by Robin Hobb
He looked at me with golden eyes that seemed almost luminous in the dim light from the open door. He just looked at me, and I suddenly felt old and the arrow scar by my spine gave me a twist of pain that made me catch my breath for an instant. A throb like a dull red foreboding followed it. I told myself I had sat too long in one position; that was all.
“Well?” he prompted me. His eyes moved over my face almost hungrily.
“I think I need more brandy,” I confessed, for somehow my cup had become empty.
He drained his own cup and took mine. When he rose, the wolf and I did also. We followed him into the cabin. He rucked about in his pack and took out a bottle. It was about a quarter empty. I tucked the observation away in my mind; so he had fortified himself against this meeting. I wondered what part of it he had dreaded. He uncorked the bottle and refilled both our cups. My chair and Hap's stool were by the hearth, but we ended up sitting on the hearthstones by thedying fire. With a heavy sigh the wolf stretched out between us, his head in my lap. I rubbed his head, and caught a sudden twinge of pain from him. I moved my hand down him to his hip joints and massaged them gently. Nighteyes gave a low groan as the touch eased him.
How bad is it?
Mind your own business .
You are my business .
Sharing pain doesn't lessen it.
I'm not sure about that.
“He's getting old. ” The Fool interrupted our chained thoughts.
“So am I,” I pointed out. “You, however, look as young as ever. ”
“Yet I'm substantially older than both of you put together. And tonight I feel every one of my years. ” As if to give the lie to his own words, he lithely drew his knees up tight to his chest and rested his chin atop them as he hugged his own legs.
If you drank some willowbark tea, it might ease you.
Spare me your swill and keep rubbing.
A small smile bowed the Fool's mouth. “I can almost hear you two. It's like a gnat humming near my ear, or the itch of something forgotten. Or trying to recall the sweet taste of something from a passing whiff of its fragrance. ” His golden eyes suddenly met mine squarely. “It makes me feel lonely. ”
“I'm sorry,” I said, not knowing what else I could say. That Nighteyes and I spoke as we did was not an effort to exclude him from our circle. It was that our circle made us one in a fundamental way we could not share.
Yet once we did, Nighteyes reminded me. Once we did, and it was good.
I do not think that I glanced at the Fool's gloved hand. Perhaps he was closer to us than he realized, for he lifted his hand and tugged the finely woven glove from it. His no illlongfingered, elegant hand emerged. Once, a chance touch of his had brushed his fingers against Verity's Skillimpregnated hands. That touch had silvered his fingers, and given him a tactile Skill that let him know the history of things simply by touching them. I turned my own wrist to look down at it. Dusky gray fingerprints still marked the inside of my wrist where he had touched me. For a time, our minds had been joined, almost as if he and Nighteyes and I were a true Skill coterie. But the silver on his fingers had faded, as had the fingerprints on my wrist and the link that had bonded us.
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He lifted one slender finger as if in a warning. Then he turned his hand and extended it to me as if he proffered an invisible gift on those outstretched fingertips. I closed my eyes to steady myself against the temptation. I shook my head slowly. “It would not be wise,” I said thickly. “And a Fool is supposed to be wise?” “You have always been the wisest creature I've known. ” I opened my eyes to his earnest gaze. “I want it as I want breath itself, Fool. Take it away, please. ”
“If you're sure . . . no, that was a cruel question. Look, it is gone. ” He gloved the hand, held it up to show me, and then clasped it with his naked one.
“Thank you. ” I took a long sip of my brandy, and tasted a summer orchard and bees bumbling in the hot sunshine among the ripe and fallen fruit. Honey and apricots danced along the edges of my tongue. It was decadently good. “I've never tasted anything like this,” I observed, glad to change the subject.
“Ah, yes. I'm afraid I've spoiled myself, now that I can afford the best. There's a good stock of it in Bingtown, awaiting a message from me to tell them where to ship it. ”
I cocked my head at him, trying to find the jest in his words. Slowly it sank in that he was speaking the plain truth. The fine clothes, the blooded horse, exotic Bingtown coffee, and now this . . . “You're rich?” I hazarded sagely.
