Fool's Fate (59 page)

    The little copper kettle was puffing steam. He lifted it from the small flame and poured water into a gaily decorated teapot.

    I had to smile. I gestured about the tent. “The bare essentials.”

    He arched one golden brow. “For civilized adventuring, yes.” He put the lid on the teapot. It was shaped like a rose. “And why should one attempt to get by with less? Now. Where was I? Ah, yes. Lord Golden, stripped of his possessions and glamour, was no longer Lord Golden, but only a fleeing debtor. Those who thought they knew him best were astonished at the way he lithely spidered down the outside of his lodgings, to land lightly on his feet and run off into the alleys. I vanished.”

    He made me wait. He rubbed one eye and smiled at me thoughtfully. I bit the inside of my cheek until he finally gave in and went on.

    “I went to Kettricken, by ways and means that I shall leave to your imagination. I think she was quite astounded to encounter me waiting for her in her bedchamber. As I have told you, she urged me to stay at Buckkeep, within the castle, under her wing, until you had completed her mission. I had to decline, of course. And...” Here he hesitated for a time. “I had words with Burrich. I think you know that already, or suspect it. It shocked me that he recognized me immediately, much as you had. He asked me questions, not because he needed answers, but to confirm what he had already ciphered out for himself, from an earlier interview with Kettricken.”

    He paused so long that I feared he would not go on. Then he said, softly, “At one point he was so furious at what I told him, I thought he would strike me dead. Then, abruptly, he began to weep.” And again he halted. I sat there, my tongue turned to ashes in my mouth. Almost I hoped he would not go on. When he did, I knew he left much unsaid.

    "Bereft of any support from the castle, I foolishly thought to return to my inn to see what rags of my fortunes my creditors might have left me to aid me in my flight. My stripped apartments looked as if a horde of locusts had despoiled them. Yet worse was to come. The landlord had seen me enter, and he had taken bribes from my creditors to contact them immediately if he heard or saw me. And he earned his greasy coins well. For a second wave of furious former friends appeared. You would have thought that they had honestly earned the money that they had won in wagers from me, so righteously outraged were they!

    “So. Once more I fled. This time, I fled the entire city, not so much in fear of my creditors as in fury at my 'friends.' You had betrayed me, Fitz. And yet, perhaps, it was your turn to betray me, given that I had so badly failed you.”

    “What?”

    I was astounded that he could say such a thing. But when our gazes met, I saw ancient shame in his deepening eyes, and recalled a time in the Mountains when my enemies had used him against me. “You know I never counted that against you. It was not you, Fool. It wasn't.”

    “And perhaps when you betrayed me, it was more Chade than you, but the damage was done, nonetheless. And I was furious and frightened and desolated to think that perhaps I had come so far, only to be defeated by him I most trusted. I fled Buckkeep on foot, eluding my pursuers, yet knowing I could not do so for long and wondering what I might do next. How could it be, I wondered, that the Catalyst could change events so that the White Prophet was so completely defeated? And slowly it came to me that it could not be so; that there was a deeper pattern at work than I had first glimpsed. I resolved to give myself to it, though I could not guess what it might be.”

    I had turned my head on my arms so I could watch him as he told the story. Now I gave a sigh, and relaxed into my hunch. He reached from beneath the covers to pour a scanty share of tea into a cup and a bowl, then gestured that I should take whichever I wished. The pot had plainly been made for one person, traveling alone, and it touched me that he still offered to share. I lifted the bowl and sipped from it. It tasted like flowers, a mouthful of summer in this land where winter always reigned. The heat of it was fleeing rapidly, briefly warming my hands as it passed through the crockery. The Fool's long elegant fingers wrapped the cup as he drank his share.

    “Go on,” I urged him when he had let the silence grow. I knew it was a trick of the storyteller to do so, but I did not begrudge him the drama.

    “Well. My second horde of creditors had paid heed to the tales of the first. They were soon after me. I ran, and swiftly, but Lord Golden's dress was a bit ostentatious to blend in with a crowd and my pack encumbered me. You recall the hill outside Buckkeep, where the Witness Stones stand still?”

