Fool's Quest - Страница 155

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“Oh.” I leaned back in the water and scrubbed at my face again. I wondered how unkempt I had appeared to the King and the Queen of the Elderlings. I hadn’t given it a thought earlier. And I realized I cared little what they thought of me. I pushed wet hair from my face, stood up, and shook water from my head. I was suddenly sleepy and the wide bed beckoned. “I’m going to bed. If you go in the pool, don’t drown.”

I walked to the shallow end and waded out. I took a towel from the stack but barely found the will to dry myself before walking toward the bed.

“Sleep well, Fitz,” the Fool said. And he was the Fool again.

“That tea. I can sleep, Fool. I can let go of everything. Stop worrying. Worrying doesn’t solve anything. I know that. In one way I know it but in another it seems wrong. It seems as if I don’t think about all the things that hurt, all the things I’ve done wrong, then I don’t really care. Tormenting myself with Bee’s death won’t bring her back. Why do I have to remember it all the time?” The bed was large and flat. There were no pillows and no coverings. I sat down on it, my towel around my shoulders. The surface was firm and slightly warm. Very slowly, it gave to the weight of my body. I lay back on it. “Molly is dead. Bee is gone. I can’t feel Nighteyes anymore. I should just accept those things and go on. Maybe. Or maybe you’re right. I should go kill all of the Servants. I’ve nothing better to do with what is left of my life. Why not do that?” I closed my eyes. When I spoke, I could hear the slurring of my words. I groped after what I was trying to say. “I’m like you now. I’ve gone beyond the end of my life, to a place where I never expected to be.”

His voice was kind. “Don’t fight it, Fitz. Don’t question it. For one night, let it all go.”

I did. I tumbled into sleep.

Chapter Thirty-Seven
Heroes and Thieves

...

Scrying is a little-respected magic and yet I have found it a small and useful talent to have. Some use a ball of polished crystal. That is well and good, for those who can afford such things. But for a boy born to a hardscrabble patch of dirt scarcely worth the name of farm, a milk pail with some water in the bottom to reflect the blue sky above works well enough. It was my hobby when I was a smallish boy. In a life that consisted largely of chores and boredom, staring into a milk pail and marveling at what I saw was a fascinating pastime. My stepfather thought me daft when he caught me at it. I was astonished to find that neither he nor my mother found anything fascinating in the water, while I watched a boy much like me but younger growing up in a castle.

I woke. I lay in the darkness. I could not remember that I had dreamed, yet words rang in my ears still. Verity says you gave up hope too easily. That you always did.

Bee’s voice? If that message was the pleasant dream the Elderling tea had promised me, it was a sad misrepresentation of what the tea actually did. I stared up at a ceiling painted a dark gray. Stars had been painstakingly dotted over the entire surface. As I stared at them through slitted eyes, the deep of night became darkest blue. I blinked. I was staring up at the sky. I was warm, cradled in softness. I smelled forest. Someone slept beside me.

I lifted my head and stared. The Fool. Only the Fool. In sleep, with his strange, blinded eyes hidden, I could see the lines of Lord Golden’s face with the coloring of my boyhood friend. But as the ceiling above me continued in its mimicry of dawn, I began to see the fine scaling along his brows. I wondered if it would progress until he looked fully like an Elderling or if the dragon’s blood had finished with him. He wore an Elderling robe of white or pale silver; it was hard to tell in the dawn light. His bared hand clasped his gloved hand to his breast as if to keep watch over it while he slept. His head was bowed over his hands, and he frowned in his sleep. His knees were drawn up to his chest, as if to protect himself from a kick. Men who have been tortured are slow to sleep carelessly. His curled body was too close to how I had found him, dead and frozen in the Pale Woman’s icy halls. I stared at him until I was sure I could see him breathing. Foolish. He was fine.

I rolled cautiously away from him and sat up on the edge of the bed. I stood up slowly. I felt well rested, with no aching muscles. I was neither too warm nor too cold. I looked around the room. The magic of the Elderlings was all round me. How easily I had accepted it last night. How swiftly I had dropped my guard. “Sweetsleep,” I muttered to myself.

