The Tawny Man 1 - Fools Errand
Chapter IX
DEAD MAN'S REGRETS
The Skill is often said to be the hereditary magic of the Farseer line, and certainly it seems to flow most predictably in those bloodlines. It is not unknown, however, for the Skill to crop up as a latent talent almost anywhere in the Six Duchies. In earlier reigns, it was customary for the Skillmaster who served the Farseer monarch at Buckkeep to regularly seek out youngsters who showed potential for the Skill. They were brought to Buckkeep, instructed in the Skill if they showed strong talent, and encouraged to form coteries: mutually chosen groups of six that aided the reigning monarch as required. Although there is a great dearth of information on these coteries, almost as if scrolls relating to them were deliberately destroyed, oral tradition indicates that there were seldom more than two or three coteries in existence at any time, and that strong Skillusers have always been rare. The procedure Skillmasters used for locating children with latent talent is lost to time. King Bounty, father to King Shrewd, discontinued the practice of building coteries, perhaps believing that restricting knowledge of the Skill to the exclusive use of princes and princesses would increase the power of those who did possess it. Thus it was that when war came to the shores of the Six Duchies in the reign of King Shrewd, there were no Skill coteries to aid the Farseer reign in the defense of the kingdom.
I awoke in the night with a jolt. Malta. I had left the Fool's mare picketed out on the hillside. The pony would come in, and likely had even put herself within the barn, but I had left the horse out there, all day, with no water.
There was only one thing to do about it. I arose silently and left the cabin, not closing the door behind me lest the shut of it awaken the Fool. Even the wolf I left sleeping as I walked out into the dark alone. I stopped briefly at the barn. As I suspected, the pony had come in. I touched her gently with my Witsense. She was sleeping and I left her where she was.
I climbed the hill to where I had picketed the horse, glad that I was not walking in the true dark of a winter night. The stars and the full moon seemed very close. Even so, my familiarity with my path guided me more than my eyes. As I came up on Malta, the horse gave a rebuking snort. I untied her picket line and led her down the hill. When the stream cut our path on its way to the sea, I stopped and let her drink.
It was a beautiful summer night. The air was mild. The chirring of night insects filled the air, accompanied by the sound of the horse sucking water. I let my gaze wander, filling myself with the night. Dark stole the colors of the grass and trees, but somehow their stark shades of black and gray made the landscape seem more intricate. The moisture in the cooler air awoke all the summer scents that had dozed by day. I opened my mouth and drew in a deep breath, tasting the night more fully. I gave myself up to my senses, letting go of my human cares, taking this moment of now and letting it stretch eternally around me. My Wit unfurled around me and I became one with the night splendor.
There is a natural euphoria to the Wit. It is both like and unlike the Skill. With the Wit, one is aware of all the life that surrounds one. It was not just the warmth of the mare nearby that I sensed. I knew the scintillant forms of the myriad insects that populated the grasses, and felt even the shadowy life force of the great oak that lifted its limbs between the moon and me. Just up the hillside, a rabbit crouched motionless in the summer grasses. I felt its indistinct presence, not as a piece of life located in a certain place, but as one sometimes hears a single voice's note within a market's roar. But above all, I felt a physical kinship with all that lived in the world. I had a right to be here. I was as much a part of this summer night as the insects or the water purling past my feet. I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world, no more, but certainly no less than the rabbit.
That Tightness of unity washed through me, laving away the nastiness of the Skill greed that had earlier befouled my soul. I took a deeper breath, and then breathed it out as if it were my last, willing myself to be part of this good, clean night.
My vision wavered, doubled, and then cleared. For a pent breath of time, I was not myself, was not on the summer hillside near my cabin, and I was not alone.