    “Of course.” I was intrigued. It was the last place I would have fled to. The bare black stones stand upon the barren hillside there as they have always stood, weathered and impervious to all. The folk of the Six Duchies have long used them as an oath place. Lovers pledge to one another there. It is said that if two men duel there, the gods will see that justice is done. The righteous will win there, if nowhere else. It is an oddly solemn place, bereft of brush or clinging vines. There would be no cover there for any hunted creature to hide in. “But why go there?”

    He lifted one narrow shoulder in an eloquent shrug. “I knew I could not get far. If I were captured and taken back to Buckkeep, doubtless my creditors would have not only taken my kit but put me to drudgery to work off my debt. I and my mission in the world would be completely undone. So I resolved to rely on fate, and test an idea that I formulated long ago. The Witness Stones are gateway stones, Fitz, just like the Skill-pillars that you have used before when in dire need to flee. Except, of course, that long ago someone or something obliterated the runes from the sides of the Witness Stones. Perhaps they are so old that they wore away naturally; perhaps some ancient Skill-user decided to put an end to their usefulness. In any case, the runes that tell where they lead are gone, leaving only the weathered marks where they used to be. As I ran toward them, my pack heavy on my back, I thought back over what you had told me of your adventures on the Treasure Beach with Prince Dutiful. I knew that I might choose the wrong facet of the stone, and find myself plunged into deep cold water.”

    I sat up straight in slow cold horror. “Fool, it is far worse than that! What if a stone had fallen facedown and you were flung from it into solid earth? Or what if you chose a destination where the stone had been shattered or--”

    “All those thoughts rushed through my mind as I raced toward it. Fortunately, there was no time for me to choose, no time for me even to wonder if there was enough of the Skill left on my fingers to work the stone. I struck the stone, fingertips first, knowing only that I must, I must, I must pass through the portal.”

    He paused. I was leaning intently toward him, my heart in my throat. To pass through a Skill-portal had always been difficult for me. We knew so little about them, only that some standing stones carved of memory stone and marked with runes could serve as passageways to distant places. I had used them less than a dozen times in my life, and never without dread and uneasiness. Some of Regal's inexperienced Skill-users had lost their minds when they were forced to use the Skill-portals. Using one had jumbled Dutiful's memory of our time on the Treasure Beach and left us both exhausted.

    The Fool smiled sweetly at me. “Don't look like that. You know I survived.”

    “At what cost?” I asked, knowing there must be one.

    “Exhaustion. I emerged somewhere, I have no idea where. Nowhere I've ever been before. It was a city in ruins, and still as dead stone can be. There was a river near it. That is as much as I can tell you. I slept, I don't know how long. When I awoke, dawn was all around me. And the Skill-pillar towered over me. This one shone clean of lichen or moss, with each rune standing out as clear as if it had been chiseled yesterday. I studied them a long time, afraid and dreading, and yet knowing they offered me my only hope. I narrowed my choices down to two of them that might possibly be the one I wished. And then I entered the pillar again.”

    “No.” I groaned.

    “Exactly how I felt. I emerged feeling as if I had taken a bad beating. But I had come to the right place.”

    He made me ask the question, enjoying it. “Where?”

    “Do you remember the broken plaza, like an ancient market circle? The one where the forest was trying to encroach? I stood on top of a stone pillar there, and for a moment, in a dream, I wore the Rooster Crown. You saw me. You remember it.”

    I nodded slowly. “It was on our road to the Stone Garden. Where the stone dragons slept, before we roused them and sent them to fight the Red Ships. Where they sleep again now, Verity-as-Dragon amongst them.”

    “Exactly. Again, I went down that forest path, and I saw him there. But he was not the one I sought. I found Girl-on-a-Dragon there, sleeping, her arms clasping the neck of her dragon, just as you had told me. And I woke her and made her understand that I must come here, and once again I mounted behind her and she flew here with me. And left me. So, you see, old friend, I did not lie to you. I flew here.”

    I sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake. A hundred questions swelled in me but I asked the most important one. “How did you wake her? It takes the Wit, the Skill, and blood to wake a stone dragon. Well do I know that!”

    “It did. And it does. The Skill I had on my fingertips, and blood was easy enough to come by.” He rubbed his wrist, possibly remembering an old cut. “I did not and do not have the Wit. But you may remember that, foolishly, I had already put some of myself into Girl-on-a-Dragon, when I was attempting to complete the carving of her and wake her.”

