Golden Fool (Tawny Man, #2)

by Robin Hobb

I do not know if it is conceit that always turns my thoughts to my own life, or if my writing is my own pathetic effort to explain my life to myself.

I was confused, thinking that my pain and my loss were one and the same thing, whereas one was but a symptom of the other. In a curious way, it was a second coming-of-age. This one was not an arrival at manhood, but rather a slow realization of myself as an individual.

Ours was the partnership. With Nighteyes gone, I felt I would never again share that arrangement with any other, animal or human.

Patience and Lacey had shared was that a man or woman who had passed their thirtieth year unwed was likely to remain so. “Set in his ways,” Patience would declare at the gossip that some graying lord had suddenly begun to court a young girl. “Spring has turned his head, but she’ll find soon enough there is no room in his life for a partner. He’s had it all his own way too long.” And so I began, very slowly, to see myself. I was often lonely. I knew that my Wit quested out for companionship. Yet that feeling and that questing were like a reflex, the twitching of a severed limb. No one, human or animal, could ever fill the gap that Nighteyes had left in my life.

I could set aside my responsibilities to others and live my life as I pleased only when I also severed my ties to them. I could not have it both ways. To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibilities, to be bound by the rules of that group. I had lived apart from that for a time, but now I knew that had been my choice.

To recognize you are the source of your own loneliness is not a cure for it. But it is a step toward seeing that it is not inevitable, and that such a choice is not irrevocable.

I was not ready even for a second kiss, let alone what it might bring. My heart was too raw. Yet I wanted to be here, sitting before her fireside. It sounds a contradiction, and perhaps it was. I did not want the inevitable complications that caresses would lead to, yet in my Wit bereavement, I took comfort in this woman’s company.

With Hap, I could share my grief, however selfish a thing that might be.

If I still belonged to anyone or anything, I belonged to my boy. I needed to feel the reality of that.

“She says she loves me. She likes my eyes.” “Well. That’s good.” How many times in his life had folk looked at his mismatched eyes, one brown and one blue, and made the sign against evil? It had to be balm to meet a girl who found them attractive.

Few things have such sharp edges as the careless words of a boy.

“It wasn’t your fault. He followed and found me. I was with him when he died. It was nothing you did, Hap. He was just old. It was his time and he went from me.” Despite my efforts, my throat clenched down on the words. The relief on the boy’s face that he was not at fault was another arrow in my heart. Was being blameless more important to him than the wolf’s death?

“You worry too much, Tom Badgerlock.” She lifted my hand to her mouth and put a warm kiss on the palm of it. “Some things are far less complex than you think they are.” I felt awkward, but I managed to say, “If that were true, it would be a sweet thing.”

He wouldn’t be the first good country lad to go bad in a town.”

“Perhaps you know the boy. It’s the young man I fear for.”

I opened my senses fully to the night, pushing away a sudden longing not just for Nighteyes’ keener perception but also for the comforting sensation of my wolf watching my back. This

There were only two courses open to me. I either had to sever all ties and flee, as I had once before, or I had to plunge fully into the swirling intrigue that had always been the Farseer court at Buckkeep.

“Good to see that you’ve realized your duties require you to arise early, Tom Badgerlock. Now if only your taste in clothing would likewise awaken.”

The smile melted from his face. He did not take his chair, but seized my wrist in a cool grip. “Are you hurt?” he asked earnestly.

I let the thought trail away. I needed to say no more to him. His eyes were huge. The Fool had read all that I had so recklessly committed to paper. Not only my own identity was bared there, but also many Farseer matters better left forgotten. And personal vulnerabilities also were exposed in those cursed scrolls. Molly, my lost love. Nettle, my bastard daughter. How could I have been so stupid as to set such thoughts to paper? How could I have let the false comfort of writing about such things lull me into exposing them? No secret was safe unless it was locked solely in a man’s own mind. It should all have been burned, long ago.

Burn it, I decided. Burn the whole cottage to the ground. Leave no trace that I had ever lived there. Even the herbs growing in the garden told too much about me. I should never have left that shell of myself for anyone to nose through; I should never have allowed myself to leave my marks so plainly on anything.

For an instant the Fool’s sympathy for me shone naked in his eyes.

I don’t want that boy to do the thing to me that makes babies. I just want our mothers’ low house, and to ride my pony out in the wind. And I want my own boat to scull across Sendalfjord, and my own skates of gear to set for fish. And when I am grown, my own bench in the mothers’ house, and a man who knows that it is right to dwell in the house of his wife’s mothers. All I want is what any other girl my age wants.

I didn’t want that decision to be mine. I didn’t even want to know that such a decision was being made, yet here I was again, neck deep in Farseer plotting. “I don’t think either of those things,” I muttered. “Cannot we just send him very far away?”

