Fool's Quest (77 page)

“There was one more thing,” Per said. He'd made a tidy job of his skinning. The hare's head and paws were still inside the hide he'd stripped cleanly from the animal's body. The guts were in a pile. He sorted the heart and liver and tossed them into the pot. The rest of the hare, dark meaty red and sinewy white, was already cut into pot-sized pieces. Motley descended and began an inquest of the small gut-pile.

“What thing?” I asked.

“He said, the Fool I mean, he said, ‘Don't let Fitz follow us. Tell him to stay here and wait. We'll be back.' ”

“He did say that,” Lant admitted.

“Anything else? Anything at all?”

They exchanged looks. “Well, it wasn't a thing he said, but something they did,” Per said. “Ash left the big pack and most of their supplies here. When they went back into the pillar, they took only a small part of what they'd brought.” He looked uncomfortable for a moment. “Sir, why would Ash and Gray both dress as women?”

“Probably the only warm garments they could steal easily,” I said to him. “Taken from a forgotten wardrobe that once belonged to an old woman named Lady Thyme.” Lant twitched at the name, and I wondered how much he knew of his father's old disguise.

Per shook his head. “Well, maybe. But their faces … Ash had red lips. Like a girl. So did your friend. So it looked like they did it on purpose.”

“Did they say nothing of why they were going to Kelsingra? Did they tell you when they might return? Why did they think they had to move on immediately? Why did the Fool not wait for me?”

Neither Lant nor Per had answers to those questions or any of the others that I asked. I paced like a caged wolf, going from the fire to the stone pillar and back again. I dared myself to follow them, but knew I'd be abandoning Lant and Perseverance to their deaths if I did not return. Then I asked myself if that duty was not just a cover for my own cowardice. A question to which I had no answer.

We ate the hare, drank the broth, and made a fruity tea from the berries I'd found. While I'd been away, Lant and Per had made improvements to our camp. They'd dragged a longer piece of log to the fireside for us to sit on and had arranged our supplies more efficiently. I looked at the large pack that the Fool and Spark had left. Plainly they had packed for a substantial journey. But if these supplies were for Kelsingra, why had they left them here? And if the Fool had wished to journey with me, why had he and Spark gone on without me? I sat and stared at the fire and waited.

“Should I take the first watch?” Per asked me.

His voice startled me. I turned to look at his worried face. “No, Per. I'm not tired yet. You get some sleep. I'll wake you when it's your watch.”

He sat down beside me. “I slept while you were gone. There was little else to do. So I'm not tired, either.”

I didn't argue with him. Later, when it was his turn to keep watch, he'd learn that he'd made a poor choice. Lant had already gone to bed. For a time, we stared at the fire in silence.

“Why were they dressed like girls?”

Secrets, secrets, secrets. Who owned the secrets? “You'd need to ask them about that.”

He was quiet for a while. Then he asked, “Is Ash a girl?”

“You'd need to ask Ash about that.”

“I did. And he asked me why I was dressed as a boy.”

“And what did you answer to that?” I prodded him.

He was quiet again and then said, “That means he's a girl.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't have to.” He hunched tighter toward the fire. “Why would Ash pretend to be a boy?”

“You'd need to ask Spark about that.”

“Spark.” The name annoyed him. He scowled and wrapped his arms around himself. “I'm not going to bother. I don't trust him any longer.” His face set into hardness. “I don't need a friend who deceives me.”

I took a deep breath and then sighed it out. There were a hundred things I could say to him. A hundred questions I could ask that might make him see things differently. But being told something is not the same as learning it. I thought of all the things Verity had told me. Burrich's stern advice. Patience's counsel. But when had I learned?

“Talk to Spark,” I said.

His silence was long. “Maybe,” he said at last.

Since, as he said, he seemed wide awake, I left him sitting there, shoved Lant over to make room, and crawled under the blankets. I gnawed on my questions. I must have slept, because I woke when Lant traded places with Per. The boy pushed his back up against mine, sighed heavily, and soon began to snore. I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep. After a time, I got up and went to join Lant by the fire. He was heating snow-water in a pot for tea. I sat down beside him and stared into the flames.

