Fool's Fate (82 page)

    At that time in Chalced, some slave craftsmen and artisans and courtesans were allowed by their masters to accept outside commissions. Occasionally one of these privileged slaves would earn enough to purchase his freedom. Many masters were understandably reluctant to let such valuable slaves go. As tattoos of ownership could not be removed from the slave's face without substantial scarring, and freedom papers were widely falsified, it was difficult for former slaves to prove they had earned their freedom. Slave owners took advantage of this by creating expensive “freedom rings,” earrings of gold or silver, often with jewels, the design unique to each noble family, that indicated a particular slave had earned his freedom. Often it took a slave years of service, after he had bought his freedom, to purchase the expensive earring that showed he was truly free to move about Chalced as he pleased, on his own recognizance.

    --FEDWREN'S “HISTORY OF CHALCED'S SLAVE CUSTOMS”

    I am no stranger to the aftermath of battle. I've walked across bloody earth and stepped over hacked bodies. Yet never before had I been in a place where the futility of war was so clearly illustrated. Warriors bound up the wounds they had dealt to one another, and Outislanders who had fought us now anxiously asked the Hetgurd men for news of relatives and clan lands left years ago. Like men waked from a legendary sleep they were, groping after lost lives, trying to cross a rift of years. It was too clear that they well remembered all that they had done as servants of the Pale Woman. I recognized one of the guards who had dragged me before her. He looked hastily aside from my gaze, and I did not confront him. Peottre had already told me the only thing I needed to know.

    I made my way through our camp. With an almost unseemly haste, it was being struck. Two badly injured men, both from the Pale Woman's force, were already loaded on the sleds, and the tents were coming down. A hasty ice cairn was being assembled over three dead men. All of them had belonged to her. Icefyre had eaten Eagle, the Hetgurd man who had fallen to the dragon. There would be no entombment for him. The other two men we had lost, Fox and Deft, had already been buried in the collapse of the pit. No sense digging them up only to bury them again, I suppose. It seemed a hasty and irreverent way to leave our fallen, but I sensed the emotion that drove it. There was an aura of haste to this departure, as if the sooner we could leave this place, the faster the Pale Woman would become a creature of the past. I hoped that she too was entombed beneath the immense fall of ice.

    Web walked beside me and Chade came hurrying to meet me. Someone had bandaged his arm. “This way,” he told me, and led me to where Burrich lay in the snow. Swift knelt beside him. They had not tried to move him. There was a wrenching wrongness to how his body lay. The spine is not meant to twist like that. I dropped to my knees beside him, surprised to find his eyes open. His hand spidered feebly against the snow. I slipped mine underneath it. He was breathing shallowly, as if hiding from the pain lurking in the lower half of his body. He managed a single word. “Alone.”

    I looked at Web and Chade. Without a word, they withdrew. Burrich's eyes met Swift's. The boy looked stubborn. Burrich took a slightly deeper breath. There was a color in his skin around his mouth and eyes, a strange darkening. “Just a moment,” he said huskily to his son. Swift bowed his head slightly and walked away from us.

    “Burrich,” I said, but an almost sharp movement of his hand against mine bade me stop.

    I saw him gather the remnants of his strength. He paced himself, taking a breath for each phrase he uttered. “Go home,” he said. And then, commanding me, “Take care of them. Molly. The lads.” I started to shake my head as he asked the impossible of me, and for a moment his hand tightened on mine, a shadow of his old grip. “Yes. You will. You must. For me.” Another breath. He furrowed his brow, as if making an important choice. “Malta and Ruddy. When she comes in season. Not Brusque. Ruddy.” He wagged one finger at me, as if I had thought to argue that decision. He took a deeper breath. “Wish I would see that foal.” He blinked his eyes slowly, then, “Swift,” he said, painfully.

    “Swift!” I shouted and saw the loitering boy lift his head and start to run back to us.

    Just before he reached us, Burrich spoke again. He almost smiled as he said, “I was the better man for her.” A breath. In a whisper, “She still would have chosen you. If you'd come back.”

    Then Swift flung himself to his knees in the snow beside Burrich and I gave my place over to him. Chade and Web had come back with a heavy blanket. Web spoke. “We're going to try to scoop out the snow under you and sling you in the blanket to put you on the sled. The Prince has already released the bird that will summon the ships to fetch us back to Zylig.”