“I think it is more like a bastard learning to tolerate pain.”

I should have felt reassured, I suppose, that even an old friend like Blade did not recognize FitzChivalry Farseer.

I’ve had to behave with perfect courtesy even when I wanted to shout, and smilingly accept flowery compliments on a situation I wish to flee.

“I did not know you had a son.” The jealousy was courteously masked but it rang green against my sense of him. I did not know how to react to it. I gave him the truth. “I’ve had him since he was eight or so. His mother abandoned him and he had no other folk willing to take him in. He’s a good lad.”

If I can save you that torment, then perhaps in some way I will have saved myself as well.”

The chill grief of his loss blew through his words. It stirred my own loss of Nighteyes to a sharper ache.

His comment made the Prince laugh, easily dispersing a building tension between us that I had not been aware of until the Fool disarmed it. Strange, suddenly to recognize his gift for doing that, after all the years I had known him.

I felt an old familiar twist in my gut. Guilt. Secrets withheld from ones who trusted me. Had not I once promised myself never to do that again? But what choice did I have? I guarded my own secret even as Lord Golden worked at prying the Prince’s secret loose from him.

“Could you put your duty to your monarch ahead of protecting a member of your own family?

Lord Golden shot me a Fool’s glance,

“There will be many differences you must resolve as you come to know one another. Understanding that each of you comes from a different, but no less valuable, culture may be the first one,”

“Does anything show?” I asked him, turning for his inspection. He surveyed me with a smile and then assured me salaciously, “Everything shows. But nothing that you’re worried about showing. Here. Put on the doublet and let me see the entire effect.”

Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die.”

He caught me staring at him. “Well?” he demanded, almost uneasily. “You’re right. You’re a very convincing Jamaillian lord.”

Perhaps because of the Skill bond between us, I was aware of the keen pleasure he took in such dissembling. Certainly, it did not show in his demeanor as he grumbled and rebuked me for clumsiness all the way down the stairs.

Queen Kettricken entered with Prince Dutiful at her right hand. She had learned much in the years since I had last seen her make such an entrance. I was unguarded against the sudden tears that stung my eyes, and I struggled valiantly to control the triumphant smile that threatened to take over my face. She was magnificent.

I jerked my eyes away from them, as if my gaze might somehow make her aware of me. Over the next few minutes, I stole glimpses of her. She wore the rubies my father had given her, the ones she had once sold to gain coin to ease the suffering of the people of Buck. Her graying hair was garlanded with late flowers, a custom as outdated as the gown she wore, but to me her eccentricity was endearing and precious. I wished I could go to her, and kneel by her chair and thank her for all she had done for me, not only during my life, but when she had supposed me dead.

Yet again it was driven home to me that Lord Golden and the Fool were two very distinct people. Golden was witty and charming, but he never displayed the Fool’s edged humor. He was also very Jamaillian, urbane and occasionally intolerant of what he bluntly referred to as “the Six Duchies attitude” toward his morality and habits. He discussed dress and jewelry with his cohorts in a way that mercilessly shredded any outside the circle of his favor. He flirted outrageously with women, married or not, drank extravagantly, and when offered Smoke, grandly declined on the grounds that “any but the finest quality leaves me nauseous in the morning.

I realized what a relief it was to have the Fool back. “How did you ever come up with ‘Lord Golden’? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more backbiting, conniving noble. If I had met you for the first time tonight, I would have despised you.

We were both smiling, in that bittersweet way one does when imagining something that the heart longs for and the head would dread.

He made another sound. I groaned. I went to his bed, dragged off a coverlet, and brought it back to the fireside. I draped it over him. “Good night, Fool.”

It was a trifling thing in a boy of his years, a bit of thoughtlessness. Yet what was minor in a boy was not so in a prince. I wanted to rebuke him for it, as Chade would have chastened me. Or Burrich. I grinned ruefully. In fairness, had I been any different at Dutiful’s age?

As I took my place opposite her, I studied her. We were nearly of an age, but her years rode her far more graciously than mine did me. Where the passage of time had scarred me, it had brushed her, leaving a tracery of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

I wanted to flee. I had almost succeeded in mastering my grief, and now she tore the wound afresh. For a time I sat woodenly, numbed by pain. Why couldn’t she just leave it alone?

She would never again believe us to be merely master and man.

“So many people, all wanting a bit of your time.” I sighed. “It is hard for me. I don’t quite know how to manage it. I’d grown used to my solitary life, with only Nighteyes and Hap making claims on me. I don’t think I’m handling this very well. I can’t imagine how Chade juggled all his tasks for so many years.”