I wanted him to show some sign of wishing to make things right between us. But he did not. So two slow days of misery trickled past.

  The next day I arose determined to put myself to rights. Perhaps if I stood and moved about as if I were healthy, I would begin to feel so. I began by washing myself, and then decided I would shave. The accumulation of whiskers was approaching a fair beard. I walked slowly to the door of my chamber and looked round. Lord Golden sat at the table, inspecting a dozen silk kerchiefs in different shades of yellow and orange and trying them against one another. I cleared my throat. He did not move. Very well, then.

  ‘Lord Golden, pardon me if I disturb you. I seem to have misplaced my shaving mirror. Could I perhaps borrow one?’

  He did not look round. ‘Do you think that’s wise?’

  ‘Borrowing a mirror? Shaving without one strikes me as less wise.’

  ‘I meant, do you think it’s wise to shave?’

  ‘I think I’m past due for it.’

  ‘Very well, then. It’s your choice.’ His tone was neutral and chill, as if I did a risky thing and he wanted no part in it. He went to his room, and returned shortly with his own elaborate silver-framed hand-mirror.

  I held it up, dreading what it would show me of my wasted face. The shock of my appearance numbed me; I dropped the mirror. Only good fortune decreed that it did not break when it fell to the rug. I have fainted from pain before, but never, I think, from pure surprise. As it was, I did not lose consciousness completely, but crumpled to sit in a heap on the floor.

  Tom?’ Lord Golden asked in annoyance and surprise.

  I had no attention for him. I slid the mirror across the rug to me and stared down into it. Then I touched my face. The scar I had borne for so long was gone. My nose was not precisely straight, but the long-ago break was far less evident. I thrust my hands inside my robe and felt my back. The sword-wound was gone, yes, but gone also was the ancient, pulling scar the festered arrowhead had left in my back. I inspected the place where my neck met my shoulder. Years ago, a Forged one had bitten a chunk from me there, leaving a puckered scar. The flesh was smooth.

  I looked up to find Lord Golden regarding me with consternation.

  ‘Why?’ I asked him wildly. ‘Why, in Eda’s name, did you do this to me? All will mark this change in me. How will I explain it?’

  He came a step closer. There was confusion in his eyes. Lord Golden spoke reluctantly. ‘But Tom Badgerlock, we did nothing to you.’ I do not know what my face looked like at his words but he recoiled from me. In a neutral voice, he continued, ‘Truly, we did not do this to you. We worked to close the wound in your back and to clean your blood of poisons. When I saw your other scar start to pucker and then to expulse bits of flesh, I cried out to them we had to stop. But even after we dropped hands and stepped back from you…’

  I tried to remember that moment, and could not. ‘Perhaps what you set in motion, my body and Skill continued. I don’t recall.’

  He covered his mouth with a hand as he stood looking down on me. ‘Chade—’ He hesitated, then forced himself to go on. His voice was nearly the Fool’s. ‘I think Lord Chade felt… I should not surmise what he felt. Only I think he believes you knew how to do this, and that you kept it a secret from him.’

  ‘Eda and El in a tangle,’ I groaned. Chade was right. I never had been good at discerning what people felt unless they told me directly. I had sensed there was some knot between us, but this was the last thing I’d expected. Even if I’d known my body had been cleared of scars, I would not have suspected that Chade would feel slighted over some imagined secret. That was what was behind his huffy retreat; his resolution was that he would continue to discover whatever I’d concealed from him. I gathered my legs under me and stood without assistance. Not that Lord Golden had offered me any. I proffered the mirror to him and turned back to my room.

  ‘So. Changed your mind about shaving, Badgerlock?’ Lord Golden asked me.

  ‘For now, yes. I’m going up to Chade’s old chamber. If you could let him know that I’d like to see him there, I’d be appreciative.’ I spoke to him as if he were the Fool. I didn’t expect a reply and I didn’t get one.

  I simply had no strength. I stopped to rest so many times on the stairs that I thought my candle would burn out and leave me in darkness. When I did reach the chamber, I had lost all ambition. At the door, the ferret leaped out to challenge me. Gilly did a wild dance, inviting me to battle for the territory. ‘You can have it,’ I told him. ‘You’d probably win anyway.’ Ignoring his rushes at my feet, I went and sat on the edge of the bed, then lay down and almost immediately fell asleep. I think I slept for a long time.

  When I awoke, the ferret was sleeping under my chin. The moment I stirred, Gilly fled. It was plain someone had come and gone. It disturbed me that I could sleep through that; when I had been bonded to my wolf, his mind had always kept watch through my senses. He would have wakened me as soon as he perceived I was hearing an intruder. I had grown too dependent on those wild senses, I decided as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I had grown too dependent on everything and everyone.

