Golden Fool

“Do Chade and Kettricken know any of what you’ve told me?”

Slowly he shook his head. “At least, not from me. Perhaps Chade has other sources. But I’ve never spoken of this to him.”

“Eda and El, why not? They treat with the Bingtowners blindly, Fool.” A worse thought struck me. “Did you tell any of them about our dragons? Do the Bingtown Traders know the true nature of the Six Duchies dragons?”

Again he shook his head.

“Thank Eda for that. But why haven’t you spoken of these things to Chade? Why have you concealed them from everyone?”

He sat looking at me silently for so long that I thought he would not answer. When he did speak, it was reluctantly. “I am the White Prophet. My purpose in this life is to set the world into a better path. Yet . . . I am not the Catalyst, not the one who makes changes. That is you, Fitz. Telling what I know to Chade would most definitely change the direction of his treating with the Bingtowners. I cannot tell if that change would aid me or hinder me in what I must do. I am, right now, more uncertain of my path than I have ever been.”

He stopped speaking and waited, as if he hoped I would say something helpful. I knew nothing to say. Silence stretched between us. The Fool folded his hands in his lap and looked down at them. “I think that I may have made a mistake. In Bingtown. And I fear that in my years in Bingtown and . . . other places, that I did not fulfill my destiny correctly. I fear I went awry, and then hence all I do now will be warped.” He suddenly sighed. “Fitz, I feel my way forward through time. Not a step at a time, but from moment to moment. What feels truest? Up until now, it has not felt right to speak of these things to Chade. So I have not. Today, now, it felt like it was time you knew these things. So I have told them to you. To you, I have passed on the decision. To tell or not to tell, Changer. That is up to you.”

It felt odd to have Nighteyes’ name for me spoken aloud by a human voice. It prodded me uncomfortably. “Is this how you always have made these crucial decisions? By how you ‘feel’?” My tone was sharper than I intended, but he did not flinch.

Instead he regarded me levelly and asked, “And how else would I do it?”

“By your knowing. By omens and signs, portentous dreams, by your own prophecies . . . I don’t know. But something more than simply by how you feel. El’s balls, man, it could be no more than a bad serving of fish that you’re ‘feeling.’ ”

I lowered my face into my hands and pondered. He had passed the decision on to me. What would I do? It suddenly seemed a more difficult decision than when I had been rebuking the Fool for not telling. How would knowing these things affect Chade’s attitude toward Bingtown and a possible alliance? Real dragons. Was a share of a real dragon worth a war? What would it mean not to ally, if the Bingtowners prevailed, and then had a phalanx of dragons at their command? Tell Kettricken? Then there were the same questions, but very different answers were likely. A sigh blasted out of me. “Why did you give this decision to me?”

I felt his hand on my shoulder and looked up to find his odd half-smile. “Because you have handled it well before, when I’ve previously done it to you. Ever since I went hunting for a boy out in the gardens and told him, ‘Fitz fixes a feist’s fits. Fat suffices.’ ”

I goggled at him. “But you’d told me you’d had a dream, and so come to tell me it.”

He smiled enigmatically. “I did have a dream. And I wrote it down. When I was eight years old. And when the time felt right, I told it to you. And you knew what to do with it, to be my Catalyst, even then. As I trust you will now.” He sat back in his chair.

“I had no idea of what I was doing, then. No concept of how far the consequences would reach.”

“And now that you do?”

“I wish I didn’t. It makes it harder to decide.”

He leaned back in his chair with a supercilious smile. “See.” Then he leaned forward suddenly. “How did you decide how to act back then, in the garden? On what you would do?”

I shook my head slowly. “I didn’t decide. There was a course of action and I took it. If anything decided me, it was based on what I thought would be best for the Six Duchies. I never thought beyond that.”

I turned my head an instant before the wine rack moved, revealing the passage behind it. Chade entered. He looked out of breath and harassed. His eyes fell on the brandy. Without a word, he walked to the table, lifted my glass and drained it. Then he took a breath and spoke. “I thought I might find you two hiding out here.”