Assassin's Quest (55 page)

The Coastal Duchies would not survive another summer. So said Chade. My tongue was silent as the Fool spoke of him. He had come to Jhaampe by secret ways in high summer, disguised as an old peddler but made himself known to the Queen when he arrived. The Fool had seen him then. “War agrees with him,” the Fool observed. “He strides about like a man of twenty. He carries a sword at his hip and there is fire in his eyes. He was pleased to see how her belly swelled with the Farseer heir, and they spoke bravely of Verity’s child on the throne. But that was high summer.” He sighed. “Now I hear he has returned. I believe because the Queen has sent word of her stillbirth. I have not been to see him yet. What hope he can offer us now, I do not know.” He shook his head. “There must be an heir to the Farseer throne,” he insisted. “Verity must get one. Otherwise . . .” He made a helpless gesture.

“Why not Regal? Would not a child from his loins suffice?”

“No.” His eyes went afar. “No. I can tell you that quite clearly, yet I cannot tell you why. Only that in all futures I have seen, he makes no child. Not even a bastard. In all times, he reigns as the last Farseer, and ushers in the dark.”

A shiver walked over me. He was too strange when he spoke of such things. And his odd words had brought another worry into my mind. “There were two women. A minstrel Starling, and an old woman pilgrim, Kettle. They were on their way here. Kettle said she sought the White Prophet. I little thought he might be you. Have you heard aught of them? Have they reached Jhaampe town?”

He shook his head slowly. “No one has come seeking the White Prophet since winter closed on us.” He halted, reading the worry in my face. “Of course, I do not know of all who come here. They may be in Jhaampe. But I have heard nothing of two such as that.” He reluctantly added, “Bandits prey on roadside travelers now. Perhaps they were . . . delayed.”

Perhaps they were dead. They had come back for me, and I had sent them on alone.

“Fitz?”

“I’m all right. Fool, a favor?”

“I like not that tone already. What is it?”

“Tell no one I am here. Tell no one I am alive, just yet.”

He sighed. “Not even Kettricken? To tell her that Verity lives still?”

“Fool, what I have come to do, I intend to do alone. I would not raise false hopes in her. She has endured the news of his death once. If I can bring him back to her, then will be time enough for true rejoicing. I know I ask much. But let me be a stranger you are aiding. Later, I may need your aid in obtaining an old map from the Jhaampe libraries. But when I leave here, I would go alone. I think this quest is one best accomplished quietly.” I glanced aside from him and added, “Let FitzChivalry remain dead. Mostly, it is better so.”

“Surely you will at least see Chade?” He was incredulous.

“Not even Chade should know I live.” I paused, wondering which would anger the old man more: that I had attempted to kill Regal when he had always forbidden it, or that I had so badly botched the task. “This quest must be mine alone.” I watched him and saw a grudging acceptance in his face.

He sighed again. “I will not say I agree with you completely. But I shall tell no one who you are.” He gave a small laugh. Talk fell off between us. The bottle of brandy was empty. We were reduced to silence, staring at one another drunkenly. The fever and the brandy burned in me. I had too many things to think of and too little I could do about any of them. If I lay very still, the pain in my back subsided to a red throb. It kept pace with the beating of my heart.

“Too bad you didn’t manage to kill Regal,” the Fool observed suddenly.

“I know. I tried. As a conspirator and an assassin, I’m a failure.”

He shrugged for me. “You were never really good at it, you know. There was a naäivetÉ to you that none of the ugliness could stain, as if you never truly believed in evil. It was what I liked best about you.” The Fool swayed slightly where he sat, but righted himself. “It was what I missed most, when you were dead.”

I smiled foolishly. “A while back, I thought it was my great beauty.”

For a time the Fool just looked at me. Then he glanced aside and spoke quietly. “Unfair. Were I myself, I would never have spoken such words aloud. Still. Ah, Fitz.” He looked at me and shook his head fondly. He spoke without mockery, making almost a stranger of himself. “Perhaps half of it was that you were so unaware of it. Not like Regal. Now there’s a pretty man, but he knows it too well. You never see him with his hair tousled or the red of the wind on his cheeks.”

For a moment I felt oddly uncomfortable. Then I said, “Nor with an arrow in his back, more’s the pity,” and we both went off into the foolish laughter that only drunks understand. It woke the pain in my back to a stabbing intensity however, and in a moment I was gasping for breath. The Fool rose, steadier on his feet than I would have expected, to take a drippy bag of something off my back and replace it with one almost uncomfortably warm from a pot on the hearth. That done, he came again to crouch beside me. He looked directly in my eyes, his yellow ones as hard to read as his colorless ones had been. He laid one long cool hand along my cheek and then gentled the hair back from my eyes.