    “As did I,” I recalled guiltily.

    “Yes. I know,” he said softly. “It is still in her. You put in the memories you could not stand to recall and the emotions you would not let yourself feel. You gave her your mother abandoning you, and never knowing your father. You gave her Regal's torment of you in his dungeons. You gave her, most of all, the pain of losing Molly and your child, to Burrich, of all people. You put into her your fury and your hurt and your sense of being betrayed.” He gave a little sigh. “It is all in her still. The things you could not allow yourself to feel.”

    “I left all that behind me long ago,” I said slowly.

    “You cut out a part of yourself and went on, less than you had been.”

    “I do not see it that way.” My reply was stiff.

    “You cannot see it that way,” he informed me calmly. “Because you cannot truly remember how awful any of it was. Because you put all of it into Girl-on-a-Dragon.”

    “Can we leave this?” I asked, almost frightened, almost angry, but confused over what would scare or anger me.

    "We must. Because you already left it, long years ago. And only I will ever know the full depth of what you felt about those things. Only I fully remember who and what you were before you did it. For we are bound together, not only by Skill and fate, but also because both of us live on, inside Girl-on-a-Dragon. Because I knew what went into her, I could reach her and rouse her. I could convey to her my desperate purpose. And so she brought me to Aslevjal.

    “It was a strange journey, wild and wonderful. You know I have ridden with her before. I was with her when she and the other dragons attacked not just the Red Ships that assailed the Six Duchies, but the White Ships that were the cruel tools of the Pale Woman. It was strange for me to be caught up in true battle. I did not like it.”

    “No one does,” I assured him. I put my brow back down on my knees and closed my eyes.

    "I suppose not. But this time, flying with her, it was different. There was no killing to witness, no other dragons flying beside us. Instead, it was just she and I. I sat behind her and put my arms around her slender waist. She is a part of the dragon, you know, not a separate creature at all. Rather like a girl-shaped limb more than anything else. So she did not speak to me, yet, strangely enough, she did smile and from time to time, she would turn to look into my face or gesture to something on the world below us that she wished me to see.

    “She flew tirelessly. From the time I climbed up behind her and the powerful beat of her dragon's wings lifted us through the canopy of tree limbs until the moment that we landed on the black sand beaches of Aslevjal, she took no rest. Nor did I. At first, we flew through blue summer skies of the lands beyond Mountain Kingdom. Then higher we flew, until my heart pounded and I was giddy, over the snowy peaks and trodden passes of the Mountains, and then back into summer. We flew over the villages of the Mountain Kingdom. They nestle into the crooks and flanks of the mountains, and their flocks are scattered over the steep pastures like white apple blossoms litter the orchard meadow after a spring windstorm.”

    I saw it, in my mind, and smiled faintly when he spoke of flying over a Six Duchies hamlet early in the morning, and the one lad who looked up and saw them and ran whooping into his cottage. And on he spoke, of rivers like silver seams in the land and planted fields like patchwork when seen from above, and of the ocean, wrinkling like paper tipped with silver. In my mind, I flew with him.

    I must have fallen asleep, lulled by his strange story. When I awoke, night was deep all around us. The camp outside our tent was still, and his pot fire held only a single flickering flame on a wick in the oil. I was huddled beneath one of his blankets, fallen over sideways on his bed. He slept, curled like a kitten, his brow nearly touching mine, on the other end of his pallet. His breathing was deep and even, and one long hand was palm up on the blankets between us, as if in offering, or beseeching something of me. Sleepily I reached over and set my hand in his. He did not seem to wake. Strangely, I felt at peace. I closed my eyes and sank down into a deep and dreamless slumber.

BELOW THE ICE

    The Outislanders have always been raiders. In the years before the Red Ship War, there were raiding incidents, as it seemed there had always been. Individual ships led by the kaempra of a clan would make a quick strike, carrying off stock, harvested crops, and occasionally captives. Bearns took the brunt of these clashes, and seemed to relish them much as Shoaks enjoyed its border disputes with Chalced. The Duke of Bearns seemed content that they were his concern, and made little complaint of dealing with them.