Fool's Quest - Страница 42

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“When?” I demanded. How dare he hide this from me! “How long ago?”

He stared at me, his anger rising to meet mine. “Moments before I asked Nettle for help. Did you think I would wait?” He handed me a very plain sword in a leather sheath. There was dust on it, and the belt that held it was stiff. I buckled it round me without comment. I drew it out, looked at it, and sheathed it again. Plain but very well made.

“Give me that,” Chade suggested, and I realized I was still wearing the sword crown. I pulled it free and handed it to him. He tossed it on his bed. I dragged the woolen shirt over my head and shoved my arms out the sleeves. As I swept the cloak over my shoulders, I told him, “Tell the Fool why I’ve gone. He’ll understand.”

“Skill to me as soon as you arrive there. Please.”

“I shall.”

I did not care who turned as I passed or who stared after me as I pounded down the great stair, through the halls of Buckkeep Castle, and out into the courtyard where a boy held the reins of a fine roan mare. Her eyes were bright with intelligence, her long legs straight and strong. “Thank you,” I called as I seized her reins and mounted. As I wheeled her toward the gate, the lad shouted something about Lord Derrick’s horse, and I saw that a long-legged black was being led toward the steps. I’d taken the wrong horse. But too late. Nothing would turn me back now.

“Go!” I told her, voice and heels, and leaned forward.

Chapter Eleven
Withywoods

...

To Prince FitzChivalry

Sir. For many years I have held your secret as closely as you have held mine. My king entrusted it to me that I might better understand all that you did in that difficult time. My pride had been gravely injured by the ruses that you and your friend Lord Golden had played upon me. I would let you know that for years now I have better understood your role in those events. I do not forget all you have done for me. I recall well that but for you I would not be alive today. I write to you to remind you that I remain ever in your debt, and that if there is ever any way in which I can serve you, I beg that you will ask it of me.

Please know I make this offer with all sincerity.

The roan mare lifted herself into a gallop and we were through the gate before anyone had a chance to either challenge us or wave us through. She was a spirited creature and seemed to relish the idea of a night gallop. Her Wit shimmered between us, seeking a confirmation from me that we would become the best of friends. But my heart was frozen with fear and I held myself small and still. Her hooves threw up chunks of packed snow from the carriageway, and the wind of our passage squeezed my face in an icy grip. A cart trail turned off toward the Witness Stones. The snowy road was less packed, and her pace slowed despite my efforts to hurry her. I blessed the brief break in the storms that let the moon and starlight reflect from the snowy fields. I pressed her and as the trail became just a rumpling in the deep snow, she lunged and surged through it. Long before we reached the stones, I had made my decision. Regal’s apprentices and journeymen had taken horses through Skill-pillars before. True, some had lost their wits doing it, but I was far more seasoned at the Skill than they had been. And my need was far greater.

At the summit of the hill, I pulled her in, let her breathe, and then reined her close to the stones. Roan. With me. I pressed my Wit against all her senses, and it shocked me when she welcomed me. She tossed her head and showed me one white-rimmed eye as I slapped the stone with a bared hand and simultaneously wheeled her in. For a long moment she leapt through a starlit sky, and then we plunged out and she landed, stiff-legged and heaving under me, on the top of Gallows Hill. A three-day journey done in an instant. Wind and falling snow had erased almost every trace of my previous passage. The roan tossed her head, eyes and nostrils wide. Her strange exhilaration swept through me. I fought through a wave of vertigo before I found both common sense and my Wit, then wrapped her in reassurance and comfort, praised her, and promised her warmth and oats and fresh water. I walked her down the snowy hill. A small bit of patience now would pay off in the stamina to finish the ride.

Once our path met with a packed trail, I nudged her to a trot, and then as we came to a road, I pushed her up to a gallop. When I felt her begin to labor beneath me, I pulled her in, and again we walked. I had never had a deep faith in either Eda or El, but that night I prayed to Eda that I would find my child hidden but safe. I tormented myself with a thousand theories as to what might have happened. She had been trapped in the walls without food or water. She had been in the stables when they burned. Smoke had overcome her. Shun had done something dreadful to her and then fled after setting the house afire.

