Assassin's Quest (56 page)

“I trusted you!” I cried out. “I trusted you with my secrets and you have betrayed me. What a fool I’ve been!” I cried out in despair. All, all was lost.

“No, I am the Fool.” He broke into our conversation. He walked slowly across the room and stood looking down on me. “The more so that I had believed you trusted me, it seems,” he went on, and I had never seen him so pale. “Your child,” he said to himself. “A true child of Farseer lineage.” His yellow eyes flickered like a dying fire as they darted from Starling to me. “You know what such tidings mean to me. Why? Why lie to me?”

I did not know what was worse, the hurt in the Fool’s eyes, or the triumph in the glance Starling gave him.

“I had to lie, to keep her mine! The child is mine, not a Farseer heir!” I cried out desperately. “Mine and Molly’s. A child to grow and love, not a tool for a kingmaker. And Molly must not hear I am alive from any save me! Starling, how could you have done this to me? Why was I such an idiot, why did I talk of such things at all to anyone?”

Now Starling looked as injured as the Fool. She stood up stiffly and her voice was brittle. “I but sought to help you. To help you do what you must do.” Behind Starling, the wind gusted the door open. “That woman has a right to know her husband is alive.”

“To which woman do you refer?” asked another icy voice. To my consternation, Kettricken swept into the room with Chade at her heels. She regarded me with a terrible face. Grief had ravaged her, had carved deep lines beside her mouth and eaten the flesh from her cheeks. Now anger raged in her eyes as well. The blast of cold wind that came with them cooled me for an instant. Then the door was closed and my eyes moved from face to familiar face. The small room seemed crowded with staring faces, with cold eyes looking at me. I blinked. There were so many of them and so close, and all stared at me. No one smiled. No welcome, no joy. Only the savage emotions that I had wakened with all the changes I had wrought. Thus was the Catalyst greeted. No one wore any expression I’d hoped to see.

None save Chade. He crossed the room to me in long strides, stripping off his riding gloves as he came. When he threw back the hood of his winter cloak, I saw that his white hair was bound back in a warrior’s tail. He wore a band of leather across his brow, and centered on his forehead was a medallion of silver. A buck with antlers lowered to charge. The sigil Verity had given to me. Starling moved hastily from his path. He gave her not a glance as he folded easily to sit on the floor by my bed. He took my hand in his, narrowed his eyes at the sight of the frostbite. He held it softly. “Oh, my boy, my boy, I believed you were dead. When Burrich sent me word he had found your body, I thought my heart would break. The words we had when last we parted . . . but here you are, alive if not well.”

He bent and kissed me. The hand he set to my cheek was callused now, the pocks scarcely visible on the weathered flesh. I looked up in his eyes and saw welcome and joy. Tears clouded my own as I had to demand, “Would you truly take my daughter for the throne? Another bastard for the Farseer line . . . Would you have let her be used as we have been used?”

Something grew still in his face. The set of his mouth hardened into resolve. “I will do whatever I have to do to see a truehearted Farseer on the Six Duchies throne again. As I am sworn to do. As you are sworn also.” His eyes met mine.

I looked at him in dismay. He loved me. Worse, he believed in me. He believed that I had in me that strength and devotion to duty that had been the backbone of his life. Thus he could inflict on me things harder and colder than Regal’s hatred of me could imagine. His belief in me was such that he would not hesitate to plunge me into any battle, that he would expect any sacrifice of me. A dry sob suddenly racked me and tore at the arrow in my back. “There is no end!” I cried out. “That duty will hound me into death. Better I were dead! Let me be dead then!” I snatched my hand away from Chade, heedless of how much that motion hurt. “Leave me!”

Chade didn’t even flinch. “He is burning with fever,” he said accusingly to the Fool. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. You should have given him willowbark tea.”

A terrible smile crooked the Fool’s lips. Before he could reply, there was a sharp shredding sound. A gray head was forced through the greased hide window, flashing a muzzle full of white teeth. The rest of the wolf soon followed, oversetting a shelf of potted herbs onto some scrolls set out below them. Nighteyes sprang, nails skittering on the wood floor, and slid to a halt between me and the hastily standing Chade. He snarled all round.
I will kill them all for you, if you say so.
I dropped my head down to my pillows. My clean, wild wolf. This was what I had made of him. Was it any better than what Chade had made of me?

