Fool's Quest - Страница 72

“Does she dream?” he demanded suddenly.

And then it poured from me, the full story of her desire to have paper on which to write her dreams down, and how she had so frightened me by foretelling the death of the “pale man” and then the messenger in her butterfly cloak. I hated to tell him how the messenger had died, but by then the sharing of that barbed secret seemed a necessity.

“She helped you burn the body?” the Fool asked incredulously. “Your little girl?”

I nodded silently, then forced myself to admit it aloud. “Yes. She did.”

“Oh, Fitz,” he rebuked me. But I had more to confess to him, and I did, with the tale of our aborted holiday in Oaksbywater, and how I had killed the dog and longed to kill her master, and how I had carelessly allowed Bee to slip away from me. And then, I had to admit the worst. I told how I had come to stab him thinking he was a danger to her.

“What? That was your child who came to me? The boy who touched me and opened me to all the futures? I didn’t dream it, did I! He was there. The Unexpected Son!”

“No, Fool. There was no lad anywhere near you. Only my daughter, my little Bee.”

“Then it was her? It was Bee I held in my arms for that one moment? Oh, Fitz! Why did not you tell me instantly!” He stood abruptly, swayed, and sank down. He grasped the arms of the chair and gripped them as if a storm blew around him. He stared at the fire as if he could see through the walls of the keep and into some other world. “Of course,” he whispered at last. “It would have to be so. I understand it all now. Who else’s could she be? In that moment, when she touched me, ah, it was no dream, no illusion or delusion. I saw with her. My mind was opened once again to all possible futures. Because, yes, she is Shaysa, even as I once was. And I did not see her in the futures I glimpsed for you because, without me, you would never have had her. She is my daughter, too, Fitz. Yours and mine and Molly’s. As is the way of my kind. Ours. Our Bee.”

I was torn between utter confusion and deepest insult. I had a faint memory of him telling me once that he’d had two fathers—brothers or cousins—in a place where folk accepted that arrangement. I’d assumed that it meant that in that place no one would care whose seed had actually ripened in the wife the husbands shared. I forced myself to calmness and looked at him carefully. His golden gaze seemed to meet mine. His eyes were more unnerving now than when they had been colorless. The metallic gleam in them seemed to shift and flow and swirl as if they were liquid while the black dots of his pupils seemed too small for the dim light. I drew a deep steadying breath. Don’t be distracted. Stay on the trail. “Fool. Bee is not your child. You were never with Molly.”

He smiled at me. “No, Beloved. Of course I was never with Molly.” His fingertip tapped the table, once, twice, thrice. He smiled gently. Then he said, “I was with you.”

I opened my mouth and stood in gaping silence. It took a long time for coherent words to find their way out. “No.” I said it firmly. “No, you were not! And even if …” And then I ran out of words and logic.

He laughed aloud. Of all the reactions he could have had, that was the last I expected. He laughed as I had rarely heard him laugh, for while the jester makes others laugh, he seldom betrays his own amusement. But now he laughed unabashedly and without restraint, until he was breathless and had to wipe tears from his sightless eyes. I stared at him. “Oh, Fitz,” he gasped at last. “Oh, my friend. What a thing for me to miss! Such a terrible time to be deprived of my sight. Still, all I could not see on your face, I heard in your voice. Oh, Fitz. Oh, my Fitz.” He had to stop speaking to take in air.

“Of all your jests upon me, that was the least funny.” I tried not to sound as hurt as I felt. In the midst of my fears for Bee, he would do this?

“No, Fitz. No. It was the best, for it was no jest. Oh, my friend. You’ve no idea what you’ve just told me, even though I have done my best to explain it to you before.” He drew breath again.

I found a bit of dignity. “I should go see Chade.” I’d had my fill of the Fool’s peculiar humor for now.

