Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

“Go away,” he said plainly. “If I’m going to puke, I don’t want you watching me.”

Some things a man should do alone.

I longed to live the direct and clean life of a wolf.

Those who are Witted should have to choose, early in their lives, which they will bind to, an animal or another human. That’s all.”

I’ll keep up. Or you’ll leave me behind and do what you must. The fatalism in the thought shamed me.

The wolf yielded up the days of his life to me for an allegiance he understood only in terms of his love for me.

Sometimes one has to trust to luck, or to believe in fate as the Fool did.

Once a man has been broken by pain, he remains forever a victim. He cannot ever forget that place he has visited, the moment when he decided that he would surrender everything rather than endure more pain. It is a shame no man ever completely recovers from.

He saw, despite all the years, the beaten boy that still huddled within me, and always would. Somewhere I forever cowered, somewhere I was endlessly unmanned by what had been done to me. It was intolerable that anyone should know that. Even my Fool. Perhaps especially him.

“I am so relieved to see you, old friend.” I heard the edge of tears in his words. Wariness haunted his voice as he cautiously asked me, “When you are finished with the ointment, might I have some for Laurel’s shoulder?”

“I have never been so frightened in my life. And there was nothing I could do. I think only he could have called you back.”

Before you kill him, think of what you take from him. Remember what it is to be alive.

Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times goes by.

Yet if I did, it would destroy all that was between the Fool and me. The assassin’s conclusion to that was to kill him, too, so that he would never look at me with those deaths in his eyes.

And then you could kill me, and then you could kill yourself, and no one would ever know of all we had shared. It would remain our shameful secret, taken to the grave with both of us. Kill us all, rather than admit to anyone what we are.

Laurel and the prisoner gone, we could drop pretenses and just be ourselves. “I’ve missed you,” I said quietly, knowing that he would know what I meant. “So have I.” His voice came from a new direction.

You may have to leave Malta and me behind once you have the Prince. Don’t hesitate.” And me. The Fool glanced at Nighteyes as if he had heard him. “I don’t think I can do that,” I said carefully. Don’t fear. I’ll protect him for you. I felt a terrible sinking in my heart. I kept severely to myself the worry, But who will protect you?

Of course, I dreamed sometimes of being a dragon. I suspected, nay, I knew, that when old age found me, I would make a futile trek into the Mountains and back to that quarry. But like Verity, I would have no coterie to assist me in the carving of my dragon.

I was confronted suddenly with a young man who, until this moment, had been to me little more than a name coupled with an idea. He wore my face. He wore my face to the extent that I knew the spot under his chin where the hair grew in an odd direction and would be hard to shave, when he was old enough to shave. He had my jaw, and the nose I had had as a boy, before Regal had broken it. His teeth, like mine, were bared in a battle rictus. Verity’s soul had planted the seed in his young wife to conceive this boy, but his flesh had been shaped from my flesh. I looked into the face of the son I had never seen or claimed, and a connection suddenly formed like the cold snap of a manacle.

According to those who believe such things, all of time is a great wheel that turns in a track of predetermined events. Left to itself, time turns endlessly, and all the world is doomed to repeat the cycle of events that lead us all ever deeper into darkness and degradation. Those who follow the White Prophet believe that to each age is born one who has the vision to redirect time and history into a better path. This one is known by his white skin and colorless eyes. It is said that the blood of the ancient lines of the Whites finds voice again in the White Prophet. To each White Prophet there is a Catalyst. Only the White Prophet of that particular age can divine who the Catalyst is.

“I don’t expect you to understand. You’re nothing but a hound sent to track me down and drag me back. Doing your duty is all you know. But I have to go after her. She is my life, the breath in my body…she completes me. We have to be together.” Well. You won’t be. I came a knife’s edge away from saying those words, but I did not.

“Is she…”—I made the unmistakable, universal gesture—“any good?” “Shut up!” He spat the words savagely. I leered at Lord Golden knowingly. “Ah, we both know what that means. It means he don’t know. At least, not firsthand. Or maybe it’s only his hand that knows.” I leaned back and smirked at him challengingly.

“It isn’t like that!” he grated. “She isn’t some…Not that I expect you to understand anything other than whores! She’s a woman worth waiting for, and when we come together, it will be a higher and sweeter thing than you can imagine. Hers is a love to be earned, and I will prove myself worthy of her.” Inside, I bled for him. They were a boy’s words, taken from minstrel tellings, a lad’s imaginings of something he had never experienced. The innocence of his passion blazed in him, and his idealistic expectations shone in his eyes.

He smiled as he looked down at his hands, the smile of a boy with a secret sweetheart.

She is a lady of the wild woods, a huntress and a forester. She does not hem handkerchiefs in a garden on a summer’s day, nor huddle within walls by a hearth when the wind begins to blow. She is free to the open world, her hair blowing in the wind, her eyes full of the night’s mysteries.”

