Golden Fool (14 page)

“Of course.”

We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something that the heart longs for and the head would dread. The fire burned before us, tongues of flame lapping up the side of the fresh log. Outside the shuttered windows, a wind was blowing. Winter’s herald. A twitch of old reflexes made me think of all the things I had not done to prepare for it. I’d left crops in my garden, and harvested no marsh grass for the pony’s winter comfort. They were the cares of another man in another life. Here at Buckkeep, I need worry about none of that. I should have felt smug, but instead I felt divested.

“Do you think the Prince will meet me at dawn in Verity’s tower?”

The Fool’s eyes were closed but he rolled his head toward me. “I don’t know. He was still dancing when we left.”

“I suppose I should be there in case he does. I wish I hadn’t said I would. I need to get back to my cabin and tidy myself out of there.”

He made a small sound between assent and a sigh. He drew his feet up and curled up in the chair like a child. His knees were practically under his chin.

“I’m going to bed,” I announced. “You should, too.”

He made another sound. I groaned. I went to his bed, dragged off a coverlet, and brought it back to the fireside. I draped it over him. “Good night, Fool.”

He sighed heavily in reply and pulled the blanket closer.

I blew out all the candles save one that I carried to my chamber with me. I set it down on my small clothing chest and sat down on the hard bed with a groan. My back ached all round my scar. Standing still had always irritated it far more than riding or working. The little room was both chill and close, the air too still and full of the same smells it had gathered for the last hundred years. I didn’t want to sleep there. I thought of climbing all the steps to Chade’s workroom and stretching out on the larger, softer bed there. That would have been good, if there had not been so many stairs between it and me.

I dragged off my fine clothes and made an effort at putting them away properly. As I burrowed beneath my single blanket, I resolved to get some money out of Chade and purchase at least one more blanket for myself, one that was not so aggressively itchy. And to check on Hap. And apologize to Jinna for not coming to see her this evening as I had said I would. And get rid of the scrolls in my cabin. And teach my horse some manners. And instruct the Prince in the Skill and the Wit.

I drew a very deep breath, sighed it and all my cares away, and sank into sleep.

Shadow Wolf.

It was not a strong call. It was drifting smoke on the wind. It was not my name. It was someone’s name for me, but that did not mean I had to answer to it. I turned away from the summoning.

Shadow Wolf.

Shadow Wolf.

Shadow Wolf.

It reminded me of Hap tugging at my shirttail when he was small. Incessant and insistent. Nagging as a mosquito buzzing near your ear in the night.

Shadow Wolf.

Shadow Wolf.

It wasn’t going to go away.

I’m sleeping
. I suddenly knew that was so, in that odd way that dreamers do. I was asleep and this was a dream. Dreams didn’t matter. Did they?

So am I. That’s the only time I can reach you. Don’t you know that?

My replying seemed to have strengthened her sending. It was almost as if she clung to me now.
No. I didn’t know that.

I looked idly around myself. I nearly recognized the shape of the land. It was spring and close by apple trees were in bloom. I could hear bees busy amongst the blossoms. There was soft green grass under my bare feet and a gentle air moved through my hair.

I’ve come so often to your dreams, and watched what you did. I thought I would invite you to one of mine. Do you like it?

There was a woman beside me. No, a girl. Someone. It was hard to tell. I could see her dress and her little leather shoes, and her weather-browned hands, but the rest of her was fogged. I could not resolve her features. As for myself . . . it was strange. I could behold myself, as if I stood outside myself, and yet it was not the me that I saw when I looked in a mirror. I was a shaggy-haired man, much taller than I truly am, and far more strong. My rough gray hair spilled down my back and hung over my brow. The nails of my hands were black, and my teeth were pointed in my mouth. Uneasiness nibbled at me. Danger here, but not to me. Why couldn’t I remember what the danger was?

This isn’t me. This isn’t right.

She laughed fondly.
Well, if you won’t let me see you as you are, then you’ll just have to be how I’ve always imagined you. Shadow Wolf, why have you stayed away? I’ve missed you. And I’ve feared for you. I felt your great pain, but I do not know what it was. Are you hurt? There seems less of you than there was. And you seem tired and older. I’ve missed you and your dreams. I was so scared you were dead, and then you didn’t come anymore. It’s taken me forever to discover that I could reach out to you instead of waiting for you to come to me.