“The word doesn't touch the reality. ” Pink suffused his amber cheeks. He looked almost chagrined to admit it.
“Tell!” I demanded, grinning at his good fortune.
He shook his head. “Far too long a tale. Let me condense it for you. Friends insisted on sharing with me a windfall of wealth. I doubt that even they knew the full value of all they pressed upon me. I've a friend in a trading town, far to the south, and as she sells it off for the best prices such rare goods can command, she sends me letters of credit to Bingtown. ” He shook his head ruefully, appalled at his good fortune. “No matter how well I spend it, there always seems to be more. ”
“I am glad for you,” I said with heartfelt sincerity.
He smiled. “I knew you would be. Yet, the strangest part perhaps is that it changes nothing. Whether I sleep on spun gold or straw, my destiny remains the same. As does yours. ”
So we were back to that again. I summoned all my strength and resolve. “No, Fool,” I said firmly. “I won't be pulled back into Buckkeep politics. I have a life of my own now, and it is here. ”
He cocked his head at me, and a shadow of his old jester's smile widened his lips. “Ah, Fitz, you've always had a life of your own. That is, precisely, your problem. You've always had a destiny. As for it being here . . . ” He shied a look around the room. “Here is no more than where you happen to be standing at the moment. Or sitting. ” He took a long breath. “I haven't come to drag you back into anything, Fitz. Time has brought me here. It's carried you here as well. Just as it brought Chade, and other twists to your fortunes of late. Am I wrong?”
He was not. The entire summer had been one large kink in my smoothly coiling life. I didn't reply but I didn't need to. He already knew the answer. He leaned back, stretching his long legs out before him. He nibbled at his ungloved thumb thoughtfully, then leaned his head back against the chair and closed his eyes.
“I dreamed of you once,” I said suddenly. I had not been planning to say the words.
He opened one catyellow eye. “I think we had this conversation before. A long time ago. ”
“No. This is different. I didn't know it was you until just now. Or maybe I did. ” It had been a restless night, years ago, and when I awakened the dream had clung to my mind like pitch on my hands. I had known it was significant, and yet the snatch of what I had seen had made so little sense, I could not grasp its significance. “I didn't know you had gone golden, you see. But now, when you leaned back with your eyes closed . . . You Êor someoneÊwere lying on a rough wooden floor. Your eyes were closed; you were sick or injured. A man leaned over you. I felt he wanted to hurt you. So I . . . ”
I had repelled at him, using the Wit in a way I had not for years. A rough thrust of animal presence to shove him away, to express dominance of him in a way he could not understand, yet hated. The hatred was proportionate to his fear. The Fool was silent, waiting for me.
“I pushed him away from you. He was angry, hating you, wanting to hurt you. But I pressed on his mind that he had to go and fetch help for you. He had to tell someone that you needed help. He resented what I did to him, but he had to obey me. ”
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“Because you Skillburned it into him,” the Fool said quietly.
“Perhaps,” I admitted unwillingly. Certainly the next day had been one long torment of headache and Skill
hunger. The thought made me uneasy. I had been telling myself that I could not Skill that way. Certain other dreams stirred uneasily in my memory. I pushed them down again. No, I promised myself. They were not the same.
“It was the deck of a ship,” he said quietly. “And it's quite likely you saved my life. ” He took a breath. “I thought something like that might have happened. It never made sense to me that he didn't get rid of me when he could have. Sometimes, when I was most alone, I mocked myself that I could cling to such a hope. That I could believe I was so important to anyone that he would travel in his dreams to protect me. ”
“You should have known better than that,” I said quietly.
“Should I?” The question was almost a challenge. He gave me the most direct look I had ever received from him. I did not understand the hurt I saw in his eyes, nor the hope. He needed something from me, but I wasn't sure what it was. I tried to find something to say, but before I could, the moment seemed to pass. He looked away from me, releasing me from his plea. When his eyes came back to mine, he changed both his expression and the subject.
