Assassin's Quest (54 page)

“Where?” I managed to say.

“What?” she asked, leaning closer. She turned her head and leaned down to see my face. Blue eyes. Too close to my own. “Did you say something?”

I refused the spoon. It was suddenly too much effort to eat, even though what I had taken had heartened me. The room seemed darker. When next I awoke night was deep around me. All was silent save for the muted crackling of a fire in the hearth. The light it cast was fitful, but enough to show me the room. I felt feverish and very weak and horribly thirsty. There was a cup of water on a low table near my bed. I tried to reach for it, but the pain in my back stopped my arm’s movement. My back felt taut with the swollen wound. Any movement awakened it. “Water,” I mouthed, but the dryness of my mouth made it a whisper. No one came.

Near the hearth, my host had made up a pallet for himself. He slept like a cat, lax, but with that aura of constant wariness. His head was pillowed on his outstretched arm and the fire glazed him with light. I looked at him and my heart turned over in my chest.

His hair was smoothed back sleek on his skull, confined to a single plait, baring the clean lines of his face. Expressionless and still, it seemed a chiseled mask. The last trace of boyishness had been burned away, leaving only the clean planes of his lean cheeks and high forehead and long straight nose. His lips were narrower, his chin firmer than I recalled. The dance of the firelight lent color to his face, staining his white skin with its amber. The Fool had grown up in the time we had been apart. It seemed too much change for twelve months, and yet this year had been longer than any in my life. For a time I simply lay and looked at him.

His eyes opened slowly, as if I had spoken to him. For a time he stared back at me without a word. Then a frown creased his brow. He sat up slowly, and I saw that truly he was ivory, his hair the color of fresh-ground flour. It was his eyes that stopped my heart and tongue. They caught the firelight, yellow as a cat’s. I finally found my breath. “Fool,” I sighed sadly. “What have they done to you?” My parched mouth could barely shape the words. I reached out my hand to him, but the movement pulled the muscles of my back and I felt my injury open again. The world tilted and slid away.

Safety. That was my first clear sensation. It came from the soft warmth of the clean bedding, the herb fragrance of the pillow beneath my head. Something warm and slightly damp pressed gently on my wound and muffled its stab. Safety clasped me as gently as the cool hands that held my frostbitten hands between them. I opened my eyes and the firelit room slowly swam into focus.

He was sitting by my bed. There was a stillness about him that was not repose as he stared past me and into the darkened room. He wore a plain robe of white wool with a round collar. The simple clothes were a shock after the years of seeing him in motley. It was like seeing a garish puppet stripped of its paint. Then a single silver tear tracked down one cheek beside the narrow nose. I was astonished.

“Fool?” My voice came out as a croak this time.

His eyes came instantly to mine and he dropped to his knees beside me. His breath came and went raggedly in his throat. He snatched up the cup of water and held it to my mouth while I drank. Then he set it aside, to take up my dangling hand. He spoke softly as he did this, more to himself than to me. “What have they done to me, Fitz? Gods, what have they done to you, to mark you so? What has become of me, that I did not even know you though I carried you in my arms?” His cool fingers moved tentatively down my face, tracing the scar and the broken nose. He leaned down suddenly to rest his brow against mine. “When I recall how beautiful you were,” he whispered brokenly, and then fell silent. The warm drip of his tear against my face felt scalding.

He sat up abruptly, clearing his throat. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes, a child’s gesture that unmanned me even more. I drew a deeper breath and gathered myself. “You’ve changed,” I managed to say.

“Have I? I imagine I have. How could I not have changed? I thought you dead, and all my life for naught. Then now, this moment, to be given back both you and my life’s purpose . . . I opened my eyes to you and thought my heart would stop, that madness had finally claimed me. Then you spoke my name. Changed, you say? More than you can imagine, as much as you have plainly changed yourself. This night, I hardly know myself.” It was as close as I had ever heard the Fool come to babbling. He took a breath, and his voice cracked on his next words. “For a year, I have believed you dead, Fitz. For a whole year.”