  There were dishes and a bottle of wine on the cleared end of the table. A pot of soup had been left warming at the edge of the hearth, and the wood had been replenished for the fire. I got up and went directly to the food. I ate and dran
k and waited. And while I waited, I perused the scrolls that had been left out for me. There was a report from someone about Icefyre and Outislander dragons. Another spy report on doings in Bingtown and their war with Chalced. An old scroll that showed a sketch of the muscles in a man’s back had been updated. The details and notes were in Chade’s hand. Well, at least my journey through death’s jaws had provided new knowledge. Beside that scroll were three more, bundled together. Tattered and faded they were, and all in the same hand. It was a set of Skill-exercises, designed specifically for the Solo. I scowled at that, wondering what they meant. A few minutes of reading enlightened me. These were exercises for the Skill-practitioner who had no coterie. It had never occurred to me before that there would be such, but when I thought about it, I saw it must be so. I had become one, hadn’t I? There had always been people who had been socially inept, or simply preferred solitude. When coteries were formed, it would be likely there would be some excluded. These exercises were for ones such as those.

  In reading it, I found it likely that they had most often been used as spies or healers. The exercises in the first scroll seemed to focus especially on subtle uses of the Skill either to listen in or implant suggestions in someone’s thoughts. The second scroll dealt with repairing another’s body. This fascinated me, not just because I had recently undergone it, but because it confirmed a thing I had suspected. What a man started with the Skill and his will, the body often took over. The body understood healing. Yet it also understood that sometimes hasty repairs were more important than perfect ones, that closing the wound might be more important than smooth skin afterwards. So the scroll put it. The body understood conserving one’s strength and reserves against tomorrow’s needs. The scroll cautioned Skill-users to be wary of ignoring the body’s own tendencies, and to be circumspect with how ardently they pursued a repair. I wondered if Chade had read that part.

  The third scroll dealt with maintaining one’s own body. On this last scroll, the clear notes in Chade’s hand contrasted strongly with the faded old inking. It chronicled his early failed efforts as well as his recent successes. This was what he had wanted me to see; these notes were why he had left it out. He wished me to know that ever since the Skill-scrolls had come into his possession, he had been trying and failing to repair his own body. He had been successful only since he had witnessed the healing of mine, and discovered that he could tap Thick’s Skill-talent to supplement his faltering and groping efforts.

  I read the diary of his frustration, and knew the fear that had accompanied it. I knew only too well what it was to live within a damaged body. And in witnessing Nighteyes’ decline, I had tasted what it must be to grow old. Chade had resumed a normal life only in the last decade. He had spent his prime sequestered here, in this room, working from the shadows and in disguise. How bitter would it be to emerge into a world of people and music, dancing and conversation and, yes, power and the wealth to enjoy it, only to have one’s declining body threaten to take it all away again? I could not blame him for what he had done, despite the risks he had taken. I understood it only too well. I dreaded the day when I would have to face such a decision, for I feared I would decide the same.

  I read carefully, several times, the scroll that had to do with repairs to the body using the Skill. It told me much that was useful, but not all I needed to know. I knew with sad certainty why Chade had held these scrolls back from me. If I had seen them, I would have known that he was pursuing a lone quest to master the Skill. And he had obviously begun it years before I had been enticed to return to Buckkeep.

  I leaned back in my chair and tried to put myself in the old man’s place. What had he imagined, what had he dreamed? I pushed myself back through the years. The war with the Red Ships has finally ended. The raiders have been driven back by the Six Duchies dragons. Peace has returned to the land, the Queen is gravid with the Farseer heir, Regal has not only returned the missing library of Skill scrolls, but has conveniently died after renewing his loyalty to the crown. And Chade, after so many years spent in the shadows, can emerge as the Queen’s trusted councillor. He can move freely about Buckkeep, enjoying food and drink and the companionship of the nobility. What is there left for him to desire? Only that which had been denied to him so many years ago.

  The Skill was not taught to royal bastards, even if they had the aptitude for it. Some kings ruthlessly administered elfbark to illegitimate youngsters, to kill the Skill-ability in them. I did not doubt that other Farseer monarchs had saved time and simply killed the bastards. I had only been taught the Skill because both Lady Patience and Chade had pleaded on my behalf. Even then, if the need for a coterie had not been so desperate, I am sure King Shrewd would have refused me.