She chattered like a child. A very real and wakeful dismay crept through me. It was like a cold mist in my heart, and then I saw it, a mist rising around me in the dream. Somehow, without knowing how, I had summoned it. I willed it thicker and stronger around me. I tried to warn her.
This isn’t right. Or good. Stay back, stay away from me.

That isn’t fair!
she wailed as the mist became a wall between us. Her thoughts reached me more faintly.
Look what you’ve done to my dream. It was so hard to make and now you’ve spoiled it. Where are you going? You are
so
rude!

I twitched free of her failing grip on me, and found I could wake up. In fact, I was already awake, and an instant later I was sitting on the edge of my cot. My combing fingers stood up what was left of my hair. I was almost ready for the Skill pain when it lurched through my belly and slammed against the cap of my skull. I took deep, steadying breaths, resolved not to vomit. When some little time had passed, a minute or half a year, I could scarcely tell which, I painstakingly began to reinforce my Skill walls. Had I been careless? Had weariness or my exposure to Smoke dropped them?

Or was my daughter simply strong enough to break through them?

chapter
V

SHARED SORROWS

A storm of gems they were.
Scaled wings jewel-like glittered.
Eyes flaming, wings fanning
The dragons came.

Too flashing bright for memory to hold.
The promise of a thousand songs fulfilled.
Claws shredding, jaws devouring
The King returned.

— “
VERITY
’
S RECKONING,
”
STARLING BIRDSONG

Air stirred against my cheek. I opened my eyes wearily. I had dozed off, despite the open window and chill morning. Before and below me stretched a vista of water. Waves tipped with white wrinkled under a gray sky. I got up from Verity’s chair with a groan; two steps carried me to the tower window. From here, the view was wider, showing me the steep cliffs and the clinging forest below this aspect of Buckkeep Castle. There was the taste of a storm in the air, and the wind was cutting its winter teeth. The sun was a handbreadth above the far horizon, dawn long fled. The Prince had not come.

I was not surprised. Dutiful was probably still deeply asleep after last night’s festivities. No, there was no surprise that he should forget our meeting, or perhaps rouse just enough to decide it wasn’t that important and roll back into sleep. Yet there was disappointment, and it was not just that my prince found sleep more important than meeting with me. It was that he had said he would meet me here, and then hadn’t. And not only hadn’t, but hadn’t sent word to cancel the meeting and save me the time and trouble of being here. It was a trifling thing in a boy of his years, a bit of thoughtlessness. Yet what was minor in a boy was not so in a prince. I wanted to rebuke him for it, as Chade would have chastened me. Or Burrich. I grinned ruefully. In fairness, had I been any different at Dutiful’s age? Burrich had never trusted me to keep dawn appointments. I could well recall how he would thunder at my door to be sure I did not miss a lesson with the axe. Well, perhaps if our roles had been different, I would have gone and pounded on the Prince’s chamber door.

As it was, I contented myself with a message, drawn in the dust on the top of a small table beside the chair. “I was here; you were not.” Brief and succinct, a rebuke if he chose to take it that way. And anonymous. It could just as easily have been a sulky page’s note to a tardy chambermaid.

I closed the window shutters and let myself out by the way I had come, through a side panel in the decorative mantel around the hearth. It was a narrow squeeze and it was tricky to properly seal it closed behind me. My candle had gone out. I descended a long and gloomy stair, sparsely lit by tiny chinks in the outer wall that let in thin fingers of light and wind. There was a level section that I negotiated through the pitch-dark; it seemed far longer than I recalled it being, and I was glad when my groping foot found the next stair. I made a wrong turn at the bottom of it. The third time I walked into a faceful of cobwebs, I knew I was lost. I turned around and groped my way back. When, some time later, I emerged into Chade’s chamber from behind the wine rack, I was dusty and irritable and sweaty. I was ill prepared for what met me there.

Chade started up from his seat before the hearth, setting down a teacup as he did so. “There you are, FitzChivalry,” he exclaimed, even as a wave of Skill slammed into me.

Don’t see me, stinkdog man.