I was a boy again, escaped from confining stone walls and tangling bedclothes. I ran lightshod through a sheep pasture dotted with tufts of ungrazed weeds, trying vainly to keep up with my companion. She was as beautiful as the stardotted night, her tawny coat spangled with darkness. She moved as unobtrusively as night herself did. I followed her, not with human eyes, but with the Witbond that joined us. I was drunk with love of her and love of this night, intoxicated with the heady rush of this wild freedom. I knew I had to go back before the sun rose. She knew, just as strongly, that we did not, that there was no better time than now to make our escape.
And in my next breath, that knowing was gone. The night still bloomed and beckoned around me, but I was a grown man, not a boy lost in the wonder of his first Witbond. I did not know who my senses had brushed, or where they were, nor why we had meshed our awarenesses so completely. I wondered if he had been as cognizant of me as I was of him. It did not matter. Wherever they were, whoever they were, I wished them well in their night's hunting. I hoped their bond would last long and be deep as their bones.
I felt a questioning tug at the lead rope. Malta had quenched her thirst and had no wish to stand still while the insects feasted on her. I became aware that my own warm body had attracted a swarm of little bloodsuckers as well. She swished her tail and I waved my hand about my head before we set off down the hill once more. I stabled her, and slipped softly back into the cabin, to seek out my own bed for the rest of the night. Nighteyes had stretched out, leaving me less than half the bed, but I did not mind. I stretched out beside him, and set my hand lightly on his ribs. The beating of his heart and the movement of his breath were more soothing than any lullaby. As I closed my eyes, I felt more at peace than I had in weeks.
I awoke easily and early the next morning. My interlude on the hillside seemed to have rested me more than sleep. The wolf had not fared so well. He still slept heavily, a healing sleep. I felt a twinge of conscience over that, but pushed it aside. Whatever I had done to his heart seemed to tax the resources of the rest of his body, but surely that was better than letting him die. I surrendered the bed to him and left him sleeping.
The Fool was not about, but the door was left standing open, a fair indication that he had gone out. I set a small fire, put on the kettle, and then took some time with washing up and shaving. I had just smoothed my hair back behind my ears when I heard the Fool's footsteps on the porch. He entered with a basket of eggs on his arm. When I looked up from drying my face, he stopped in his tracks. A wide grin spread slowly over his face.
“Why, it's Fitz! A bit older, a bit more worn, but Fitz all the same. I had wondered what you looked like under that thatch.”
I glanced back into the mirror. “I suppose I don't take much pains with my appearance anymore.” I grimaced at myself, then dabbed at a spot of blood. As usual, I had nicked myself where the old scar from my time in Buckkeep's dungeons seamed my face. Thank you, Regal. “Starling told me that I look far older than my years. That I could return to Buckkeep Town and never fear that anyone would recognize me.”
The Fool made a small sound of disgust as he set the eggs on the table. “Starling is, as usual, wrong on both counts. For the number of years and lives you have lived, you look remarkably young. It's true that experience and time have changed your features; folk recalling the boy Fitz would not see him grown to a man in you. Yet, some of us, my friend, would recognize you even if you were flayed and set afire.”
“Now there's a comforting thought.” I set the mirror down and turned to the task of making breakfast. “Your color has changed,” I observed a moment later as I broke eggs into a bowl. “But you yourself don't look a day older than the last time I saw you.”
The Fool was filling the teapot with steaming water. “It's the way of my kind,” he said quietly. “Our lives are longer, so we progress through them more slowly. I've changed, Fitz, even if all you see is the color of my flesh. When last you saw me, I was just approaching adulthood. All sorts of new feelings and ideas were blossoming in me, so many that I scarce could keep my mind on the tasks at hand. When I recall how I behaved, well, even I am scandalized. Now, I assure you, I am far more mature. I know that there is a time and place for everything, and that what I am destined to do must take full precedent over anything I might long to do for myself.”
I poured the beaten eggs into a pan and set them at the fire's edge. I spoke slowly. “When you speak in riddles, it exasperates me. Yet when you try to speak clearly of yourself, it frightens me.”
“All the more reason why I should not speak of myself at all,” he exclaimed with false heartiness. “Now. What be our tasks for the day?”
