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“I loved him through you.
“Well. I am glad that someone could help you. Even as I envy Kettricken.”
“You envy her, that she mourns?”
“I envy her, that she could c...
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Will you be back in time to help me limp down to dinner?” “I expect so.” His spirits seemed suddenly dampened, as if he were truly in pain. He nodded gravely. “Perhaps I will see you then.”
I was a man grown, yet I felt caught in a boy’s dilemma. How did I express thanks, apology, and interest in her without appearing too grateful, apologetic, or interested?
With a sharpness I had not felt in years, I suddenly longed for Molly, and how simple, good, and true it had been between us. This was not that, any more than my partnering with Starling had been. It wasn’t even sharing a bed. At the heart of my discontent, I wanted to be in love with someone the way I had been that first time. I wanted someone I could touch and be held by, someone who made everything else in the world more significant simply by her existence.
Jinna and I had been on the path to becoming friends. I was just beginning to know her. What had I done to that?
“I’m in no position to be a father to anyone. I didn’t even come to see Hap last night, when he told me it was important. I’ve no wish to start another life that I cannot protect.”
“What the heart longs for, and what the mind knows are two different things.
“There is a love that twines in and out of your days. Sometimes, it leaves, but when it does, it runs alongside you until it returns.” She lifted my hand closer to her face, studying it. Then she kissed my palm, and moved it back to her breast. “That doesn’t mean that you must be alone and idle while you wait for it to come back,”
Life never gives up willingly.
She made me feel young and foolish,
My attempts at poetry about Molly went into the flames, to burn in a final burst of passion.
Let any man try to recall all he might have written down over fifteen years of his life, and there would doubtless be some gaps.
“Do you…do you like working for him?” I instantly knew that was not the question he wanted to ask. I wondered what was troubling him. Was he jealous of my friendship with the Fool? Did he feel excluded somehow? I made my voice gentle. “He has been my friend for a long time. I told you that before, in the inn on our way home. The roles we play now, master and man, are only for convenience. They afford me an excuse to attend occasions where a man such as myself would not be expected. That’s all.” “Then you don’t truly…serve him.” I shrugged a shoulder. “Only when it fits my role, or when it
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“I had noticed that you had become cooler toward Lord Golden of late. If that was the reason behind it, well, you create a loss for yourself in not getting to know him better. Once he is your friend, no man can ask for a truer one.”
Verity had once told me that being Skilled to by my father, Chivalry, was like being trampled by a horse: he barged in, dropped his information, and fled. So it was with Dutiful.
Many of his repeated mistakes and his late arrivals in the morning could be blamed on this feminine distraction. I felt certain that if Svanja did not exist, Hap would be more intent, and perhaps better satisfied with his lessons. A stricter father might have forbidden him to see the girl. I did not. Sometimes I thought it was because of how such restrictions had felt to me; at other times, I wondered if I feared that Hap would not obey such a command, and so I dared not give it.
Frustration squeezed my heart. I was doing nothing wrong, and yet Jinna’s posture as she left the tavern told me how affronted she was. Nor could I leave Laurel sitting alone and inebriated to hurry after Jinna and explain to her, even if I had felt inclined to do so. So I sat stewing in my discomfort while Laurel took several more deep breaths and recovered herself.
I fear that I…I said something last night, to someone, never intending that…I didn’t even mean it that way, but she…”
When I nodded, the Fool smiled. Then Lord Golden patted his lips with his napkin.
I snarled at him, and he smiled sweetly in return.
There. It was over. He had atoned for his gaffe of the night before, and now all would return to what it had been. I could have told him that is never so.
I felt an irrational urge to strike him, to wipe that expression from his face. It was as if he stood within a burning barn and rejoiced at the heat, unmindful of the peril to himself and Svanja.
Perhaps the gods punish us by bringing us face to face with our own foolish mistakes, condemning us to watch our children fall into the same traps that crippled us.
I think I grasped then, fleetingly, the passion that powered the Fool. He believed in the terrible strength of the White Prophet and the Catalyst, to shoulder the future from the rut of the present and into some better pathway. He believed that some act of ours could somehow prevent others from repeating the mistakes of the past.
His cool cheek was pressed against mine as we stared side by side through the narrow slit. He rested a hand on my shoulder to steady himself, but I could feel the tension of his suppressed excitement. Obviously, this meeting had a deeper significance to him. Later, I would ask him who the others were. For now, I was engrossed with the scene before me. I only wished I could see the Queen, Chade, and Prince Dutiful as I watched this encounter unfold.
