More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“It has been so long since your tongue has had an edge to it, it’s almost a relief to hear you mock me.” “Had I known you missed it, I would have been rude to you much sooner.” He grinned. Then he grew more serious. “FitzChivalry, mystery hovers about that woman like flies on…spilt beer.
So you are hungry? No. Bored.
One thing I have learned well in my travels. The riches of one region are taken for granted in another. Fish we would not feed to a cat in Buckkeep is prized as a delicacy in the inland cities. In some places water is wealth, in others the constant flooding of the river is both an annoyance and a peril. Fine leather, graceful pottery, glass as transparent as air, exotic flowers…all of these I have seen in such plentiful supply that the folk who possess them no longer see them as wealth. So perhaps, in sufficient quantity, magic becomes ordinary.
“No words,” she said dully as if she had not heard me. Her eyes were opaque as she asked. “Does he know how I have failed him? Does he know about…our child?” “I do not believe he does, my lady. I sense no such grief in him, and well I know how it would grieve him.” Kettricken swallowed. I cursed my clumsy words, and yet, was it my place to utter words of comfort and love to his wife?
She sighed heavily, but I could sense her strangling on her sorrow.
“I’m going to be all right,” she said. To hear the strength of her belief in those words made my heart ache. “It’s just…It’s hard just now.
I knew I might have terrible sorrows to bear. I am strong enough…to bear these things. But no one warned me that I might come to love the man they’d choose for me. To bear my sorrow is one thing. To bring sorrow to him is another.”
Molly sang the song over and over and over, but I found no boredom there. It was a scene I could watch for a month, for a year, and never know tedium.
“I am too tired to be strong.”
“Then I’d be dead,” I pointed out. “Among other things. Fool, there is no sense in trying to play that game with the past. Here is where we are today, and we can only make our moves from here.”
“Only that we do it together, Fitzy-fitz. Only that we do it together.”
“I did. And when I was younger, I dreamed many dreams, and even had visions. But it is as I have told you before; nothing is a precise fit. Look you, Fitz. If I showed you wool and a loom and a set of shears, would you look at it and say, Oh, that is the coat I will someday wear? But once you have the coat on, it is easy to look back and say, Oh, those things foretold this coat.” “What is the good of it, then?” I demanded in disgust. “The good of it?” he echoed. “Ah. I have never quite thought of it in those terms before. The good of it.”
“We walked from winter to spring yesterday.” Next to me the Fool shifted, scratched, and muttered, “Typical minstrel. Exaggerate everything.”
The fool dud the meme format
“Oh, this! This is such as I have not felt in years, not since I was a child. The certainty, the power of it. Kettle! Would you hear a White Prophet speak? Then hearken to this, and be glad as I am glad. We are not only where we must be, we are when we must be. All junctures coincide, we draw closer and closer to the center of the web. You and I.” He clasped my head suddenly between his two hands and placed his brow against mine. “We are even who we must be!”
“By his love is he betrayed, and his love betrayed also.”
It shames me to say that I froze for an instant. As much as I loved the Fool, I feared Will still. I reached at last, a second and an eternity later, to put my hand on his brow.
I knew his beauty and his power in the briefest flashes of insight.
If I had not been so anxious, it would have been humorous to see the Fool so deftly quelled.
Perhaps there is no living creature in the quarry after all, only this monument to slow death.
Kettricken drew a ragged breath. “My lord,” she began, and then her voice broke. “Verity, I lost our child. Our son died.” I did not understand until then what a burden it had been for her, seeking for her husband, knowing she must tell him this news. She dropped her proud head as if expecting his wrath. What she got was worse. “Oh,” he said. Then, “Had we a son? I do not recall…”
“Why…too late to save the folk of the Six Duchies.” He peered at me as if I were simple. “Why else would I be doing it? Why else would I leave my land and my queen, to come here?” I tried to grasp what he was telling me, but one overwhelming question popped out of my mouth. “You believe you have carved this whole dragon?”
One plays each stone to best advantage in the game. The object is to win, not to hoard one’s stones.”
“When you can either laugh or cry, you might as well laugh,”
“No. I wish to rest, with you beside me. If you would, my queen.” It was no more than the bones of his affection, but she seized on it. “I would, my lord.” It hurt me to see her content with so little.
He meant the words for comfort. I did not need them. Instead I reached to rest a hand on his ruff. Did you see how she stood and faced them down? I demanded with pride. A most excellent bitch, Nighteyes agreed.
“You still don’t believe that Verity’s dragon will fly when it is finished? I do. Of course, I have very little else to believe in anymore. Very little.”
the Catalyst who has changed my living death to dying life,
Fitz. Be wise. Let her go, and keep those memories intact. Save what you can of her, and let her keep what she can of the wild and daring boy she loved. Because both he and that merry little miss are no more than memories anymore.” She shook her head. “No more than memories.” “You are wrong!” I shouted furiously. “You are wrong!”
If a minstrel must embroider the truth to help us recall it fully, then let her, and let no one say she has lied. Truth is often much larger than facts.
“No. It’s all right.” I caught my breath. “Now, Verity. I would it were done quickly.” “Are you sure?” “As you will.” He took my life from me.
The Fool had his arm around Nighteyes. “Fitz,” he said quietly. He spoke into the wolf’s ruff, but I heard him clearly. “Fitz, I am sorry. But you cannot throw away all your pain. If you stop feeling pain…”
“No. We wouldn’t have. Let me tell you something, Fitz. You are going to miss what you gave away. You will recover some of the feelings in time, of course. All memories are connected, and like a man’s skin, they can heal. In time, left to themselves, those memories would have stopped hurting you. You may someday wish you could call up that pain.” “I do not think so,” I said calmly, to cover my own doubt. “I still have plenty of pain left.”
“Fitz,” she said quietly. “I asked you once, for yourself. In gentleness and friendship. To chase a memory away.” She looked away from me, at the sunlight glinting on the stream. “Now I offer that,” she said humbly. “But I don’t love you,” I said honestly. And instantly knew that it was the worst thing I could have said just then.
“And better care of yourself than I did. I did love you, you know,” he said brusquely. “Despite all I’ve done to you, I loved you.” At first I could think of no answer to that. Then, as he reached his dragon and placed his hands on its brow, I told him, I never doubted it. Never doubt I loved you.
“That is wise. It is time for this Fool to be wise. When you come back, I shall help you pack.”
The Catalyst comes to change all things.
All the fear I had borne inside me, over a year’s time now. Of what? Of a whining, spoiled child who schemed to take his older brothers’ toys.
We fished, we ate, we slept. I thought only of things that did not hurt.
I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.
It was, after all, a time for heroes and all sorts of marvelous things to occur.
I sigh and set my quill aside. I have written too much. Not all things need to be told. Not all things should be told.
I have never seen any of the children. In that, I am truly my father’s son.
I think I will always miss him.
When Starling comes, she chides me, and tells me I am a young man yet. What, she demands of me, became of all my insistence that one day I would have a life of my own? I tell her I have found it. Here, in my cottage, with my writing and my wolf and my boy. Sometimes, when she beds with me and I lie awake afterward listening to her slow breathing, I think I will rise on the morrow and find some new meaning to my life. But most mornings, when I awake aching and stiff, I think I am not a young man at all. I am an old man, trapped in a young man’s scarred body.