I looked around them again. Chade was standing, his face very still. Every single face held some shock, some sadness, some disappointment that I was responsible for. Despair and fever shook me. “I’m sorry,” I said weakly. “I have never been what you thought I was,” I confessed. “Never.”

Silence filled up the room. The fire crackled briefly.

I dropped my face to my pillow and closed my eyes. I spoke the words I was compelled to say. “But I shall go and find Verity. Somehow, I will bring him back to you. Not because I am what you believe me to be,” I added, slowly lifting my head. I saw hope kindle in Chade’s face. “But because I have no choice. I have never had any choices.”

“You do believe Verity is alive!” The hope in Kettricken’s voice was savagely hungry. She swept toward me like an ocean storm.

I nodded my head. Then, “Yes,” I managed. “Yes, I believe he lives. I have felt him strongly with me.” Her face was so close, huge in my sight. I blinked my eyes, and then could not focus them.

“Why has not he returned then? Is he lost? Injured? Does he have no care for those he left behind?” Her questions rattled against me like flung stones, one after another.

“I think,” I began, and then could not. Could not think, could not speak. I closed my eyes. I listened to a long silence. Nighteyes whined, then growled deep in his throat.

“Perhaps we should all leave for a time,” Starling ventured unevenly. “Fitz is not up to this just now.”

“You may leave,” the Fool told her grandly. “Unfortunately I still live here.”

Going hunting. It is time to go hunting. I look to where we came in, but the Scentless One has blocked that way, covering it over with another piece of deerskin. Door, part of us knows that is the door and we go to it, to whine softly and prod at it with our nose. It rattles against its catch like a trap about to spring shut. The Scentless One comes, stepping lightly, warily. He stretches his body past me, to put a pale paw on the door and open it for me. I slip out, back into a cool night world. It feels good to stretch my muscles again, and I flee the pain and the stuffy hut and the body that does not work to this wild sanctuary of flesh and fur. The night swallows us and we hunt.

It was another night, another time, before, after, I did not know, my days had come unlinked from one another. Someone lifted a warm compress from my brow and replaced it with a cooler one. “I’m sorry, Fool,” I said.

“Thirty-two,” said a voice wearily. Then, “Drink,” it added more gently. Cool hands raised my face. A cup lapped liquid against my mouth. I tried to drink. Willowbark tea. I turned my face away in disgust. The Fool wiped my mouth and sat down on the floor beside my bed. He leaned companionably close against it. He held his scroll up to the lamplight and went on reading. It was deep night. I closed my eyes and tried to find sleep again. All I could find were things I’d done wrong, trusts I’d betrayed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Thirty-three,” said the Fool without looking up.

“Thirty-three what?” I asked.

He glanced over at me in surprise. “Oh. You’re truly awake and talking?”

“Of course. Thirty-three what?”

“Thirty-three “I’m sorry’s. To various people, but the greatest number of them to me. Seventeen calls for Burrich. I lost count of your calls for Molly, I’m afraid. And a grand total of sixty-two “I’m coming, Verity’s.”

“I must be driving you crazy. I’m sorry.”

“Thirty-four. No. You’ve just been raving, rather monotonously. It’s the fever, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

The Fool went back to reading. “I’m so tired of lying on my belly,” I ventured.

“There’s always your back,” the Fool suggested to see me wince. Then, “Do you want me to help you shift to your side?”

“No. That just hurts more.”

“Tell me if you change your mind.” His eyes went back to the scroll.

“Chade hasn’t been back to see me,” I observed.

The Fool sighed and set aside his scroll. “No one has. The healer came in and berated us all for bothering you. They’re to leave you alone until she pulls the arrow out. That’s tomorrow. Besides, Chade and the Queen have had much to discuss. Discovering that both you and Verity are still alive has changed everything for them.”

“Another time, he would have included me.” I paused, knowing I was wallowing in self-pity, but unable to stop myself. “I suppose they feel they cannot trust me anymore. Not that I blame them. Everyone hates me now. For the secrets I kept. For all the ways I failed them.”

“Oh, not everyone hates you,” the Fool chided gently. “Only me, really.”

