Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

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

He was not just one old man come to visit me. He brought all of my past trailing along behind him as an embroidered train follows a woman into a hall. When I let him into my door, I had let in my old world with him.

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.

I don’t understand. You are ill? No. Just stupid. Ah. Nothing new there. Well, you haven’t died from that so far.

“In the space of a sundown, you show me the wide world from a horse’s back, and the soul of the world within my own walls.”

Like sundered pieces of crockery that snick back together so precisely that the crack becomes invisible, the Fool joined us and completed us.

We moved for a space in wolf time, in the contentment of the present, not worrying about what had passed or what was to come.

“If you insist we must both take different names now, then I shall call you ‘Beloved.’ And whenever I call you that, you may call me ‘Fool.’ ”

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.

“Please rise,” she said quietly. “You have been at my side through too many trials for me ever to want to see you on your knees before me. And as I recall, you once called me Kettricken.”

“Perhaps I spent too long in the Mountains, where all know that the true ruler of that kingdom is the servant of all.”

“Pain. That’s what being a Farseer means to me. Pain and being used.”

And you’re sorry. I don’t doubt you’re sincere. Yet I seem to recall warning you, years ago, that those words will only work so often, and then they ring hollow. Fitz, it hurts me to see you this way.”

It hurts me to see that you are still…as you’ve always been since…damn. Since you were taken from your mother. Wary and isolated and mistrustful. Despite all I’ve…After all these years, have you given your trust to no one?”

“I won’t ask of you that which you can’t give. You are what life has made you. And what I made you, Eda be merciful.

Reality reordered itself around me. Lord Golden, I suddenly realized, was every bit as complete and real a person as the Fool had been.

So. How did you find me, and why? I asked him. I found you just as I’d find any fleabite.

Little brother, do not treat me as if I am already dead, or dying. If you see me that way, then I would rather truly be dead. You steal the now of my life away, when you constantly fear that tomorrow will bring my death. Your fears clutch cold at me and snatch all my pleasure in the day’s warmth from me.

From now on, we belong together, come what may.”

The man who looked back at me from the mirror put me somewhat in mind of Verity, but even more of the portrait of King-in-Waiting Chivalry that still hung in the hall at Buckkeep.

But this, Fitz, this is how I have always seen you. And how you have never seen yourself.”

“Be the night. Not the wind that stirs the trees, not even the soundless owl a-wing or the tiny mouse crouched motionless. Be the night that flows over all, touching without being felt. For night is a cat.”

Cruelty is a skill taught not only by example but by experience of it.

Be what you are, Farseer and Old Blood both. Even if it kills us, it will be easier than these endless denials. I’d rather die being true to ourselves.

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 dilemma of what one of us would do when the other died had been snatched away from us, and replaced with the reality. Neither of us would go on forever.

Good hunting. I’m going now, my brother. He spoke with great determination. Alone? You can’t bring a buck down alone! I sighed with resignation. Wait, I’ll get up and come with you. Wait for you? Not likely! I’ve always had to run ahead of you and show you the way.

If a man does not die of a wound, then it heals in some fashion, and so it is with loss.

So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.

but to fix the past in a settled way. Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it.

But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way.

History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.