I thought it out as I stirred the setting eggs and pushed them closer to the fire. “I don't know,” I said quietly.
He looked startled at the sudden change in my voice. “Fitz? Are you all right?”
I myself could not explain the sudden lurch in my spirits. “Suddenly, it all seems so pointless. When I knew Hap was going to be here for the winter, I always took care to provide for us both. My garden was a quarter that size when the boy first came to me, and Nighteyes and I hunted day to day for our meat. If we did not hunt well and went empty for a day or so, it did not seem of much consequence. Now, I look at all I have already set by and think, If the boy is not here, if Hap is wintering with a master while he starts to learn his trade, why, then, I already have plenty for both Nighteyes and me. Sometimes it seems that there's no point to it. And then I wonder if there's any point left to my life at all.”
A frown divided the Fool's brows. “How melancholy you sound. Or is this the elfbark I'm hearing?”
“No.” I took up the shirred eggs and brought them to the table. It was almost a relief to speak the thoughts I'd been denying. “I think it was why Starling brought Hap to me. I think she saw how aimless my life had become, and brought me someone to give shape to my days.”
The Fool set down plates with a clatter, and dished food onto them in disgusted splats. “I think you give her credit for thinking of something beyond her own needs. I suspect she picked up the boy on an impulse, and dumped him here when she wearied of him. It was just lucky for both of you that you helped each other.”
I said nothing. His vehemence in his dislike for Starling surprised me. I sat down at the table and began eating. But he had not finished.
“If Starling meant for anyone to give shape to your days, it was herself. I doubt that she ever imagined you might need anyone's companionship other than hers.”
I had an uncomfortable suspicion he was right, especially when I recalled how she had spoken of Nighteyes and Hap on her last visit.
"Well. What she thought or didn't think scarcely matters now. One way or another, I'm determined to see Hap apprenticed well. But once I do
“Once you do, you'll be free to take up your own life again. I've a feeling it will call you back to Buckkeep.”
“You've 'a feeling'?” I asked him dryly. “Is this a Fool's feeling, or a White Prophet's feeling?”
“As you never seemed to give credence to any of my prophecies, why should you care?” He smiled archly at me and began eating his eggs.
“A time or three, it did seem as if what you predicted came true. Though .your predictions were always so nebulous, it seemed to me that you could make them mean anything.”
He swallowed. “It was not my prophecies that were nebulous, but your understanding of them. When I arrived, I warned you that I had come back into your life because I must, not because I wanted to. Not that I didn't want to see you again. I mean only that if I could spare you somehow from all we must do, I would.”
“And what is it, exactly, that we must do?”
“Exactly?” he queried with a raised eyebrow.
“Exactly. And precisely,” I challenged him.
“Oh, very well, then. Exactly and precisely what we must do. We must save the world, you and I. Again.” He leaned back, tipping his chair onto its back legs. His pale brows shot toward his hairline as he widened his eyes at me.
I lowered my brow into my hands. But he was grinning like a maniac and I could not contain my own smile. “Again? I don't recall that we did it the first time.”
“Of course we did. You're alive, aren't you? And there is an heir to the Farseer throne. Hence, we changed the course of all time. In the rutted path of fate, you were a rock, my dear Fitz. And you have shifted the grinding wheel out of its rut and into a new track. Now, of course, we must see that it remains there. That may be the most difficult part of all.” -ai, “And what, exactly and precisely, must we do to ensure that?” I knew his words were bait for mockery, but as ever, I could not resist the question.
“It's quite simple.” He ate a bite of eggs, enjoying my suspense. “Very simple, really.” He pushed the eggs around on his plate, scooped up a bite, then set his spoon down. He looked up at me, and his smile faded. When he spoke, his voice was solemn. “ must see that you survive. Again. And you must see that the Farseer heir inherits the throne.”
“And the thought of my survival makes you sad?” I demanded in perplexity.
“Oh, no. Never that. The thought of what you must go through to survive fills me with foreboding.”
