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Let him look at me, at the scars he had put upon me, and know who killed him. And afterward? If I lived for there to be an afterward, and if any who saw me knew me, so be it. Let it be known that the Fitz had come back from his grave to work a true King’s Justice on this would-be king.
I supposed there was something about me that made all elderly folk assume my time was at their disposal.
In that moment, I knew that Regal had finally found what he had sought. A Witted one to hunt me. Old Blood had been bought.
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?”
“Fool?” My voice came out as a croak this time. His eyes came instantly to mine and he dropped to his knees beside me. His breath came and went raggedly in his throat. He snatched up the cup of water and held it to my mouth while I drank. Then he set it aside, to take up my dangling hand. He spoke softly as he did this, more to himself than to me. “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?” His cool fingers moved tentatively down my face, tracing the scar and the broken
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He shrugged for me. “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.” The Fool swayed slightly where he sat, but righted himself. “It was what I missed most, when you were dead.”
I smiled foolishly. “A while back, I thought it was my great beauty.” For a time the Fool just looked at me. Then he glanced aside and spoke quietly. “Unfair. Were I myself, I would never have spoken such words aloud. Still. Ah, Fitz.” He looked at me and shook his head fondly. He spoke without mockery, making almost a stranger of himself. “Perhaps half of it was that you were so unaware of it. Not like Regal. Now there’s a pretty man, but he knows it too well. You never see him with his hair tousled or the red of the wind on his cheeks.”
To see you take breath puts the breath back in my lungs. If there must be another my fate is twined around, I am glad it is you.”
“We’ve the world to save, you and I.”
“You can have me,” I told him quietly. “And I will do my best to bring Verity back, and do all I can to restore to him his throne. You can have my death, if that is what it takes. More than that, you can have my life, Chade. But not my child’s. Not my daughter’s.”
I do not think their attacks can destroy me, but I fear they may weaken me enough that I do not succeed. Or worse yet, that they may distract me and succeed in my place. We cannot allow that, boy. You and I are all that stand between them and their triumph. You and I. The Farseers.”
“How many men have you killed?” It was not the cold question it sounded. I answered her seriously. “I don’t know. My…teacher advised me against keeping a count. He said it wasn’t a good idea.” Those weren’t his exact words. I remembered them well. “How many doesn’t matter after one,” Chade had said. “We know what we are. Quantity makes you neither better nor worse.”
“The White Prophet and the Catalyst!” she cried in disgust. “Rather name them as they are, the Fool and the Idiot.
“Elfbark is well known among Skilled ones as a thing to avoid,” she said quietly. I heard every word, for no one in the tent even seemed to be breathing. “It deadens a man to Skill, so that he can neither use the Skill himself, nor may others reach through its fog to Skill to him. It is said to stunt or destroy Skill talent in the young, and to impede its development in older Skill users.” She looked at me with pity in her eyes. “You must have been strongly talented, once, to retain even a semblance of Skilling.”
Heart = broken
“Is your tongue hinged in the middle so that it flaps at both ends? You talk too much!” Kettle rebuked me.
“It would be a poor courtesy to Hod’s skill to pass this on with a blunted blade. Take better care of it than I did, Fitz.” He resheathed it and handed it to me. His eyes met mine as I took it. “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.”
Literally sobbing rn
So this was how I was going to die. I was glad the Fool had not told me. I probably would have killed myself first.
