Fool's Quest (39 page)

“I gather she took it to herself. It is not what Chade named her. But Fool, are you saying they took Bee because she is a prophet?” Uneasiness was a cold coiling of worms inside me.

“Is she?” he asked me quietly. “Tell me about her, Fitz. And hide nothing.”

When I was silent, gathering my thoughts, he spoke again. The most peculiar smile trembled on his lips, and tears glimmered in his eyes. “But perhaps you have already told me as much as I needed to know, even if I did not put the sense in your words. She is small and blond and pale-eyed. And clever. Tell me. Was she long in the womb?”

My mouth went dry. Where was this leading? “Yes. So long that I thought Molly's mind had turned. For more than a year, almost two, she insisted she was pregnant. And when finally the child came, she was so tiny. And so very slow to grow. For years, we thought she would never do more than lie in her crib and stare. Then, slowly, she began to be able to do things. To roll over, and then to sit without support. Even after she could walk, however, she did not speak. Not for years. I despaired of her, Fool. I thought her mindless or very slow, and wondered what would become of her after Molly and I were dead. Then, when she first began to speak, it was only to Molly. She seemed … wary of me. It was only after Molly died that she talked freely to me. But even before that, she proved her cleverness. Molly taught her to read, and she taught herself to write and to paint. And, Fool, I suspect she will be able to Skill, eventually. For she was aware of me. ‘Like a boiling pot, with your thoughts spilling over,' she said. And that was why she avoided my touch and being close to me. But we were getting to know each other, she was starting to trust me as a child should trust her father …” I suddenly choked and could not go on. It was sweet release to speak aloud of my child, to trust someone with the full truth of her, and sharpest pain that I described a child stolen from me.

“Does she dream?” he demanded suddenly.

And then it poured from me, the full story of her desire to have paper on which to write her dreams down, and how she had so frightened me by foretelling the death of the “pale man” and then the messenger in her butterfly cloak. I hated to tell him how the messenger had died, but by then the sharing of that barbed secret seemed a necessity.

“She helped you burn the body?” the Fool asked incredulously. “Your little girl?”

I nodded silently, then forced myself to admit it aloud. “Yes. She did.”

“Oh, Fitz,” he rebuked me. But I had more to confess to him, and I did, with the tale of our aborted holiday in Oaksbywater, and how I had killed the dog and longed to kill her master, and how I had carelessly allowed Bee to slip away from me. And then, I had to admit the worst. I told how I had come to stab him thinking he was a danger to her.

“What? That was your child who came to me? The boy who touched me and opened me to all the futures? I didn't dream it, did I! He was there. The Unexpected Son!”

“No, Fool. There was no lad anywhere near you. Only my daughter, my little Bee.”

“Then it was her? It was Bee I held in my arms for that one moment? Oh, Fitz! Why did not you tell me instantly!” He stood abruptly, swayed, and sank down. He grasped the arms of the chair and gripped them as if a storm blew around him. He stared at the fire as if he could see through the walls of the keep and into some other world. “Of course,” he whispered at last. “It would have to be so. I understand it all now. Who else's could she be? In that moment, when she touched me, ah, it was no dream, no illusion or delusion. I saw with her. My mind was opened once again to all possible futures. Because, yes, she is Shaysa, even as I once was. And I did not see her in the futures I glimpsed for you because, without me, you would never have had her. She is my daughter, too, Fitz. Yours and mine and Molly's. As is the way of my kind. Ours. Our Bee.”

I was torn between utter confusion and deepest insult. I had a faint memory of him telling me once that he'd had two fathers—brothers or cousins—in a place where folk accepted that arrangement. I'd assumed that it meant that in that place no one would care whose seed had actually ripened in the wife the husbands shared. I forced myself to calmness and looked at him carefully. His golden gaze seemed to meet mine. His eyes were more unnerving now than when they had been colorless. The metallic gleam in them seemed to shift and flow and swirl as if they were liquid while the black dots of his pupils seemed too small for the dim light. I drew a deep steadying breath.
Don't be distracted. Stay on the trail.
“Fool. Bee is not your child. You were never with Molly.”

He smiled at me. “No, Beloved. Of course I was never with Molly.” His fingertip tapped the table, once, twice, thrice. He smiled gently. Then he said, “I was with you.”

I opened my mouth and stood in gaping silence. It took a long time for coherent words to find their way out. “No.” I said it firmly. “No, you were not! And even if …” And then I ran out of words and logic.