I staggered and then caught at the table to remain standing. I ignored Chade, who was scowling at me, to focus on Thick. The idiot serving man, his face smudged with soot, stood by the work hearth. His figure wavered before my eyes and I felt giddy. If I had not reset my walls the night before to guard against Nettle’s Skill tinkering, I think he would have been able to wipe all image of himself from my mind. As it was, I spoke through gritted teeth.

“I do see you. I will always see you. But that does not mean I will hurt you. Unless you try to hurt me. Or unless you are rude to me again.” I was sorely tempted to try the Wit on him, to
repel
at him with a burst of sheer animal energy, but I did not. I would not use the Skill. I would have had to open my walls to do so, and it would have revealed to him the limits of my strength. I was not yet ready for that. Remain calm, I told myself. You have to master yourself before you can master him.

“No, no, Thick! Stop that. He’s good. He can be here. I say so.”

Chade spoke to him as if he were three years old. And while I recognized that the small eyes in the round face that glowered at me were not the eyes of a man my intellectual equal, I also saw a flash of resentment there at being thus addressed. I seized on it. I kept my gaze on Thick’s face but spoke to Chade.

“You don’t need to talk to him like that. He isn’t stupid. He’s . . .” I groped for a word to express what I suddenly was certain of. Thick’s intelligence might be limited in some ways, but it was there. “Different,” I ended lamely. Different, I reflected, as a horse was different from a cat and they both were different from a man. But not lesser. Almost I could sense how his mind reached in another direction from mine, attaching significance to items I dismissed even as he dismissed whole areas that anchored my reality.

Thick scowled from me to Chade and back again. Then he took up his broom and a bucket of ash and cinders from the fireplace and scuttled from the room. After the scroll rack had swung back into place behind him, I caught the flung thought fragment.
Dogstinker
.

“He doesn’t like me. He knows I’m Witted, too,” I complained to Chade as I dropped into the other chair. Almost sulkily, I added, “Prince Dutiful didn’t meet me in Verity’s tower this morning. He had said he would.”

My remarks seemed to go past the old man. “The Queen wants to see you. Right away.” He was neatly if not elegantly attired in a simple robe of blue this morning with soft fur slippers on his feet. Did they ache from dancing?

“What about?” I asked as I rose and followed him. We went back to the wine rack, and as we triggered the concealed door, I remarked, “Thick didn’t seem surprised to see me enter from here.”

Chade shrugged one shoulder. “I do not think he is bright enough to be surprised by something like that. I doubt that he even noticed it.”

I considered and decided that it might be true. To him, it might have no significance. “And the Queen wanted to see me because?”

“Because she told me so,” he replied a bit testily. After that I kept silent and followed him. I suspected his head throbbed, as mine did. I knew he had an antidote to a night’s hard drinking, and knew also how difficult it was to compound. Sometimes it was easier to put up with the throbbing headache than to grind one’s way through creating a cure.

We entered the Queen’s private chambers as we had before. Chade paused to peek and listen to be sure there were no witnesses, then admitted us to a privy chamber, and from there to the Queen’s sitting room, where Kettricken awaited us. She looked up with a weary smile as we entered. She was alone.

We both bowed formally. “Good morning, my queen,” Chade greeted her for us, and she held out her hands in welcome, gesturing us in. The last time I had been here, an anxious Kettricken had awaited us in an austere chamber, her thoughts centered solely on her missing son. This time, the room displayed her handiwork. In the center of a small table, six golden leaves had been arranged on a tray of gleaming river pebbles. Three tall candles burning there gave off the scent of violets. Several rugs of wool eased the floor against winter’s oncoming chill, and the chairs were softened with sheepskins. A day fire burned in the hearth, and a kettle puffed steam above it. It reminded me of her home in the Mountains. She had also arranged a small table of food. Hot tea exhaled from a fat pot. I noticed there were only two cups as Kettricken said, “Thank you for bringing FitzChivalry here, Lord Chade.”

It was a dismissal, smoothly done. Chade bowed again, perhaps a bit more stiffly than he had the first time, and retreated by way of the privy chamber. I was left standing alone before my queen, wondering what all this was about. When the door closed behind Chade, she gave a sudden great sigh. She sat down at the table and gestured at the other chair. “Please, Fitz,” and her words were an invitation to drop all formality as well as to be seated.