My eyes darted to his face. His cynical smile reassured me. “Secrets,” he said, and sighed. “Someday I shall write a long philosophical treatise on the power of secrets, when kept or told.”

“Do you have any more brandy?”

“Thirsty again? Do have some more willowbark tea.” There was acid courtesy in his voice now, overladen with honey. “There’s plenty, you know. Buckets of it. All for you.”

“I think my fever is down a bit,” I offered humbly.

He lifted a hand to my brow. “So it is. For now. But I do not think the healer would approve of you getting drunk again.”

“The healer is not here,” I pointed out.

He arched a pale eyebrow at me. “Burrich would be
so
proud of you.” But he rose gracefully and went to the oak cabinet. He stepped carefully around Nighteyes sprawled on the hearth in heat-soaked sleep. My eyes traveled to the patched window and then back to the Fool. I supposed some sort of agreement had been worked out between them. Nighteyes was so deeply asleep he was not even dreaming. His belly was full as well. His paws twitched when I quested toward him, so I withdrew. The Fool was putting the bottle and two cups on a tray. He seemed too subdued.

“I am sorry, you know.”

“So you have told me. Thirty-five times.”

“But I am. I should have trusted you and told you about my daughter.” Nothing, not a fever, not an arrow in my back would keep me from smiling when I said that phrase. My daughter. I tried to speak the simple truth. It embarrassed me that it seemed a new experience. “I’ve never seen her, you know. Only with the Skill, anyway. It’s not the same. And I want her to be mine. Mine and Molly’s. Not a child that belongs to a kingdom, with some vast responsibility to grow into. Just a little girl, picking flowers, making candles with her mother, doing . . .” I floundered and finished, “Whatever it is that ordinary children are allowed to do. Chade would end that. The moment that anyone points to her and says, “There, she could be the Farseer heir,’ she’s at risk. She’d have to be guarded and taught to fear, to weigh every word and consider every action. Why should she? She isn’t truly a royal heir. Only a bastard’s bastard.” I said those harsh words with difficulty, and vowed never to let anyone say them to her face. “Why should she be put in such danger? It would be one thing if she were born in a palace and had a hundred soldiers to guard her. But she has only Molly and Burrich.”

“Burrich is with them? If Chade chose Burrich, it is because he thinks him the equal of a hundred guards. But far more discreet,” the Fool observed. Did he know how that would wrench me? He brought the cups and the brandy and poured for me. I managed to pick up my own cup. “To a daughter. Yours and Molly’s,” he offered, and we drank. The brandy burned clean in my throat.

“So,” I managed. “Chade knew all along and sent Burrich to guard her. Even before I knew, they knew.” Why did I feel they had stolen something from me?

“I suspect so, but I am not certain.” The Fool paused, as if wondering at the wisdom of telling me. Then I saw him discard the reserve. “I’ve been putting pieces together, counting back the time. I think Patience suspected. I think that’s why she started sending Molly to take care of Burrich when his leg was injured. He didn’t need that much care, and he knew it as well as Patience did. But Burrich is a good ear, mostly because he talks so little himself. Molly would need someone to talk to, perhaps someone that had once kept a bastard himself. That day we were all up in his room . . . you had sent me there, to see what he could do for my shoulder? The day you locked Regal out of Shrewd’s rooms to protect him . . .” For a moment he seemed caught in that memory. Then he recovered. “When I came up the stairs to Burrich’s loft I heard them arguing. Well, Molly arguing, and Burrich being silent, which is his strongest way to argue. So, I eavesdropped,” he admitted frankly. “But I didn’t hear much. She was insisting he could get some particular herb for her. He wouldn’t. Finally, he promised her he would tell no one, and bade her to think well and do what she wished to do, not what she thought was wisest. Then they said no more, so I went in. She excused herself and departed. Later, you came and said she had left you.” He paused. “Actually, looking back, I was as dull-witted as you, not to have worked it out just from that.”

“Thank you,” I told him dryly.

“You’re welcome. Though I will admit we all had much on our minds that day.”

“I’d give anything to be able to go back in time and tell her that our child would be the most important thing in the world for me. More important than king or country.”

“Ah. So you would have left Buckkeep that day, to follow her and protect her.” The Fool quirked an eyebrow at me.

After a time, I said, “I couldn’t.” The words choked me and I washed them down with brandy.