    “Doesn't matter,” Burrich said. His hand closed on Swift's as he shut his eyes. A few moments later, I saw his hand go lax.

    “Move him now,” I suggested. “While he's unconscious.”

    I helped them, digging in the snow under Burrich's body and sliding the blanket beneath him. Despite our efforts to be gentle, he moaned as we moved him, and my Wit-sense of him faded a notch. I said nothing of that but I am sure that Swift was as aware of it as I was. The situation didn't need words. We loaded him onto the sled with the other two injured men. Just before we left that place, I looked up into the clear sky, searching. But there was no sign of either dragon.

    “Not even a thank-you,” I commented to Web.

    He shrugged wordlessly and we set out.

    For the rest of that day, I either walked beside Burrich or took turns pulling the sled. Swift walked always where he could see his father, but I do not think Burrich's eyes opened again that day. Thick rode on the tail of the sled, huddled in a blanket and staring. Kossi and Oerttre rode on the other sled, well bundled against the cold. Peottre pulled it, humming a tune as he trudged along, while the Narcheska and Dutiful walked alongside it. They were in front of us. I could not hear what the Narcheska was telling her mother, but I could guess. Her eye, when it fell on Dutiful, was slightly less disapproving, but mostly her gaze lingered on her daughter, with pride. The remaining Hetgurd men led us, probing the snow for cracks as we went. Web and then Chade came to walk alongside me for a time. There was nothing to say and that was what we said.

    I counted it up to myself, mostly because I could not stop my mind from doing so. My prince had led here one dozen men plus Swift and Thick. Six Hetgurd men had come to oversee us. Twenty in all. Plus the Fool and Burrich. Twenty-two. The Pale Woman had killed Hest and Riddle and the Fool. Burrich was dying from the injury her dragon had dealt him. Eagle had died in the rain of ice from Chade's explosion. Fox and Deft were likewise lost. Sixteen of us would return to Zylig. Assuming that Churry and Drub had survived on the beach alone. I drew a deep breath. We were bringing the Narcheska's mother and sister home. Surely that counted for something. And eight Outislanders would be going back to their homes, men their families had long believed dead. I tried to feel some sort of satisfaction, but could not find it. This last and briefest battle of the Red Ship War had been the most costly to me.

    Peottre called a halt in the gray of evening and we made a quiet camp. We used two of the tents to erect a makeshift shelter around the sled that the injured men were on so we would not have to move them. The other two were able to speak and eat, but Burrich was still and quiet. I brought Swift food and drink, and sat with him for a time, but after a while, I sensed that he wished to be alone with his father. I left him there and went out to walk under the stars.

    There is no true dark to a night in that land. Only the brightest of the stars showed. The night was cold and the constant wind blew, heaping loose snow against the shelters. I could not think of anywhere I wanted to be or anything I wanted to do. Chade and the Prince were crowded into the Narcheska's tent with Peottre's family. There was triumph and rejoicing there; both were foreign emotions to me. The Hetgurd men and the recovered Outislanders were having a reunion of sorts. I walked past a tiny fire where Owl was matter-of-factly burning a dragon-and-serpent tattoo off a man's forearm. The smell of roasting flesh rode the wind while the man grunted and then roared with the pain. Dutiful's Wit coterie, sans Swift, had also crammed themselves into a small tent. I heard Web's deep voice as I went past and caught the gleam of a cat's eye peering out. Doubtless they shared the Prince's triumph. They had freed the dragon and he'd won the Narcheska's regard.

    Longwick sat alone before a small fire in front of a darkened tent. I wondered where he had got the brandy I smelled. I nearly walked past him with a silent nod, but something in his face told me that here was where I belonged tonight. I hunkered down and held my hands over the tiny fire. “Captain,” I greeted him.

    “Of what?” he retorted. He rolled his head back with a crackling sound, and then sighed. “Hest. Riddle. Deft. Doesn't say much for me that all the men who accompanied me here are dead and I still live.”

    “I'm still alive,” I pointed out to him.

    He nodded. Then he gestured with his chin toward the tent and said, “Your half-wit's in there, asleep. He looked a bit lost tonight, so I took him in.”

