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took a sip of it and tried to remember why I had walked down to Buckkeep Town. I decided it had simply been the need to be moving. But now I was sitting still. Stupid.
If love doesn’t come first and linger after, if love can’t wait and endure disappointment and separation, then it’s not love. Love doesn’t require bedding to make it true. It doesn’t even demand day-to-day contact. I know this because I have known love, many kinds of love, and amongst them, I’ve known what I felt for you.”
This arguing with him was as useless as all the words Burrich and Patience had spent on me. He’d go his own way, make his own mistakes, and maybe, when he was my age, learn his own lessons from them. Wasn’t that what I had done? “I’ll still finish paying for your apprenticeship,” I said quietly.
“Tom, I hate this. I’m trying hard, and I’m doing and saying all the wrong things. Svanja’s parents are angry with her all the time, and when she complained to me about it and I said perhaps I should meet them and promise to go more slowly, she got angry at me. And she’s mad at me for living at Gindast’s and having to stay in most nights.
But I can’t let you walk away and think I’ve forgotten everything you taught me. I haven’t. But I have to find my own life here, and sometimes the things you taught me just don’t seem to fit with how everyone else thinks. Sometimes the things you taught me don’t seem to work here. But I’m trying, Tom. I’m trying.”
“I love you, Tom. I’ll keep trying.” I sighed in relief. “Me, too. I love you, and I’ll keep trying. Hurry, now. You’re long-legged and swift. Perhaps you won’t be late if you run.”
“I had a conversation with Hap today. I told him that loving someone and bedding someone were two different things.” Lord Golden blinked slowly. Then he asked, “And did he believe you?” I took a breath. “I don’t think he completely understood me. But in time, I expect he will.” “Many things take time,”
There might come a time when “Don’t see him, don’t see him” would keep a rope away from his neck.
Yet I had heard more than one Farseer say it: the weapon you discard today can be used against you tomorrow.
Had I said I was not an assassin, would never be one again? I wondered if I had been a liar or an idiot to voice such words.
The brief interlude with him this morning had made me more aware than ever of how much I missed him. It cut me deeply that he would be himself to humor Chade, but not me. If, I reminded myself sourly, the Fool was indeed who he truly was.
Neither the Fool nor Lord Golden was there.
Chade had somehow discovered that I had left the castle and had sent Starling to intercept me and deflect me from Laudwine. Providing me with the opportunity to apologize to the ruffled minstrel was likely a part of his plan. How that old man loved pulling the strings!
“Answer me!” No lies left, no truth left. I looked up at the sergeant and tried to speak. Then I was slipping, sliding away from them all into the dark. Keep watch, Nighteyes, I begged him, but there was no answer and no wolf stood over me.
“Fitz, do you hear me? Do you hear me, boy? I’m not going to let you die, so you might as well cooperate. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and fight to live.”
I suddenly thought of all the persons to whom I hadn’t bid farewell. Hap. Kettricken. Burrich and Molly. I’d always meant to make everything right with everyone before I died. “Patience, Mother,” I said, but no one heard me. Perhaps I didn’t even speak the words aloud.
Then I felt the Fool’s touch on my back. If Dutiful’s hands had been cold to my fevered skin, then the Fool’s fingers were as icicles. Their jabbing ice probed me. All eternity paused in anticipation of that dreaded, desired touch.
It was neither pain nor pleasure; it was connection, pure and simple,
The Fool fell silent, but I felt how he struggled within that silence. Then he spoke in a voice full of despair. “We have failed him. He’s dying.” “No, oh no. Not my boy, not my Fitz. Please, no.” Light as leaves, the old man’s hands settled on me. I knew how terribly he desired to make me right. Then his hands seemed to sink into me and the heat of his touch burned like liquor running through my veins.
They let me go. I raced on without them. I couldn’t stop now. As a flash flood cuts down a ravine, clearing all debris along with the live trees that it tears up from the banks, so I raced.
I stared up at what I had wrought merely by virtue of nearly dying, and my courage left me. Catalyst indeed.
She stood fluidly. It only took two steps to cross my tiny room. She blew out all the candles save one, and she took that one from the holder. I became aware that my queen was in a nightrobe and wrapper. Her hair hung in a thick gold braid down her back. “It’s night,” I said stupidly. “Yes. Very late at night. Go to sleep now, Fitz.” “What are you doing here so late at night?” “Watching you sleep.”
“If I lost you,” she said unwillingly, “I would lose the only one who knows the whole of my story. The only one who looks at me and knows all I went through with my king.”
“I expected to die down there. Alone.” And my discordant memories of my jail cell rushed back to fill me. I recalled both my terror and my despair, and felt anger that I had to bear those memories. They had left me there. Chade, the Fool, Kettricken, Dutiful—all of them.