“If there’s a few, we fight. If there’s many, we run.” “Complex strategy. Chade taught you well.”

Verity, I thought, for no reason at all save that it seemed to center me. I hesitated, then I groped for and found the boy’s hand. I held it in mine, and it pleased me unreasonably that his palm was callused with work.

Go carefully, my heart, I wished after him, but softly, softly, lest he know how much I feared for him.

I didn’t want to choose how my friends would die. I’m too tired to flee. I’m dying here. The Fool’s eyes wavered to Nighteyes.

Why I have forced you to stay alive, despite all that was done to you. There must be a Farseer heir. If you keep him alive and restore him to Buckkeep, that is all that matters. We keep the future on the path I have set for it, even if it must go on without me. But if we fail, if he dies…”

“Then…it ends. For us. But he is not the only change we have wrought…time must seek to flow as it always has, washing all obstacles away. So…fate finds her. In all times, fate battles against a Farseer surviving. Here and now, we guard Dutiful. But if we all fall, if Nettle becomes the lone focus of that battle…”

Dying would be kinder. You cannot save us, but you can save the boy. I cannot leave you here. We cannot end like this, you and I. Tears blinded me just when I needed to see most clearly. We not only can, we must. The pack does not die if the cub survives. Be a wolf, my brother. Things are clearer so. Leave us to fight while you save the cub. Save Nettle, too. Live well, for both of us, and someday, tell Nettle tales of me.

The Fool rolled his shoulders. He lifted his sword in a two-handed grip. He swung it once, experimentally, then held it aloft. “Go quickly, Beloved.”

“How can the hardest thing I have ever done in my life also be the most cowardly?”

The last smile he gave me was his old Fool’s smile, tremulous and yet mocking the world’s ability to hurt him.

The Skill is infinitely large, and yet intimately small.

“We are here,” I replied, and laughed. I had never known that anger and despair could make a man laugh.

I am disappointed in my son.

Ok fitz

And all the while the Skill plucked at me, whispering promises. It was only cold and rushing so long as I resisted it. If I gave in, I knew it would become all warmth and comfort and belonging. If I surrendered to it, I would subside into peaceful existence without individual awareness. What would be so terrible about that? Nighteyes and the Fool were gone. I’d failed in my mission to bring Dutiful back to Kettricken. Molly did not wait for me; she had a life and a love. Hap, I told myself, trying to stir some sense of responsibility. What about Hap? But I knew that Chade would see to Hap’s needs, at first out of a sense of duty to me, but before long for the sake of the boy himself. But Nettle. What of Nettle? The answer was terrible.

“I hate you,” he told me, in a voice devoid of rancor. “That’s understandable,” I heard myself reply. I sometimes shared that sentiment.

It is only fitting that a Farseer should actually restore a life for the ones that have been taken from me.” And there it was. The seed of hate from which all this had sprung. Once more, the Farseers did not have to see far to know whence their ill fortune came. The Prince’s pitfall was built from his uncle’s arrogance and cruelty. Hatred was the legacy Regal had bequeathed to me, as well, but my heart closed against the sympathy that flared in me. The Piebalds were my enemies. Regardless of what they had suffered, they had no right to this boy. “And what was Peladine to you, Laudwine?” I asked evenly. I suspected I knew the answer, but he surprised me.

Give up a boy I scarcely knew to buy all that. One single life, weighed against all those others. I made my decision.

Perhaps the Fool is wrong, and time cannot be shifted from its course. Perhaps it is all determined before we are born. Or perhaps the next White Prophet will choose a better Catalyst.

I refused to feel hurt that the Fool had spoken so little to me. Lord Golden could not be concerned with a servant’s injuries, any more than Tom Badgerlock should fret about his master’s bruises. We had our roles to play still. So I feigned sleep, but from beneath lowered lashes I watched them, and listened to their talk.

Swift as thought, he slipped away from me, running down the hillside like a cloud’s shadow when the wind blows. My connection to him frayed away as he went, scattering and floating like dandelion fluff in the wind.

I had to go with him; a morning this wondrous must be shared. “Wait!” I cried, and in shouting the word, I woke myself. Nearby, the Fool sat up, his hair tousled. I blinked. My mouth was full of salve and wolf-hair, my fingers buried deep in his coat. I clutched him to me, and my grip sighed his last stilled breath out of his lungs. But Nighteyes was gone. Cold rain was cascading down past the mouth of the cave.

I knew that Chade would ask me what they had said, but I was too dispirited to attempt to spy on them.

If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss. From the sharp pain of immediate bereavement, both the Prince and I passed into the gray days of numb bewilderment and waiting. So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.

I scarcely needed a nursemaid, and that there were excellent reasons why the Fool and I should not betray the depth of our friendship to either Laurel or Dutiful. But I ached with loss and loneliness, and resentment was the least painful emotion I could feel.

For me to cling to him now and make him the focus of my life would have been the act of a leech. So who was I, when I stood alone, stripped of all others? It was a difficult question.