by Robin Hobb
‘You’ve been fed. This isn’t an inn.’
The guard went out, slamming the door behind him. I heard several bolts shot into place. My friend went to the door and watched the guard depart down the hallway. Then he came back to my side. ‘Think you can drink?’
I didn’t answer but I managed to wobble my head up off the straw. He held the brimming ladle near my mouth and I carefully sucked in a mouthful. He was patient, crouching there and holding the ladle steady as I drank. I had to go slow. I’d never realized that the muscles in my back could be involved in sucking water into my mouth and holding my head up. After a time, I let my head sag back down and he took the water away. I lay panting softly. Blackness hovered at the edges of my vision, then gradually receded. ‘Is it night?’
‘It’s always night in these places,’ he answered mournfully, and for a moment I glimpsed the real man, one who had spent far too much time in situations such as this. I wondered how long he’d been Chade’s, then doubted that he knew anything of who employed him this way. He pulled his stool closer and spoke quietly. ‘It’s afternoon. You’ve been in here two days now. When they first brought me in, the healer was working on you. I thought you were awake then. Don’t you remember it?’
‘No.’ Perhaps I could have, if I had tried, but I was suddenly queasily certain I didn’t want to recall that. Two days. My heart sank. If Chade were going to get me out of here swiftly, he would have done so by now. That two days had already passed could indicate that I should expect to be here for a time. A sudden jab of pain broke that chain of thought. I tried to focus my mind again. ‘No one has come to see me, or offered to pay my fine?’
He goggled at me. ‘Fine? Man, you murdered three people. There’s no fine for that.’ Then he abruptly gentled his voice. I was still absorbing that I could die on a gallows when he added, ‘There was a man who came after the healer got done with you. Some high lord, dressed all fancy and foreign. You were unconscious and they wouldn’t let him come in here. He demanded to know what had become of a purse you were carrying for him. The guards said they didn’t know anything about it. He got really angry then, and told them to think well what they were saying, that if his property was not restored to him intact, he would take extreme measures. He said you had a little red purse, embroidered with a bird, a, um, a pheasant on it. He wouldn’t say what was in it, only that it was very valuable and it was his and he wanted it back.’
‘Lord Golden?’ I asked softly.
‘Yes, that was his name.’
I had no idea what the Fool had been talking about. ‘I don’t remember the purse,’ I said. The pain was rising like an engulfing tide. I tried to hold onto my thoughts but could not. I pushed back my fear and discovered that it cloaked my anger. I didn’t deserve this. Why had they left me here? I could die here.
I could feel Dutiful fumbling at the edges of my mind. ‘I’m so tired,’ I said, meaning to Skill it but saying it instead. The pain from my wound was thudding down my leg, making my hip and knee ache. My right arm had no strength in it. I closed my eyes, centered myself and tried to reach out to the Prince. Instead, I plunged into blackness.
The next several days passed for me like images glimpsed by lightning during a thunderstorm. The few memories I have are starkly and strongly etched, yet they are so momentary as to be nearly meaningless. A man I suspect was a healer looked into a basin of my blood and proclaimed it too dark. My cellmate complained bitterly to someone at the door-grate that the stench was enough to choke a goat. I stared at an odd pattern of straw on the floor and listened to Hap scream obscenities at someone. I desperately wanted him to be quiet, lest they decide to hurt him, too. To be conscious was to be afraid. Sick, hurt and afraid. Alone. They’d left me alone here to die, so I would not embarrass them. Sleep brought Nighteyes’ old nightmares of a filthy cage and a keeper who beat him.
The Skill is a magic which demands physical strength, a clear mental focus, and a strong will to perform. I had none of those. Waves of Skill-sendings from Dutiful struck me and washed through me, leaving no clear residue of thought. I knew only that he tried to reach me, and I wished heartily that he would stop. I wanted silence and stillness so I could hide from my pain. Sometimes I was aware of Nettle, too. I doubt that she sensed she had reached me,
In between those glimpses of waking life and nightmare plagued sleep, I lived another life. The rounded hillsides were smooth and white with snow under a grey sky. There were no trees, no bushes, and not even an upthrust of stone. Only the snow, the whispering wind and the ever-twilight. The only break in the smoothness of the snow were Nighteyes’ tracks going on before me. I followed them doggedly. I would find him and I would join him. He could not be that far ahead. Once the wind turned to wolves howling in the distance, and I tried to hurry. That effort only woke me to the cold stink of the prison cell. I had moved and something hot and foul was trickling from my wound. I closed my eyes again and sought for the peace of the snowy hills.