I pushed my plate away, my appetite fled. “I still don't understand you,” I replied irritably.
“Yes you do,” he contradicted me implacably. “I suppose you say you don't because it is easier that way, for both of us. But this time, my friend, I will lay it cold before you. Think back on the last time we were together. Were there not times when death would have been easier and less painful than life?”
His words were shards of ice in my belly, but I am nothing if not stubborn. “Well. And when is that ever not true?” I demanded of him.
There have been very few times in my life when I have been able to shock the Fool into silence. That was one of them. He stared at me, his strange eyes getting wider and wider. Then a grin broke over his face. He stood so suddenly he nearly overset his chair, and then lunged at me to seize me in a wild hug. He drew a deep breath as if something that had constricted him had suddenly sprung free. “Of course that is true,” he whispered by my ear. And then, in a shout that near deafened me, “Of course it is!”
Before I could shrug free of his strangling embrace, he sprang apart from me. He cut a caper that made motley of his ordinary clothes, and then sprang lightly to my tabletop. He flung his arms wide as if he once more performed for all of King Shrewd's court rather than an audience of one. “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 right?”
Infectious as his fey mood was, I still managed to shake my head. “I have no idea if you are right or wrong.”
“Then take my word for it. I am right. For am I not the White Prophet? And are not you my Catalyst, who comes to change the course of all time? Look at you. Not the hero, no. The Changer. The one who, by his existence, enables others to be heroes. Ah, Fitz, Fitz, we are who we are and who we ever must be. And when I am discouraged, when I lose heart to the point of saying, 'But why cdnnot I leave him here, to find what peace he may?,' then, lo and behold, you speak with the voice of the Catalyst, and change my perception of all that I do. And enable me to be once more what I must be. The White Prophet.”
I sat looking up at him. Despite my efforts, a smile twisted my mouth. “I thought I enabled other people to be heroes. Not prophets.”
“Ah, well.” He leapt lightly to the floor. “Some of us must be both, I fear.” He gave himself a shake, and tugged his jerkin straight. Some of the wildness went out of him. “So. To return to my original question. What are our tasks today? My turn to give you the answer. Our first task today is to give no thought to the morrow.”
I took his advice, for that day at least. I did things I had not been giving myself permission to do, for they were not the serious tasks that provided against the morrow, but the simple work that brought me pleasure. I worked on my inks, not to take to market and sell for coin, but to try to create a true purple for my own pleasure. It yielded no success that day; all my purples turned to brown as they dried, but it was a work I enjoyed. As for the Fool, he amused himself by carving on my furniture. I glanced up at the sound of my kitchen knife scraping across wood. The movement caught his eye. “Sorry,” he apologized at once. He held the knife up between two fingers to show me, and then carefully set it down. He got up from his chair and wandered over to his saddle pack. After a moment of digging, he tugged out a roll of fine bladed tools. Humming to himself, he went back to the table and set to on the chairs. He went barefingered to his task, tugging off the fine glove that usually masked his Skill hand. As the day progressed, my simple chairs gained leafy vines twining up their backs, and occasional little faces peeping out of the foliage.
When I looked up from my work in midafternoon, I saw him come in with chunks of seasoned wood from my woodpile. I leaned back from my desk to watch him as he turned and considered each one, studying them and tracing their grain with his Skill fingers as if he could read their secrets hidden to my eyes. At length he selected one with a knee in it and started in on it. He hummed to himself as he worked, and I left him to it.
Nighteyes woke once during the day. He clumped down from my bed with a sigh and tottered outside. I offered him food when he returned but he turned his nose up at it. He had drunk deeply, all the water he could hold, and he lay himself down with a sigh on the cool floor of the cabin. He slept again, but not as deeply.