“Why do you dislike me so much?”

I didn't need to think about it. “You made my daughter unhappy. And when I had to entrust her to you, you didn't care for her or comfort her. Revel was the one to come and take her in from the snowy wagon.”

He was silent. “We were confused, Shine and I. We could make no sense of what you and Riddle were doing. You told us next to nothing. I tried to take Bee out of the wagon and she acted like … like a sulky child. I was tired, and cold, and angry with you. So I left her to find her own way in. If none of this had happened, would it have been so important? Fitz, I did not want to be a scribe, let alone a tutor to children. I wanted to be at Buckkeep Castle, with my friends, following my own life. I've never had the care of children, and even you must admit that Bee was no ordinary child.”

“That's enough,” I suggested pleasantly. He had stirred guilt in me, until his last words.

“I'm not like you!” he burst out. “I'm not like my father. I tried to be, to please him. But I'm not! And I don't want to be. I'm here, I'm going with you, because, yes, I failed your daughter. Just as much as I failed my sister. My sister. Do you know how it twists inside me to name her that? What they did to Shine, to my sister—it makes me ill to think of her hurt that way. I want to avenge her, I want to avenge Bee. I know I can't undo what happened. I can't change what I did, only what I will do. And I'm not doing this for you, or even for my father. I'm doing it for me. To give myself whatever peace I can find over what happened.

“I don't know how I'll help you or what you'll ask me to do or if I can do it. But I'm here. I intend to try. And I can't go home until this is done. But I do want to go home, after all this is over, and I want to go home alive. So you'd better start talking to me and telling me what is going on, or teaching me what I have to do. Or something. Because I'm with you now until you go home. Or I'm dead. And I think that boy is, too.”

“I don't want you here. I didn't want you to come.”

“Yet here we are. And I don't think even you are spiteful enough to let me die of ignorance.”

That was true. I had almost thought of a response when I heard a muffled shriek. It burst suddenly louder and was followed by the sound of a wild struggle over by the Skill-pillar. Lant had the presence of mind to seize a flaming stick from the fire. I reached the pillar first but when Lant lifted the brand I shouted, “Get back! Don't touch the Fool and don't let him touch you!” And in the next breath, I told him, “Drag Spark over by the fire. Wake Per. Get water heating.”

Spark was twitching and yelping like a dog having a bad dream, but her eyes were open. I feared for her. Many years ago, I'd seen what a trip through a Skill-portal could do to unprepared minds. Regal had driven many of his young Skill-apprentices mad when he had attempted to send a small army through a pillar. Spark was unSkilled and had just experienced her third trip through a Skill-portal in less than a day. I was angry at the Fool for risking the youngster, and heartsick that I would be helpless to aid her. I feared even more for the Fool. I prayed that the uneven light of the burning branch tricked my eyes, for it looked to me as if his left hand was unevenly silvered with Skill.

He lay on his back, staring up at me and panting. His blind eyes were wide and the torchlight danced in their golden depths. The skirts he wore were flung wide around him, like a collapsed tent.

I heard Per's sleepy voice raised in query, and Lant shouting at him to build up the fire, pack the pot with snow, get it melting, and bring a blanket for him to put around Spark. I'd let them create and manage that chaos. They were doing as much for Spark as I knew to do. Keep her warm and try to get food into her. I moved carefully to the Fool's right side, away from the dangerously silvered hand. “Fool,” I said in as even a voice as I could muster. “Fool, can you hear me? Can you speak to me?”

“The dragon!” His words shuddered on a gasp. “Is the dragon coming?”

I lifted my eyes to the night sky. I saw nothing except stars frozen and twinkling in the darkness. “There is no dragon that I can see.”

