Fool's Fate

by neetha Napew

  “And Nettle waked him up!” Thick announced happily as he finally trudged up to us. “And I saved her and put her safe. She loves me.”

  “What?” This burst from Burrich, a cry of outrage and pain. “Nettle, my Nettle? Witted? It isn’t possible, it cannot be!”

  “No. Not Witted. Skilled.” Chade sounded impatient. “But untrained. Dangerously untrained. Another consequence for which we must thank Fitz and his whims. We nearly lost her in the Skill-current, but Thick knew her well enough to find her and take her out of it. She’s safe now, Burrich. Probably very confused as to what happened to her just then, but safe.”

  “This is too much. I cannot deal with this.” Burrich had been holding my arm, but now I was suddenly supporting him. He shuddered out a breath. “I suspected she had a touch of Chivalry’s magic. I suspected for a long time, and when she told me of her wolf dream . . . that was when I knew I must go to Kettricken, to find out what it meant and to arrange for Nettle to be taught.” He gave me a strange smile, torn between pride in her and fear for her future. “She was strong enough to wake a dragon?”

  Then all of us were rocked by a blast of thought that sent Chade tottering, and then sinking to his knees. It was dragon speech, reaching into our minds. Tintaglia had found us.

  Go and help him! Dig Icefyre out, and harm not a scale upon him. I come swift as flame, for by touch of our minds, I know where he is and no longer need the guidance of a bird! I warn you, I am not far away, and when I arrive, I expect to see him standing to meet me. If he is not, woe upon you all!

  It was neither the Skill nor the Wit, and yet it struck my mind with the force of a strong Skill-sending. Icefyre’s recent use of my mind had left me raw to the Skill, and the force of Tintaglia’s thought physically staggered me. I suspect that those of us versed in the Skill were more susceptible to her thoughts than the others. Certainly it staggered Dutiful’s entire Skill coterie. Those of his Wit coterie reacted in a variety of ways, some seeming to take the full import of her words, others looking about as if puzzled, and Cockle showing no awareness of it at all. Civil raised a shout. “You all heard her! Tintaglia commands that we dig Icefyre out! Let’s do it!” He raced up the hill as if leading a charge against an enemy.

  Among the Outislanders, as least one prostrated himself, believing that a god or demon had spoken to him. Two of the others stared off in the distance, as if questing after something they might have heard. The others gave no reaction. Burrich, long sealed off to the Skill by my father in order to protect him, looked puzzled for a moment, as if he had almost recalled something. I suspect his Wit made him vaguely aware of a sending without comprehending the thought that had accompanied it.

  An instant only I had to absorb all this. Then Thick, with a wide and joyous smile, went racing away from us, up the hill, his short legs pumping as hard as they could. “I’m coming!” he shouted. “I’m coming to dig you out, Icefyre!”

  I put his enthusiasm down to Icefyre’s earlier influence over his simple mind and his recent success at rescuing Nettle, which must have been a heady experience for the man. I strode after him, Dutiful at my side and Chade at our heels. It was only when I heard Dutiful mutter, “We have moved much of the ice above his back. Surely that is where he will break through first. We have not much more work to do!” that I wondered at his sudden enthusiasm for the task.

  “Then you do not share Chade’s hope that we could simply leave the dragon where he is, as he was?”

  “Yes. I do. I did. But that was . . . before. Before Nettle woke him. No. Before . . . But Tintaglia commands this. Tintaglia . . .” His pace slowed and he looked at me in consternation. “This is, this was, almost like when you commanded me with the Skill. But it isn’t. I can set this aside. I think.” He caught at my arm and halted me alongside him, an odd expression on his face. “She commanded, and for a moment, I could think of nothing but obeying her. Strange. Is that what they mean by the charm of a dragon?”

  Burrich startled me when he spoke. I had almost forgotten him, and yet he had somehow kept pace with us. “The old tales speak of the charm of a dragon coming from its breath. What have I missed? Some sort of Skill-sending?”