“Tomorrow,” he told me gravely. “We shall be ourselves again. The Fool and the Bastard. Or the White Prophet and the Catalyst, if you will. We will have to take up those lives, as little as we care for them, and fulfill all fate has decreed for us. But for here, for now, just between us two, and for no other reason save I am me and you are you, I tell you this. I am glad, glad that you are alive. To see you take breath puts the breath back in my lungs. If there must be another my fate is twined around, I am glad it is you.”

He leaned forward then and for an instant pressed his brow to mine. Then he breathed a heavy sigh and drew back from me. “Go to sleep, boy,” he said in a fair imitation of Chade’s voice. “Tomorrow comes early. And we’ve work to do.” He laughed unevenly. “We’ve the world to save, you and I.”

21

Confrontations

D
IPLOMACY MAY VERY
well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold? And this is as true of a marriage pact as it is of a trade agreement between kingdoms. Each side knows truly how much it is willing to surrender to the other to get what it wishes; it is in the manipulation of that secret knowledge that the hardest bargain is driven. There is no action that takes place between humans in which secrets do not play a part, whether it be a game of cards or the selling of a cow. The advantage is always to the one who is shrewder in what secret to reveal and when. King Shrewd was fond of saying that there was no greater advantage than to know your enemy’s secret when he believed you ignorant of it. Perhaps that is the most powerful secret of all to possess.

The days that followed were not days for me, but disjointed periods of wakefulness interspersed with wavery fever dreams. Either my brief talk with the Fool had burned my last reserves, or I finally felt safe enough to surrender to my injury. Perhaps it was both. I lay on a bed near the Fool’s hearth and felt wretchedly dull when I felt anything at all. Overheard conversations rattled against me. I slipped in and out of awareness of my own misery, but never far away, like a drum beating the tempo of my pain was Verity’s
Come to me, come to me
. Other voices came and went through the haze of my fever but his was a constant.

“She believes you are the one she seeks. I believe it, too. I think you should see her. She has come a long and weary way, seeking the White Prophet.” Jofron’s voice was low and reasonable.

I heard the Fool set down his rasp with a clack. “Tell her she is mistaken, then. Tell her I am the White Toymaker. Tell her the White Prophet lives farther down the street, five doors down on the left.”

“I will not make mock of her,” Jofron said seriously. “She has traveled a vast distance to seek you and on the journey lost all but her life. Come, holy one. She waits outside. Will not you talk to her, just for a bit?”

“Holy one,” the Fool snorted with disdain. “You have been reading too many old scrolls. As has she. No, Jofron.” Then he sighed, and relented. “Tell her I will talk with her two days hence. But not today.”

“Very well.” Jofron plainly did not approve. “But there is another one with her. A minstrel. I don’t think she will be put off as easily. I think she is seeking him.”

“Ah, but no one knows he is here. Save you, me, and the healer. He wishes to be left alone for a time, while he heals.”

I moved my mouth. I tried to say I would see Starling, that I had not meant to turn Starling away.

“I know that. And the healer is still at Cedar Knoll. But she is a smart one, this minstrel. She has asked the children for news of a stranger. And the children, as usual, know everything.”

“And tell everything,” the Fool replied glumly. I heard him fling down another tool in annoyance. “I see I have but one choice then.”

“You will see them?”

A snort of laughter from the Fool. “Of course not. I mean that I will lie to them.”

Afternoon sun slanting across my closed eyes. I woke to voices, arguing.

“I only wish to see him.” A woman’s voice, annoyed. “I know he is here.”

“Ah, I suppose I shall admit you are right. But he sleeps.” The Fool, with his maddening calm.

“I still would see him.” Starling, pointedly.

The Fool heaved a great sigh. “I could let you in to see him. But then you would wish to touch him. And once you had touched him, you would wish to wait until he awakened. And once he awakened, you would wish to have words with him. There would be no end to it. And I have much to do today. A toymaker’s time is not his own.”

“You are not a toymaker. I know who you are. And I know who he truly is.” The cold was flowing in the open door. It crept under my blankets, tightened my flesh and tugged at my pain. I wished they would shut it.