“Fool. Do you ever long to go back in your life and do something differently?” He took his seat but did not touch the glass. “All men do. It’s a foolish game we play. What troubles you, Fitz?” And I told him, pouring out my heart as if I were a child, giving him all my fears and disappointments to sort, as if somehow he could make sense of them for me. “I look back, Fool, and sometimes it seems that the times when I was most certain I was doing the right thing was when I made my gravest errors. Hunting down Justin and Serene and killing them before the assembled dukes after they had
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I wasn’t weeping. This was pain past weeping. The only thing new about this was admitting it aloud, to myself. “I brought it all down on myself. It was all my own doing.” He leaned across the table to set his long cool hand atop mine. “It’s a foolish game, Fitz,” he said softly. “And you attribute too much power to yourself, and too little to the sweep of events.
“Long, long ago, we argued this. Remember? I said that at one time there had to have been dragons of flesh and bone, to inspire Skill coteries to create dragons of stone and memory.”
As he spoke, I could almost see it. Perhaps my dreams had primed me to it. How often in my sleep had I imagined what it would be to be a dragon as Verity had become, to fly the skies, to hunt and to feed? Something in his words reached those dreams, and they suddenly seemed true memories of my own rather than the imaginings of sleep.
“Is this how you always have made these crucial decisions? By how you ‘feel’?” My tone was sharper than I intended, but he did not flinch. Instead he regarded me levelly and asked, “And how else would I do it?”
Amber’s voice, I surmised. Yet another façade for the person I thought I knew.
“It is difficult for me,” the Fool replied in Amber’s voice. “It is not so difficult for him, because he knows little of it. There. Fool that I am and have been, truly, to have ever let that secret have breath to anyone, let alone shape. Such a monstrous vanity on my part.” “Monstrous? Immense! You carved a ship’s figurehead in his likeness, and hoped no one would ever guess what he meant to you? Ah, my friend. You manage everyone’s lives and secrets so well and then when it comes to your own…Well. And he doesn’t even know that you love him?” “I think he chooses not to. Perhaps he
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“My dear Jek, you’ve seen him. No one could spoil his face. Not for me.” A pretty little sigh.
This “Amber” took a woman’s delight in such tidings.
Amber bore no resemblance to Lord Golden or the Fool. The change was that complete. And that was the second thing that scalded me that evening. Not just that he had spoken of me to strangers, in such detail that Jek could recognize me and believe I was his lover, but that there still remained a life or lives of his that I had no knowledge about. Strange, how being left out of a secret always feels like a betrayal of trust.
I sat alone by the light of my candle and wondered who, in truth, the Fool was.
And like cooling tar, my feelings for the Fool hardened as they grew colder. The injury grew in me as I thought about it. He had excluded me. The heart knows but one reaction to that. I would now exclude him. I stood and then walked to the door of my room.
There are few things so tender as a man’s dignity. The affront I felt was a thing both painful and angry, a weight that grew in my chest as I climbed the stairs. I fingered all my grievances, numbering them to myself.
How dared he put me in this position?
There had been Prince Dutiful’s question. And suddenly my confrontation with the guardsmen in the steams took on a new connotation.
To discover that the truest friend I had ever had was actually a stranger was like a knife in my heart. He was another abandonment, a missed step in the dark, and a false promise of warmth and companionship. I shook my head to myself. “Idiot,” I said quietly. “You are alone. Best get used to it.” But without thinking, I reached toward where there had once been comfort.
I blinked, denying the stinging boy’s tears that clung to my eyelashes. Alone. It always came back to alone. It was like a contagion that had clung to me since my mother had lacked the courage to defy her father and keep me, and since my father had abandoned his crown and holdings rather than own up to me.
“And why is that, I ask myself? Why does ‘Tom Badgerlock’ dispose of me so easily? Because perhaps I never mattered at all to you, save for one thing. One convenient little thing that I brought right to your door for you, one thing that I thought we shared in friendship and fondness and, yes, even love. But you decided you don’t want that from me anymore, so you throw all of me aside. You make that the whole of what we shared, and discard me with it. And why? I confess, I’ve given much more thought to it than I should. And I think I’ve found the answer. Is it because you’ve found another place
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Whose face did you see, all those times when you closed your eyes?” “Molly’s, you stupid bitch. Always Molly’s.”
But my festering anger had finally found a target this evening.
“And no doubt you mouth her name into your pillow as your Lord Golden mounts you. Oh, yes, that I can imagine well. You’re pathetic, Fitz. Pathetic.”
Why had the Fool done this to me? Why? I resumed my trudge down the road.