    “Thanks.” I knew a moment of guilt, and then asked myself if I should have left Burrich to tend Thick. And reflected that perhaps having someone to oversee had been the best thing for Longwick. He shifted, and then offered me a brandy flask. It was a soldier's flask, dented and scratched, his own hoard of spirits, and a gift to be respected. I drank from it sparingly before returning it to him.

    “Sorry about your friend. That Golden fellow.”

    “Yes.”

    “You went back a ways.”

    “We were boys together.”

    “Were you? Sorry.”

    “Yes.”

    “I hope that bitch died slow. Riddle and Hest were good men.”

    “Yes.” I wondered if she had died at all. If she were still alive, could she be any threat to us? Dragon, Rawbread, and Forged servants had all been taken from her. She was Skilled, but I could think of no way she could use that against all of us. If she was alive, she was as alone as I was. Then I sat for a time, wondering which I hoped: whether she was dead or alive and suffering? Finally, it came to me. I was too tired to care.

    Some time later, Longwick asked me, “Are you really him? Chivalry's Bastard?”

    “Yes.”

    He nodded slowly to himself, as if that explained something. “More lives than a cat,” he said quietly.

    “I'm going to bed,” I told Longwick.

    “Sleep well,” he said, and we both laughed bitterly.

    I found my pack and bedding and took it into Longwick's tent. Thick stirred slightly as I made my bed alongside him. “I'm cold,” he mumbled.

    “Me, too. I'll sleep against your back. That will help.”

    I lay down in my blankets but I didn't sleep. I wondered useless things. What had she done to the Fool? How had she killed him? Had he been completely Forged before she killed him? If she'd sent him into the dragon, did that mean he'd felt some final pain when the stone dragon died? Stupid, stupid questions.

    Thick shifted heavily against my back. “I can't find her,” he said quietly.

    “Who?” I asked sharply. The Pale Woman was large in my thoughts.

    “Nettle. I can't find her.”

    My conscience smote me. My own daughter, the man who had raised her dying, and I hadn't even thought of reaching out to her.

    Thick spoke again. “I think she's afraid to go to sleep.”

    “Well. I can't blame her.” Only myself.

    “Are we going back home now?”

    “Yes.”

    “We didn't kill the dragon.”

    “No. We didn't.”

    There was a long pause and I hoped he had gone back to sleep. Then he asked me quietly, “Are we going home on a boat?”

    I sighed. His childish concern was the only thing that could have weighed me heavier. I tried to find sympathy for him. It was difficult. “It's the only way we can go home, Thick. You know that.”

    “I don't want to.”

    “I don't blame you.”

    “Me, neither.” He sighed heavily. After a time he said, “So this was our adventure. And the prince and the princess get married and live happily ever after, with many children to warm them in their old age.”

    He had probably heard that phrase thousands of times in his life. It was a common way for a minstrel to end a hero tale.

    “Perhaps,” I said cautiously. “Perhaps.”

    “What happens to the rest of us?”

    Longwick came into the tent. Quietly he began to make up his bed. From the way he moved, I suspected he had finished his brandy.

    “The rest of us go on with our lives, Thick. You'll go back to Buckkeep and serve the Prince. When he becomes the King, you'll be at his side.” I reached to find his happy ending. “And you'll live well, with pink sugar cakes and new clothes whenever you need them.”

    “And Nettle,” he said with satisfaction. “Nettle is at Buckkeep now. She's going to teach me how to make good dreams. At least, that's what she said. Before the dragon and all.”

    “Did she? That's good.”

    With that, he seemed to settle for the night. In a short time, his breathing took on the slower rhythm of sleep. I closed my eyes and wondered if Nettle could teach me how to make good dreams. I wondered if I'd ever have the courage to meet her. I didn't want to think about her right now. If I thought about her, then I had to think about telling her about Burrich.

    “What will you do, Lord FitzChivalry?” Longwick's question in the dark was like a voice out of the sky.

    “That isn't me,” I said quietly. “I'll go back to the Six Duchies and be Tom Badgerlock.”

    “Seems like a lot of people know your secret now.”

    “I think they are all men who know how to hold their tongues. And will do so, at Prince Dutiful's request.”