Fool's Quest - Страница 125

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A pretty fancy, I chided myself. A childish comfort to offer myself. It had been so hard to believe in Molly’s death. Time would erase my doubts. Bee was gone. The rest of the day passed in drops of time. Hap came to me, and wept into his hands, and showed me the gift he’d been carrying for Bee since the end of summer. It was a doll with a wrinkled apple head and twiggy little hands. I thought it both grotesque and oddly charming with its crooked smile and seashell eyes. He gave it to me and I set it on the stand by my bed. I wondered if I could sleep with it watching me.

That night, in the Fool’s room, he sang the songs Bee had loved best, the old songs, the counting songs, the silly songs that had made her laugh with delight. The crow bobbed her head in time and once shouted, “Again, again!” Kettricken sat beside the Fool and held his bony hand. We had ginger cakes and elderberry wine. A bit too much wine perhaps. Hap congratulated me on becoming a prince instead of a Witted Bastard, and I congratulated him on being a famous minstrel instead of an odd-eyed Red-Ship bastard. At the time it seemed terribly funny to us two, but Ash stared at us in horror and Perseverance, who had somehow been invited, looked insulted on my behalf.

I slept that night. The next morning I breakfasted with the Fool, and then received an invitation to game with Integrity and Prosper. I did not wish to go but they would not let me refuse. I knew they meant well and hoped to distract me from my grief. I dressed in fussy clothing. I wore no hidden knives and carried no poison. I rolled dice made of jade and hematite and lost badly in games of chance that I’d never learned. My bets were made with small silver coins instead of the copper ones that crossed tables in the taverns of my youth. That evening I returned to visit the Fool, to find Hap already there entertaining Ash and Per with some very silly songs. I sat and listened with a pleasant expression on my face.

Decisions. No. A decision. The Fool had been right. If I did not choose what to do with what remained of my life, someone else would. I felt like ore, pounded to powder, heated until I’d melted and poured away. And now I was hardening into something I’d never been before. My awareness of what I would be came to me slowly, like numbness wearing off after a heavy blow. Inexorably. In my sleepless nights, my plans took shape. I knew what I would have to do, and in my cold evaluation, I knew I would have to do it alone.

Before I began, I would have to finish, I told myself. Late one night, I found myself smiling sourly as I recalled how the Fool had finished his role as Lord Golden. His plan to exit had not gone exactly as he’d imagined. He’d had to make a headlong flight from his creditors. Mine, I resolved, would be a gentler fading. A kinder vanishing than his had been.

Gradually I blundered into a peculiar normality. I looked at each person I would leave behind and considered well what each needed, as well as how I must prepare for my undertaking. I kept my word to the Fool: I took Ash down to the practice grounds and gave him over to Foxglove. When she demanded a training partner of a suitable size for him, I gave her Perseverance, and she started both of them with wooden swords. Foxglove penetrated Ash’s disguise far more swiftly than I had. The second day she had the lads she drew me aside and obliquely asked me if I had noticed anything “odd” about Ash. I replied that I knew how to mind my own business, and that made her smile and nod. If she varied Ash’s training at all, I did not notice.

I gave my guard over to Foxglove’s keeping. The few remaining Rousters accepted her hammering discipline and began to be useful. She demanded they surrender their Rouster colors and integrate with my guard. Privately, I asked her to make them available for any special duty that Lord Chade might require of them. With his network of spies and errand runners tattering away, I wondered if he might not require a guard of his own, something the old assassin had never supplied to himself. She nodded gravely and I left it in her very capable hands.

The next time Prosper and Integrity invited me to game, I countered with an invitation to the practice yards, and there I took my cousins’ measures. They were not the pampered castle cats that some might have thought them, and it was there, wooden blade against wooden blade, that I began to know them as men and kin. They were good men. Prosper had a sweetheart and looked forward to her being announced as his intended. Integrity did not bear the weight of the crown of the king-in-waiting, and had a dozen ladies vying to ride and game and drink with him. I gave to them as much as I could of what Verity had supplied to me. I became the man older than their father, telling them the stories of their grandfather that I thought they should hear.

