Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

I turned to look up at him. His face was very grave, and I saw in his eyes what he had not said to me. He missed me. His asking me to return to Buckkeep was as much for himself as for any other reason. I discovered then a small share of healing and peace. I was still loved, by Chade at least. It moved me and I felt my throat tighten with it. I tried to find lighter words. “You never claimed that being your apprentice would give me a calm, safe life.”

Stop longing. You poison today’s ease, reaching always for tomorrow.

“Oh, Fool,” I choked. “It cannot be you, yet it is. And I do not care how.”

“All down the years,” he said, his voice going golden as his skin. “You have been with me, as close as the tips of my fingers, even when we were years and seas apart. Your being was like the hum of a plucked string at the edge of my hearing, or a scent carried on a breeze. Did not you feel it so?”

“What’s her name?” “Malta. I named her myself. I bought her in Shoaks, on my way here.”

“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.” “Oh, my friend,” he said quietly. No more than that needed to be said. We are whole.

“It was the deck of a ship,” he said quietly. “And it’s quite likely you saved my life.”

“Well, if you cannot call me ‘Beloved,’ then I suppose you should continue to call me ‘Fool.’ For I am ever the Fool to your Fitz.”

He lifted his mug in a mocking toast. “To us: the White Prophet and his Catalyst.” I lifted mine. “The Fool and the Fitz,” I amended his words, and touched my mug to his.

“Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make. Am I right?”

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

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. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.

If anything happens to either of them…it’s strange, isn’t it, how you don’t know how big a part of you someone is until they’re threatened? And then you think that you can’t possibly go on if something happens to them, but the most frightening part is that, actually, you will go on, you’ll have to go on, with them or without them. There’s just no telling what you’ll become.

But the boy loved the cat. The cat loved the boy. Poor boy.

“You are his. And he will still be safe when I am gone.”