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“The knots of your cloak-strings are frozen. I’m going to cut them. Lie still now.” The voice was curiously gentle, as if unused to such a tone.
Blue eyes.
He sat up slowly, and I saw that truly he was ivory, his hair the color of fresh-ground flour. It was his eyes that stopped my heart and tongue. They caught the firelight, yellow as a cat’s. I finally found my breath. “Fool,” I sighed sadly. “What have they done to you?” My parched mouth could barely shape the words. I reached out my hand to him, but the movement pulled the muscles of my back and I felt my injury open again. The world tilted and slid away.
Safety.
“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?”
“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.
“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.
“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.
When word reached us that you were dead, that Regal had killed you…my life ended.
“It made of me a lie. How could I be the White Prophet if the Catalyst were dead? What could I predict?
“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.”
“You were never really good at it, you know. There was a näiveté 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.”
“It was what I missed most, when you were dead.” I smiled foolishly. “A while back, I thought it was my great beauty.”
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.
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.
“Once, perhaps, I was the Fool. It is common knowledge here in Jhaampe. But now I am the Toymaker. As I no longer use the other title, you may take it for yourself if you wish. As for Tom, I believe he takes the title Bed Bolster these days.”
“I suppose I should see both Chade and Kettricken. To tell them I am alive and reveal the truth to them. But when I am stronger. Just now, Fool, I would be alone,” I begged him. I wanted to see neither sympathy nor puzzlement on his face. I prayed he would believe my lie even as I despised myself for the foul thing I had said of Molly. So I kept my eyes closed, and he took his candles and went away.
“I trusted you!” I cried out. “I trusted you with my secrets and you have betrayed me. What a fool I’ve been!” I cried out in despair. All, all was lost. “No, I am the Fool.” He broke into our conversation.
I looked at him in dismay. He loved me. Worse, he believed in me. He believed that I had in me that strength and devotion to duty that had been the backbone of his life. Thus he could inflict on me things harder and colder than Regal’s hatred of me could imagine. His belief in me was such that he would not hesitate to plunge me into any battle, that he would expect any sacrifice of me. A dry sob suddenly racked me and tore at the arrow in my back. “There is no end!” I cried out. “That duty will hound me into death. Better I were dead! Let me be dead then!” I snatched my hand away from Chade,
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“I’m sorry,” I said weakly. “I have never been what you thought I was,” I confessed. “Never.”
“Perhaps we should all leave for a time,” Starling ventured unevenly. “Fitz is not up to this just now.” “You may leave,” the Fool told her grandly. “Unfortunately I still live here.”
“Secrets,” he said, and sighed. “Someday I shall write a long philosophical treatise on the power of secrets, when kept or told.”
“Burrich is with them? If Chade chose Burrich, it is because he thinks him the equal of a hundred guards. But far more discreet,”
“I know you couldn’t have. I understand. You see, no one can avoid fate. Not as long as we are trapped in time’s harness, anyway. And,” he said more softly, “no child can avoid the future that fate decrees. Not a fool, not a bastard. Not a bastard’s daughter.”
“Sometimes all the choices are poor ones, Fool, and still a man must choose.”
Do you hate me, boy?” For a moment, I didn’t know. But the thought of hating Chade meant too great a loss to me. Too few folk in the world cared for me. I could not hate even one of them. I shook my head a tiny bit. “But,” I said slowly, carefully forming the thick words, “don’t take my child.”
Children, I have found, are much more swift to accept the unusual. They admit their curiosity, you see, rather than disdaining the object that arouses it.”
It is hard to believe he lived in such isolation for years. He draws people to himself like a flower draws bees. He has a most gentlemanly way of letting a woman know she is admired.
To try to envision Chade as a charmer of women required my mind to bend in an unaccustomed direction.
I did not know why it suddenly shocked me so to find that all their momentous planning had moved on without any words from me, as if I were no more than a horse in a stall, waiting to be saddled, mounted, and reined to the hunt.
“I’m fine,” I assured her dully. “I was just thinking it would be pleasant to help the Fool make the puppets for a time.” She frowned again. “I still do not understand what you see in him. Why do not you come to stay in a room near Kettricken and me? You need little tending anymore; it is time you resumed your rightful place at the Queen’s side.”
I knew his pain. Yet it was crowded from his features by the rapturous smile that overwhelmed his face.
The anger I had been nursing toward Kettricken and Chade was gutted. I could find the emotion still, but I could not bring it back in force. I had briefly seen not only my child but the entire situation from all possible views. There was no malice in their intent, nor even selfishness. They believed in the morality of what they did. I did not. But I could no longer deny entirely the sense of what they sought. It left me feeling soulless. They would take my child away from Molly and me. I could hate what they did, but I could not focus that anger at them.
I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering how Kettricken would see me. Did she still see the young man who had dogged Verity’s steps and so often served her at court? Or would she look at my scarred face and think she did not know me, that the Fitz she had known was gone? Well, she knew by now how I had gained my scars. My queen should not be surprised. I would let her judge who stood behind those marks.
She has no true affection for Fitz, you know, only for being able to say she knew FitzChivalry.”
All the girl in Kettricken had burned away, as the impurities are burned and beaten from iron ore in a foundry. With it seemed to have gone any feeling for her husband’s bastard nephew.
I am childless.” Until I heard her speak that word aloud, I did not grasp what her depth of pain was.
Other men might dream of high honors or riches or deeds of valor sung by minstrels. I wanted to come to a small cot as light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day. Of all the things I had ever had to give up simply by virtue of the blood I carried, that was the dearest.
Accept, and endure.” They were the wrong words.
She is too important for simple love to claim her.”
“Be quiet. Can’t you just be quiet!” Burrich’s voice, stern and weary. “Don’t be cross at her. She’s only a babe. She’s probably just hungry.”
Burrich shook his head. “I’d like to ‘punish’ the man that beat that into you,” he said, and an edge of his old temper crept into his voice. “What did you really learn from your father taking his temper out on you?” he demanded. “That to show tenderness to your baby is a weakness? That to give in and hold your child when she cries because she wants you is somehow not an adult thing to do?”
Had he not been half as old as God, I’d have made him answer for his words.”
If every woman who had heard a man promise marriage were a wife, well, there’d be a spate less of bastards in the world.”
The Fool surprised me by putting an arm around me. I moved closer to him gratefully, sharing warmth. The sympathy of my wolf wrapped me. I waited for the Fool to say something comforting. He was too wise to try. I fell asleep longing for words that did not exist.
“Where’s Nighteyes?” I asked as soon as I missed him.
But now she was the Queen of the Six Duchies, and I had seen her strength. Surely she needed no comfort from one such as I.
Nooooooo Fitzy
Thinking. Of what comes before and after choosing to do an action. One becomes aware that one is always making choices, and considers what the best ones are.
“It is not so complex a question, princeling. Who is this woman who knows so much of what troubles you, who suddenly fishes out of a pocket a game I have only seen mentioned once in a very old scroll, who sings for us ‘Six Wise Men Went to Jhaampe-Town’ with two additional verses I’ve never heard anywhere. Who, O light of my life, is Kettle, and why does so ancient a woman choose to spend her last days hiking up a mountain with us?”