  “Something like that,” Dutiful pondered. “Almost a Skill-command, I think, but I do not know. I think I wanted to help Icefyre before she commanded it. It seems my own thought to me. Yet—”

  And then Chade passed us, muttering, “The powder. The powder will do it; the powder will blast him free. We only have to change where we set it. Or perhaps set it in smaller vessels—”

  Dutiful and I exchanged a glance and then caught up with him. I seized his sleeve, but he shook me off. I grabbed hold of him again.

  “Chade, you cannot kill him now. It’s too late. Tintaglia is nearly here, and too many of our people are intent on digging him free. It won’t work.”

  “I . . . kill him?” He looked shocked at the thought. “No, not kill him. Blast him free, you fool.”

  I exchanged a worried look with the Prince. “Why?” I asked Chade gently.

  He looked as if my ignorance mystified him. Then, for just a moment, I saw another look pass over his face, one that frightened me. He groped. But however Tintaglia had fogged his mind, Chade had long been an expert at fabricating reasons to have me do whatever he decided I should do. “Does it escape you that an angry female dragon is on her way here, one that has been alerted to our presence thanks to you? What have you left us to do? If we kill him now, she’ll kill us all. She as much as said so. Unfortunately, that means we must make ourselves useful to a dragon. If we extricate Icefyre before Tintaglia arrives, she may see it as a sign of good intentions on our part. You yourself said we might use her goodwill to build an alliance with Bingtown. Until we know her strength, I judge it best to placate her in any way we can. Don’t you?”

  “And you think the best way to free him is with your powder?”

  “One blast can do the work of ten men with shovels. Trust me on this, Fitz. I know what I’m doing.” He now seemed as enthused to blast Icefyre free as he had earlier been to blow him up. How hard had Tintaglia’s command hit him? With the force of a Skill-command, which one must unquestioningly obey, regardless of one’s own judgment?

  Was the Fool Forged yet? Dead? The sudden thought broke abruptly over me like a wave of cold water, dashing me from my present worry. I staggered with the impact of it. I had done what the Fool had hoped I would do. I had wakened the dragon and now all our forces were turned to freeing him and uniting him with Tintaglia. It had even felt like the right thing to do, at the moment that I did it. But now my soul scrabbled at the remorselessness of time. I could not go back and change the decision, yet it suddenly seemed far too heavy and sharp a thing to carry for the rest of my life. His fingerprints burned briefly cold on my wrist.

  Still my feet carried me on with the rest of them. When we reached the excavation, we discovered that all the dragon’s struggles had done little. The ice over his back was cracked and starred from beneath, and he had collapsed part of the tunnel that had been dug above his neck and head. The Wit coterie had already attacked the cracks in the ice with much enthusiasm and little manpower. As I arrived, the Hetgurd men joined them. For the first time, every man at the camp was united in the task of unearthing the dragon alive. But no amount of excitement could make the work any less arduous.

  Chade berated me for being an idiot when we all discovered I had left the powder pot behind when I had fled the tunnel. He put two men to work reopening the tunnel, and then completely confused the suspicious Wit coterie by putting them to work digging deep, narrow holes alongside the dragon. “We’ll put smaller loads of powder along the edge of that crack he’s made. It won’t be enough to harm him, just enough to break the ice up so we can haul it away in larger chunks. Fitz, I’ll need you with me to help me measure and package the powder. Dutiful, you too, and bring Longwick. We’ll need more vessels suitable for holding the fires. It will be tricky to set them off, but I’
m convinced that near-simultaneous blasts will serve us best.”

  Chade was in his element, organizing and improvising. He burned with a fierce joy at putting his thoughts into action. I realized then that in his own way, he would have been a fine soldier and strategist, much as Verity had been. The times in my life when he had seemed most alive had been when he had finally flung aside all constraints to transform his thoughts into deeds.