It would be weeks before I pieced together the whole sequence of events. Lord Golden’s missing purse of raw gemstones was found in Laudwine’s cottage. Not that he was known as Laudwine in Buckkeep Town. Starling had been correct. To his neighbours, the one-armed man was known as Keppler. A witness attested that he had seen a man who might have been me pursue someone who might have been Padget into Keppler’s cottage. Obviously, I had been robbed of my master’s purse on my way to taking them to a gem-cutter for him. I had followed the thieves, they had fought me, and I’d killed them all, taking a grievous injury myself. Then I had valiantly killed the rabid horse before it could break free of the shed and injure people in the street. From being an accused triple-murderer, I was suddenly elevated to the status of loyal servant willing to risk his life for his master’s property. As no one came forward to contradict this fabrication, or even to claim the bodies of ‘Keppler’ and Padget, it became the acknowledged truth in Buckkeep Town. The goatherd neighbours soon spoke of how it seemed to them that Keppler had many visitors who came and went at odd hours.
And so Lord Golden was allowed to claim what was left of me. He sent two serving-men to fetch me home. Stinking and semi-conscious, I was loaded onto a litter for a cold and jolting trip up to Buckkeep Castle. I did not know the men who came to fetch me, and they cared little for me. I felt each step they took, and would have wept if I had had the strength. The pain was such that it kept jolting me back to wakefulness. The stoutly-muscled men who trudged up the hill commented that they were grateful for the cold, still air, for it made the smell of my pus-running wound less. They delivered me to Lord Golden’s door. He held a scented handkerchief over his mouth and nose as he commanded them to put me on my bed. Then he paid the men generously and thanked them for bringing me home to die. In the blackness of my closed room, I shut my eyes and tried to do just that.
Fragments of speech whirled like falling leaves in my memory. They flowed into my head and filled it up like other people’s furniture moved into a once-familiar room. I could not disengage from them. Something held me there as firmly as the hand that gripped mine.
‘… Can’t move him again, even if you could get a litter up those stairs. You’ll have to do it here.’
‘I don’t know how. I don’t know how. I don‘t know how!’ This from Dutiful. ‘Eda and El, Chade, I’m not being stubborn. Don’t you think I’d save him if I could? But I don’t know how; I’m not even sure what you’re asking me to do.’
Stinks worse than dogshit now. Thick was bored and wished he were anywhere else.
Chade, patiently explaining it yet again. 'It doesn't matter that you don't know how. He's going to die if we don't do anything. If you try and it kills him, well, at least it will be quicker than what he's enduring now. Now, I want you to look at these drawings carefully. They are my own work, from years ago. This shows you what those organs should look like, intact…
I fell away from them. Blessed blackness for a time. Just as I found the snow-rounded hills, they
tugged me back. Their hands were on me. My clothing was cut away. Someone retched, and Chade, tight-breathed, told them to get out of the room until called for. Then, harsh rags, water both cold and hot on my wound and close at hand a woman said sadly, 'It's hopelessly foul. Can't we just let him go peacefully?
'No! I thought the voice was King Shrewd's. Then I knew it could not be. It must be Chade, sounding so like his brother. 'Get the Prince back in here. It's time.
Then I felt Dutiful's icy hands on my hot flesh, set to either side of the wound. 'Just Skill into his body, Chade told him. 'Skill into him, look at what is wrong, and fix it.
'I don't know how, Dutiful repeated, but I felt him try. His mind battered against mine like a moth against a lamp's chimney. He was trying to reach my thoughts, not my body. I pushed feebly at him. That was a mistake.
For a moment, our minds touched and linked. No. I told him. No. Leave me alone.
His hands went away. 'He doesn't want us to do this, Dutiful reported uncertainly.
‘I don’t care! Chade’s voice was furious. ‘He isn’t allowed to die. I won’t permit it.’ Suddenly, the words were louder, shouted right by my ear. ‘Fitz, do you hear me? Do you hear me, boy? I’m not going to let you die, so you might as well cooperate. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and fight to live.’
