The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (51 page)

Yet if I did, it would destroy all that was between the Fool and me as well. The assassin’s conclusion to that was to kill him, too, so that he would never look at me with those deaths in his eyes.

And then you could kill me, and then you could kill yourself, and no one would ever know of all we had shared. It would remain our shameful secret, taken to the grave with both of us. Kill us all, rather than admit to anyone what we are
.

As unerring as a cold pointing finger, the thought jabbed me in the terrible division that had plagued me since we had captured the archer…no, since I had first realized, for the sake of my Farseer oath, I must set myself against the Old Blood and against the Prince’s wishes for himself.

‘
Are
you Witted?’ Laurel asked me slowly. Her voice was quiet but the question rang in my ears.

The others were still staring at me. I reached for the lie, but could not utter it. To speak it would be to deny the wolf. I was alienated from the Old Blood, yet there was still a kinship that went deeper than emotion or learned loyalties. I might not live as Old Blood, but the threats that hovered over their heads menaced me as well.

But I was sworn to the Farseers, and that, too, was my bloodline.

What must I do?

What is right. Be what you are, Farseer and Old Blood both. Even if it kills us, it will be easier than these endless denials. I’d rather die being true to ourselves.

It was like pulling my soul out of a morass.

The pain of my Skill-headache lessened abruptly, as if finding my own decision had freed me of something. I found my tongue. ‘I am Witted,’ I admitted quietly and soberly. ‘And I am sworn to the Farseer line. I serve my queen. And my prince, though he may not yet recognize it. I will do whatever I must to keep my oath of loyalty to them.’ I stared at the boy with wolf-eyes, and spoke what we both knew. ‘The Old Bloods have not taken him out of any loyalty or love for him. They do not seek to “free” him. They have taken him in an effort to claim him. Then they will use him. They will be as ruthless in that as they have been in taking him. But I will not allow that to befall
him. No matter what I must do to assure that he is saved from that, I will do it. I will find where they have taken him and I will take him home. Regardless of what it may cost me.’

I saw the archer blanch. ‘I am a Piebald,’ he declared shakily. ‘Do you know what that means? It means I refuse to be ashamed of my Old Blood. That I will declare myself and assert my right to use my magic. And I will not betray my own kind. Even if it means facing my death.’ Did he say those words to show his determination equalled mine? Then he was mistaken. Obviously he had taken my words as a threat. Another mistake…I didn’t care. I didn’t bother to correct his misapprehension. One night spent in fear would not kill him, and perhaps he might, by morning, be ready to tell me where they were taking the Prince. If not, my wolf and I would find him.

‘Shut up,’ I told him. ‘Sleep while you can.’ I glanced at the others, who were watching our exchange closely. Laurel was staring at me with loathing and disbelief. The set lines in the Fool’s face aged him. His mouth was small and still, his silence an accusation. I closed my heart against it. ‘We should all sleep while we can.’

And suddenly fatigue was a tide rising around me. Nighteyes had come to sit beside me. He leaned against me, and the bone-weariness he felt was suddenly mine, too. I sat down, muddy and wet as I was, on the sandy floor of the cave. I was cold, but then, it was a night when one should expect to be cold. And my brother was beside me, and between us we had warmth to share. I lay down, put my arm over him and sighed out. I meant to lie still for just a moment before I rose to take the first watch. But in that instant, the wolf drew me down and wrapped me in his sleep.

In Chaky, there was an old woman who was most skilled at weaving. She could weave in a day what it took others a week to do, and all of the finest work. Never a stitch that she took went awry, and the thread she spun for her best tapestries was so strong that it could not be snipped with the teeth but must be cut with a blade. She lived alone and apart, and though the coins came in stacks to her for her work, she lived simply. When she missed the week’s market for the second time, a gentlewoman who had been waiting for the cloak the weaver had promised her rode out to her hut to see if aught was wrong. There was the old woman, sitting at her loom, her head bent over her work, but her hands were still and she did not stir to the woman’s knock at her doorjamb. So the gentlewoman’s man-servant went in, to tap on her shoulder, for surely she dozed. But when he did, the old woman tumbled back, dead as a stone, to sprawl at his feet. And from her bosom leapt out a fine fat spider, big as a man’s fist, and it scampered over the loom, trailing a thick thread of web. So all then knew the trick of her weaving. Her body they cut in four pieces and burned, and with her they burned all the work known to come from her loom, and then her cottage and loom itself.

