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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.
Nighteyes,
<3
“It’s not Fitz anymore,” I said pleasantly. “It’s Tom Badgerlock.”
Ah não, feio e não combina com vc
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. But sometimes it has been a near thing.
He talked too of traders from Bingtown and the islands beyond it, as well as those from the Out Islands.
He was intrigued by some wild story that Bingtown was hatching dragons and that soon towns could buy a Bingtown dragon for a watch beast. I assured him that I had seen real dragons, and that such tales were not to be believed. More realistic were the rumors that Bingtown’s war with Chalced might spread to the Six Duchies. “Would a war come here?” he wanted to know. Young as he was, he had only vague but frightening memories of our war with the Red Ships. Still, he was a boy, and a war seemed as interesting an event as Springfest. “ ‘Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced,’ ” I
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The Fool had warned me: “She has no true affection for Fitz, you know, only for being able to say she knew FitzChivalry.”
The betrayal of a friend differs from the treachery of a lover only in the degree of pain, not the kind.
A shiver ran over me, as if the Fool himself stood at my elbow and whispered words at my ear. “Do not you sense it? A crossroads, a vertex, a vortex. All paths change from here.”
I wondered how long I would have to live before my secrets were so old that they no longer mattered.
The Wit is more curse than gift, I sometimes think. Perhaps the hardest part of possessing it is witnessing so completely the casual cruelty of humans. Some speak of the savagery of beasts.
I told them all as tales I had heard from another, not because I enjoyed the telling of them, but because it was history the boy should know.
I suddenly wished he were smaller, so I could catch him up mid-stride and hug him.
Fitz coração de pai <3
“I’m going to give you a gift, son. This is knowledge it took me twenty years to gain, so appreciate that I’m giving it to you while you’re young.” I took a breath. “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.”
But having once experienced a relationship not only founded on years of knowing one another but blessed with the heady intoxication of genuine love, I did not think I could ever settle for anything else.
“You’ve already given me more than I could ever pay back. Including the ability to go after this for myself.”
There is monstrous vanity in the pride we take in our children, I told myself.
Had I completely forgotten how to deal with people?
Same
Your one true love is stitched in and out and through your life. Love will return to you. Don’t doubt that.”
“Oh, Fool,” I choked. “It cannot be you, yet it is. And I do not care how.”
“Malta.
That evening remains for me always a moment to cherish, as golden and fragrant as brandy in crystal glasses.
Following that service to my King, injured in both body and spirit, I withdrew from court and society for fifteen years. I believed I would never return.
What life showed me, in my years apart from the world, was that no man ever gets to know the whole of a truth.
“When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.”
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.
I have always believed that was the essence of boyhood: believing that mistakes could not be fatal.
Odd, the small things that are amusing when one has had enough to drink.
Healing and peace were the most elusive of the prey I stalked. We lived simply, as predators with no loyalties save to one another. That absolute solitude was the best balm for the wounds I had taken to both my body and my soul. Such injuries do not truly heal but I learned to live with my scars,
I came to accept that I had died, that I had lost my life in every way that mattered.
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.
Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.”
“There is nothing dishonorable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.” He shifted slightly in the dark. “And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them.”
“I think that was when I fully acknowledged that my old life was completely reduced to ashes. If Verity had remained in some form I could reach, if he had still existed to partner me in the Skill, then I think some part of me would have wanted to remain FitzChivalry Farseer. But he did not. The end of my King was also the end of me. When I rose and walked away from the Stone Garden, I knew I truly had what I had longed for all those years: the chance to determine for myself who I was, and a time in which to live my own life as I chose. From now on, I alone would make my decisions.”
I was reminded, suddenly, of a summer morning in my childhood when I had watched a butterfly twitch and tear its way out of its chrysalis. Had it felt so, as if the stillness and translucency that had wrapped and protected it had abruptly become too confining to bear?
My heart, I told myself, would always be able to find him, would always find a place where we still touched and merged.
Such power over a man should not reside with those who do not love him.
“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?”
Look at you. Not the hero, no. The Changer. The one who, by his existence, enables others to be heroes.
But as is ever the case, if a story is well told, the listeners will stay with it to the end, and so they did this time.
Sometimes one has to trust to luck, or to believe in fate as the Fool did.
Cruelty is a skill taught not only by example but by experience of it.
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.
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.
So grief has always seemed to me, a time of waiting not for the hurt to pass, but to become accustomed to it.
“But you treat me like a man, not ‘the Prince.’ As if your expectations of a man were higher than those for a prince.”
“To my mother, I am a son. But I am also, always, the Prince and Sacrifice for my people. And to all others, always, I am the Prince. Always. I am no one’s brother. I am no man’s son. I am not anyone’s best friend.” He laughed, a small strangled laugh. “People treat me very well as ‘my Prince.’ But there is always a wall there. No one speaks to me as, well, as me.” He shrugged one shoulder and his mouth twisted to one side wryly. “No one except you has ever told me I was stupid, even when I was most definitely being stupid.”
