by Robin Hobb
I was appalled. ‘All this from a simple game supposed to help Dutiful focus his mind on the Skill.’
Chade laughed. ‘One never knows where such things will lead.’
It recalled another question to my mind. ‘Speaking of something that led to something else: of those we felt stir when Dutiful and Thick Skilled out, have any come to Buckkeep?’
‘Not yet,’ Chade replied, and tried to keep disappointment from his voice. ‘I had hoped they would hasten here, but I suppose that summons was both too strange and too abrupt. We should make a time when we can all sit down and intentionally reach forth in that way again. Last time, it only occurred to me in that instant that we could summon those we had wakened. My thoughts to them were rushed and unclear. And now we have so little time before we sail that there is no point in calling them here now. Nonetheless, it should be one of the first things we attend to when we return. How I wish that our prince were setting out with a traditional coterie of six trained Skill-users at his beck and call. Instead we are five, and one is the Prince himself.’
‘Four, for we leave Lord Golden behind.’ I pointed out
‘Four,’ Chade agreed sourly. He looked at me and Nettle’s name hung, unuttered, between us. Then, as if to himself, he said, ‘And there is no time now to train any others. In truth, there is scarcely time enough to train those we have.’
I cut him off before he could voice his frustration with himself. ‘It will come with time, Chade. I am convinced you cannot force it, any more than a swordsman can use will alone to make himself better. It must be coupled with endless practice and with drills that seemingly have nothing to do with his goals. Patience, Chade. Patience with yourself, and with us.’
He still could not hear any individual of the coterie Skill to him, unless there was physical contact as well. He was aware of Thick’s Skilling but it was like the humming of a gnat by his ear; it conveyed nothing. I did not know why we could not break through to him, and I did not know why he could not reach out to us. He had the Skill. Both my healing and my scarring had proven that he possessed great talent with it in that specialized area. But Chade was a man consumed by his ambition, and he would not rest until he had mastered the full spectrum of his magic.
But my efforts to reassure Chade had only turned his thoughts into a different channel. ‘Would you rather have an axe?’ he asked me abruptly.
I goggled at him for a moment, and then grasped his thought. ‘I haven’t fought with an axe in years,’ I told him. ‘I suppose I could try to get some practice in before we sailed. But I thought you just told me that this would probably be more drudgery than battle. After all, what enemy do we expect to fight?’
‘Even so. Still, an axe might prove more useful against the ice around the dragon than a sword. Request one from the Weaponsmaster tomorrow. And begin some drill with it to refresh your skills.’ He cocked his head at me and smiled. I knew that smile. I was already braced when he added, ‘You’ll be teaching weapons to Swift, along with reading and numbers. He is not doing well in the hearth classes with the other children. Burrich has taught him ahead of his years, so he is bored when put with the lads his own age and uncomfortable with the older boys. Kettricken has decided he would do best with an individual tutor. The Queen chose you.’
‘Why me?’ I demanded. What I had seen of the boy at Web’s lessons did not make me anxious to take him on as a student of anything. He was a dark and moody child, who sat solemn through stories that had other children rolling with laughter. He spoke little and looked much with Burrich’s black eyes. He carried himself as stiffly as a guardsman who had just taken a lashing, and had as much cheerfulness, also. ‘I am not suited to be a tutor. Besides, I think the less I have to do with the boy, the better for both of us. What if Burrich came to visit him and the boy wished him to meet his teacher? It would cause great difficulties.’
Chade shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Would that there was a chance of that happening. In the ten days the boy has been here, there has not been one word from his father to say he regretted sending him. I think Burrich has well and truly disowned him. That is one reason why Kettricken thinks it so important that one man take him over. He needs such a man in his life. Give him a sense of belonging, Fitz.’
‘Why me?’ I asked again sourly.
