Fool’s Errand

‘Because you Skill-burned it into him,’ the Fool said quietly.

‘Perhaps,’ I admitted unwillingly. Certainly the next day had been one long torment of headache and Skill-hunger. The thought made me uneasy. I had been telling myself that I could not Skill that way. Certain other dreams stirred uneasily in my memory. I pushed them down again. No, I promised myself. They were not the same.

‘It was the deck of a ship,’ he said quietly. ‘And it’s quite likely you saved my life.’ He took a breath. ‘I thought something like that might have happened. It never made sense to me that he didn’t get rid of me when he could have. Sometimes, when I was most alone, I mocked myself that I could cling to such a hope. That I could believe I was so important to anyone that he would travel in his dreams to protect me.’

‘You should have known better than that,’ I said quietly.

‘Should I?’ The question was almost a challenge. He gave me the most direct look I had ever received from him. I did not understand the hurt I saw in his eyes, nor the hope. He needed something from me, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I tried to find something to say, but before I could, the moment seemed to pass. He looked away from me, releasing me from his plea. When his eyes came back to mine, he changed both his expression and the subject.

‘So. What happened to you after I flew away?’

The question took me aback. ‘I thought … but you said you had not seen Chade for years. How did you know how to find me, then?’

By way of answer, he closed his eyes, and then brought his left and right forefingers together to meet before him. He opened his eyes and smiled at me. I knew it was as much answer as I would get.

‘I scarcely know where to begin.’

‘I do. With more brandy.’

He flowed effortlessly to his feet. I let him take my empty cup. I set a hand on Nighteyes’ head and felt him hovering between sleep and wakefulness. If his hips still troubled him, he was concealing it well. He was getting better and better at holding himself apart from me. I wondered why he concealed his pain from me.

Do you wish to share your aching back with me? Leave me alone and stop borrowing trouble. Not every problem in the world belongs to you. He lifted his head from my knee and with a deep sigh stretched out more fully before the hearth. Like a curtain falling between us, he masked himself once more.

I rose slowly, one hand pressed against my back to still my own ache. The wolf was right. Sometimes there was little point to sharing pain. The Fool refilled both our cups with his apricot brandy. I sat down at the table and he set mine before me. His own he kept in his hand as he wandered about the room. He paused before Verity’s unfinished map of the Six Duchies on my wall, glanced into the nook that was Hap’s sleeping alcove and then leaned in the door of my bedchamber. When Hap had come to live with me, I had added an additional chamber that I referred to as my study. It had its own small hearth, as well as my desk and a scroll rack. The Fool paused at the door to it, then stepped boldly inside. I watched him. It was like watching a cat explore a strange house. He touched nothing, yet appeared to see everything. ‘A lot of scrolls,’ he observed from the other room.

I raised my voice to reach him. ‘I’ve been trying to write a history of the Six Duchies. It was something that Patience and Fedwren proposed years ago, back when I was a boy. It helps to occupy my time of an evening.’

‘I see. May I?’

I nodded. He seated himself at my desk, and unrolled the scroll on the stone game. ‘Ah, yes, I remember this.’

‘Chade wants it when I am finished with it. I’ve sent him things, from time to time, via Starling. But up until a month or so ago, I hadn’t seen him since we parted in the Mountains.’

‘Ah. But you had seen Starling.’ His back was to me. I wondered what expression he wore. The Fool and the minstrel had never got along well together. For a time, they had made an uneasy truce, but I had always been a bone of contention between them. The Fool had never approved of my friendship with Starling, had never believed she had my best interests at heart. That didn’t make it any easier to let him know he had always been right.

‘For a time, I saw Starling. On and off for, what, seven or eight years. She was the one who brought Hap to me about seven years ago. He’s just turned fifteen. He’s not home right now; he’s hired out in the hopes of gaining more coin for an apprenticeship fee. He wants to be a cabinetmaker. He does good work, for a lad; both the desk and the scroll rack are his work. Yet I don’t know if he has the patience for detail that a good joiner must have. Still, it’s what his heart is set on, and he wants to apprentice to a cabinetmaker in Buckkeep Town. Gindast is the joiner’s name, and he’s a master. Even I have heard of him. If I had realized Hap would set his heart so high, I’d have saved more over the years. But –’

‘Starling?’ His query reined me back from my musings on the boy.