He laughed aloud. Of all the reactions he could have had, that was the last I expected. He laughed as I had rarely heard him laugh, for while the jester makes others laugh, he seldom betrays his own amusement. But now he laughed unabashedly and without restraint, until he was breathless and had to wipe tears from his sightless eyes. I stared at him. “Oh, Fitz,” he gasped at last. “Oh, my friend. What a thing for me to miss! Such a terrible time to be deprived of my sight. Still, all I could not see on your face, I heard in your voice. Oh, Fitz. Oh, my Fitz.” He had to stop speaking to take in air.

“Of all your jests upon me, that was the least funny.” I tried not to sound as hurt as I felt. In the midst of my fears for Bee, he would do this?

“No, Fitz. No. It was the best, for it was no jest. Oh, my friend. You've no idea what you've just told me, even though I have done my best to explain it to you before.” He drew breath again.

I found a bit of dignity. “I should go see Chade.” I'd had my fill of the Fool's peculiar humor for now.

“Yes. You should. But not just yet.” He reached out and unerringly seized my hand. “Stay here, Fitz. For I think I know at least part of the answer to your most important question. And I have answers to the other questions that you do not even know to ask. That last one is the one I answer first. Fitz. You can deny it. But I have been with you, in every way that matters. As you have been with me. We've shared our thoughts and our food, bound each other's wounds, slept close when the warmth of our bodies was all we had left to share. Your tears have fallen on my face, and my blood has been on your hands. You've carried me when I was dead, and I carried you when I did not even recognize you. You've breathed my breath for me, sheltered me inside your own body. So, yes, Fitz, in every way that matters, I've been with you. We've shared the stuff of our beings. Just as a captain does with her liveship. Just as a dragon does with his Elderling. We've been together in so many ways that we have mingled. So close have we been that when you made love to your Molly, she begat our child. Yours. Mine. Molly's. A little Buck girl with a wild streak of White in her.

“Oh, gods. Such a jest and such a joy. A jest I played upon you? Hardly! A joy you have given me. Tell me. Does she look like me at all?”

“No.” Yes. The twin peaks of her upper lip. Her long pale lashes against her cheeks. Her blond hair, curly as mine, wild as his had been. Her round chin, not the Fool's as he was now but twin to him as a child.

“Oh, how you lie!” the Fool rejoiced. “She does! I know it in your affronted silence. Bee looks like me! Yours and mine, and doubtless the most beautiful and clever child that ever existed!”

“She is that.”
Don't think of his ridiculous claim.
Of all the people I could lie to, I'd always been best at lying to myself. Bee was mine. Only mine. Her paleness came from my Mountain mother. I could believe that. It was easier to believe that than to agree that the Fool had shared in her making. Wasn't it?

“And now the most important of your questions I answer.” His voice went deadly solemn. He sat straighter at the table. His shoulders were squared and his peculiar gaze distant. “At this instant, I do not know where they are. But I know where they must take her. Back to Clerres and the school. Back to the den of the Servants. She will be a precious prize to them. Not an Unexpected Son, no, but a trueborn shaysa, unseen and unpredicted. And not created by them. How astonished they will be by that.” He paused and thought for a short time. “And how determined to use her. Fitz, I do not think you need to fear for her life, yet. But all the same, we must fear for her and recover her as quickly as possible.”

“Can we intercept them?” Hope flared in me at the first possibility of actually doing something rather than simply floundering and agonizing. I pushed all else he had said aside. All those thoughts could wait until I held Bee in my arms again.

“Only if we are very clever. Exceedingly clever. It will be like that guessing game they play in the market, the one with the pea under one of three walnut shells. We must decide which route they will be smartest to take, and then that they will certainly not take the route as we will have deduced it. And then we must think of the route they would choose as the one we would think most unlikely, and discard that as well. We must thwart the future as they know it. It's a puzzle, Fitz, and they have far more information than we do. But there is one piece of information they may have but do not understand. They may know she is our child, but they have no idea to what lengths we will go to recover her.”

He stopped speaking. Cradling his chin in one hand, he turned his face toward the firelight. He pulled at his lips as if his mouth pained him. I stared at him. The scars on his cheeks were fading but his silhouette looked wrong to me. He turned his face back to me. The shifting gold in his eyes was like molten metal seething in a pot. “I will need to ponder this, Fitz. I must try to dredge from my memory every prophecy or dream about the Unexpected Son that I ever memorized. And I do not know if any of them will be useful. Do any of them truly apply to Bee? Or is she a chance find for them, a treasure discovered when they were seeking something very different? Will they split their group, and send some home with Bee while others continue to seek the Unexpected Son?