“It chased us. And we ran, with Spark gripping my hand and dragging me through the streets. They were crowded with Elderlings laughing and talking, and we ran and ran, we ran right through all of them. Spark shouted they weren't real, that only the dragon was. But one of them was real, I think. One Elderling. I felt that arrow.” He paused, panting for breath.

“Were you hit? Was Spark?”

“I don't know.” With his right hand, he plucked at the loose fabric of the shoulder of his blouse. “I felt it, as if someone had seized me hard for just a moment and then let go. Spark kept running, dragging me along, and I tried to keep up. Then she shouted, ‘The pillar!' and I slapped it. And here we are. Oh, here we are, Fitz. Don't be angry at me. Please don't be angry.”

“I'm not angry,” I lied. “I'm terrified for both of you.” That was rock-hard truth. I spoke carefully. “Fool, it looks as if you have Skill on your left hand. As Verity did when he carved the dragons. I'm going to help you stand and walk you to the fire. Don't touch yourself with that hand and don't touch me.” The failing light of the torch licked along his brightly shining fingers. I'd never discovered precisely where Verity had obtained so much of the raw magic. My king had coated both his hands in it, the better to shape a dragon from stone. The raw Skill had penetrated his flesh and stolen the focus of his mind. By the time we found him, he had scarcely recognized his queen. Kettricken had wept to see him so, but all he had cared for at that moment was to carve his dragon.

“Yes,” he said, and his smile was beatific and frightening in the torchlight. He held his silvered fingers up, and I shrank back from them. “That much I managed. Against all odds. I brought a glove with me, in the wild hope I might succeed. It's in the pocket of my skirt.”

“Right or left side?”

“Right,” he said and feebly patted there.

I did not want to touch his garments. I didn't know how he had gotten raw Skill on his left hand but I feared it might be spattered elsewhere. I thrust the base of my branch, which now had but a single dancing flame on it, into the snow and found the edge of a white glove peeking from a pocket concealed in the voluminous skirts. I tugged it free. “Put your right hand on my wrist so you can feel what I'm doing. I'm holding the glove open. Oh, Fool, be so careful. I don't want that stuff on me.”

“If you could feel it as I do, you would,” he said. “It burns so sweetly.”

“Fool, I beg you, be careful of me.”

“I will. As I so seldom have before. Hold the glove wide, Fitz.”

And I did. “Don't let your left hand touch the outside of it. Don't touch your left hand with your right.”

“I know what I'm doing.”

I muttered a small curse that expressed my doubt about that, and he appalled me by laughing. “Give me the glove,” he added. “I can do it myself.”

I watched him anxiously, worried that he would silver either his right hand or the outside of the glove. I was not confident of the failing torchlight but I thought he had managed. “Can you stand and walk?”

“I put on a glove. Wasn't that enough for you?”

“I suppose it was.” I maneuvered an arm around him and hauled him to his feet. It took more effort than I'd expected and I abruptly realized the weight of the skirts and the fur-lined cloak he wore. “This way. We have a fire.”

“I can sense it.”

He was not steady on his feet but he walked. “Sense it? Or see the light against the dark?”

“Both, and more. I think it's a dragon-sense, from the dragon blood. I smell the fire, I see the light it gives off, but more. There's something I can't quite describe. It's not my eyes, Fitz, but I sense warmth. The warmth of your body, and the greater heat of the fire. I can tell you that Lant stands to the left of it, and Perseverance crouches by Spark. Is she all right?”

“Let's find out,” I suggested, swallowing my fears. I had the Wit so I knew what it was to have a sense that others did not possess. If he said he could sense my warmth, why doubt him? I knew that on the far side of the market-circle, a bitch fox watched us from the darkness of the forest edge. My Wit told me that. I would not dispute what his “dragon-sense” told him.

My heart sank as I steadied the Fool toward the fire. Spark sprawled in the snow, making pathetic little sounds, like a kitten mewling for its mother. Her hands scrabbled and her booted feet kicked uselessly. Per was hunkered down beside her. The conflict on his face was as shifting as the firelight. Fear. Sympathy. Uneasiness. Confusion.