Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

Is time the wheel that turns, or the track it leaves behind?

I was thirty-five that year. When I was twenty, I would have considered a man of my current age to be teetering on the verge of dotage. These days, it seemed neither young nor old to me, but a suspension between the two. I no longer had the excuse of callow youth, and I could not yet claim the eccentricities of age. In many ways, I was no longer sure what I thought of myself. Sometimes it seemed that my life was slowly disappearing behind me, fading like footprints in the rain, until perhaps I had always been the quiet man living an unremarkable life in a cottage between the forest and the sea.

I lay abed that morning, listening to the small sounds that sometimes brought me peace.

My quiet reclusive life was beginning to chafe his young shoulders. Starling’s stories of life at Buckkeep, painted with all the skill of her minstrel ways, created pictures too vivid for him to ignore. So I had reluctantly let her take him to Buckkeep for a holiday, that he might see for himself a Springfest there, eat a carris-seed-topped cake, watch a puppet show, mayhap kiss a girl.

Yet no sooner were they gone than the little house seemed too quiet. The boy’s excitement at leaving had been too reminiscent of how I myself had once felt about Springfests and the like. Puppet shows and carris-seed cakes and girls to kiss all brought back vivid memories I thought I had long ago drowned.

“Fitz, my boy. Ah, Fitz!” He reached to embrace me. For an instant, I stood frozen, unable to move. I did not know what I felt. That my old mentor had tracked me down after all these years was frightening. There would be a reason, something more than simply seeing me again. But I also felt that leap of kinship, that sudden stirring of interest that Chade had always roused in me.

“You saw Burrich then?” He had raised me, and now he raised my daughter as his own. He’d taken to wife the woman I’d seemingly abandoned. They both thought me dead. Their lives had gone on without me. To hear of them mingled pain with fondness. I chased the taste of it away with Sandsedge brandy.

“No.” I said the word quickly before I could be seduced. I am not sure how definitive my answer sounded. No sooner had Chade broached the idea than desire for it surged in me. It was the answer, the so-simple answer after all these years. Train up a new coterie of Skill-users. I knew Chade had the scrolls and tablets relating to the Skill magic. Galen the Skillmaster and then Prince Regal had wrongfully withheld them from us, so many years ago. But now I could study them, I could learn more and I could train up others, not as Galen had done, but correctly. Prince Dutiful would have a Skilled coterie to aid and protect him, and I would have an end to my loneliness. There would be someone to reach back when I reached out. And both my children would know me, as a person if not as their father. Chade was as sly as ever.

It is the ordained end for any Skilled one.”

But restlessness, once awakened, is a powerful thing.

“It was good,” he said neutrally. He gave me one full look, and his mismatched eyes, one brown, one blue, were full of torment.

“No.” I heard the shortness of the word, but could think of nothing to add to it. It did not seem to bother her.

The past clutched at me, but I put its greedy fingers aside, determined to immerse myself in the present. This life was not so bad. It was simple and uncluttered, without conflict. Wasn’t this the life I had always dreamed of? A life where I made my decisions for myself?

A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.

Silence can ask all the questions, where the tongue is prone to ask only the wrong one.

“Did you know that Starling is married?” I looked at him then, and my face must have answered for me. He closed his eyes in sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I should have known you didn’t. I should have found a better way to tell you.” And the simple comfort of a woman who came to my arms when she would, because she desired to be with me, and the sweet evenings of tales and music by the fire, and her dark merry eyes looking up into mine were suddenly guilty and deceptive and furtive. I was as foolish as I had ever been, no, even stupider, for the gullibility of a boy is fatuousness in a man. Married. Starling married.

My folly had been in thinking that truth would never change.

I don’t understand. You are ill? No. Just stupid. Ah. Nothing new there. Well, you haven’t died from that so far. But sometimes it has been a near thing.

It built up in my mind until I began to question everything you’d ever taught me about anything.” He looked back at the fire. “It felt horrible, to be so betrayed.”

“Starling said that it was none of my business; that it hurt no one. She said that if I told you, I’d be the cruel one, hurting you, not her. She said that she’d always been careful not to hurt you, that you’d had enough pain in your life. When I said that you had a right to know, she said you had a greater right not to know.” Starling’s clever tongue. She’d left him no way to feel right about himself.

