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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.”
But for here, for now, just between us two, and for no other reason save I am me and you are you, I tell you this. I am glad, glad that you are alive. 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.”
You tell me, Nighteyes challenged me. He saved your life, fed you from his kills, and shared his den with you. Is he pack with us or not? I suppose he is, I said after a moment’s consideration. I had never seen things in quite that light before. Unobtrusively, I shifted in my bedding to be slightly closer to the Fool. “Are you cold?” I asked him aloud.
“All I can truthfully say I know of it is that he is not a man like other men.” “I cannot disagree with that,” I said quietly. “He is unique among all the people I have ever known.”
“That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.” “Well, it is important…” I began. “Rubbish!” he exclaimed. “Mere plumbing, when all is said and done. Why is it important?”
The Fool, the Fool, only the Fool. I sought for him, I almost found him. Oh, he was passing strange, and surpassing strange.
I was the Fool and the Fool was me. He was the Catalyst and so was I. We were two halves of a whole, sundered and come together again. For an instant I knew him in his entirety, complete and magical, and then he was pulling apart from me, laughing, a bubble inside me, separate and unknowable, yet joined to me. You do love me! I was incredulous. He had never truly believed it before. Before, it was words. I always feared it was born of pity. But you are truly my friend. This is knowing. This is feeling what you feel for me. So this is the Skill. For a moment he reveled in simple recognition.
“Hurry,” I bid him. He embraced me almost convulsively, and shocked me when he kissed my mouth.
Perhaps, somewhere there is a toymaker who makes puppets that are a delight and a marvel. I hope he wears an earring of silver and blue. The fingerprints he left on my wrist have faded to a dusky gray. I think I will always miss him.
