Assassin's Quest tft-3

by Robin Hobb

  "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 ba
ttled 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.

  The Coastal Duchies would not survive another summer. So said Chade. My tongue was silent as the Fool spoke of him. He had come to Jhaampe by secret ways in high summer, disguised as an old peddler but made himself known to the Queen when he arrived. The Fool had seen him then. "War agrees with him," the Fool observed. "He strides about like a man of twenty. He carries a sword at his hip and there is fire in his eyes. He was pleased to see how her belly swelled with the Farseer heir, and they spoke bravely of Verity's child on the throne. But that was high summer." He sighed. "Now I hear he has returned. I believe because the Queen has sent word of her stillbirth. I have not been to see him yet. What hope he can offer us now, I do not know." He shook his head. "There must be an heir to the Farseer throne," he insisted. "Verity must get one. Otherwise…" He made a helpless gesture.

  "Why not Regal? Would not a child from his loins suffice?"

  "No." His eyes went afar. "No. I can tell you that quite clearly, yet I cannot tell you why. Only that in all futures I have seen, he makes no child. Not even a bastard. In all times, he reigns as the last Farseer, and ushers in the dark."

  A shiver walked over me. He was too strange when he spoke of such things. And his odd words had brought another worry into my mind. "There were two women. A minstrel Starling, and an old woman pilgrim, Kettle. They were on their way here. Kettle said she sought the White-Prophet. I little thought he might be you. Have you heard aught of them? Have they reached Jhaampe town?"

  He shook his head slowly. "No one has come seeking the White Prophet since winter closed on us." He halted, reading the worry in my face. "Of course, I do not know of all who come here. They may be in Jhaampe. But I have heard nothing of two such as that." He reluctantly added, "Bandits prey on roadside travelers now. Perhaps they were delayed."

  Perhaps they were dead. They had come back for me, and I had sent them on alone.

  "Fitz?"

  "I'm all right. Fool, a favor?"

  "I like not that tone already. What is it?"

  "Tell no one I am here. Tell no one I am alive, just yet."

  He sighed. "Not even Kettricken? To tell her that Verity lives still?"

  "Fool, what I have come to do, I intend to do alone. I would not raise false hopes in her. She has endured the news of his death once. If I can bring him back to her, then will be time enough for true rejoicing. I know I ask much. But let me be a stranger you are aiding. Later, I may need your aid in obtaining an old map from the Jhaampe libraries. But when I leave here, I would go alone. I think this quest is one best accomplished quietly." I glanced aside from him and added, "Let FitzChivalry remain dead. Mostly, it is better so."

  "Surely you will at least see Chade?" He was incredulous.

  "Not even Chade should know I live." I paused, wondering which would anger the old man more: that I had attempted to kill Regal when he had always forbidden it, or that I had so badly botched the task. "This quest must be mine alone." I watched him and saw a grudging acceptance in his face.

  He sighed again. "I will not say I agree with you completely. But I shall tell no one who you are." He gave a small laugh. Talk fell off between us. The bottle of brandy was empty. We were reduced to silence, staring at one another drunkenly. The fever and the brandy burned in me. I had too many things to think of and too little I could do about any of them. If I lay very still, the pain in my back subsided to a red throb. It kept pace with the beating of my heart.

  "Too bad you didn't manage to kill Regal," the Fool observed suddenly.

  "I know. I tried. As a conspirator and an assassin, I'm a failure."

  He shrugged for me. "You were never really good at it, you know. There was a naïveté to you that none of the ugliness could stain, as if you never truly believed in evil. It was what I liked best about you." The Fool swayed slightly where he sat, but righted himself. "It was what I missed most, when you were dead."

  I smiled foolishly. "A while back, I thought it was my great beauty."

  For a time the Fool just looked at me. Then he glanced aside and spoke quietly. "Unfair. Were I myself, I would never have spoken such words aloud. Still. Ah, Fitz." He looked at me and shook his head fondly. He spoke without mockery, making almost a stranger of himself. "Perhaps half of it was that you were so unaware of it. Not like Regal. Now there's a pretty man, but he knows it too well. You never see him with his hair tousled or the red of the wind on his cheeks."

  For a moment I felt oddly uncomfortable. Then I said, "Nor with an arrow in his back, more's the pity," and we both went off into the foolish laughter that only drunks understand. It woke the pain in my back to a stabbing intensity however, and in a moment I was gasping for breath. The Fool rose, steadier on his feet than I would have expected, to take a drippy bag of something off my back and replace it with one almost uncomfortably warm from a pot on the hearth. That done, he came again to cr
ouch beside me. He looked directly in my eyes, his yellow ones as hard to read as his colorless ones had been. He laid one long cool hand along my cheek and then gentled the hair back from my eyes.

  "Tomorrow," he told me gravely. "We shall be ourselves again. The Fool and the Bastard. Or the White Prophet and the Catalyst, if you will. We will have to take up those lives, as little as we care for them, and fulfill all fate has decreed for us. But for here, for now, just between us two, and for no other reason save I am me and you are you, I tell you this. I am glad, glad that you are alive. To see you take breath puts the breath back in my lungs. If there must be another my fate is twined around, I am glad it is you."

  He leaned forward then and for an instant pressed his brow to mine. Then he breathed a heavy sigh and drew back from me. "Go to sleep, boy," he said in a fair imitation of Chade's voice. "Tomorrow comes early. And we've work to do." He laughed unevenly. "We've the world to save, you and I."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Confrontations

  Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold? And this is as true of a marriage pact as it is of a trade agreement between kingdoms. Each side knows truly how much it is willing to surrender to the other to get what it wishes; it is in the manipulation of that secret knowledge that the hardest bargain is driven. There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part, whether it be a game of cards or the selling of a cow. The advantage is always to the one who is shrewder in what secret to reveal and when. King Shrewd was fond of saying that there was no greater advantage than to know your enemy's secret when he believed you ignorant of it. Perhaps that is the most powerful secret of all to possess.