  Burrich had come with us when we returned to Chade’s tent, for he could be of little help with the digging. It was sad to know that he realized that. He reminded me somewhat of an old dog that knows he can no longer keep up with the pack on the scent, and so holds his place at his master’s stirrup in faith that he will be there for the kill. I glanced up at him as he sat attentively on Chade’s pallet. Chade was opening another small cask of his powder. I knelt on the floor, a clean hide stretched out before me, measuring powder into piles that were approximately the same size as the example that Chade had heaped for me. The consistency of the powder troubled me; it was not a uniform color, and some seemed ground finer than the rest, but Chade had already shrugged aside my questions. “In time I will perfect it. But for now, it will work, and that is all that counts, boy. Where is the Prince? I sent him to scavenge tight containers from any of the tents. He should be back by now. And Longwick, with the kettles. It’s going to be a mix-and-match that we must do, and the sooner we begin, the better.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be here soon,” I said, and then to Burrich, “You’re very quiet. Is it because you came here to kill the dragon, and now we all struggle to save it?”

  He knit his dark brows at me. “You thought I came here to slay a dragon?” He gave a snort of amazement and then shook his head. “I didn’t believe in this dragon. I thought it a girl’s bad dream, and so it was easy for me to assure Nettle that I’d protect her from it. I took her to Buckkeep and there I learned that there might be some vestige of a dragon here. But when I came here, I came to bring you home, you and Swift. Because, regardless of what it might cost you, or me, that is where you belong.” He gave a sudden sigh. “I’ve always been a simple man, Fitz, seeking simple answers to my problems. And here I am, trying to see how to untangle the mess you and I have made of things, and now to protect Nettle from a dragon that knows her name and how to talk sense to Swift about Beast Magic. I’d thought that you had died of the Wit, you know. The Queen tried to give me what she knew of that tale, how a Forged One came to be wearing a shirt I’d sewn for you, with King Shrewd’s pin still in the collar . . . When I think of the anguish I felt as I buried that wretch . . .”

  But his thoughts were interrupted abruptly by Dutiful bursting into the tent. “They’ve gone! I can’t find them anywhere!”

  “Containers to put the powder in?” Chade demanded single-mindedly. “What, all gone?”

  “No! The Narcheska and Peottre! They are gone, their beds left empty. I do not think they returned to them after we spoke last night. I think they left then and if they did—”

  “Then there is only one place they could have gone.” Despite Chade’s earlier assurances that it didn’t matter, he was now scowling and poking at the piles of more finely ground powder. “They went to the Pale Woman. And told her that Fitz had come back to us, and that we now knew the true stakes of the game.” He suddenly scowled. “And we spoke of Web’s gull in front of them, and Tintaglia coming here. They will have told her. She will now know of our thoughts of her, and what our vulnerabilities are. The Pale Woman will know that if she wishes to move against us, she must act swiftly. Our only recourse is to be even swifter than she is. We must get that dragon out of the ice.”

  “But why would Elliania and Peottre do that? Why would they turn on us, when they knew I was willing to kill the dragon for them?” The Prince was agonized.

  “I don’t know.” Chade was implacable. “But it’s safest for us to assume treachery, to assume that everything we spoke of last night is now being told to the Pale Woman. And we must now see how that leaves us vulnerable.”

  “But it’s all changed since last night! Last night, Fitz and I plotted to do her bidding, to give way to her will. Why go to the Pale Woman to tell her that, why not wait until the deed was done?” Dutiful scowled. “When they left us last night, Peottre did not look like a man about to cower before an enemy.”

  “I don’t know.” Chade’s concentration didn’t waver. “Make the piles only this size when the powder is this fine, Fitz.” Then, “I don’t know, Dutiful. But it is my duty to assume that they mean you harm, and try to think of what move we could make to forestall them.” With a scraper, he corrected one of my piles. “After the dragon is freed,” he added, almost to himself. He lifted his eyes back to Dutiful. “We still need those containers.”

  “I’ll get them,” the boy replied faintly.

  “Good. Set the girl and Peottre out of your mind for a time. If they slipped away last night, they are long gone, and too far away for us to be able to do anything about it. Let us deal with the crisis at hand, and then move on to the next one.”

  Dutiful nodded distractedly and left. My heart was heavy for him. “Do you really believe they went to report to her?”

  “Perhaps. But I don’t think so. As I told Dutiful, we must assume the worst, and there draw our lines of defense. And our best defense may be to free the dragon that you have wakened.” He knit his brows, pondering it, but then seemed to find his piles of powder more interesting. “We will think more on it when Icefyre is freed.”