I allowed myself my own farewells. Winter at Buckkeep Castle took me back to the days of my childhood. It was true that if I had wanted, I could have joined the lords and ladies elegantly attired and perfumed, rolling dice or playing other games of chance. There were singers from Jamaillia and poets from the Spice Islands. But still, in front of the Great Hearth, huntsmen fletched arrows and women brought their spinning or embroidery. There the working folk of the castle listened to the younger generation of minstrels or watched apprentices endlessly rehearse their puppetry while doing their tasks by firelight. When I was a lad, even a bastard had been welcomed there.

I took comfort there, coming and going quietly, enjoying the music, the awkward courtships among the younger staff, the pranks of the boys and girls, and the soft firelight and slower pace. More than once I saw Ash there and Perseverance, and twice I saw Spark, watching Ash’s friend from a distance with a pensive look on her face.

Chade remained genially vague. He took his meals in his room. He was welcoming when I called on him but never addressed me in a way that indicated he clearly recalled who I was and what we had been to each other. He always had an attendant. Often it was Steady or Shine. Sometimes it was a pretty Skill-apprentice named Welcome. He delighted in her attention and she seemed fond of him. I walked in once to find her combing out his white hair and singing a song about seven foxes. The few times I contrived to be alone with him by asking her to run some small errand, she went quickly and returned before I had more than the briefest opportunity to try to jostle some true response from Chade.

Kettricken had taken Shine in hand. The girl dressed more sedately yet elegantly and was occupied whenever I glimpsed her. Nettle began her Skill-lessons. Shine seemed content to be at court and to be part of Kettricken’s circle. No young men were allowed to court her, and Kettricken chose industrious and intelligent young women to be her companions. Shine blossomed in the light of the queen’s interest. I could not be certain, but I wondered if some of her calm was due to herbal teas. Having found her father and his doting affection, she seemed to accept that Lant was lost to her as a suitor. In darker moments I wondered if her experiences at the hands of the Chalcedeans had dampened her enthusiasm for the company of men. My even darker conclusion was that if it was so, there was nothing I could do about it.

I knew I’d have to wring from her a fuller account of her experiences with her kidnappers. I made my request to Nettle, as I feared answering upsetting questions might trigger some sort of Skill-storm with her. Nettle agreed immediately that we must know everything we could. Kettricken was less willing to subject Shine to a detailed interrogation, but when the matter was placed before Dutiful, he agreed it was necessary while suggesting it be done as gently as possible. I prepared a list of questions, but it was Kettricken who asked them, with Nettle present in the room to monitor Shine’s level of distress. I was there also, but behind the wall, back in my old spy-hole, where I could listen and take notes without my presence increasing her anxiety.

It went well, but not at all as I had expected. Kettricken summoned Shine to help in sorting out a large basket of brightly dyed yarn that had become mingled. Nettle joined them, seemingly by chance and, as women seem always to do, joined in the task of sorting and rewinding the yarn. Their talk wandered until I thought I would go mad with waiting for my information. But somehow Kettricken shepherded Shine’s thoughts to that terrible day when she had been snatched out of her old life. Then she did nothing but listen, with occasional exclamations of sympathy or a soft word or two that invited the girl to confide more in them.

I think Shine was almost relieved to tell what had befallen her. Her words were hesitant at first, and then came in a torrent. I learned the names of some of her captors, and listened in sick horror to how they had neglected my child in her grave illness. It was only when Shine mentioned Bee’s shedding of her skin that I recognized what had happened. Just as it had with the Fool, it seemed that as she approached whatever it was she was fated to do, her color darkened. Only to hear Shine tell it, Bee had become paler. I pushed all implications of that aside, stubbornly telling myself that I must stay fixed on Shine’s every word. Later, I would think of what it meant to me. And would mean to the Fool.

I took careful note of every painful detail and became ever gladder that neither the handsome rapist nor Duke Ellik had reached a gentle end at my hands. But as Shine wound the tale to an end, to my horror she confided to both of them her pain at discovering that the man she had regarded as a suitor was actually her brother. She wept then, a girl’s brokenhearted weeping that even when her long nightmare was over, she had woken to the fact that the man she loved could never be hers in the way she had desired.

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