I rose and left the Fool sleeping and went to the smaller room. The pool had drained itself, and my discarded clothing was where I had dropped it. One boot stood and the other sprawled on its side. I moved slowly, gathering my things and trying to clear my brain at the same time. I felt peculiar. One at a time, I gathered my worries with my clothing. Even drunk, I’d never behaved as selfishly as I had last night. It bothered me. I found fresher clothes in my pack, donned them, and tidied my discarded clothing. The water in the ewer was warm. There was a looking-glass and, beside it, brushes. I persuaded my hair into a warrior’s tail and decided that it would be easier to have a beard than to shave. I turned my face from side to side, studying the gray in my whiskers. So be it.

“Fitz?”

“I’m right here. Up and dressed.”

“I … dreamed.”

“You said the tea would do that, give pleasant dreams.”

I turned to find him sitting up on the bed. The Elderling gown was silvery. It reminded me of very fine chain mail. Or fish scales.

“I dreamed of both of us here. Walking in this city, laughing and talking. But so long ago. In a time of dragons, when the city was fine and unshattered.” He paused, his mouth slightly ajar. He said softly, “The air smelled like flowers. It was like that first time. In the Mountains at the market-circle.”

“We are deep in an Elderling city. The buildings are impregnated with Skill and memories. I’m not surprised you had such a dream.”

“It was a very sweet dream,” he said softly. He stood and slowly groped his way toward me.

“Wait. Let me come for you.” I reached his side and, taking his hand, I set it on my arm. “I’m sorry I left you to fend for yourself last night.”

“I was fine.”

“I didn’t mean to be so thoughtless.” And yet, how good it had felt. To think only of my own needs and no one else’s. How selfish, I rebuked myself. I guided him to the ewer of wash-water.

“Don’t apologize. The sweetsleep affected you exactly as I knew it would.”

His pack was overturned, Amber’s wardrobe spilled out across the floor. “Do you want me to put your clothing back in the pack?” I asked him.

He straightened from washing his face with one hand, groped for and found a drying cloth. “Sweet Eda, no! I’ll have Spark repack our things. Fitz, you’ve never had respect for fabric or lace. I won’t trust you with it now.” He came toward me, his hands fluttering before him. His bared hand touched my shoulder, and then he crouched down over the spilled pack. He found garments by touch, considering texture. He paused once to hold up a skirt. “Is this blue? Or turquoise?”

“Blue,” I said, and he set it aside. “Are you hungry? Shall I ring for food?”

“Please,” he said as he shook out a white blouse.

I think he listened to my boots on the tiles, for just as I reached the entry to the sitting room, he said, “If you would shut the door?”

I did so and then explored the room. I judged that the heavy furniture of dark wood had come from Bingtown. I found a flower painted on a twining vine on a trellis that framed the door. It was slightly raised, and I touched it. The petals blushed from pink to red and back again. I stepped back from it. I heard nothing, no bell in the distance. I walked to the window. I looked out in puzzlement, for the garden below was in riotous bloom. Out there, a fountain splashed and a caged bird hopped from perch to perch. Flowers blossomed. Another step, and my perspective of the window changed. Despite the bird’s motion and the flowers nodding in the breeze, there was no window. More Elderling magic.

I tapped on the door to the bedchamber. “I’ve rung for food.”

“You may come in,” Amber’s voice replied. And when I entered, she was seated before the mirror she could not see, pushing a brush through her short pale hair and then patting at it. She seemed to feel me looking at her. “Does it bother you?” she asked me.

I did not ask her what she meant. “Strange to say, no. You are you. Fool, Lord Golden, Amber, and Beloved. You are you, and we know each other as well as any two people can.”

“Beloved,” she said, and smiled sadly. I did not know if she repeated my word, or if the Fool called me by his own name. She dropped her hands to the top of the table, gloved one atop the bared one. “There was a time,” she began, “when you would have hated this masquerade.”

“There was,” I agreed. “And this is a different time.”

She smiled at that. And nodded. She turned her head as if glancing at me. “Did you … would you like to be the Fitz you were last night? The man who had only himself to care for?”

I did not answer swiftly. I could have blamed it on the tea, or claimed not to recall it. But I did. Perhaps it had been the tea, but he was right. I had simply let go of everything and everyone and thought only of myself. Once, it was all I had longed for. I wanted to be free of obligations to family, to duty to the Farseer throne: I’d wanted to do only what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. Last night I’d had a taste of that. I had no idea how the Fool had found his way around an unfamiliar room, how he had washed himself or found the garments he’d slept in. I’d abandoned him to his own diminished resources.

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