Fool's Quest - Страница 67

I saw Nettle recoil from me. She lifted her hands to cover her ears and then it was suddenly harder to reach her. I groped for her, but she tried to wall me out. She could not. I seeped through. I turned my slow glance to Dutiful. Another wall. Why?

“You’re still bleeding.” Kettricken shook out her handkerchief and pressed the silky thing to my brow.

“It only happened a few moments ago,” I told her, knowing she had not been a party to our shared thoughts.

“A day, at least,” she reminded me. I stared at her. Wit or Skill? What was the difference, I abruptly wondered. Were not we all animals in some sense of that foolish word?

“I am not sure that time is the same for us,” I said aloud, and then was glad of Riddle’s strong hand gripping my wrist and pulling me up into the wagon. He leaned close to me. “Let go of Kettricken. Walls up, Fitz,” he said quietly. “I’ve not the Skill, but even I can sense you spilling.” Then he left me to help Dutiful arrange Chade. The old man lay on his side, clutching at his wound and groaning. The driver spoke, the horses started the wagon with a lurch, and I passed out.

I came back to awareness somewhat on the stairs inside Buckkeep Castle. A serving man was helping me walk up the stairs. I didn’t know him. I felt alarm, and then a wash of Skill from Dutiful assured me that all was well. I should just keep climbing the stairs. Do not try to Skill back to me, please. Or to anyone. Please put up your walls and try not to spill. I could feel Dutiful’s weariness. I seemed to recall that he had asked me to look to my walls several times. He was not with me. I wondered why.

In my room, a different serving man, one I had never seen before, offended me by insisting on helping me remove my bloody clothes and put on a clean nightshirt. I did not wish to be further bothered, but a healer came into my room and asserted that he must clean both the wound on my shoulder and the slash on my brow and then suture my brow closed with many a “Beg your indulgence, Prince FitzChivalry,” and “If my prince would be pleased to turn his face toward the light,” and “It grieves me to ask you to endure this pain, Prince FitzChivalry,” until I could scarcely stand the man’s unctuousness. When all was done, he offered me tea. At the first sip, I knew it was too strong with valerian, but I had little will to resist his insistence that I drink it. And then I must have slept again.

I woke to the fire burned low and the room full of darkness. I yawned, stretched against the ache of my muscles, and gazed dully at the short flames that licked lazily across the surface of the last log in my hearth. Slowly, slowly, I found myself in place and time. And then my heart jumped in my chest and began to hammer. Chade, injured. Bee, stolen. The Fool, possibly dying. The disasters vied to dominate my fear as being the most terrifying. I groped out with the Skill and touched Nettle and Dutiful simultaneously. Chade?

Softly, Fitz. Softly. Hold yourself in. It isn’t good, Dutiful responded glumly. The stays of his girdle deflected the sword but it still penetrated his side. He lost a great deal of blood and seems disoriented from his experience within the Skill-pillar. The only sense we have had from him is that he is angry with you for divulging that he, too, has a daughter who has been stolen. I am still trying to settle that bit of news in my mind!

I pushed my weary thoughts back. Had I divulged Chade’s secret? Probably when I had spilled myself, it had cascaded out. I was appalled that I had been so careless, but could not dwell on that. It had been when I had given Nettle and Dutiful access to my mind to explain the situation. Even now, I felt too weary for detailed conversation. Is Nettle all right? She looked so worn.

I am better, now that you and Chade are here. I am coming to your room. Now. Try to be very still until I get there.

I had forgotten that our minds were touching. Am I that addled still? I asked myself, and felt my question echo off into the Skill-current.

I am coming also. And, yes, you are that addled, so please, if you can, put up your walls. Be still. You are alarming the other coteries. You seem to have gained strength and lost control of your thoughts during your passage. You are battering our apprentices. And you seem to not be entirely within yourself, if you can conceive what I mean. As if you are still caught in the Skill-current.

Barricading my thoughts back into my own mind was like building a drystone wall. Fit each piece into place. Hold back the cascading thoughts, stop the chaining thoughts of worry, fear, desperation, and guilt. Stop them, hold them, guard them.

When I thought I was safe once more behind my walls, I became aware of my body’s complaints.