Badgerlock’s
Old Blood Tales

I awoke before dawn, with the terrible sensation of having forgotten something. I lay still for a time in the darkness,
piecing together my uneasiness. Sleepily I tried to recall what had wakened me. Through the tattering veils of a headache, I forced my mind to function. Threads of a tangling nightmare came back to me slowly. They were unnerving; I had been a cat. It was like the worst of the old Wit-tales, in which the Witted one was gradually dominated by his beast until one day he awoke as a shape-changer, doomed to take on the form of his beast and forever prey to his beast’s worst impulses. In my dream, I had been the cat, but in a human body. Yet there had been a woman there also, sharing my awareness with the cat, mingled so thoroughly that I could not determine where one began and the other left off. Disturbing. The dream had caught at me, snagged me with its claws and held me under. Yet some part of me had heard … what? Whispers? The soft jingle of harness, the grit of boots and hooves on sand?

I sat up and glared around at the darkness. The fire was no more than a dark red smudge on the earth nearby. I could not see, but I was already certain that my prisoner was gone. Somehow he had wriggled loose, and now he had gone ahead to warn the others that we followed. I gave my head a shake to clear it. He had probably taken my damn horse as well. Myblack was the only one of the horses dumb enough to allow herself to be stolen without a sound.

I found my voice. ‘Lord Golden! Awake. Our prisoner has escaped.’

I heard him sit up in his blankets, no more than an arm’s length away. I heard him scrabble in the darkness, then a handful of wood bits was thrown on the fire. They glowed, and then a small flame of true fire leaped up. It only flared briefly, but what it showed was enough to confound me. Not only our prisoner was missing, but Laurel and Whitecap were gone.

‘She went after him,’ I guessed stupidly.

‘They went together.’ The Fool pointed out the more likely scenario. Alone with me, he completely abandoned Lord Golden’s voice and posture. In the fading flare of the
fire, he sat up on his blanket, his knees tucked under his chin and his arms wrapped around his legs as he expostulated. He shook his head at his own stupidity. ‘When you fell asleep, she insisted she would take first watch. She promised to wake me when her duty was over. If I had not been so concerned over your behaviour, I might have seen how peculiar that offer was.’ His wounded look was almost an accusation. ‘She loosed him, and then they left deliberately and quietly. So quietly that not even Nighteyes heard them go.’

There was a question in his words if not his voice. ‘He isn’t feeling well,’ I said, and bit down on any other explanation. Had the wolf deliberately held me deep in sleep while he allowed them to leave? He still slept heavily by my side, the sodden sleep of exhaustion and sickness. ‘Why would she go with him?’

The silence lasted too long. Then, unwillingly the Fool guessed, ‘Perhaps she thought you would kill him, and she didn’t want it to come to that.’

‘I wouldn’t have killed him,’ I replied irritably.

‘Oh? Well, then, I suppose it is good that at least one of us is sure of that. Because frankly, the same fear had crossed my mind.’ He peered at me through the dimness, and then spoke with disarming directness. ‘You frightened me last night, Fitz. No. You terrified me. I almost wondered if I knew you at all.’

I didn’t want to discuss that. ‘Do you think he could have freed himself and then forced Laurel to go with him?’

He was quiet for a time, then accepted my change of subject. ‘That is possible, but only just. Laurel is … very resourceful. She would have found some way to make a noise. Nor can I imagine why he would do so.’ He frowned. ‘Did you think they looked at one another oddly? Almost as if they shared a secret?’