Sooner is usually better than later when it comes to facing unpleasantness, I told myself.

You’ve inflicted your stiff standards on yet another young man. I hope you take great pride in knowing you’ve raised another moralistic, judgmental prig like yourself.”

He makes me feel young and desirable and capable of real passion.” “What did I make you feel?” I asked unwillingly, my voice low. I knew I was inviting more pain but I couldn’t stop myself. That puzzled her for a moment. “Comfortable,” she said at last, with no thought for my feelings. “Accepted and valued.” She smiled suddenly, and her expression cut me. “Generous, giving you what no one else would. And more. Worldly and adventurous. Like a bright songbird come to visit a wren.”

The Fool had warned me: “She has no true affection for Fitz, you know, only for being able to say she knew FitzChivalry.” Perhaps, despite all the years we’d shared, that was still true.

“I know Chade.” “And he knows you.” The words were almost an accusation. “He once told me that you were incapable of completely trusting anyone. That wanting to trust, and fearing to, would always divide your soul. No. I think the old man simply wanted to see you alone so he could speak freely to you. To have you to himself, and to see for himself how you were doing, after all your years of silence.”

Nevertheless, I tried to think of some significant words, something that would salvage the good part of what we had shared. But nothing came to me, and in the end I stood dumbly by as she snatched the reins from my hand and mounted.

“You could have been someone. Regardless of how you were born, they gave you every chance of making something of yourself. You could have mattered. But this is what you chose. Remember that. You chose this.”

For once the boy was apprenticed out, whom else did I have in the world besides Nighteyes?

I wondered how long I would have to live before my secrets were so old that they no longer mattered.

“It doesn’t matter who a man’s father is. Your parents made a child, but it’s up to you to make the man you’ll be.” I held his gaze for a moment. Then, “Come on. Let’s go home.”

I had bumbled along with Hap, never really giving much thought to what I was or was not teaching him about being a man. Then one evening, a young man meets my eyes and tells me that he can fend for himself if he needs to, and I feel the warm flush of success. The boy had raised himself, I told myself, but I still smiled as I fell asleep.

As we stood together and watched our boy walk down the lane to the main road, I wondered if I had ever been so insufferably young and sure of myself, but the ache in my heart had the pleasant afterglow of pride.

I was experiencing a very adolescent response to it.

It was another fine summer day. Best use it while I had it, for while summer smiles, winter is never far away.

Beautiful summer days followed, one after another, like blue and green beads on a string. There was nothing wrong with my life.

Peace but waited for me to give myself up to it. The fault was in me that I held back from it.

But waiting for the boy’s return became an allegory for my whole life.

Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow. The boy will come back when he comes back. What is there to grieve over in that? There is nothing wrong with either of us. Tomorrow will come soon enough, one way or another.

Perhaps, after all the years, I was finally learning that there was no comfort for loneliness in such reaching.

When he drew near, he reined in his beast with a touch, and sat looking down on me with amber eyes. He smiled. Something turned over in my heart.

I opened my mouth, then helplessly spread wide my arms.

He glowed as if a light had been kindled in him. He did not dismount but flung himself from his horse toward me, a launch aided by Nighteyes’ sudden charge from the wood toward him. The horse snorted in alarm and crow-hopped. The Fool came free of his saddle with rather more energy than he had intended,

“You’ve gone gold, Fool.

he said, his voice going golden as his skin.

We flowed beneath the overarching trees, and her hooves making music on the hard-packed earth woke a like song in my heart.

We are whole.

Like sundered pieces of crockery that snick back together so precisely that the crack becomes invisible, the Fool joined us and completed us. Whereas Chade’s visit had filled me with questions and needs, the Fool’s presence was in itself an answer and a satisfaction.

“I need what I have always needed from you, ever since I discovered that you existed. If I am to change time in its course, if I am to set the world on a truer path than it has ever followed before, then I must have you.

“I dreamed of you once,” I said suddenly. I had not been planning to say the words.

“Because she felt no shame at all, you think it must all belong to you. People like her are so adept at passing on blame. This is a lovely red ink on this. Where did you get it?”