  Chade had never been taught. And in the ways that boys do, I had always simply accepted that piece of knowledge about my master. I had never asked him, ‘Were you ever tested for Skill-ability? Did you ask to be taught and were refused, or did you never even ask?’ I had never asked for the details. Yet I knew that he had longed for that forbidden knowledge. I knew it in how ardently he had pursued it for me, and how badly he had hoped that I would succeed at it. My failure to master the magic had smarted as keenly for him as it had for me.

  Yet I had never, until now, considered what these factors might mean when those scrolls came into his hands. Ever since he had come to my cottage, I had known that he had been reading the scrolls. Knowing Chade, I should have known that with or without a teacher, he would try to master what he read there. I should have offered to teach him what I knew. Every time he had brought up the question of Skill-candidates, had he secretly hoped I would look at him? And why hadn’t I ever seriously considered the idea? Oh, yes, once I had thrown it out, as a man throws a bone to a hungry dog to appease it. But I had not truly considered him capable of learning it. Why not?

  I had more questions about myself than I did about Chade. While I was pondering them, I heated water and found his looking-glass. In Chade’s assassin’s armoury were any number of knives sharp enough to shave with. I made a credible job of it, taking my time and watching my unscathed face emerge. I was sitting at the table, looking at myself in the mirror when Chade entered. I didn’t wait for him to speak.

  ‘I didn’t realize that my old scars were gone. I think the coterie started the wheels turning, and after that my healing was like a runaway cart on a steep street. It just kept going on its own. I don’t even really know how it was done.’

  He spoke as humbly as I did. ‘So Lord Golden managed to convey to me.’ Then he came closer. When he stood over me, he studied my face, cocking his head to one side. When I looked up at him, he smiled reminiscently. ‘Oh, my boy. You do look like your father. Far too much for our purposes now. You should not have shaved; the beard at least covered some of the changes in your face. Now you must wait until it grows back enough to disguise how much you’ve changed before you can go about the keep again.’

  I shook my head. ‘It wouldn’t do, Chade. Not even a heavy beard would be enough.’ I took a long final look at myself as I might have been. Then I laughed and pushed the mirror away. ‘Come sit down. We both know what must be done. I’ve read your scrolls, but they don’t seem to apply. In this effort tonight, we are going to have to feel our way.’

  We did not work well together. I think by nature we were both Solos, and yet we would have to learn to function together as part of Dutiful’s Coterie. And so we made a number of false starts, and irritably blamed Galen’s fogging of me and my use of elfbark and those short-sighted folk who had not trained Chade when he was a boy. But at length, the Skill flowed hesitantly between us, and as I so often had before, I trusted myself to his long-fingered hands. I fed him strength and the Skill itself, for his ability was as yet only a sporadic trickling of the magic. Chade’s knowledge of how a man’s body was put together combined with my own body’s awareness of itself to guide what we did. In some ways it was a more difficult task than my healing had been, for each piece had to
be done separately, and in defiance of what my body felt was correct. But we prevailed.

  And when we had finished, I took up the mirror again. My new scar was less noticeable than the old one, and my nose not quite as crooked. But it would suffice. The marks were there. As were the old bite scar on my neck, the star from the arrowhead near my spine, and a new web of scarring where the sword-wound should have been. These new scars were easier to tolerate than the old ones, for we involved only the skin and did not anchor them to the muscles underneath. Still, they pulled irritatingly. I knew I’d eventually get used to them. It was Chade who noticed that my ‘badgerlock’ was now growing in dark at the roots. He shook his head over that. ‘I’ve no idea how to change that. Nothing in the scrolls mentions a change in the color of hair. Dye the whole shock of white hair black is my advice. Let that change be obvious. Folk will think you’ve become vain. Vanity is easy to explain.’

  I nodded and set the mirror down. ‘But later. Right now, I’m exhausted,’ I said, and spoke the simple truth.

  He looked at me oddly. ‘And your headache?’

  I frowned and lifted a hand to my brow. ‘Is no worse than an ordinary headache, despite all the Skilling we’ve done tonight. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps it only took getting used to.’

  He shook his head slowly and came around the table to set his hands to my skull. ‘Here,’ he said, tracing the now non-existent scar that had birthed my badgerlock of white hair. ‘And here.’ He prodded an area near my eye-socket.

  I winced from habit, then sat still. ‘It doesn’t hurt. My head always hurt, when I combed my hair, and my face always ached if I was long in the cold. I never thought about it before.’

  ‘I’d date the injury by your eye to when Galen tried to kill you on the tower top. In the Queen’s garden, when you were his student. Burrich said you nearly lost the vision in that eye. Have you forgotten the beating he gave you?’