As I took my place opposite her, I studied her. We were nearly of an age, but her years rode her far more graciously than mine did me. Where the passage of time had scarred me, it had brushed her, leaving a tracery of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She wore a green gown today, and it set off the gold of her hair and awakened jade gleams in her eyes. Her dress was simple, as was the plaiting of her hair; she wore no jewelry or cosmetics.

And she did not indulge in any kind of ceremony as she poured tea for me and set my cup before me. “There are cakes, too, if you wish,” she said, and I did, for I had not yet broken my fast that day. Yet something in her voice, an edge of hoarseness, made me set down the cup I’d started to lift. She was looking aside from me, avoiding my eyes. I saw the frantic fluttering of her eyelashes, and then a tear brimmed over and splashed down her cheek.

“Kettricken?” I asked in alarm. What had gone awry that I did not know about? Had she discovered the Narcheska’s reluctance to wed her son? Had there been another Wit threat?

She caught her breath raggedly and suddenly looked me full in the face. “Oh, Fitz, I did not call you here for this. I meant to keep this to myself. But . . . I am so sorry. For all of us. When first I heard, I already knew. I woke that dawn, feeling as if something had broken, something important.” She tried to clear her throat and could not. She croaked out her words, tears coursing down her face. “I could not put my finger on the loss, but when Chade brought your tidings to me, I knew instantly. I felt him go, Fitz. I felt Nighteyes leave us.” And then a sob wracked her, and she dropped her face into her hands and wept like a devastated child.

I wanted to flee. I had almost succeeded in mastering my grief, and now she tore the wound afresh. For a time I sat woodenly, numbed by pain. Why couldn’t she just leave it alone?

But she seemed not to notice my coldness. “The years pass, but you never forget a friend like him.” She was speaking to herself, her head bowed into her hands. Her words came muffled and thick with tears. She rocked a little in her chair. “I’d never felt so close to an animal, before we traveled together. But in the long hours of walking, he was always there, ranging ahead and coming back and then checking behind us. He was like a shield for me, for when he came trotting back, I always knew that he had gone before us and was satisfied no danger awaited us. Without his assurance, I am sure my own poor courage would have failed a hundred times. When we began our journey, he seemed just a part of you. But then I got to know him for himself. His bravery and tenacity, even his humor. There were times, especially there at the quarry, when we went off to hunt and he alone seemed to understand my feelings. It was not just that I could hold tight to him and cry into his fur and know he would never betray my weakness. It was that he rejoiced in my strengths, too. When we hunted together and I made a kill, I could feel his approval like . . . like a fierceness that said I deserved to survive, that I had earned my place in this world.” She drew breath raggedly. “I think I will always miss him. And I didn’t even get to see him again before . . .”

My mind reeled. Truly, I had not known how close they had been. Nighteyes also had kept his secrets well. I had known that Queen Kettricken had a predilection for the Wit. I had sensed faint questing from her when she meditated. I had often suspected that her Mountain “connection” with the natural world would have a less kindly name in the Six Duchies. But she and my wolf?

“He spoke to you? You heard Nighteyes in your mind?”

She shook her head, not lifting her face from her hands. Her fingers muffled her reply. “No. But I felt him in my heart, when I was numb to all else.”

Slowly I rose. I walked around the small table. I had intended only to pat her bent shoulders, but when I touched her, she abruptly stood and stumbled into my embrace. I held her and let her weep against my shoulder. Whether I would or no, my own tears welled. Then her grief, not sympathy for me but true grief at Nighteyes’ death, gave permission to mine, and my mourning ripped free. All the anguish I had been trying to conceal from those who could not understand the depth of loss I felt suddenly demanded vent. I think I only realized that our roles had changed when she pushed me gently down into her chair. She offered me her tiny, useless handkerchief and then gently kissed my brow and both my cheeks. I could not stop crying. She stood by me, my head cradled against her breast, and stroked my hair and let me weep. She spoke brokenly of my wolf and all he had been to her, words I scarcely heard.

She did not try to stop my tears or tell me that everything would be all right. She knew it would not. But when my weeping finally had run its course, she stooped and kissed me on my mouth, a healing kiss. Her lips were salt with her own tears. Then she stood straight again.