He had not released my hand. I felt the trembling that went through him. He stood suddenly, saying, “We both need something to drink.” He walked away from me across the darkened room. He had grown, but it was in shape rather than size. I doubted he was much taller, but his body was no longer a child’s. He was lean and slight as ever, muscled as tumblers are. He brought a bottle from a cabinet, two simple cups. He uncorked the bottle and I smelled the warmth of the brandy before he poured. He came back to sit by my bed and offer me a cup. I managed to wrap my hand around it despite my blackened fingertips. He seemed to have recovered some of his aplomb. He looked at me over the rim as he drank. I lifted my head and tipped a spill of mine into my mouth. Half went down my beard and I choked as if I had never had brandy before. Then I felt the hot race of it in my belly. The Fool shook his head as he gently wiped my face.

“I should have listened to my dreams. Over and over, I dreamed you were coming. It was all you ever said, in the dream. I am coming. Instead I believed so firmly that I had failed somehow, that the Catalyst was dead. I could not even see who you were when I picked you up from the ground.”

“Fool,” I said quietly. I wished he would stop speaking. I simply wanted to be safe for a time, and think of nothing. He did not understand.

He looked at me and grinned his old sly Fool’s smile. “You still don’t understand, do you? When word reached us that you were dead, that Regal had killed you . . . my life ended. It was worse, somehow, when the pilgrims began to trickle in, to hail me as the White Prophet. I knew I was the White Prophet. I’ve known it since I was a child, as did those who raised me. I grew up, knowing that someday I would come north to find you and that between the two of us we would put time in its proper course. All of my life, I knew I would do that.

“I was not much more than a child when I set out. Alone, I made my way to Buckkeep, to seek the Catalyst that only I would recognize. And I found you, and I knew you, though you did not know yourself. I watched the ponderous turning of events and marked how each time you were the pebble that shifted that great wheel from its ancient path. I tried to speak to you of it, but you would have none of it. The Catalyst? Not you, oh, no!” He laughed, almost fondly. He drained off the rest of his brandy at a gulp, then held my cup to my lips. I sipped.

He rose, then, to pace a turn about the room, and then halted to refill his cup. He came back to me again. “I saw it all come to the tottering brink of ruin. But always you were there, the card never dealt before, the side of the die that had never before fallen uppermost. When my king died, as I knew he must, there was an heir to the Farseer line, and FitzChivalry yet lived, the Catalyst that would change all things so that an heir would ascend to the throne.” He gulped his brandy again and when he spoke the scent of it rode his breath. “I fled. I fled with Kettricken and the unborn child, grieving, yet confident that all would come to pass as it must. For you were the Catalyst. But when word came to us that you were dead . . .” He halted abruptly. When he tried to speak again, his voice had gone thick and lost its music. “It made of me a lie. How could I be the White Prophet if the Catalyst were dead? What could I predict? The changes that could have been, had you lived? What would I be but a witness as the world spun deeper and deeper into ruin? I had no purpose anymore. Your life was more than half of mine, you see. It was in the interweaving of our doings that I existed. Worse, I came to wonder if any part of the world were truly what I believed it. Was I a white prophet at all, or was it but some peculiar madness, a self-deception to console a freak? For a year, Fitz. A year. I grieved for the friend I had lost, and I grieved for the world that somehow I had doomed. My failure, all of it. And when Kettricken’s child, my last hope, came into the world still and blue, what could it be but my doing somehow?”

“No!” The word burst from me with a strength I had not known I had. The Fool flinched as if I had struck him. Then, “Yes,” he said simply, carefully taking my hand again. “I am sorry. I should have known you did not know. The Queen was devastated at the loss. And I. The Farseer heir. My last hope crumbled away. I had held myself together, telling myself, well, if the child lives and ascends the throne, perhaps that will have been enough. But when she was brought to bed with naught but a dead babe for all her travails . . . I felt my whole life had been a farce, a sham, an evil jest played on me by time. But now . . .” He closed his eyes a moment. “Now I find you truly alive. So I live. And again, suddenly, I believe. Once more I know who I am. And who my Catalyst is.” He laughed aloud, never dreaming how his words chilled my blood. “I had no faith. I, the White Prophet, did not believe my own foreseeing! Yet here we are, Fitz, and all will still come to pass as it was ever meant to do.”

Again he tipped the bottle to fill his cup. The liquor, when he poured it, was the color of his eyes. He saw me staring and grinned delightedly. “Ah, you say, but the White Prophet is no longer white? I suspect it is the way of my kind. I may gain more color now, as the years pass.” He made a deprecating motion. “But that is of little import. I have already talked too much. Tell me, Fitz. Tell me all. How did you survive? Why are you here?”