“So. What happened to you after I flew away?”
The question took me aback. “I thought . . . but you said you had not seen Chade for years. How did you know how to find me, then?”
By way of answer, he closed his eyes, and then brought his left and right forefingers together to meet before him. He opened his eyes and smiled at me. I knew it was as much answer as I would get.
“I scarcely know where to begin. ”
“I do. With more brandy. ”
He flowed effortlessly to his feet. I let him take my empty cup. I set a hand on Nighteyes' head and felt him hovering between sleep and wakefulness. If his hips still troubled him, he was concealing it well. He was getting better and better at holding himself apart from me. I wondered why he concealed his pain.
Do you wish to share your aching back with me? Leave me alone and stop borrowing trouble. Not every problem in the world belongs to you. He lifted his head from my knee and with a deep sigh stretched out more fully before the hearth. Like a curtain falling between us, he masked himself once more.
I rose slowly, one hand pressed against my back to still my own ache. The wolf was right. Sometimes there waslittle point to sharing pain. The Fool refilled both our cups with his apricot brandy. I sat down at the table and he set mine before me. His own he kept in his hand as he wandered about the room. He paused before Verity's unfin' ished map of the Six Duchies on my wall, glanced into the nook that was Hap's sleeping alcove, and then leaned in the door of my bedchamber. When Hap had come to live with me, I had added an additional chamber that I referred to as my study. It had its own small hearth, as well as my desk and a scroll rack. The Fool paused at the door to it, then stepped boldly inside. I watched him. It was like watching a cat explore a strange house. He touched nothing, yet appeared to see everything. “A lot of scrolls,” he observed from the other room.
I raised my voice to reach him. “I've been trying to write a history of the Six Duchies. It was something that Patience and Fedwren proposed years ago, back when I was a boy. It helps to occupy my time of an evening. ” “I see. May I?”
I nodded. He seated himself at my desk, and unrolled the scroll on the stone game. “Ah, yes, I remember this. ”
“Chade wants it when I am finished with it. I've sent him things, from time to time, via Starling. But up until a month or so ago, I hadn't seen him since we parted in the Mountains. ”
“Ah. But you had seen Starling. ” His back was to me. I wondered what expression he wore. The Fool and the minstrel had never gotten along well together. For a time, they had made an uneasy truce, but I had always been a bone of contention between them. The Fool had never approved of my friendship with Starling, had never believed she had my best interests at heart. That didn't make it any easier to let him know he had always been right.
“For a time, I saw Starling. On and off for, what, seven or eight years. She was the one who brought Hap to me about seven years ago. He's just turned fifteen. He's not home right now; he's hired out in the hopes of gaining more coin for an apprenticeship fee. He wants to be a cabinetmaker. He does good work, for a lad; both the desk and the scroll rack are his work. Yet I don't know if he has the patience for detail that a good joiner must have. Still, it's what his heart is set on, and he wants to apprentice to a cabinetmaker in Buckkeep Town. Gindast is the joiner's name, and he's a master. Even I have heard of him. If I had realized Hap would set his heart so high, I'd have saved more over the years. But ”
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“Starling?” His query reined me back from my musings on the boy.
It was hard to admit it. “She's married now. I don't know how long. The boy found it out when he went to Springfest at Buckkeep with her. He came home and told me. ” I shrugged one shoulder. “I had to end it between us. She knew I would when I found out. It still made her angry. She couldn't understand why it couldn't continue, as long as her husband never found out. ”
“That's Starling. ” His voice was oddly nonjudgmental, as if he commiserated with me over a garden blight. He turned in the chair to look at me over his shoulder. “And you're all right?”
I cleared my throat. “I've kept busy. And not thought about it much. ”
“Because she felt no shame at all, you think it must all belong to you. People like her are so adept at passing on blame. This is a lovely red ink on this. Where did you get it?”