But none of my wild theories would explain why my household staff would claim to know nothing of Lady Bee or Lady Shun. I chewed my information a dozen different ways but made a meal from none of it. The night was cold and weariness welled in me. The closer I came to Withywoods, the less inclination I felt to be there. I should have stopped at Oaksbywater for the night. The thought surprised me and I shook my head to clear it from my mind. I pushed the mare back to a gallop, but I felt more heavyhearted than ever when I saw the lights of Withywoods through the trees.

Steam was rising from the roan’s withers when I pulled her in before the manor house. Even in the cold night, I could smell the stench of the burnt stables and the animals that had been in it. The loss of the building and the horses was a separate stabbing blow that made real the possibility that I had lost my little daughter as well. But as I swung down from the saddle, shouting for servants and stable boys, my heart lifted that I could see no damage to the house. The fire had not spread. I suddenly felt incredibly weary and woolly-witted. Bee, I said to myself, and pushed the haze of sleepiness away.

Chade. I’m here. Stables burned.

My Skill-message went nowhere. It was a terrible sensation, as if for one moment I was smothered and fighting for breath. Chade! Nettle! Dutiful! Thick! With each effort, the sense of suffocation increased. The Skill-current was there, I could almost touch it, but something shredded my sending into scattered threads. Exhaustion rose like a tide, stifling my terror. My fear became despair and I abandoned the effort. I shouted again and was relieved to hear my own voice.

A houseman pulled the door open for me and I heard it drag across the threshold. In the light from the lamp he lifted, I saw the damage that had been done. Someone had beaten the doors of my home in. That stung me to full alertness again. “What’s happened here?” I demanded breathlessly. “Where’s Revel? Where’s FitzVigilant? And Bee and Shun?”

The man goggled at me. “Who?” he demanded, and then, “The scribe is long abed, sir. Since his accident, he has been poorly. The whole household is abed, except for me. I can fetch Steward Dixon, but Holder Badgerlock, you look exhausted. Mayn’t I build up the fire in your chamber and see you there? And in the morning—”

“How did the stable burn down? Where is my daughter? Where is Lord Chade’s messenger Sildwell?”

“Lady Nettle?” the man queried me earnestly, and I gave him up for an idiot. Don’t ask questions of idiots: Find the likeliest person to have an answer. “Wake the steward and have him meet me in my private study immediately. Not the estate study, my private study! Have him bring FitzVigilant!”

I strode past the man, snatching the lamp from his hands and shouting over my shoulder, “And find someone to see to that horse!” before I broke into a run. Bee would be there. I knew she would be there. It was the one place she always felt safe, the secret that only she and I shared. I tried to ignore other damage to the house as I raced through corridors and up stairs. I passed a door that had been forced and still hung off its hinges. A tapestry had sustained a slash and hung crookedly, one corner puddled on the floor. My mind could not encompass it. My stables had been burned, someone had attacked Withywoods and marauded through its corridors, my daughter was missing, and the door servant seemed completely at ease with whatever had happened. “Bee!” I shouted as I ran, and I continued to shout her name until I reached the door of the study. Throughout the house, I heard doors opening and querying voices raised. I didn’t care who I roused. Why should anyone be sleeping when the daughter of the house was missing?

The doors of my study had been forced, the fine wood splintered. Two of my scroll racks leaned drunkenly against each other, their contents spilled to the floor. My desk had been ransacked, my chair overturned. I cared nothing for that destruction, nor for any stolen secrets. Where was my little girl? I was panting as I strove to align the doors so that I could close them and work the catch to the hidden labyrinth. “Bee,” I told her, my voice cracking with hope. “Papa’s home, I’m coming. Oh, Bee, please be there.”

I worked the catch hidden in the door hinge and then hunched over to enter the secret spy-ways that wended behind the paneled corridors of Withywoods. I found her tiny hidey-hole. It was empty and looked untouched, her cushions and pens just as she had left them. The fragrance of one of her mother’s candles still hung in the air. “Bee!” I called, still hoping I might hear an answer from her. Hunched over, I followed her chalk marks toward the entry in the pantry. I was horrified to see other markings on the walls, her clear letters indicating passageways that I’d never explored.

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