“And since my Catalyst and I changed the world, have they harvested new prophecies from their stables of Whites and part-Whites? I think it likely. How can we outwit something like that? How do we outfox a fox who knows every path and den, when they seem able to fog every witness who might be able to help us?”

A shadow of an idea flitted through my brain. Before I could grasp it, the Fool broke the flimsy thought. “Go on!” With the back of his fingers he shooed me away. “Take some rest or visit Chade. I need to think alone.”

I shook my head, marveling at him. In the space of a conversation, he had gone from a quivering, fearful wreck to dismissing me as if he were my king. I wondered if the dragon blood was affecting his mood as well as his body.

The Fool nodded a farewell, already lost in thought. I rose, stiff from sitting, and descended to my room. Ash had been there. It had been meticulously tidied with a precision I could never have achieved. A merry little fire on the hearth waited to be fed. I gave it a log and sat down in the chair before it. I stared into the flames.

The Fool was Bee's father. The thought pushed itself into my mind. Ridiculous. A wild claim by a desperate man. She did look like him. Sometimes. Not that much. But more like him than she looked like me. No. It was impossible and I would not consider it. I knew I was Bee's father. I knew that with complete certainty. A child could not have two fathers. Could she? Bitches could have split litters, with pups born that came from different males. But Bee was a lone child! No. A child could not have two fathers. An unwelcome memory intruded. Dutiful had been conceived by Verity's use of my body. Did Dutiful have two fathers? Was he as much my son as Verity's? I refused to think any longer about it tonight.

I considered my bed. I ached all over. My head was throbbing. My brow was puckered, and not with thought. I found the looking-glass in Lord Feldspar's traveling trunk. The slash on my brow was a wrinkled seam in my skin. The healer had botched his stitches. Picking them out myself would be long and painful. Later. Think about something else. Something that didn't hurt.

I would, I thought, go and find some food. No. Prince FitzChivalry would not wander down to the kitchens looking for cold roast or a dollop of soup from the cauldron kept for the guardsmen. I sat down on the edge of the bed. Or would he? Who could predict what Prince FitzChivalry would do? I leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. Patience, I thought to myself, had not changed to suit Buckkeep Castle but had remained her adorable, eccentric self. A regretful smile bent my mouth. No wonder my father had loved her so. I'd never considered how she had managed to remain herself despite the constraints of court life. Could I be as free as she had been? Set my own rules within the court? I closed my eyes to think about it.

I twitched awake to a soft tapping. I was dressed, on the bed. Light through the shutters on my window told me it was day. I rubbed my face, trying to wake myself, and then wished I hadn't. The puckering seam on my brow was sore now. The tapping came again.

“Ash?” I called softly, and then realized it was coming from the hidden door rather than the one that gave onto the corridor. “Fool?” I queried, and in response heard “Motley, Motley, Motley.” Ah. The crow. I triggered the door and, as it swung open, she hopped out into my room.

“Food, food, food?” she asked.

“I'm sorry. I've nothing here for you.”

“Fly. Fly, fly, fly!”

“Let me look at you first.”

She hopped closer to me and I went down on one knee to inspect her. The ink seemed to be lasting. I could not see any white on her. “I'll let you out, for I know you must ache to fly. But if you are wise you will avoid your own kind.”

She said nothing to that but watched me as I went to the window and opened it. It was a blue-sky day. I looked out over castle walls topped with an extra rampart of snow. I had expected it to be dawn. It wasn't. I had slept all the night and part of the morning away. She hopped to the sill and launched without a backward glance. I closed the window and then secured the secret door. The cold air on my face had tightened the faulty stitches. They had to come out. The Fool was blind, and taking them out myself would require holding a mirror with one hand and picking at them with the other. I certainly did not want to call back the healer who had done this to me.

Without thinking, I reached for Chade.
Could you help me remove the stitches in my brow? My body is trying to heal and the stitches are puckering the flesh.

I felt him there, at the end of my Skill-thread. He drifted like a gull riding the breeze. Then he said softly,
I can see the warmth of the flames through the spy-hole. It's cold here but I must stay for the whole watch. I hate him so. I want to go home. I just want to go home.