It was hard to admit it. ‘She’s married now. I don’t know how long. The boy found it out when he went to Springfest at Buckkeep with her. He came home and told me.’ I shrugged one shoulder. ‘I had to end it between us. She knew I would when I found out. It still made her angry. She couldn’t understand why it couldn’t continue, as long as her husband never found out.’

‘That’s Starling.’ His voice was oddly non-judgemental, as if he commiserated with me over a garden blight. He turned in the chair to look at me over his shoulder. ‘And you’re all right?’

I cleared my throat. ‘I’ve kept busy. And not thought about it much.’

‘Because she felt no shame at all, you think it must all belong to you. People like her are so adept at passing on blame. This is a lovely red ink on this. Where did you get it?’

‘I made it.’

‘Did you?’ Curious as a child, he unstopped one of the ink bottles on my desk and stuck in his little finger. It came out tipped in scarlet. He regarded it for a moment. ‘I kept Burrich’s earring,’ he suddenly admitted. ‘I never took it to Molly.’

‘I see that. I’m just as glad you didn’t. It’s better that neither of them know I survived.’

‘Ah. Another question answered.’ He drew a snowy kerchief from inside his pocket and ruined it by wiping the red ink from his finger. ‘So. Are you going to tell me all the events in order, or must I pry bits out of you one at a time?’

I sighed. I dreaded recalling those times. Chade had been willing to accept an account of the events that related to the Farseer reign. The Fool would want more than that. Even as I cringed from it, I could not evade the notion that somehow I owed him that telling. ‘I’ll try. But I’m tired, and we’ve had too much brandy, and it’s far too much to tell in one evening.’

He tipped back in my chair. ‘Were you expecting me to leave tomorrow?’

‘I thought you might.’ I watched his face as I added, ‘I didn’t hope it.’

He accepted me at my word. ‘That’s good, then, for you would have hoped in vain. To bed with you, Fitz. I’ll take the boy’s cot. Tomorrow is soon enough to begin to fill in nearly fifteen years of absence.’

The Fool’s apricot brandy was more potent than the Sandsedge, or perhaps I was simply wearier than usual. I staggered to my room, dragged off my shirt and dropped into my bed. I lay there, the room rocking gently around me, and listened to his light footfalls as he moved about in the main room, extinguishing candles and pulling in the latch string. Perhaps only I could have seen the slight unsteadiness in his movements. Then he sat down in my chair and stretched his legs towards the fire. At his feet, the wolf groaned and shifted in his sleep. I touched minds gently with Nighteyes; he was deeply asleep and welling contentment.

I closed my eyes, but the room spun sickeningly. I opened them a crack and stared at the Fool. He sat very still as he stared into the fire, but the dancing light of the flames lent their motion to his features. The angles of his face were hidden and then revealed as the shadows shifted. The gold of his skin and eyes seemed a trick of the firelight, but I knew they were not.

It was hard to realize he was no longer the impish jester who had both served and protected King Shrewd for all those years. His body had not changed, save in colouring. His graceful, long-fingered hands dangled off the arms of the chair. His hair, once as pale and airy as dandelion fluff, was now bound back from his face and confined to a golden queue. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. Firelight bronzed his aristocratic profile. His present grand clothes might recall his old winter motley of black and white, but I wagered he would never again wear bells and ribbons and carry a rat-headed sceptre. His lively wit and sharp tongue no longer influenced the course of political events. His life was his own now. I tried to imagine him as a wealthy man, able to travel and live as he pleased. A sudden thought jolted me from my complacency.

‘Fool?’ I called aloud in the darkened rooms.

‘What?’ He did not open his eyes but his ready reply showed he had not yet slipped towards sleep.

‘You are not the Fool any more. What do they call you these days?’

A slow smile curved his lips in profile. ‘What do who call me when?’