“Ah, yes, you and Kettle know our great secret. I am the White Prophet, and he is Tom the shepherd. But today I am busy, prophesying puppets finished tomorrow, and he is asleep. Counting sheep, in his dreams.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Starling lowered her voice, but it carried anyway. “He is FitzChivalry, son of Chivalry the Abdicated. And you are the Fool.”

“Once, perhaps, I was the Fool. It is common knowledge here in Jhaampe. But now I am the Toymaker. As I no longer use the other title, you may take it for yourself if you wish. As for Tom, I believe he takes the title Bed Bolster these days.”

“I will be seeing the Queen about this.”

“A wise decision. If you wish to become her Fool, she is certainly the one you must see. But for now, let me show you something else. No, step back, please, so you can see it all. Here it comes.” I heard the slam and the latch. “The outside of my door,” the Fool announced gladly. “I painted it myself. Do you like it?”

I heard a thud as of a muffled kick, followed by several more. The Fool came humming back to his worktable. He took up the wooden head of a doll and a paintbrush. He glanced over at me. “Go back to sleep. She won’t get in to see Kettricken any time soon. The Queen sees few people these days. And when she does, it’s not likely she’ll be believed. And that is the best we can do for now. So sleep while you may. And gather strength, for I fear you will need it.”

Daylight on white snow. Belly down in the snow amongst the trees, looking down on a clearing. Young humans at play, chasing one another, leaping and dragging one another down to roll over and over in the snow. They are not so different from cubs. Envious. We never had other cubs to play with while we were growing. It is like an itch, the desire to race down and join in. They would be frightened, we caution ourselves. Only watch. Their shrill yelps fill the air. Will our she-cub grow to be like these, we wonder? Braided hair flies behind as they race through the snow chasing one another.

“Fitz. Wake up. I need to talk to you.”

Something in the Fool’s tone cut through both fog and pain. I opened my eyes, then squinted painfully. The room was dark, but he had brought a branch of candles to the floor by my bedside. He sat beside them, looking into my face earnestly. I could not read his face; it seemed that hope danced in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, but also he seemed braced as if he brought me bad tidings. “Are you listening? Can you hear me?” he pressed.

I managed a nod. Then, “Yes.” My voice was so hoarse I hardly knew it. Instead of getting stronger for the healer to pull the arrow, I felt as if the wound were getting stronger. Each day the area of pain spread. It pushed always at the edge of my mind, making it hard to think.

“I have been to dine with Chade and Kettricken. He had tidings for us.” He tilted his head and watched my face carefully as he said, “Chade says there is a Farseer child in Buck. Just a babe yet, and a bastard. But of the same Farseer lineage as Verity and Chivalry. He swears it is so.”

I closed my eyes.

“Fitz. Fitz! Wake up and listen to me. He seeks to persuade Kettricken to claim the child. To either say that it is her rightful child by Verity, hidden by a false stillbirth to protect her from assassins. Or to say the child is Verity’s bastard, but that Queen Kettricken chooses to legitimize her and claim her as heir.”

I could not move. I could not breathe. My daughter, I knew. Kept safe and hidden, guarded by Burrich. To be sacrificed to the throne. Taken from Molly, and given to the Queen. My little girl, whose name I didn’t even know. Taken to be a princess and in time a queen. Put beyond my reach forever.

“Fitz!” The Fool put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it gently. I knew he longed to shake me. I opened my eyes.

He peered into my face. “Have you nothing to say to me?” he asked carefully.

“May I have some water?”

While he got it for me, I composed myself. He helped me drink. By the time he took the cup, I had decided what question would be most convincing. “What did Kettricken say to the news that Verity had fathered a bastard? It could scarcely bring her joy.”

The uncertainty I had hoped for spread across the Fool’s face. “The child was born at the end of harvest. Too late for Verity to have sired it before he left on his quest. Kettricken grasped it faster than I did.” He spoke almost gently. “You must be the father. When Kettricken asked Chade directly, he said as much.” He cocked his head to study me. “You did not know?”

I shook my head slowly. What was honor to one such as I? Bastard and assassin, what claim did I have to nobility of soul? I spoke the lie I would always despise. “I could not have fathered a child born at harvest. Molly had turned me out of her bed months before she left Buck.” I tried to keep my voice steady as I spoke. “If the mother is Molly, and she claims the child is mine, she lies.” I strove to be sincere as I added, “I am sorry, Fool. I have fathered no Farseer heir for you, nor do I intend to.” It was no effort to let my voice choke and tears mist my eyes. “Strange.” I shook my head against the pillow. “That such a thing could bring me such pain. That she could seek to pass the babe off as mine.” I closed my eyes.

