Fool's Quest

I lit a second candle from the first one and set them in the holders on the table.

“You don’t know what to say,” he observed.

“I don’t,” I admitted. I tried to set my own fears aside to deal with his. “I know you are safe here. But I also know that no matter how often I say that, it won’t change how you feel. Fool, what can I do? What would make you feel better?”

He turned his face away from me. After a long moment, he said, “You should read your message. The boy blurted out it was important before he ran away.”

I picked up the small scroll on the table. Chade’s spy-seal was on it. I broke the wax free and unrolled it.

“Fitz. Do I look that frightful? When I sat up in my chair and screamed, the boy screamed, too. As if he’d seen a corpse rise from the grave and shriek at him.”

I set the scroll aside. “You look like a very ill man who was deliberately starved and tortured. And your color is … odd. Not tawny, as you were in the days of Lord Golden, nor white as you were when you were King Shrewd’s jester. You are gray. It’s not a color one would expect a living man to be.”

He was silent for so long that I turned my eyes back to the scroll. There was to be another festive gathering tonight, the final one of the Winterfest before our nobility once more dispersed to their own duchies. Queen Elliania urged everyone to attend and asked everyone to wear their best to celebrate turning toward the growing light. Chade suggested that perhaps Lord Feldspar should make a trip to town and purchase some finery for the occasion. He suggested a tailor’s shop, and by that I knew that the garments would have been ordered and rushed to be prepared for me.

“You’re an honest man, Fitz.” The Fool’s voice was dull.

I sighed. Had I been too honest? “What good would it serve for me to lie to you? Fool, you look terrible. It breaks my heart to see you this way. The only thing I can offer myself or you is that as you eat and rest and grow stronger, your health will improve. When you are stronger, I hope to use the Skill to urge your body to repair itself. That is the only comfort either of us has. But it will take time. And demand our patience. Haste will not serve us.”

“I don’t have time, Fitz. Rather, I do. I have time to get better or time to die. But somewhere, I am sure, there is a son who needs to be rescued before the Servants of the Whites find him. With every day, with every hour, I fear they have already secured him. And with every day and every hour, I am mindful of the continued captivity of a hundred souls in a faraway place. It may seem it has little to do with us and Buckkeep and the Six Duchies, but it does. The Servants use them with no more thought than we give to penning up a chicken or wringing a rabbit’s neck. They breed them for their insights into the future, and they use those insights to make themselves omniscient. It bothers them not at all when a baby is born who will never walk or can barely see. As long as they are pale and have prescient dreams, that is all they care about. The power of the Servants reaches even to here, twisting and turning events, bending time and the world to their will. They have to be stopped, Fitz. We have to go back to Clerres and kill them. It must be done.”

I said what I knew was true. “One thing at a time, my friend. We can only attempt one thing at a time.”

He stared sightlessly at me as if I had said the cruelest thing in the world to him. Then his lower jaw trembled, and he dropped his face into his broken hands and began to sob.

I felt sharp annoyance and then deep guilt that I’d felt it. He was in agony. I knew it. How could I feel annoyed at him when I knew exactly what he was experiencing? Hadn’t I felt that way myself? Had I forgotten the times when my experiences in Regal’s dungeons had washed over me like a wave, obliterating whatever was good and safe in my life and carrying me right back into that chaos and pain?

No. I tried to forget that, and in the last decade of years, for the most part I had. And my annoyance with the Fool was not annoyance but extreme uneasiness. “Please. Don’t make me remember that.”

I realized I’d said the betraying words out loud. His only response was to cry louder, in the hopeless way of a child who has no hope of comforting himself. This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.

“Tears can’t undo it,” I said and wondered why I uttered the useless words. I both wanted to hold him and feared to. Feared that it would alarm him to be touched and feared even more that it would draw me tighter into his misery and wake my own. But at last I took the three steps that carried me around the table. “Fool. You are safe here. I know you can’t believe it just yet, but it’s over. And you are safe.” I stroked the broken hair on his head, rough as the coat of a sick dog, and then pulled him closer to cradle his head against my sternum. His clawlike hands came up and clutched my wrist, and he held himself tighter against me. I let him have his tears. They were the only things I could give him then. I thought of what I had wanted to tell him, that I had to leave him for a few days to get Bee.