Had he seen something I had not? I tried to think that through, then gave it up as a hopeless task. Reluctantly, I pushed my blanket completely away. I spoke quietly, still not wishing to wake the wolf. ‘We have to go after them. Now.’ My
wet, muddy clothes from the night before were clammy and stiff on my body. Well, at least I didn’t have to get dressed. I stood up. I refastened my swordbelt a notch closer to its old setting. Then I stopped, staring at the blanket.

‘I covered you,’ the Fool admitted quietly. He added, ‘Let Nighteyes sleep, at least until dawn. We will need some light to find their trail.’ He paused then asked, ‘You say we should follow them because you think … what? That he will go to wherever the Prince has gone? Do you think he would take Laurel there with him?’

I bit a torn corner off my thumbnail. ‘I don’t know what I think,’ I admitted.

For a time we both pondered in silence and darkness. I drew a breath. ‘We must go after the Prince. Nothing must distract us from that. We should go back to where we left his trail yesterday and try to discover it again, if the rains have left anything for us to discover. That is the only path that we are absolutely certain will lead to Dutiful. If that fails us, then we will fall back on trying to follow Laurel and the Piebald and hope that that trail also leads to the Prince.’

‘Agreed,’ the Fool replied softly.

I felt oddly guilty because I felt relief. Not just that he had agreed with me, not just that the Piebald had been put out of my reach, but relief that with Laurel and the prisoner gone, we could drop pretences and just be ourselves. ‘I’ve missed you,’ I said quietly, knowing that he would know what I meant.

‘So have I.’ His voice came from a new direction. In the dark, he was up and moving silently and gracefully as a cat. That thought brought my dream back to me abruptly. I grasped at the tattering fragments of it. ‘I think the Prince might be in danger,’ I admitted.

‘You’re only now concluding that?’

‘A different type of danger to what I expected. I suspected the Witted ones of luring him away from Kettricken and the court, of bribing him with a cat to be his Wit-partner so that
they could take him off and make him one of their own. But last night, I dreamed, and … it was an evil dream, Fool. Of the Prince displaced from himself, of the cat exerting so much influence over their bonding that he could scarcely recall who or what he was.’

‘That could happen?’

‘I wish I knew for certain. The whole thing was so peculiar. It was his cat, and yet it was not. There was a woman, but I never saw her. When I was the Prince, I loved her. And the cat, I loved the cat, too. I think the cat loved me, but it was hard to tell. The woman was almost … between us.’

‘When you were the Prince.’ I could tell that he could not even decide how to phrase the question.

The mouth of the cave was a lighter bit of darkness now. The wolf slumbered on. I fumbled through an explanation. ‘Sometimes, at night … it’s not exactly Skilling. Nor is it completely the Wit. I think that even in my magic, I am a bastard cross of two lines, Fool. Perhaps that is why Skilling sometimes hurts so much. Perhaps I never learned to do it properly at all. Maybe Galen was right about me, all the time –’

‘When you were the Prince,’ he reminded me firmly.

‘In the dreams, I become him. Sometimes I recall who I truly am. Sometimes I simply become him and know where he is and what he is doing. I share his thoughts, but he is not aware of me, nor can I speak to him. Or perhaps I can. I’ve never tried. In the dreams, it never occurs to me to try. I simply become him, and ride along.’

He made a small sound, like breathing out thoughtfully. Dawn came in the way it does at the change of the seasons, going from dark to pearly grey all in an instant. And in the moment, I smelled that summer was over, that the thunderstorm last night had drowned it and washed it away, and the days of autumn were undeniably upon us. There was a smell in the air of leaves soon to fall, and plants abandoning their
greenery to sink back into their roots, and even of seeds on the wing seeking desperately for a place to settle and sink before the frosts of winter found them.

I turned away from the mouth of our cave and found the Fool, already dressed in clean clothes, putting the final touch to our packing … ‘There’s just a bit of bread, and an apple left,’ he told me. ‘And I don’t think Nighteyes would fancy the apple.’

He tossed me the bread for the wolf. As the light of day reached his face, Nighteyes stirred. He carefully thought nothing at all as he rose, cautiously stretched, and then went to lap water from the pool at the back of the cave. When he came back, he dropped down beside me and accepted the bread as I broke it into pieces.

