Fool's Quest

“Sharpening your knife is never a waste of time. You’ve finally learned that. Not an apprentice any longer, nor even a journeyman. This makes you a master.”

“Thank you,” I said quietly and was surprised at the heart I took from his words. “I’ll have to go part of the way by the pillars, and from there I’ll have to travel overland, and then take a ship. It will be a very long journey.”

He nodded. His hand still rested on my head. “My son wants to go with you,” he said quietly.

“Lant?”

“Yes. He has spoken of it to me often, when he thought he was talking to my empty shell. He wants to go. And I want him to as well. Take him with you. Let him prove himself to himself and bring him back to me a man.”

“Chade, I can’t. He’s not …”

“He’s not like us. He lacks our capacity for hate. Or vengeance. He was appalled at what befell his so-called stepmother, but it had to be done. I know that, but he can’t see it. He would have gone to her and promised that he would make no claim on Vigilant’s estates. He believed he could calm her.” Chade shook his head. “He doesn’t recognize evil, even when it’s delivered a rib-cracking beating to him. He’s a good man, Fitz. Probably better than either of us. But he doesn’t feel as if he’s a man. Take him with you.”

“I don’t understand why he’d want to go.”

Chade gave a huff of laughter. “You are as close as he has to an elder brother. And who was my boy before he was? The tales I told of that nameless boy fired him with rivalry and with a desire to be like him. And be liked by him. In his early training, I made you the rival for my regard that he could never best. The one he determined he would equal. He longed to step up, to be in our company. Then he met you, and he failed. And failed again, and again. Fitz. I cannot give him what he seeks. I know you mean to go alone. That would be a mistake. Trust me in this, and take Lant. Until he wins your regard, he has none for himself. So take him. Let my son prove himself a man to you and to himself. Let both of you set aside all rivalry and jealousy.”

Jealousy? I felt no jealousy of that pup! But it was easier not to dispute that with Chade. I did not want to take Lant and I knew I could not take him, but I didn’t say no to Chade. For this moment, he was my old mentor as he had always been. I wanted no quarrel with him, not when I feared it might be my last conversation with him. I shifted our focus. “Have you been feigning illness all this time?”

“No. Only sometimes. It suits me to seem weak. Fitz, I don’t trust Rosemary. She has convinced Dutiful that he does not need assassins such as you and me. She’s been letting all my nets unravel. All my informants have gone unpaid, and unable to report to me. Everything I built, all those years. It’s falling apart.”

“Chade, I still have to go. I cannot stay here and take up your webs.”

“Heh!” He laughed and I looked up to see him smiling fondly at me. “As if you could. As if anyone could. No, Fitz. I’m failing and I know it. And no one will come after me. The time for such as me is past. No, I do not ask that you stay and take up my work. Go and do what you must.”

“Chade. Why do you pretend to be feeble, with a wandering mind?”

He laughed again. “Oh, Fitz. Because I am. Not every day and every hour. Sometimes I feel I am as sharp as ever. And then I cannot find my slippers, and I look and look, to find they were on my feet all that time.” He shook his head at himself. “Better that people think I am wandering all the time than know the truth. I don’t want Rosemary to see me as a threat to her assumption of power.”

I was incredulous. “Do you fear her?”

“Stop. I can already hear you thinking of how you will kill her for me. A slow poison, a fall down the steps. No one the wiser and the old man kept safe.”

He was right. It made me smile, and then I tried to feel ashamed of that. I couldn’t. He was right about me.

“So let her have it, my den and my bed, my tools and even my writings. She won’t find the key ones. No one will. Except perhaps you. When you come back.” He took a deep breath and sighed it out again. “I have another task now. Shine. There is so much time to make up for. They thought to punish me by killing her or marrying her off to some cloddish brute, but what they did was worse. She is vapid, Fitz. And vain. Ignorant. But she need not be. There is a bright mind there, turned to all the wrong things. Kettricken teaches her now and I do not despise what she teaches my daughter. But for all her years, Kettricken is still naïve in some ways. She still believes that honesty and good will triumph in the end. So I must be here, for my Shine, to teach her that a little knife in her boot or a well-planned bolt-hole may be the key to a long life.