Fool's Quest (8 page)

“Please.”

I fetched another cup and poured him a small measure. While I was up, I added a log to the fire. I suddenly felt very comfortable and weary in a good way. We were warm and dry on a winter night, I'd served my king well this evening, and my old friend was at my side and slowly recuperating. I felt a twinge of conscience as I thought of Bee, so far away and left to her own devices, but comforted myself that my gifts and letter would soon be in her hands. She had Revel and I liked her maid. She would know I was thinking of her. Surely after I had spoken to both Shun and Lant so severely, they would not dare to be cruel to her. And she had her riding lessons with the stable lad. It was good to know she had a friend, one she had made on her own. I dared to hope she had other household allies I knew nothing about. I told myself I was foolish to worry about her. She was actually a very capable child.

The Fool cleared his throat. “That night, we camped in the forest at the edge of the broken city, and the next morning we hiked to where we could look down on a port town. Prilkop said it had grown greatly since last he had seen it. Its fishing fleet was in the harbor, and he said there would be other ships coming from the south to buy the salted fish and fish oil and a coveted leather made from very heavy fish skin.”

“Fish leather?” The question leapt from me.

“Indeed, that was my reaction. I'd never heard of such a thing. But there is a trade in it. The rougher pieces are cherished for polishing wood or even stone, and the finer pieces are used on the grips of knives and swords; even soaked in blood, they don't become slippery.” He coughed again, wiped his mouth, and took more brandy. When he drew breath to go on, it wheezed in his throat. “So. Down we went, in our winter clothes, to that sunny town. Prilkop seemed sure of a welcome there, so he was surprised when the folk stared at us and then turned away. The city on the hilltop was regarded as being haunted by demons. In that town, we saw abandoned buildings that had been built from the stone salvaged from the city but were now considered haunted by dark spirits. No one welcomed us, even when Prilkop showed them silver coins. A few children followed us, shouting and throwing pebbles until their elders called them back. We went down to the docks, and there Prilkop was able to buy us passage on an ill-kept vessel.

“The ship was there to buy fish and oil and stank of it. The crew was as mixed a lot as I've ever seen; the youngsters aboard looked miserable and the older hands were either tremendously unlucky or had suffered repeated rough treatment. A missing eye here, a peg for a foot on another man, and one with only eight fingers left to his hands. I tried to persuade Prilkop that we should not board, but he was convinced that if we did not depart that town we'd lose our lives that night. I judged the ship just as poor a choice, but he was insistent. And so we went.”

He paused. He ate some more soup, wiped his mouth, sipped his brandy, and carefully wiped his mouth and fingers again. He picked up the spoon and set it down. Sipped again from his brandy cup. Then he pointed his blind eyes my way, and for the first time since we had met again, a look of pure mischief passed over his face. “Are you listening?”

I laughed aloud, to know he still had that spirit in him. “You know I am.”

“I do. Fitz, I feel you.” He held up his hand, showing me the fingertips that had once been silvered with Skill and were now sliced away to a smooth scar. “I took back my link to you long ago. And they cut the silver from my fingertips, for they guessed how powerful it was. So, in the years of my confinement, I thought I imagined my bond with you.” He tipped his head. “But I think it's real.”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I've felt nothing in all the years we were separated. Sometimes I thought you must be dead and sometimes I believed you had forgotten our friendship entirely.” I halted. “Except for the night your messenger was killed in my home. There were bloody fingerprints on the carving you had left for me, the one of you, Nighteyes, and me. I went to brush them away, and I swear that something happened.”

“Oh.” He caught his breath. For a time, he stared sightlessly. Then he sighed. “So. Now I understand. I did not know what it was, then. I did not know one of my messengers had reached you. They were … I was in great pain, and suddenly you were there, touching my face. I screamed for you to help me, to save me or to kill me. Then you were gone.” He blinked his blinded eyes. “That was the night—” He gasped for air suddenly and leaned on the table. “I broke,” he admitted. “I broke that night. They hadn't broken me, not with the pain or the lies or the starvation. But that moment, when you were there and then you were not … that was when I broke, Fitz.”