And so I passed that day in pleasure, which is to say, in the sort of work I wanted to do rather than the work that I thought I ought to be doing. Chade came often to my mind that day. I wondered, as I seldom had before, at how the old assassin had passed his long hours and days up in his isolated tower before I had come to be his apprentice. Then I sniffed disdainfully at that image of him. Long before I had arrived, Chade had been the royal assassin, bearing the King's Justice in the form of quiet work wherever it neededto go. The sizable library of scrolls in his apartments and his endless experiments with poisons and deadly artifice were proof that he had known how to occupy his days. And he had had the welfare of the Farseer reign to give him a purpose in life.
Once, I too had shared that purpose. I had shrugged free of it to have a life of my own. Odd, that in the process I had somehow wrenched myself free of the very life I had thought to have to myself. To gain the freedom to enjoy my life, I had severed all connections with that old life. I had lost contact with all who had loved me and all had loved.
That wasn't the complete truth, but it suited my mood. An instant later, I realized I was wallowing in selfpity. My last three attempts at a purple ink were drying to brown, though one did have a very nice shade of rose to the brown. I set aside that scrap of paper, after making notes on it as to how I had gotten the color. It would be good ink for botanical illustrations, I thought.
I unfolded my legs from my chair and rose, stretching. The Fool looked up from his work. “Hungry?” I asked him.
He considered a moment. “ could eat. Let me cook. The food you make fills the stomach but does little more than that.”
He set aside the figurine he was working on. He saw me glance at it, and covered it, almost jealously. “When I'm finished,” he promised, and began a purposeful ransacking of my cupboards. While he was tsking over my lack of any interesting spices, I wandered outside. I crossed the stream, which could have led me gently down to the beach. Idly I walked up the hill, past both horse and pony grazing freely. At the crest of the hill I walked more slowly until I reached my bench. I sat down on it. Only a few steps away, the grassy hill gave way to sudden slate cliffs and the rocky beach below them. Seated on my bench, all I could see was the wide vista of ocean spread out before me. Restlessness walked through my bones again. I thought of my dream of the boy and the hunting cat out in the night and smiled to myself. Run away from it all, the cat had urged the boy, and the thought had all my sympathy.
Yet, years ago, that was what I had done, and this was what it had brought me. A life of peace and selfsufficiency, a life that should have satisfied me; yet, here I sat.
A time later, the Fool joined me. Nighteyes too came at his heels, to lie down at my feet with a martyred sigh. “Is it the Skillhunger?” the Fool asked with quiet sympathy.
“No,” I replied, and almost laughed. The hunger he had unknowingly waked in me yesterday was temporarily crippled by the elfbark I had consumed. I might long to Skill, but right now my mind was numbed to that ability.
“I've put dinner to cook slowly over a little fire, to keep from driving us out of the house. We've plenty of time.” He paused, and then asked carefully, “And after you left the Old Blood folk, where did you go?”
I sighed. The wolf was right. Talking to the Fool did help me to think. But perhaps he made me think too much. I looked back through the years and gathered up the threads of my tale.
“Everywhere. When we left there, we had no destination. So we wandered.” I stared out across the water. “For four years, we wandered, all through the Six Duchies. I've seen Tilth in winter, when snow but a few inches deep blows across the wide plains but the cold seems to go down to the earth's very bones. I crossed all of Farrow to reach Rippon, and then walked on to the coast. Sometimes I took work as a man, and bought bread, and sometimes the two of us hunted as wolves and ate our meat dripping.”
I glanced over at the Fool. He listened, his golden eyes intent on my story. If he judged me, his face gave no sign of it.
“When we reached the coast, we took ship north, although Nighteyes did not enjoy it. I visited Beams Duchy in the depth of one winter.”
“Beams?” He considered that. “Once, you were promised to Lady Celerity of Beams Duchy.” The question was in his face but not his voice.
“That was not of my will, as you recall. I did not go there to seek out Celerity. But I did glimpse Lady Faith, Duchess of Beams, as she rode through the streets on her way to Ripplekeep Castle. She did not see me, and if she had, I am sure she would not have recognized the ragged wanderer as Lord FitzChivalry. I hear that Celerity married rich in both love and lands, and is now the Lady of Ice Towers near Ice Town.”