“Verity calls me. I must go to him.”

The Fool drew in breath at my words, not a gasp, but a slow inhalation as if he took life back into himself. He almost glowed with pleasure at my words. “So he lives! Ah!” Before I could speak more, he lifted his hands. “Slowly. Tell me all, in order. These are words I have hungered to hear. I must know everything.”

And so I tried. My strength was small and sometimes I felt myself borne up on my fever so that my words wandered and I could not recall where I had left off my tale of the past year. I got as far as Regal’s dungeon, then could only say, “He had me beaten and starved.” The Fool’s quick glance at my scarred face and the casting aside of his eyes told me he understood. He, too, had known Regal too well. When he waited to hear more, I shook my head slowly.

He nodded, then put a smile on his face. “It’s all right, Fitz. You are weary. You have already told me what I most longed to hear. The rest will keep. For now, I shall tell you of my year.” I tried to listen, clinging to the important words, storing them in my heart. There was so much I had wondered for so long. Regal had suspected the escape. Kettricken had returned to her rooms to find that her carefully chosen and packed supplies were gone, spirited away by Regal’s spies. She had left with little more than the clothes on her back and a hastily grabbed cloak. I heard of the evil weather the Fool and Kettricken had faced the night they slipped away from Buckkeep.

She had ridden my Sooty and the Fool had battled headstrong Ruddy all the way across the Six Duchies in winter. They had reached Blue Lake at the end of the winter storms. The Fool had supported them and earned their passage on a ship by painting his face and dyeing his hair and juggling in the streets. What color had he painted his skin? White, of course, all the better to hide the stark white skin that Regal’s spies would be watching for.

They had crossed the lake with little incident, and passed Moonseye and traveled into the Mountains. Immediately Kettricken had sought her father’s aid in finding what had become of Verity. He had, indeed, passed through Jhaampe but nothing had been heard of him since. Kettricken had put riders on his trail and even joined in the search herself. But all her hopes had come to grief. Far up in the mountains, she had found the site of a battle. The winter and the scavengers had done their work. No one man could be identified, but Verity’s buck standard was there. The scattered arrows and hewn ribs of one body showed it was men and not the beasts or elements that had attacked them. There were not enough skulls to go with the bodies and the scattering of the bones made the number of dead uncertain. Kettricken had clung to hope until a cloak had been found that she remembered packing for Verity. Her hands had embroidered the buck on the breast patch. A tumble of moldering bones and ragged garments were beneath it. Kettricken had mourned her husband as dead.

She had returned to Jhaampe to pendulum between devastated grief and seething rage at Regal’s plots. Her fury had solidified into a determination that she would see Verity’s child upon the Six Duchies throne, and a fair reign returned to the folk. Those plans had sustained her until the stillbirth of her child. The Fool had scarcely seen her since, save to catch glimpses of her pacing through her frozen gardens, her face as still as the snows that overlaid the beds.

There was more, shuffled in with his account, of both major and minor news for me. Sooty and Ruddy were both alive and well. Sooty was in foal to the young stallion despite her years. I shook my head over that. Regal had been doing his best to provoke a war. The roving gangs of bandits that now plagued the Mountain folk were thought to be in his pay. Shipments of grain that had been paid for in spring had never been delivered, nor had the Mountain traders been permitted to cross the border with their wares. Several small villages close to the Six Duchies border had been found looted and burned with no survivors. King Eyod’s wrath, slow to stir, was now at white heat. Although the Mountain folk had no standing army as such, there was not one inhabitant who would not take up arms at the word of their Sacrifice. War was imminent.

And he had tales of Patience, the Lady of Buckkeep, brought erratically by word of mouth passed among merchants and on to smugglers. She did all she could to defend Buck’s coast. Money was dwindling, but the folk of the land gave to her what they called the Lady’s Levy and she disposed of it as best she could amongst her soldiers and sailors. Buckkeep had not fallen yet, though the Raiders now had encampments up and down the whole coastline of the Six Duchies. Winter had quieted the war, but spring would bathe the coast in blood once more. Some of the smaller keeps spoke of treaties with the Red Ships. Some openly paid tribute in the hopes of avoiding Forging.