‘Fitz?’ There was wonder and horror in Dutiful’s voice.
A crack of silence opened. Then, harshly, Chade explained. ‘He was born a bastard, just as I was. It’s long been a joke between us, that the word only stings when it comes from someone who doesn’t wear it also.’
Feeble, Chade. Feeble, I wanted to tell him, and Dutiful knows you too well to be taken in by it.
Someone stroked the hair back from my brow and took my hand. I thought it was the Fool. I tried to tighten my hand on his slender one, to somehow let him know that I would beg his pardon if I could. I suddenly thought of all the persons that I hadn’t bid farewell. Hap. Kettricken. Burrich and Molly. I’d always meant to make everything right with everyone before I died. ‘Patience, mother, I said, but no one heard me. Perhaps I didn’t even speak the words aloud.
‘Show me the picture,’ Lord Golden said. He let go of my hand and I swung abruptly into the blackness. I fell until I died. From the pillowed brow of a snow hilly, I glimpsed the summerland. A flash of grey moved in the tall grasses. Nighteyes! I called to him. He turned and looked back at me. He showed his teeth in a snarl, warning me back. I tried to move forward but again I was drawn back up to the surface. I thrashed helplessly, a fish on a line, but my body moved not at all.
‘… done it before. At least, something like it. I was there when he used the Skill to heal his wolf. And years ago, I studied how a man’s body is put together. And I don’t have the Skill, myself, but I know Fi—Tom. If you can use the Skill through me, I’m willing to allow that.’ The Fool was insistent.
‘I have to use the privy.’
‘Go, then, Thick, but come right back. Understand me? Come right back here when you have.’ I can hear annoyance in Chade’s voice. And uncertainty. ‘Well, what can it hurt? Go ahead. Try.’
Then I felt the Fool’s touch on my back. If Dutiful’s hands had been cold to my fevered skin, then the Fool’s fingers were as icicles. Their jabbing ice probed me. All eternity paused in anticipation of that dreaded, desired touch.
Long ago, the Fool had accompanied me into the Mountains on the quest to find Verity. In helping me tend our exhausted king, he had carelessly let his fingers come into contact with Verity’s Skill-silvered hands. That physical manifestation of the Skill-magic had gleamed like quicksilver. The contact with the pure magic had jolted the Fool and forever marked him. The silvering magic had faded with time, yet enough of it remained on his fingertips that I had seen the Fool use it in his woodcarving. It allowed him to know, intimately, whatever those fingers touched, be it wood or plant or beast. Or me. Long ago, he had left his fingerprints on my wrist. Lord Golden’s gloves always kept his Skill-fingers covered, protected from casual contact. Yet now the hands that touched the skin of my back were bared.
I knew the instant that his Skill-coated fingers made contact with my skin. Like little cold knives his touch plunged into me, cutting more sharply than the sword which had stirred my guts. It was neither pain nor pleasure; it was connection, pure and simple, as if we shared a skin. I lay still under that scrutiny, lacking even the strength to tremble, as I prayed he would go no further. I need not have feared. I felt the Fool’s honor in that touch, an honor that was like armour between us. It was only my body he probed, not my heart or mind. I knew then with terrible guilt how my earlier accusations had wronged my friend. He would never seek anything from me that I did not first offer him. I heard him speak, and the words echoed through, me even as they washed against my ears.
‘I can see the damage, Chade. The muscles are like snapped cords that have pulled back on themselves. And where the blade cut him, there is rot and poison leaking from his own guts. His blood carries it through his body. It is not just this wound that is toxic. The wrongness gleams throughout his whole body, like dye spreading through water or decay that has reached up through a tree. It has overwhelmed him, Chade. The trouble is not just here, where the blade went in, but in other places where his own body tries to make it right and instead succumbs to the poison.’
‘Can you repair it? Can you heal his body?’ Chade’s voice seemed choked and weak, but it could have been because the Fool’s thoughts seemed so thunderously loud.
‘No. I can see what is wrong but perceiving damage does not mend it. He is not a chunk of wood, so I cannot simply carve the rot away from what is sound.’ The Fool fell silent, but I felt how he struggled within that silence. Then he spoke in a voice full of despair. ‘We have failed him. He’s dying.’