Chade smiled even wider. ‘I think the symmetry of it pleases Kettricken. And I confess to seeing a certain rough justice there, as well.’ Then he took a breath and spoke more seriously. ‘Where else would you have us put him? With someone who despises the Wit? With someone who finds him a burden but has no sense of obligation to him? No. He’s yours, now, Fitz. Make something of him. And teach him the axe. The lad should have Burrich’s build when he is grown. Right now, he’s just skin over bone. Take him to the practice courts each day and put some muscle on his frame.’
‘In my spare time,’ I promised him sourly. I wondered if Burrich had regarded me with as much dread as I did his son. I considered it probable. Yet no matter how much I dreaded it, Chade’s words had made it inevitable. The moment he had asked me ‘where else should I put the boy?’ I had known dread of what might befall Swift in someone else’s hands. It was not that I wanted an extra responsibility, least of all now. It was that I could not bear the thought of someone else taking him and being cruel or ignoring him. Such is the conceit all men have once they have been parents. One becomes convinced that no one else is better suited to the task.
I thought with dread of taking up the axe again. That was going to hurt. Yet Chade was right. It had always been my best weapon. Fine blades were wasted on me. I thought with regret of the beautiful sword that the Fool had given me. It had remained with him, along with my extravagant wardrobe, when I had left his service. I had not been comfortable masquerading as his servant, but now I found that I missed it. At least it had given me an opportunity to spend time with him. Our last conversation had healed some of the rift between us, but in another way it had created a distance of its own. I had come face to face with the fact that the Fool was but one aspect of the man I had thought I’d known. It was, I reflected sourly, like being friends with a puppeteer’s puppet and trying to ignore the man that gave it speech and made it dance.
Yet, late that same night, I went to his chamber door and tapped lightly. Dim light seeped from beneath it, but I stood long in the hall before a voice within asked irritably, ‘Who is there?’
‘Tom Badgerlock, Lord Golden. Might I come in?’
After a pause, I heard the latch lifted. I entered a room that I scarcely recognized. Reserved elegance had become sprawling opulence. Rich carpets overlapped one another on the floor. The candlesticks on the table were gold, and the perfume that the burning tapers gave off breathed as expensively as if he burned coins. The man who stood before me was robed in lavish silk and adorned with jewels. Even the hangings of the walls had been changed. The simple hunting scenes common to so many Buckkeep tapestries had been replaced with ornate depictions of Jamaillian gardens and temples.
‘Will you come in and close the door, or did you merely wish to stand there and gawp?’ he demanded peevishly. ‘It is late at night, Tom Badgerlock. Scarcely the hour for casual visitors.’
I shut the door behind me. ‘I know. I apologize for that, but when I’ve come round at more reasonable times, you haven’t been here.’
‘Did you forget something when you left my service and moved out of your chambers? That hideous tapestry, perhaps?’
‘No.’ I sighed and decided that I would not let him force me back into that role. ‘I missed you. And I’ve regretted, over and over, that stupid argument I began with you when Jek was here. It is as you warned me. I’ve been doomed to remember it every day, and every day wished I could unsay those words.’ I walked over to his hearth and dropped into one of the chairs by the dwindling fire. There was a decanter of brandy on a small table beside it and a glass with a drop or two left in the bottom.
‘I’ve no idea what you are talking
about. And I was just about to seek my bed. So. Your business here, Badgerlock?’
‘Be angry with me if you wish. I suppose I deserve it. Be whatever you have to be with me. But stop this charade and be yourself. That’s all I ask.’
He stood silent for a moment, looking at me with haughty disapproval. And then he came to take the other chair. He poured himself more brandy without offering me any. I could smell that it was the apricot one that we had shared in my cabin less than a year ago. He sipped it and then observed, ‘Be myself. And who would that be?’ He set down the glass, leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms on his chest.