He spoke in the baiting tone of the jester he had been. If I tried to sort out that question, he would tumble me in verbal acrobatics until I gave up hoping for an answer. I refused to be drawn into his game. I rephrased my question. ‘I should not call you Fool any more. What do you want me to call you?’

‘Ah, what do I want you to call me now? I see. An entirely different question.’ Mockery made music in his voice.

I drew a breath and made my question as plain as possible. ‘What is your name, your real name?’

‘Ah.’ His manner was suddenly grave. He took a slow breath. ‘My name. As in what my mother called me at my birth?’

‘Yes.’ And then I held my breath. He spoke seldom of his childhood. I suddenly realized the immensity of what I had asked him. It was the old naming magic: if I know how you are truly named, I have power over you. If I tell you my name, I grant you that power. Like all direct questions I had ever asked the Fool, I both dreaded and longed for the answer.

‘And if I tell you, you would call me by that name?’ His inflection told me to weigh my answer.

That gave me pause. His name was his, and not for me to bandy about. But, ‘In private, only. And only if you wished me to,’ I offered solemnly. I considered the words as binding as a vow.

‘Ah.’ He turned to face me. His face lit with delight. ‘Oh, but I would,’ he assured me.

‘Then?’ I asked again. I was suddenly uneasy, certain that somehow he had bested me yet again.

‘The name my mother gave me, I give now to you, to call me by in private.’ He took a breath and turned back to the fire. He closed his eyes again but his grin grew even wider. ‘Beloved. She called me only “Beloved”.’

‘Fool!’ I protested.

He laughed, a deep rich chuckle of pure enjoyment, completely pleased with himself. ‘She did,’ he insisted.

‘Fool, I’m serious.’ The room had begun to revolve slowly around me. If I did not go to sleep soon, I would be sick.

‘And you think I am not?’ He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Well, if you cannot call me Beloved, then I suppose you should continue to call me Fool. For I am ever the Fool to your Fitz.’

‘Tom Badgerlock.’

‘What?’

‘I am Tom Badgerlock now. It is how I am known.’

He was silent for a time. Then, ‘Not by me,’ he replied decisively. ‘If you insist we must both take different names now, then I shall call you Beloved. And whenever I call you that, you may call me Fool.’ He opened his eyes and rolled his head to look at me. He simpered a lovesick smile, then heaved an exaggerated sigh. ‘Good night, Beloved. We have been apart far too long.’

I capitulated. Conversation was hopeless when he got into these moods. ‘Goodnight, Fool.’ I rolled over in my bed and closed my eyes. If he made any response, I was asleep before he uttered it.

SIX

The Quiet Years

I was born a bastard. The first six years of my life, I spent in the Mountain Kingdom with my mother. I have no clear recollections of that time. At six, my grandfather took me to the fort at Moonseye, and there turned me over to my paternal uncle, Verity Farseer. The revelation of my existence was the personal and political failure that led my father to renounce his claim to the Farseer throne and retire completely from court life. My care was initially given over to Burrich, the Stablemaster at Buckkeep. Later, King Shrewd saw fit to claim my loyalty, and apprentice me to his court assassin. With the death of Shrewd, by the treachery of his youngest son Regal, my loyalty passed to King Verity. Him I followed and served until the time I witnessed him pour his life and essence into a dragon of carved stone. Thus was Verity-as-Dragon animated, and thus were the Six Duchies saved from the depredations of the Red Ship Raiders of the Out Islands, for Verity-as-Dragon led the ancient Elderling dragons as they cleansed the Six Duchies of the invaders. Following that service to my king, injured in both body and spirit, I withdrew from court and society for fifteen years. I believed I would never return.

In those years, I attempted to write a history of the Six Duchies, and an accounting of my own life. In that time, I also obtained and studied various scrolls and writings on a wide variety of topics. The disparity of these pursuits was actually a concerted effort on my part to track down the truth. I strove to find and examine the pieces and forces that had determined why my life had gone as it had. Yet the more I studied and the more I entrusted my thoughts to paper, the more truth eluded me. What life showed me, in my years apart from the world, was that no man ever gets to know the whole of a truth. All I had once believed of all my experiences and myself, time alone illuminated anew. What had seemed clearly lit plunged into shadow, and details I had considered trivial leapt into prominence.