The Fool spoke gently. “As I understand it, she has made no claims for the child. As of yet, I believe she knows nothing of Chade’s plan.”

“I suppose I should see both Chade and Kettricken. To tell them I am alive and reveal the truth to them. But when I am stronger. Just now, Fool, I would be alone,” I begged him. I wanted to see neither sympathy nor puzzlement on his face. I prayed he would believe my lie even as I despised myself for the foul thing I had said of Molly. So I kept my eyes closed, and he took his candles and went away.

I lay for a time in the dark, hating myself. It was better this way, I told myself. If ever I returned to her, I could make all right. And if I did not, at least they would not take our child from her. I told myself over and over again I had done the wise thing. But I did not feel wise. I felt traitorous.

I dreamed a dream at once vivid and stultifying. I chipped black stone. That was the entire dream, but it was endless in its monotony. I was using my dagger as a chisel and a rock as a hammer. My fingers were scabbed and swollen from the many times my grip had slipped and I’d struck them instead of the dagger hilt. But it didn’t stop me. I chipped black stone. And waited for someone to come and help me.

I awoke one evening to find Kettle sitting by my bed. She looked even older than I recalled. Hazy winter daylight seeped through a parchment window to touch her face. I studied her for a time before she realized I was awake. When she did, she shook her head at me. “I should have guessed, from all your strangeness. You were bound for the White Prophet yourself.” She leaned closer and spoke in a whisper. “He will not allow Starling in to see you. He says you are too weak for so lively a visitor. And that you wish no one to know you are here, just yet. But I’ll take word of you to her, shall I?”

I closed my eyes.

A time of bright morning and a knock at the door. I could not sleep, nor could I stay awake for the fever that racked me. I had drunk willowbark tea until my belly was sloshing. Still my head pounded, and I was always shivering or sweating. The knock came again, louder, and Kettle set down the cup she had been plaguing me with. The Fool was at his worktable. He put aside his carving tool, but Kettle called “I’ll get it!” and opened the door, even as he was saying, “No, let me.”

Starling pushed in, so abruptly that Kettle exclaimed in surprise. Starling came past her, into the room, shaking snow from her cap and cloak. She shot the Fool a look of triumph. The Fool merely nodded cordially at her as if he had been expecting her. He turned back to his carving without a word. The bright sparks of anger in her eyes grew hotter, and I sensed her satisfaction in something. She shut the door loudly behind her and came into the room like the north wind herself. She dropped to sit cross-legged on the floor beside my bed. “So, Fitz. I’m so glad to finally see you again. Kettle told me you were hurt. I’d have come to see you before, but I was turned away at the door. How are you today?”

I tried to focus my mind. I wished she would move more slowly and speak more softly. “It’s too cold in here,” I complained petulantly. “And I’ve lost my earring.” I had only discovered the loss that morning. It fretted me. I could not recall why it was so important, but my mind would not let go of it either. The very thought made my headache worse.

She stripped off her mittens. One hand was bandaged still. She touched my forehead with the other. Her hand was blessedly cold. Odd that cold could feel so good. “He’s burning up!” she accused the Fool. “Haven’t you the sense to give him willowbark tea?”

The Fool shaved off another curl of wood. “There’s a pot of it there by your knee, if you haven’t overset it. If you can get him to drink any more of it, you’re a better man than I.” Another curl of wood.

“That would not be hard,” Starling said in an ugly little voice. Then, in a kinder tone, to me, “Your earring isn’t lost. See, I have it right here.” She took it from the pouch at her belt. One small part of me worked well enough to notice that she was warmly dressed in the Mountain style now. Her hands were cold and a bit rough as she put the earring back in my ear for me. I found a question.

“Why did you have it?”

“I asked Kettle to bring it to me,” she told me bluntly. “When
he
would not let me in to see you. I had to have a token, something to prove to Kettricken that all I told her was true. I have been to her and spoken to her and her counselor, this very day.”

The Queen’s name broke through my wandering thoughts and gave me a moment of focus. “Kettricken! What have you done?” I cried in dismay. “What have you told her?”

Starling looked startled. “Why, all she must know so that she will help you on your quest. That you are truly alive. That Verity is not dead, and that you will seek him. That word must be sent to Molly that you are alive and well, so that she shall not lose heart but will keep your child safe until you return. That . . .”