“I made it. ”
“Did you?” Curious as a child, he unstopped one of the ink bottles on my desk and stuck in his little finger. It came out tipped in scarlet. He regarded it for a moment. “I kept Burrich's earring,” he suddenly admitted. “I never took it to Molly. ”
“I see that. I'm just as glad you didn't. It's better that neither of them know I survived. ”
“Ah. Another question answered. ” He drew a snowy kerchief from inside his pocket and ruined it by wiping the red ink from his finger. “So. Are you going to tell me all the events in order, or must I pry bits out of you one at a time?”
I sighed. I dreaded recalling those times. Chade had been willing to accept an account of the events that related to the Farseer reign. The Fool would want more than that. Even as I cringed from it, I could not evade the notion that somehow I owed him that telling. “I'll try. But I'm tired, and we've had too much brandy, and it's far too much to tell in one evening. ”
He tipped back in my chair. “Were you expecting me to leave tomorrow?”
“I thought you might. ” I watched his face as I added, “I didn't hope it. ”
He accepted me at my word. “That's good, then, for you would have hoped in vain. To bed with you, Fitz. I'll take the boy's cot. Tomorrow is soon enough to begin to fill in nearly fifteen years of absence. ”
The Fool's apricot brandy was more potent than the Sandsedge, or perhaps I was simply wearier than usual. I staggered to my room, dragged off my shirt, and dropped into my bed. I lay there, the room rocking gently around me, and listened to his light footfalls as he moved about in the main room, extinguishing candles and pulling in the latchstring. Perhaps only I could have seen the slight unsteadiness in his movements. Then he sat down in my chair and stretched his legs toward the fire. At his feet, the wolf groaned and shifted in his sleep. I touched minds gently with Nighteyes; he was deeply asleep and welling contentment.
I closed my eyes, but the room spun sickeningly. I opened them a crack and stared at the Fool. He sat very still as he stared into the fire, but the dancing light of the flames lent their motion to his features. The angles of his face were hidden and then revealed as the shadows shifted. The gold of his skin and eyes seemed a trick of the firelight, but I knew they were not.
It was hard to realize he was no longer the impish jester who had both served and protected King Shrewd for all those years. His body had not changed, save in coloring. His gracefu
l, longfingered hands dangled off the arms of the chair. His hair, once as pale and airy as dandelion fluff, was now bound back from his face and confined to a golden queue. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. Firelight bronzed his aristocratic profile. His present grand clothes might recall his old winter motley of black and white, but I wagered he would never again wear bells and ribbons and carry a ratheaded scepter. His lively wit and sharp tongue no longer influenced the course of political events. His life was his own now. I tried to imagine him as a wealthy man, able to travel and live as he pleased. A sudden thought jolted me from my complacency.
“Fool?” I called aloud in the darkened room.
“What?” He did not open his eyes but his ready reply showed he had not yet slipped toward sleep.
“You are not the Fool anymore. What do they call you these days?”
A slow smile curved his lips in profile. “What does whocall me when?”
He spoke in the baiting tone of the jester he had been. If I tried to sort out that question, he would tumble me in verbal acrobatics until I gave up hoping for an answer. I refused to be drawn into his game. I rephrased my question. “I should not call you Fool anymore. What do you want me to call you?”
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“Ah, what do I want you to call me now? I see. An entirely different question. ” Mockery made music in his voice.
I drew a breath and made my question as plain as possible. “What'is your name, your real name?”
“Ah. ” His manner was suddenly grave. He took a slow breath. “My name. As in what my mother called me at my birth?”
“Yes. ” And then I held my breath. He spoke seldom of his childhood. I suddenly realized the immensity of what I had asked him. It was the old naming magic: if I know how you are truly named, I have power over you. If I tell you my name, I grant you that power. Like all direct questions I had ever asked the Fool, I both dreaded and longed for the answer.
“And if I tell you, you would call me by that name?” His inflection told me to weigh my answer.
That gave me pause. His name was his, and not for me to bandy about. But, “In private, only. And only if you wished me to,” I offered solemnly. I considered the words as binding as a vow.