I was silent. How had he broken? He had told me that when the Servants tormented him, they wanted him to tell them where his son was. A son he had no knowledge of. That, to me, had been the most horrific part of his tale. A tortured man who is concealing knowledge retains some small portion of control over his life. A tortured man who has no knowledge to barter has nothing. The Fool had had nothing. No tool, no weapon, no knowledge to trade to make his torment cease or lessen. The Fool had been powerless. How could he have told them something he didn't know? He spoke on.

“After a time, a long time, I realized there was no sound from them. No questions. But I was answering them. Telling them what they needed to know. I was screaming your name, over and over. And so they knew.”

“Knew what, Fool?”

“They knew your name. I betrayed you.”

His mind was not clear, that was obvious. “Fool, you gave them nothing they did not know. Their hunters were already there, in my home. They'd followed your messenger. That was how the blood got on the carving. How you felt me there with you. They'd already found me.” As I said those words, my mind went back to that long-ago night. The Servants' hunters had tracked his messenger to my home and killed her there before she could deliver the Fool's words to me. That had been years ago. But only weeks before, another of his messengers had reached Withywoods and conveyed his warning and his plea to me: Find his son. Hide him from the hunters. That dying messenger had insisted she was being pursued, that the hunters were hot on her trail. Yet I'd seen no sign of them. Or had I not recognized the signs they had left? There had been hoofprints in a pasture, the fence rails taken down. At the time, I'd dismissed it as coincidence, for surely if they'd been tracking the messenger, they would have made some attempt to determine her fate.

“Their hunters had not found
you,
” the Fool insisted. “They'd trailed their prey there, I think. But they were not looking for you. The Servants who tormented me had no way of knowing where their hunters were at that moment. Not until I screamed your name, over and over, did they know how important you were. They had thought you were only my Catalyst. Only someone I had used. And abandoned … For that would be what they expected. A Catalyst to them is a tool, not a true companion. Not a friend. Not someone who shares the prophet's heart.” We both held a silence for a time.

“Fool, there is something I do not understand. You say you have no knowledge of your son. Yet you seem to believe he must exist, on the word of those at Clerres who tormented you. Why would you believe they knew of such a child when you did not?”

“Because they have a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand predictions that if I succeeded as a White Prophet, then such an heir would follow me. Someone who would wreak even greater changes in this world.”

I spoke carefully. I didn't want to upset him. “But there were thousands of prophecies that said you would die. And you did not. So can we be sure these foretellings of a son are real?”

He sat quietly for at time. “I cannot allow myself to doubt them. If my heir exists, we must find him and protect him. If I dismiss the possibility of his existence, and he does exist and they find him, then his life will be a misery and his death will be a tragedy for the world. So I must believe in him, even if I cannot tell clearly how such a child came to be.” He stared into darkness. “Fitz. There in the market. I seem to recall he was there. That I touched him and in that moment, I knew him. My son.” He drew a ragged breath and spoke in a shaky voice. “All was light and clarity around us. I could not only see, I could see all the possibilities threading away from that moment. All that we might change together.” His voice grew weaker.

“There was no light. The winter day was edging toward evening, and the only person near you was … Fool. What's wrong?”

He had swayed in his chair and then caught his face in his hands. Then he said in a woeful voice. “I don't feel well. And … my back feels wet.”

My heart sank. I moved to stand behind him. “Lean forward,” I suggested quietly. For a wonder, he obeyed me. The back of his nightshirt was wet with something that was not blood. “Lift up your shirt,” I bade him, and he tried. With my help, we bared his back, and again he did not protest. I lifted a candle high. “Oh, Fool,” I said before I could think to control my voice. A large and angry swelling next to his spine had split open and was leaking a thin, foul fluid down his scarred and bony back. “Sit still,” I told him and stepped away to the water warming by the fire. I soaked my napkin in it, wrung it out, and then warned him, “Brace yourself,” before applying it to the sore. He hissed loudly, and then lowered his forehead onto his crossed arms on the table.