Chade? Are you dreaming? You're safe home, in Buckkeep Castle.

I want to go back to our little farm. I should have inherited it, not him. He had no right to send me away like this. I miss my mother. Why did she have to die?

Chade. Wake up! It's a bad dream!

Fitz. Stop, please.
Nettle shushed me. Her Skilling to me was tight and private. None of her apprentices or journeymen would hear us.
We are trying to keep him calm. I'm looking for a dream that might soothe him and give him a road back to us. But I seem to find only his nightmares. Come to his room, and I'll see to your stitches.

Remember to come as Prince FitzChivalry!
Dutiful cut in, riding her stream of thought.
You caused enough talk when you stole that horse. I've bought it for you, at twice what any horse should be worth! I've tried to explain it was a mistake, that you'd ordered up a horse and thought the roan was for you. But be circumspect with any you meet and try to avoid conversation. We are still trying to construct a plausible history for you. If anyone comments on your youthful appearance, imply that it's an effect from your years among the Elderlings. And please be suitably mysterious about that!

I affirmed that in a tight Skill-sending to Dutiful. Then I considered myself carefully in the looking-glass. I was seething with impatience to go after Bee, but riding out randomly was as likely to take me farther away from her as to put me on her trail. I tamped down my frustration. I had to wait. Stand and wait. The Fool's suggestion that we dash off to Clerres, a journey of months, seemed premature to me. Every day that I traveled south was another day of Bee held captive by Chalcedeans. Better by far to recapture Bee and Shun sooner rather than later, before they could be carried out of the Six Duchies. Now that we knew who and what they were, it seemed unlikely to me that they could elude our search efforts. The reports would come back here, to Buckkeep. Surely somewhere, someone had seen a sign of them.

And in the meanwhile, I resolved to be as tractable as I could. I'd already created enough difficulties for Dutiful and Nettle. And I had a feeling I was going to be asking for a great deal of help from them and the royal treasury. They would do it for love of me and Bee, regardless of the cost. But it was going to be difficult for the king to lend me the men-at-arms I would require without anyone making a firm connection between Tom Badgerlock's stolen child, the raid on Withywoods, and the long-missing FitzChivalry. It would be even more difficult with Chade wandering in a wound fever and unable to apply his cleverness to the problem. The least I could do was not make their political puppetry any more difficult.

Political puppetry. While brutes held my child captive.
Rage swelled in me. I felt my heart surge and my muscles swell with it. I wanted to fight, to kill those Chalcedeans as I'd stabbed and bitten and throttled Chade's attackers.

Fitz? Is there a threat?

Nothing, Dutiful. Nothing.
Nothing I had a target for. Yet.

When I emerged from my room, I was shaved and my hair groomed back into as much of a warrior's tail as I could boast. My clothing was the least colorful of the garb that Ash had set aside as fitting for Prince FitzChivalry. I wore the simple sword at my hip, a privilege of my rank within Buckkeep. Ash had polished my boots to a gloss, and the earring I wore had what appeared to be a real sapphire in it. The frilly half-cloak with the lace edges was an annoyance, but I had decided I must trust Ash and hope such foolish garb was not a boy's prank.

The halls of the castle, which had been thronged with folk for Winterfest, were quieter now. I strode along them confidently, giving a smile to any servant I encountered. I'd reached the stair that would take me to the level of the royal apartments and Chade's elaborate rooms when a tall woman suddenly pushed off the wall she had been leaning on. Her gray hair was pulled back in a warrior's tail and her easy stance told me she was perfectly balanced on her feet. She could attack or flee in an instant. I was suddenly very alert. She smiled at me and I wondered if I'd have to kill her to get past her. She spoke softly. “Hey, Fitz. Are you hungry? Or are you too proud now to join me in the guards' mess?”

Her eyes met mine and she waited. It took a time for my memory to travel back that many years. “Captain Foxglove?” I managed to guess.

The smile on her face warmed and her eyes gleamed. “I wondered if you'd know me, after all these years. We're a long way from Neat Bay in distance and time. But I've made a bet, and a large one, that a Farseer doesn't forget who had his back.”

I immediately extended a hand and we clasped wrists. Her grip was almost as firm as it had once been, and I was immensely glad she wasn't there to kill me.

“And it's many a year since anyone called me captain. But you, what have you been up to? That slash looks no more than a week old.”

I touched it self-consciously. “It's a humiliating tale, of a very foolish encounter with the corner of a stone wall.”