‘No, oh no. Not my boy, not my Fitz. Please, no.’ Light as leaves, the old man’s hands settled on me. I knew how terribly he desired to make me right. Then his hands seemed to sink inside me and the heat of his touch burned like liquor running through my veins. Someone gasped, and then I felt, I felt the Fool join his mind to Chade’s. They linked in me. It was a feeble thing, this Skilling effort. The old man’s voice cracked as he cried out, ‘Dutiful. Take my hand. Lend me strength.’
Dutiful joined them. It disrupted everything. Light exploded into blackness. ‘Get Thick!’ someone shouted. It didn’t matter. I fell for a long time, getting smaller and smaller as I fell. I heard the howling of wolves. It grew louder.
Then I became aware of a light. The light was not hot, but it was terribly penetrating. I fell into it and became it. It seemed to come from inside my eyes themselves. There was no avoiding it. It was light that seared but did not illuminate. I could see nothing. It was unbearably bright, and then suddenly, the brilliance increased. I screamed, my whole body screamed with the force of the light surging through me. I was a broken limb jerked straight, a dammed river released, snarled hair roughly combed. Rightness tore through me. The cure was worse than the malady. My heart stopped. Voices cried out in dismay. Then my heart slammed into motion again. Air scorched into my lungs.
I passed through an instant of wild wakefulness in which I saw all, knew all, felt all. They surrounded me in a circle. The Fool’s Skilled fingers were pressed to my back. Chade gripped his free hand, and in turn his hand held Dutiful’s. Dutiful clenched Thick’s chubby wrist in his hand and Thick stood, stock-still and stolid, immobile and yet roaring like a bonfire. Chade’s eyes were wide, showing the whites all round and his clenched teeth were bared in a snarl of joy. Dutiful’s face was white with fear, his eyes squeezed shut. And the Fool, the Fool was gold gleaming and joy and a flight of jewelled dragons across a pure blue sky. And the Fool screamed suddenly, shrill as a woman, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! It’s too much, we’ve gone too far!’
They let me go. I raced on without them. I couldn’t stop now. As a flash flood cuts down a ravine, clearing all debris along with the live trees that it tears up from the b
anks, so I raced. Healing? It was not a healing. Healing is gentleness and recovery and time. Healing, I suddenly knew, was not a thing that one man did to another. Healing was what a body did for itself, given the rest and time and sustenance to do it. If a man set fire to his feet to warm his hands, that would be like this healing was. My body sloughed rotted flesh and purged poisonous fluids from itself. Yet one cannot tear away from a structure without replacing it, and building bricks must come from somewhere. My body stole from itself and I felt it do it, but could not stop the process. And so I was made whole, but at a cost to the strength of that whole. Like a wall built without sufficient mortar, strength was sacrificed to the paucity of materials. When all was done and the world thundered to stillness around me, I lay looking up at them from the wash of filth and poison that my body had ejected, and I had not even the strength to blink.
They looked down at me, the four who had reconstructed my body. The old man, the golden lord, the prince and the idiot stared down at me, and in their gazes awe mingled with fear and satisfaction vied with regret. Thus was Dutiful’s Coterie formed, and it was as poor a way for any five folk to be joined as I could imagine. Not since Crossfire’s Coterie of cripples had there been such a sadly mismatched assortment of Skill-users. The Fool had no true Skill of his own, only the silver shadows on his fingertips and the thread of Skill — awareness we had shared for so long. Thick possessed it in ample quantity but had neither knowledge nor any ambition to gain knowledge to use it well. I had Skill, but as always it faded and then fountained unpredictably, untrained and unreliable. And Chade, gods help us all, had discovered his own talent in the waning of his years. He flourished it like a boy waving a wooden sword, with no concept of what a true edge could do. He had knowledge, and ambition like a floodtide, and yet he did not have the intrinsic understanding that Thick did. Only in our prince did Skill balance both intellect and ambition, and there it was Wit-tainted. I stared up at what I had wrought merely by virtue of nearly dying, and my courage left me. Catalyst indeed. A coterie should be able to lend its strength to the Farseer monarch in time of need. This one could not function without him. And it should have been built on the camaraderie of mutually-chosen companions. This was more like an accidental meeting of travellers in a tavern.