And then the obvious fell into place and I thought myself a great dunce. Jofron. Why had he written to her? Why had he warned her to guard her son? Perhaps because he was their son? I reorganized my memories of Jofron and the Fool. Close to thirty-five years ago, when the Fool found me dying in the Mountains, he had taken me to his little home. He’d had a little Mountain house that he shared with Jofron. He had moved her out when he took me in. And when he had left to go with me on my quest, he had left everything he owned there for her. I thought of how she had reacted to me the last time we met. Could I interpret her ways toward me as the reaction of a lover who had been spurned for a friend? She had seemed to enjoy showing me that he had written to her while sending me no word.
I reached back to those feverish days, remembering her voice, the adoring way she spoke of her White Prophet. I had deemed it a sort of religious fervor. Perhaps it had been a different passion. But if she had borne him a child, surely he would have known for a certainty. He had sent her messages. Had she ever replied to them? If he’d left a child there, the boy would be a year younger than Nettle. Surely not a child that needed my protection? And the grandson who had been there had looked nothing like the Fool. Surely if he were the Fool’s grandson, his White heritage would have shown somewhere. The Fool’s grandson. For a long moment, those words seemed impossible to fit together.
I pondered it as the flames ate her bones. The messenger’s words made little sense. If the Fool had fathered a child the last time he’d been in Buckkeep, his son would be a young man, not a little boy. It didn’t make sense. The messenger had called him a boy. I recalled how slowly the Fool had grown, how he had claimed to be decades older than I was. There was so much I didn’t know. But if it was the way of his kind to age slowly, perhaps the son he had left behind still appeared to be a child? Then it could not be Jofron’s son, who had fathered a boy of his own. Had he sent her a warning because he feared the hunters would pursue any child who might remotely be the Fool’s son? My mind ran in circles, trying to build a tower with too few blocks. Surely, if it was Jofron’s son, he could have told me, with dozens of clues that only I would recognize. Call him the Toymaker’s son, and I’d know him. But surely that was true of any son? The gardener’s boy, the huntswoman’s child … we’d known each other so well. Any child he’d left, surely he could have identified to me. If the Fool knew for sure where the child was … Was he sending me on a wild goose chase to find a child reputed to exist on the basis of some obscure White prophecies? He wouldn’t do that to me. No. Almost certainly he would. Because he could believe that I could find such a child. Was it even the Fool’s son? I sifted the messenger’s meager words again. An unexpected son. Once, he had told me, those words referred to me. And now? Was there another “unexpected son” somewhere? Could I be certain this boy was the Fool’s son? Her knowledge of my language had been less than perfect …
“Papa?” Bee’s voice was shaking, and when I turned to her, I saw that she had wrapped her arms around herself and was shivering with cold. “Have we finished?” Her nose was red at the tip.
I looked at our fire. The last load of branches I had put on it collapsed suddenly. How much would be left of the girl? The skull, the heavier thighbones, the column of spine. I stepped forward to peer into the heart of the fire. They were covered with ember and ash. Tomorrow I’d bring the bedding from the nurse’s bed in the room adjacent to Bee’s and burn it here. Tonight, it was enough. I hoped. I looked around us. There was a moon, but layers of clouds veiled it. An icy mist hung over the low and boggy pasturelands. What moonlight reached the ground there was claimed by the fog.
“Let’s go back in.”
I held out a hand to her. She looked at it, and then reached up to put her small fingers in mine. They were cold. Impulsively I scooped her up. She pushed against me. “I’m nine. Not three.”
I released her and she slid to the ground. “I know that,” I said apologetically. “You just looked so cold.”
“I am cold. Let’s get back inside.”