So. How long have they been gone?
I asked him.

You know I let them go. Why do you even ask me that?

I was silent for a time.
I had changed my mind. Couldn’t you feel that? I had decided I wouldn’t even hurt him, let alone kill him
.

Changer. Last night you bore us both too close to a very dangerous place. Neither one of us truly knew what you would do. I chose to let them go rather than find out. Did I choose wrong?

I didn’t know. That was the frightening part, that I didn’t know. I wouldn’t ask him to help me track Laurel and the archer. Instead I asked,
Think we can pick up the Prince’s trail?

I promised you I would, didn’t I? Let us simply do what we must do and then go home.

I bowed my head. It sounded good to me.

The Fool had been juggling the apple in one hand. Once Nighteyes had finished eating, he stopped, gripped the apple in both hands, and then gave it a sudden twist. It broke smoothly into two halves, and he tossed one to me. I caught it, and shook my head at him, grinning. ‘Every time I think I know all your tricks –’

‘You find out how wrong you are,’ he finished. He ate his half rapidly, saving the core for Malta, and I did the same with Myblack. The hungry horses were not enthusiastic about the day ahead. I smoothed their ragged coats a bit before I saddled them and fastened our saddle-packs to Myblack. Then we led them out and down the gravelly slope, now slippery with mud. The wolf limped along behind us.

As so often happens after a good thunderstorm, the sky was blue and clear. The scents of the day were strong as the rising sun warmed the wet earth. Birds sang. Overhead, a flock of ducks headed south in the morning light. At the bottom of the hill, we mounted.
Can you keep up?
I asked Nighteyes worriedly.

You’d better hope so. Because without me, you haven’t a chance of trailing the Prince.

A single set of horse-tracks led back the way we had come. Heavy imprints. They were riding double, as fast as Whitecap could carry them. Where were they going, and why? Then I put Laurel and the Piebald out of my head. It was the Prince we sought.

Whitecap’s hoof-prints returned to where we had been ambushed the day before. I noted, in passing, that the Piebald had retrieved his bow. Then they had ridden back towards the road. Whitecap’s tracks were still pushed deep in the damp soil. They had gone on together, then.

Theirs were not the only fresh tracks under the tree. Two other horses had come and gone there since the night’s rain. Their tracks overcut those of the heavily-burdened Whitecap. I frowned over that. These were not the tracks of the pursuers from the village. They had not come this far; at least not yet. I decided to hope that the deaths of their friends and the horrid weather had turned them back. These fresh tracks came from the northwest, then turned, and went back that way. I pondered for a time, then the obvious hammered me: ‘Of course. The
archer had no horse. The Piebalds sent someone back for their sentry.’ I grinned ruefully. ‘At least they’ve left us a clear trail to follow.’

I glanced over but the Fool’s face was still. He did not share my elation.

‘What’s wrong?’

He gave a sickly smile. ‘I was imagining how we would feel now if you had killed that boy last night, beating their destination out of him.’

I did not want to follow that thought. I said nothing and concentrated on the tracks in the earth. Nighteyes and I led, and the Fool followed. The horses were hungry, and Myblack in particular fractious because of it. She snatched at yellow-veined willow leaves and clumps of dry grass whenever she could, and I felt too much sympathy to correct her. Had I been able to satisfy my belly that way, I would have snatched a handful of leaves myself.

As we pushed on, I saw signs of the rider’s haste as he raced back to warn his party that their sentry had been taken. The tracks followed the obvious routes now, the easiest way up a hill, the clearest path through a tongue of woods. The day was still young when we found the remnants of a camp under the spread of an oak grove.

‘They must have had a wet, wild night of it,’ the Fool guessed, and I nodded. The fire spot showed the remains of charred logs extinguished by the downpour and never rekindled. A woven blanket had left its imprint on the sodden ground; whoever had slept there had slept wet. The ground was churned with tracks. Had other Piebalds awaited them here? The departing tracks overcut one another. There was no point in wasting time trying to puzzle it out.