Burrich the Stablemaster, the man who raised me, once warned me ‘When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.’ I have discovered that to be true, from first hand experience. Yet even without deliberately attempting to cut and discard pieces of a story, years after giving a full and just accounting of an event, a man may discover himself a liar. Such lies happen not by intent, but purely by virtue of the facts he was not privy to at the time he wrote, or by being ignorant of the significance of trivial events. No one is pleased to discover himself in such a strait, but any man who claims never to have experienced it is but stacking one lie on top of another.

My efforts at writing a history of the Six Duchies were based on oral accounts and the old scrolls that I had had access to. Even as I set pen to paper, I knew I might be perpetrating another man’s error. I had not realized that my efforts to recount my own life might be subject to the same flaw. The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

No man can return to being a boy. But there are interludes in a man’s life when, for a time, he can recapture the feeling that the world is a forgiving place and that he is immortal. I have always believed that was the essence of boyhood: believing that mistakes could not be fatal. The Fool brought that old optimism out in me again, and even the wolf seemed puppyish and fey for the days he was with us.

The Fool did not intrude into our lives. I made no adaptations or adjustments. He simply joined us, setting his schedule to ours and making my work his own. He was invariably stirring before I was. I would awake to find the door of my study and my bedroom door open, and like as not the outside door open as well. From my bed, I would see him sitting cross-legged like a tailor on my chair before my desk. He was always washed and dressed to face the day. His elegant clothes disappeared after that first day, replaced with simple jerkins and trousers, or the evening comfort of a robe. The moment I was awake, he was aware of my presence, and would lift his eyes to mine before I spoke. He was always reading, either the scrolls and documents that I had painstakingly acquired, or those composed by me. Some of those scrolls were my failed attempts at a history of the Six Duchies. Others were my disjointed efforts to make sense of my own life by setting it onto paper. He would lift an eyebrow to my wakefulness, and then carefully restore the scroll to precisely where it had been. Had he chosen to do so, he could have left me ignorant of his perusal of my journals. Instead, he showed his respect by never questioning me about what he had read. The private thoughts that I had committed to paper remained private, my secrets sealed behind the Fool’s lips.

He dropped effortlessly into my life, filling a place that I had not perceived was vacant. While he stayed with me, I almost forgot to miss Hap, save that I hungered so to show the boy off to him. I know I spoke often of him. Sometimes the Fool worked alongside me in the garden or as I repaired the stone and log paddock. When it was a task for one man, such as digging the new postholes, he perched nearby and watched. Our talk at such times was simple, relating to the task at hand, or the easy banter of men who have shared a boyhood. If ever I tried to turn our talk to serious matters, he deflected my questions with his drollery. We took turns on Malta, for the Fool bragged she could jump anything, and a series of makeshift barriers across my lane soon proved this was so. The spirited little horse seemed to enjoy it as much as we did.

After our evening meal, we sometimes walked the cliffs, or clambered down to stroll the beaches as the tide retreated. In the changing of the light, we hunted rabbits with the wolf, and came home to set a hearthfire more for cheer than warmth. The Fool had brought more than one bottle of the apricot brandy, and his voice was as fine as ever. Evenings were his turn to sing, and talk, and tell stories, both amazing and amusing. Some seemed to be drawn from his own adventures; others were obviously folklore acquired along the way. His graceful hands were more articulate than the puppets he once had fashioned, and his mobile face could portray every character in the tales he told.

It was only in the late evening hours, when the fire had burned to coals and his face was more shadow than shape that he led my talk where he would go. That first evening, in a quiet voice mellowed by brandy, he observed, ‘Have you any idea how hard it was for me to let Girl on a Dragon carry me off and leave you behind? I had to believe that the wheels were in motion, and you would live. It taxed my faith in myself to the utmost to fly off and leave you there.’

‘Your faith in yourself?’ I demanded, feigning insult. ‘Had you no faith in me?’