He moved swiftly, like a child hurrying out of the room to escape a scolding. Or a man fleeing a truth he did not want to hear.
“Have you ever suddenly realized that there was someone you loved, but presently did not like very much?” “Strange you should ask me that,” the Fool observed dryly from close behind me. Then I heard him walk away.
I wanted him to show some sign of wishing to make things right between us. But he did not. So two slow days of misery trickled past.
I spoke to him as if he were the Fool. I didn’t expect a reply and I didn’t get one.
“The reticence and secrecy. Does it become a habit? I swear, Chade, I don’t know why…Damn this. Yes. The Fool and I have a Skill bond. Thin but there, a remnant from when he first got the Skill on his fingers when he touched Verity and then me. And when he used it to pull me back to my body, it grew stronger. I suspect that if I considered it, I would find it stronger still since this healing.
“You contradict yourself. You are a danger that will protect me? I do not need you, yet you will come to me when I need you? You make no sense!”
“I thought you would die and I’d never get the chance to tell you I was s-s-sorry. For how I behaved. I knew you’d nearly given up on me, in that you hardly spoke to me or came to see me anymore. And then you were hurt, and I could not get to you in that jail.
“I feel such a fool,” he admitted after a time. “And the worst part is, I’d take her back in a breath if she came to me. Faithless as I know she is, first to him and now to me, I’d still take her back. Even if I had to wonder ever after if I could hold her.” After a time, he asked quietly, “Is this how you felt when I told you Starling was married?”
“I thought I would die from it,” he declared passionately.
“A sour comfort. Tom. Is there any such thing as a true woman?” He asked this so wearily that it twisted my heart to see him so soon disillusioned. “Yes, there is,” I asserted. “And you are young yet, with as good a chance as any of finding one.”
For an instant I wanted to seize him and shake him, to demand that he be the Fool again for me. Then the fury was gone and in its wake I stood trembling and sick. I felt then that I’d killed the Fool somehow, that I had destroyed him when I had demanded answers to the questions that had always floated unasked between us.
Explanations had seldom worked between us. Trust had. But I had broken that, like a child who takes something apart to see how it works and ends up with a handful of pieces. Perhaps he could not be the Fool again, any more than I could go back to being Burrich’s stable boy. Perhaps our relationship had changed too profoundly for us to relate as Fitz and the Fool. Perhaps Tom Badgerlock and Lord Golden were all that was left to us.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I know what you want. I know about boys! I had a son of my own, once.’ She meant you,” he added heavily in case the inference had escaped me.
Thus I trembled and my throat closed and I could not think what to do when a secret so well and truly kept was suddenly spoken aloud.
“Your father was a far better man than I am,” I told him.
Buckkeep Castle was stuffed full of secrets, and half of them were not secrets at all. They were only the things we dared not ask one another for fear the answers would be unbearably painful. I had never asked Patience to tell me about my father; never asked her or Verity what Chivalry had thought of me.
“How do I thank you for that?” “You don’t need to. You are my prince.” His face grew very still. Kettricken lurked in his eyes as he said, “I don’t much like that. It seems to make us more distant. I would that you and I were only cousins.”
How strange to be loved simply for who I was.
My sickness has taken a grave toll on my appearance.” “It has, I must agree. But to dye your hair as a remedy…well. Men.
Cold isn’t so bad. Cold can only kill you if you stand still. Just keep moving. Good advice, cat. Good advice. Good-bye, Fennel.
Even Chade saw me differently. I could not force Lord Golden to revert to being the Fool. Perhaps he could not, even if he had wished to. Was it so different for me? I was as much Tom Badgerlock as FitzChivalry Farseer now. Time to let it go.
“A White Prophet finds his Catalyst. The one on whom great events may turn. And he uses him, ruthlessly, to turn time out of his track. Once more my tracks will converge with hers. And we will set our wills against one another, to see who prevails.”
This last time…This last time was too much. I don’t want to be the White Prophet anymore. I don’t want you to be my Catalyst.” His voice had degraded to a cracked whisper. “But there isn’t any way to stop. The only thing that stops this is if you die.”
He gave me a loose-lipped smile. “I can’t go through another one of your deaths. I can’t.” “You can’t?” He gave a giggle of despair. “You see. We’re trapped. I’ve trapped you, my friend. My beloved.”
“But what if I do live? What if we win? What then?” He parted the bottle’s mouth from his. “What then? Ah.” He smiled beatifically. “Then the world goes on, my friend. Children run down muddy streets. Dogs bark at passing carts. Friends sit and drink brandy together.” “Doesn’t sound much different from what we have,” I observed sourly. “To go through all this and make no difference at all.” “Yes.” He agreed beatifically. His eyes filled with tears. “Not much different from the wondrous and amazing world that we have now. Boys falling in love with girls that aren’t right for them. Wolves
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The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons.