‘I don’t know. I wish you were the Fool,’ I said quietly. ‘But I think we have come too far to go back to that pretence. Yet, if we could, I would. Willingly.’ I looked away from him. I kicked at the end of a hearth log, pushing it further into the fire and waking new flames in. a gust of sparks. ‘When I think of you now, I do not even know how to name you to myself. You are not Lord Golden to me. You never truly were. Yet you are not the Fool any more either.’ I steeled myself as the words came to me, unplanned but obvious. ‘How could the truth be so difficult to say?’
For a teetering instant, I feared he would misunderstand my words. Then I knew that he would know exactly what I meant by them. For years, he had shown that he understood my feelings, in the silences he kept. Before we parted company, I had to repair, somehow, the rift between us. The words were the only tool I had. They echoed of the old magic, of the power one gained when one knew someone’s true name. I was determined. And yet, the utterance still came awkward to my tongue.
‘You said once that I might call you Beloved, if I no longer wished to call you Fool.’ I took a breath. ‘Beloved, I have missed your company.’
He lifted a hand and covered his mouth. Then he disguised the gesture by rubbing his chin as if he thought something through carefully. I do not know what expression he hid behind his palm. When he dropped his hand from his face, he was smiling wryly. ‘Don’t you think that might cause some talk about the keep?’
I let his comment pass for I had no answer to it. He had spoken to me in the Fool’s mocking voice. Even as it soothed my heart, I had to wonder if it was a sham for my benefit. Did he show me what I wished to see, or what he was?
‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘I suppose that if you were going to have an appropriate name for me, it would still be Fool. So let us leave it at that, Fitzy. To you, I am the Fool.’ He looked into the fire and laughed softly. ‘It balances, I suppose. Whatever is to come for us, I will always have these words to recall now.’ He looked at me and nodded gravely, as if thanking me for returning something precious to him.
There were so many things I wanted to discuss with him. I wanted to review the Prince’s mission and talk about Web and ask him why he now gambled so much and what his wild extravagances meant. But I suddenly wanted to add no more words to what we had said tonight. As he had said, it balanced now. It was a hovering scale between us; I would chance no word that might tip it awry again. I nodded to him and rose slowly. When I reached the door, I said quietly, ‘Then, good night, Fool.’ I opened the door and went out into the corridor.
‘Good night, beloved.’ he said from his fireside chair. I shut the door softly behind myself.
EPILOGUE
The hand that once wielded both sword and axe now aches after an evening of the quill. When I wipe the tip of one clean, I often wonder how many buckets of ink I have used in a lifetime? How many words have I set down on paper or vellum, thinking to trap the truth thereby? And of those words, how many have I myself consigned to the flames as worthless and wrong? I do as I have done so many times. I write, I sand the wet ink, I consider my own words. Then I burn them. Perhaps when I do so, the truth goes up the chimney as smoke. Is it destroyed, or set free in the world? I do not know.
I used to doubt the Fool when he told me that all of time was a great circuit, and that we are ever doomed to repeat what has been done before. But the older I get, the more I see it is so. I thought then that he meant one great circle entrapped all of us. Instead, I think we are born into our circuits. Like a colt on the end of a training line, we trot in the circular path ordained for us. We go faster, we slow down, we halt on command and we begin again. And each time we think the circle is something new.
My father’s raising was given over, all those many years ago, to my grandfather’s half-brother, Chade. In his turn, my father gave me over to his right-hand man to rear. And when I became a father, I entrusted that the same hand could best raise my daughter in safety. Instead, I took in another man’s son and made Hap mine. Prince Dutiful, my son and yet not mine, also came to be my student. And in time, Burrich’s own son came to me, to learn from me that which his own father would not teach him.
Each circle spins off a circle of its own. Each one seems a new thing but in truth it is not. It is just our most recent attempts to correct old errors, to undo old wrongs done to us and to make up for things we have neglected. In each cycle, we may correct old errors, but I think we make as many new ones. Yet what is our alternative? To commit the same old errors again? Perhaps having the courage to find a better path is having the courage to risk making new mistakes.
THE END
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