The Fool had spread Hap’s bedding on the floor before the hearth, and we had abandoned our chairs to sprawl in the dubious comfort there. The wolf, his nose on his paws, dozed on my left side while on my right, the Fool leaned on his elbows, chin propped in his hands. He gazed into the fire, his lifted feet waving vaguely.

The last flames of the fire danced merrily in his eyes. ‘In you? Well. I shall say only that I took great comfort in the wolf at your side.’

In that, his confidence was not misplaced, the wolf observed wryly.

I thought you were asleep.

I’m trying to be.

The Fool’s voice was almost dreamy as he went on, ‘You had survived every cataclysmic event that I had ever glimpsed for you. So I left you, forcing myself to believe that there was a period of quiet in store for you. Perhaps, even, a time of peace.’

‘There was. After a fashion.’ I took a breath. I nearly told him of my death watch by Will. Almost, I told him of how I had reached through Will with the Skill-magic, finally to seize control of Regal’s mind and work my will on him. I let the breath out. He didn’t need to hear that; I didn’t need to relive it. ‘I found peace. A bit at a time. In pieces.’ I grinned foolishly to myself. Odd, the small things that are amusing when one has had enough to drink.

I found myself speaking of my year in the Mountains. I told him how we had returned to the valley where the hot springs flowed, and of the simple hut I had built against the coming of winter. The seasons turn more quickly in the high country. One morning the leaves of birch trees are veined in yellow, and the alder has gone red in the night. A few more nights, and they are bare-fingered branches reaching towards a cold blue sky. The evergreens hunch themselves against the oncoming winter. Then the snow comes, to cloak the world in forgiving white.

I told him of hunting the days away with Nighteyes as my sole companion. Healing and peace were the most elusive of the prey I stalked. We lived simply, as predators with no loyalties save to one another. That absolute solitude was the best balm for the wounds I had taken to both my body and my soul. Such injuries do not truly heal but I learned to live with my scars, much as Burrich once learned to tolerate his game leg. We hunted deer and rabbit. I came to accept that I had died, that I had lost my life in every way that mattered. Winter winds blew around our small shelter, and I understood that Molly was no longer mine. Brief things were those winter days, pauses of sunlight on glittering white snow before the long, blue-fingered dusks returned to draw the deep nights close to us. I learned to cushion my loss with the knowledge that my little daughter would grow up in the shelter of Burrich’s good right arm, much as I myself had.

I had tried to rid myself of my memories of Molly. The stabbing pain of recalling her abused trust of me was the brightest gem in a glittering necklace of painful memories. As much as I had always longed to be freed of my duties and obligations, being released from such bonds was as much a severing as an emancipation. As the brief days of winter alternated with the long, cold nights, I numbered to myself those I had lost. Those who still knew I lived did not even take up the fingers of one hand. The Fool, Queen Kettricken, the minstrel Starling, and through those three, Chade: those were the four who knew of my existence. A few others had seen me alive, amongst them Hands the Stablemaster and one Tag Reaverson, a guardsman, but the circumstances of those brief meetings were such that any tales of my survival were unlikely to be believed.

All others who had known me, including those who had loved me best, believed me dead. Nor could I return to prove them wrong. I had been executed once for practising Wit-magic. I would not chance a more thorough death. Yet even if that taint could be lifted from my name, I could not return to Burrich and Molly. To do so would destroy all of us. Even if Molly had been able to tolerate my beast-magic and my many deceptions of her, how could any of us untangle her subsequent marriage to Burrich? To confront Burrich with his usurpation of my wife and my child would destroy him. Could I found future happiness on that? Could Molly?

‘I tried to comfort myself with the thought that they were safe and happy.’

‘Could not you reach out with the Skill, to assure yourself of that?’

The shadows of the room had deepened and the Fool’s eyes were fixed on the fire. It was as if I recounted my history to myself.

‘I could claim I learned the discipline to leave them to their privacy. In truth, I think I feared it would drive me mad, to witness love shared between them.’

I watched the fire as I spoke of those days, yet I felt the Fool’s eyes turn to me. I did not turn towards him. I did not want to see pity there. I had grown past the need for anyone’s pity.