Several of my stitches were too tight. The slightest change in my facial expression made them pull. The rest of my body ached, and I was suddenly, horribly hungry in a way I could not control.

There was a tap on my door but before I could rise from my bed, Nettle entered. “You’re still spilling,” she whispered. “Half of Buckkeep Castle will be having nightmares tonight. And eating like ravenous dogs. Oh, Da.” Sudden tears stood in her eyes. “Out there by the stones. I could not even speak to you afterward … our poor folk at Withywoods. That fight! And how much agony you feel about Bee. How hurt you were that I asked for her, and how guilty … How you love her! And how you torment yourself. Here. Let me help you.”

She sat down on the edge of my bed and took my hand. As if I were a child being taught to wield a spoon, or an old man leaning on a youngster’s shoulder, her Skill flowed into me, mingled with mine, and she set my walls. It was good to be contained again, as if someone had buttoned a warm coat securely around me. But even after I found that the clamor of the lesser Skill-stream of strangers had been sealed out of me and my own thoughts fenced in, Nettle kept hold of my hand. I turned my head slowly to look at her.

For a time, she just looked at me silently. Then she said, “I’ve never really known you, have I? All these years. The things you kept hidden from me, lest I think less of Burrich or my mother. The reserve you held because you felt you did not deserve to intrude into my life … Has anyone ever really known you? Known what you felt and thought?”

“Your mother did, I think,” I said, and then I had to wonder. The Fool, I nearly said, and then Nighteyes. That last answer, I knew, would have been the truest truth. But I did not say it.

She sighed a small sigh. “A wolf,” she said. “A wolf best knew your heart.” I was certain I had not shared that thought with her. I wondered if, after I had been so vulnerable to her, she now could tell when I held things back. I was trying to summon words to say to her when there was a second tap on the door and Riddle entered, bearing a tray. King Dutiful, looking less than regal, was behind him.

“I brought food,” Riddle announced even as the scent of it dizzied me with longing.

“Just let him eat first,” Dutiful advised as if I were an ill-mannered dog or perhaps a very small child. “He’s sharing his hunger with the whole castle.” And again, I could think of no words. Thoughts were too fast for words and too complex. There was too much to say, more than anyone could ever say in a lifetime about even the simplest things. But before I could despair about that, Riddle put the food in front of me. I recognized it as having come from the guard’s mess, the simple hearty food one could find there at any hour of the day or night. A thick brown soup, lumpy with vegetables and chunks of meat, good brown bread with a chewy crust. Riddle had not skimped when he had buttered two slabs of that, nor on the wedges of orange cheese beside them. The flagon of ale on the tray had spilled over a bit, wetting the edge of the bread. I didn’t care.

“He’s going to choke,” someone said, but I didn’t.

“Fitz?” said Dutiful.

I turned to look at him. It was strange to remember that there were people in the room. Devouring the meal had been such a consuming experience, it was startling to discover the world could hold more sensory information than that. My eyes wandered over his face, finding my features in his, and then Kettricken’s.

“Are you feeling a bit more yourself?” he asked. I wondered how much time had passed. I found I was breathing hard. Eating that fast was hard work. No one else had spoken since his last words. Was that how time was truly measured? In how many people spoke, in how much information was shared? Perhaps it was measured in how much food one ate. I tried to pare my thoughts down to something that might fit in words.

“I think I feel better,” I said. No. That wasn’t true. I thought nothing of the kind. Better than what? My thoughts raced away from me again. Someone was touching me. Nettle. She had moved behind me and set her hands on my shoulders. She was making my walls stronger. Making me one thing, one separate person instead of the taste of the bread and the sound of the fire crackling. Separating me out from everything else.

“I’m going to talk,” Dutiful said. “And I’m going to hope you are listening, and that you can find the sense of my words better than Chade can. Fitz. Fitz, look at me. You were almost a day in the stones. You told us you were coming, and we waited for you, and you didn’t emerge. Nettle reached out to try and find you, and with Steady’s strength and Riddle helping her she found you and held you together until I could reach into the stone and draw you out. Eda and El, that was strange! I felt I found your hand and pulled you out of the earth itself!