  I feared that Tintaglia’s command had sunk deep into his mind. I wanted to believe Chade was thinking clearly, but I was not confident of it.

  Longwick came first with the kettles, and then Dutiful with the containers of varying sizes. As soon as he had what he wanted, Chade sent them back to the excavation site, with orders to be sure the six holes he had ordered dug alongside the dragon were progressing. I wondered if he merely intended to keep the Prince busy. Chade seemed very picky to me as he sorted through the containers, first selecting the vessels to hold the powder, making sure of the tightness of the stoppers or lids, and then matching them to their firepots. I offered to help him but he refused. “Eventually, I will devise the perfect container for my powder. It must be one that will yield to fire, but not too swiftly, for whoever sets fire to it must have time to move away. It should be tight enough to keep out moisture, if the powder is to be safely stored in it. And it must be one that can be filled cleanly, with no residual powder clinging to the outside. Eventually, I will fashion a better way to ignite it . . .”

  He was now completely focused on what he was doing, a master still puzzling out his new invention, unwilling to trust it to his journeyman’s hands. I withdrew from him a small way, sitting on Dutiful’s pallet next to a silent Burrich. He seemed deep in his own thoughts. I still felt a terrible sense of urgency, a desire for it all to be over. I could not decide if Tintaglia had imprinted me with a command, or if it was my agony over the Fool. I could not keep my thoughts from turning to him. I tried not to wonder what he might be enduring, or if he was past enduring anything. The dragon’s touch seemed to have restored my Skill, yet when I groped for my silk-thin Skill-bond with the Fool, I could not feel him. It frightened me. “I’m doing what you wanted me to do,” I promised the Fool quietly. “I’ll try to get the dragon free.”

  Chade, absorbed in his sorting and loading of the powder vessels, did not appear to hear me, but Burrich did. Perhaps it is as they say, that his fading sight had sharpened his other senses. He set his hand to my shoulder. Perhaps if Web had never spoken of it, I would never have noticed it. But he was right. I felt Burrich’s calm flow into me. It was not his thoughts that reached me, but a sense of connection with his being. It did not match the strength of a Wit-bond between man and animal, and yet it was there. He spoke quietly. “You’ve been doing that for a long time, boy. Doing what others wanted you to do. Taking on tasks no one else wanted.” It was a statement, not a judgment.
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  “So did you.”

  He was quiet a moment. Then, “Yes. That’s true. Like a dog that needs a master, I believe someone once told me.”

  The cutting words I had once flung at him now brought bitter smiles to both of us. “Perhaps that has been true for me as well,” I admitted.

  We both sat still and silent for a time, finding a moment of respite in the eye of the storm all around us. Outside, I could hear the muffled noises of the working men. Their voices came distantly through the cold. I heard the dull ring of metal tools against ice, and the deeper thuds of chunks of ice flung into the wooden-bottomed sleds. Closer to hand, Chade muttered to himself and scraped his powder into precise loads. I felt for the dragon, and he was there, but my Wit-sense of him was dimmed as if he conserved his strength and now would do no more for himself than remain alive and await rescue. Burrich’s hand was still on my shoulder. I suddenly suspected that, just as I did, he quested out toward the dragon.

  “What will you do about Swift?” I asked Burrich, before I was even aware I was going to speak.

  Burrich spoke almost casually. “I’ll take my son home. Try to raise him to be an upright man.”

  “You mean, not to use his Wit.”

  Burrich made a noise that might have been an assent or a request to drop the topic. I couldn’t.

  “Burrich, all those years in the stables, all your gift for healing and calming and training animals. Was that the Wit? Did you have a bond with Vixen?”

  He took his time answering me. Then, he gave me a question instead. “What you are really asking me is, did I do one thing and demand another of you?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “Fitz. I’ve been a drunk. It was nothing I ever wished to see you or my sons become. I’ve given in to other appetites, knowing well that no good could come of it. I am a man, and human. But that doesn’t mean that I would condone or encourage those things in my boys. Would you? Kettricken told me that you had a foster son. I was glad to hear that you had not been entirely alone. But did raising him not teach you something about yourself? That the faults you find abhorrent in yourself are even more horrifying when you see your son manifest them?”