She shook her head at that. “Odd that it looks like a sword-slash. I can see that what I have to tell you would have been better told a month ago. Come with me, please.”

Delayed,
I Skilled small and tight to Dutiful and Nettle.
Captain Foxglove wishes a word with me.

Who?
Dutiful demanded worriedly.

She guarded your mother at the Battle of Neat Bay. Kettricken will recall her, I think.

Oh.

I wondered how much he knew of that tale, and as my recollection of that bloody day trickled through my mind, I strode along beside the old woman. She still had the upright bearing of a guardsman and the long stride of one who can quick-march for miles. But as we walked, she said, “I haven't been a captain in the guards for many years, my prince. When the Red-Ship War was finally over I married, and we managed to have three children before I was too old to bear. And in their time, they gave Red Ross and me a dozen grandchildren. You?”

“No grandchildren yet,” I said.

“So Lady Nettle's child will be your first, then?”

“My first grandchild,” I confirmed. The words were strange in my mouth.

We clattered down the stairs side by side and I was strangely glad of the envious looks other servants bestowed on her as we passed them. Time was when friendship with the Bastard had not been something to prize, but she had given it to me. Down we went, to the level of the castle where the real work was done, threading past the laundry folk with their baskets of linens both clean and dirty, past pages balancing trays of food, and a carpenter and his journeyman, and three apprentices off to repair something in the castle. Past the kitchens where once Cook had reigned and made me her favorite despite the political ramifications. And to the arched doorway that led to the guards' mess, where the clamor of hungry folk eating seldom ceased.

Foxglove flung up a hand to my chest and halted me there. She met my gaze, looking straight into my eyes. Her hair was gray and lines framed her mouth but her dark eyes snapped bright as ever. “You're a Farseer, and I know a true Farseer remembers his debts. I'm here on behalf of my granddaughter and a grandson. I know you'll remember the days when a few words from you made me and Whistle and a handful of other good soldiers leave King Verity's guard to put on the purple and white and the fox badge for our foreign queen. You remember that, don't you?”

“I do.”

“Then ready a smile, sir. Your time has come.”

She gestured for me to precede her. I entered the room, braced with dread and ready for anything. Except for someone to shout, “Hep!” and have every guard at the table suddenly surge to his feet. Benches scraped loudly against the floor as they were pushed back. One mug teetered precariously as the table gave a bounce. Then it settled and silence filled the room of men and women standing tall and formally alert to greet me. I caught my breath.

Many years ago, King-in-Waiting Verity had fashioned a sigil for me. I'd been the only one to wear it. It had been the Farseer buck, but with his head lowered to charge rather than the lofty pose that a king's son would wear. And across it there had been the red bend that marked me as a bastard even as the buck acknowledged my bloodlines.

Now I faced a room of standing guards, and half a dozen of them wore the slashed buck on their chests. Their jerkins were Buck blue, with a stripe of red down the breast. I stared, speechless.

“Sit down, you idiots. It's still just the Fitz,” Foxglove announced. Oh, she was enjoying this, and when a few of the youngsters in the room gasped at her temerity, she compounded it by taking my arm and tugging me to a place at one of the long benches at the table. “Push the ale pitcher down this way, and some of the black bread and the white cheese. He may sit at the high table now, but he was raised on guardroom rations.”

And so I sat, and someone poured a mug for me, and I wondered how this could feel so good and so strange and so terrible all at once. My daughter was missing and in danger, and here I sat, grinning foolishly as an old woman explained that it was time I had my own guard, and although her other grandchildren were all members of Kettricken's guard, her two youngest hadn't given an oath yet. As the rest of the guards settled at the table, smirking at one another to see a Farseer “prince” sharing their common fare, they could not know that food had seldom tasted better to me. This dark bread and sharp cheese and the ale that foamed over the top of the tankard were the foods that had sustained me through many a dark hour. It was the best feast I could imagine for this peculiarly triumphal moment.

Foxglove herded two youngsters toward me, a hand on each of their shoulders. Neither could have been over twenty, and the girl visibly straightened herself to try to be taller. “They are cousins, but as alike as two kits from the same litter. This is Sharp and here is Ready. They're already wearing your badge. Will you take their oaths now?”

“Does King Dutiful know of all this?”
I spoke the words aloud as I Skilled them tightly to Dutiful. Thought is fast. He witnessed my dilemma instantly and I felt his amusement at it.