“It's like a boil. It's opened and draining now. I think that might be good.”

He gave a small shudder but said nothing. It took me a moment to realize he was unconscious. “Fool?” I said, and touched his shoulder. No response. I reached out with the Skill and found Chade.
It's the Fool. He's taken a turn for the worse. Is there a healer you can send up to your old rooms?

None that would know the way, even if any were awake at this hour. Shall I come?

No. I'll tend to him.

Are you certain?

I'm sure.

Probably better not to involve anyone else. Probably better it was only him and me, as it had been so often before now. While he was unaware of pain, I lit more candles to give me light, and brought a basin. I cleansed the wound as well as I could. He was limp and still as I trickled water onto it and sponged away the liquid that flowed out. It did not bleed. “No different from a horse,” I heard myself say once through my gritted teeth. Cleaned, the split boil gaped on his back as if some vile mouth had opened in his skin. It went deep. I forced myself to look at his abused body. There were other suppurations. They bulged, some shiny and almost white, others red and angry and surrounded by a network of dark streaks.

I was looking at a dying man. There was too much wrong with him. To think that somehow food and rest could bring him closer to healing was folly. It would prolong his dying. The infections that were destroying him were too widespread and too advanced. He might even now be dead.

I set my hand to the side of his neck, placing two of my fingers on the pulse point there. His heart was still beating: I felt it there in the feeble leaping of his blood. I closed my eyes and held my fingers there, taking a peculiar comfort in that reassuring beat. A wave of dizziness passed through me. I had been awake too long, and drunk too much at the feast long before I'd added brandy with the Fool to the mix. I was suddenly old, and tired beyond telling. My body ached with the years I'd heaped on it and the tasks I'd demanded of it. The ancient, familiar pain of the arrow scar in my back, so close to my spine, twitched to wakefulness and grew to an unavoidable deep throb, as if someone's finger were insistently prodding the old injury.

Except that I no longer had that scar. Or the pain from it. That realization whispered into my awareness, light as the first clinging snowflakes on a window. I did not look at it, but accepted what was happening. I let my breathing slow and remained very still inside my own skin. Inside
our
skin.

I slipped my awareness from my own body into the Fool's and heard him make a soft sound, a wounded man disturbed in deepest sleep.
Do not worry. I am not after your secrets.

But even the mention of secrets roused him. He struggled a little, but I remained still and I do not think he could find me. When he subsided, I let my awareness tendril throughout his body.
Gently. Go softly,
I told myself. I let myself feel the pain of his back injury. The boil that had drained was not as dangerous as the ones that had not. It had emptied itself but the poisons from some of the others were working deeper into his body and he had no strength to fight them.

I turned them back. I pushed them out.

It did not take that much effort. I worked carefully, asking as little of his flesh as I could. In some other place, I set my fingers to the sores and called up the poison. Hot skin strained to the breaking point opened under my touch, and the poisons trickled out. I used my Skill-strength in a way that I had not known it could be used, yet it seemed so obvious to me there and in that moment. Of course it worked this way. Of course it could do this.

“Fitz.”

“Fitz!”

“FITZ!”

Someone seized me and jerked me back. I lost my balance and fell. Someone tried to catch me, failed, and I struck the floor hard. It knocked the wind out of me. I gasped and wheezed and then opened my eyes. It took a moment for me to make sense of what I saw. The dying firelight illuminated Chade standing over me. His face was seized with horror as he stared down at me. I struggled to speak and could not. I was so weary, so very tired. Sweat was drying on my body, and my clothing clung to me where it was soaked. I lifted my head and became aware that the Fool was slumped forward on the table. The red light of the fire showed pus oozing from a dozen injuries on his back. I rolled my head and my gaze met Chade's horrified stare.