“Yes. You should. But not just yet.” He reached out and unerringly seized my hand. “Stay here, Fitz. For I think I know at least part of the answer to your most important question. And I have answers to the other questions that you do not even know to ask. That last one is the one I answer first. Fitz. You can deny it. But I have been with you, in every way that matters. As you have been with me. We’ve shared our thoughts and our food, bound each other’s wounds, slept close when the warmth of our bodies was all we had left to share. Your tears have fallen on my face, and my blood has been on your hands. You’ve carried me when I was dead, and I carried you when I did not even recognize you. You’ve breathed my breath for me, sheltered me inside your own body. So, yes, Fitz, in every way that matters, I’ve been with you. We’ve shared the stuff of our beings. Just as a captain does with her liveship. Just as a dragon does with his Elderling. We’ve been together in so many ways that we have mingled. So close have we been that when you made love to your Molly, she begat our child. Yours. Mine. Molly’s. A little Buck girl with a wild streak of White in her.

“Oh, gods. Such a jest and such a joy. A jest I played upon you? Hardly! A joy you have given me. Tell me. Does she look like me at all?”

“No.” Yes. The twin peaks of her upper lip. Her long pale lashes against her cheeks. Her blond hair, curly as mine, wild as his had been. Her round chin, not the Fool’s as he was now but twin to him as a child.

“Oh, how you lie!” the Fool rejoiced. “She does! I know it in your affronted silence. Bee looks like me! Yours and mine, and doubtless the most beautiful and clever child that ever existed!”

“She is that.” Don’t think of his ridiculous claim. Of all the people I could lie to, I’d always been best at lying to myself. Bee was mine. Only mine. Her paleness came from my Mountain mother. I could believe that. It was easier to believe that than to agree that the Fool had shared in her making. Wasn’t it?

“And now the most important of your questions I answer.” His voice went deadly solemn. He sat straighter at the table. His shoulders were squared and his peculiar gaze distant. “At this instant, I do not know where they are. But I know where they must take her. Back to Clerres and the school. Back to the den of the Servants. She will be a precious prize to them. Not an Unexpected Son, no, but a trueborn shaysa, unseen and unpredicted. And not created by them. How astonished they will be by that.” He paused and thought for a short time. “And how determined to use her. Fitz, I do not think you need to fear for her life, yet. But all the same, we must fear for her and recover her as quickly as possible.”

“Can we intercept them?” Hope flared in me at the first possibility of actually doing something rather than simply floundering and agonizing. I pushed all else he had said aside. All those thoughts could wait until I held Bee in my arms again.

“Only if we are very clever. Exceedingly clever. It will be like that guessing game they play in the market, the one with the pea under one of three walnut shells. We must decide which route they will be smartest to take, and then that they will certainly not take the route as we will have deduced it. And then we must think of the route they would choose as the one we would think most unlikely, and discard that as well. We must thwart the future as they know it. It’s a puzzle, Fitz, and they have far more information than we do. But there is one piece of information they may have but do not understand. They may know she is our child, but they have no idea to what lengths we will go to recover her.”

He stopped speaking. Cradling his chin in one hand, he turned his face toward the firelight. He pulled at his lips as if his mouth pained him. I stared at him. The scars on his cheeks were fading but his silhouette looked wrong to me. He turned his face back to me. The shifting gold in his eyes was like molten metal seething in a pot. “I will need to ponder this, Fitz. I must try to dredge from my memory every prophecy or dream about the Unexpected Son that I ever memorized. And I do not know if any of them will be useful. Do any of them truly apply to Bee? Or is she a chance find for them, a treasure discovered when they were seeking something very different? Will they split their group, and send some home with Bee while others continue to seek the Unexpected Son?

“And since my Catalyst and I changed the world, have they harvested new prophecies from their stables of Whites and part-Whites? I think it likely. How can we outwit something like that? How do we outfox a fox who knows every path and den, when they seem able to fog every witness who might be able to help us?”

A shadow of an idea flitted through my brain. Before I could grasp it, the Fool broke the flimsy thought. “Go on!” With the back of his fingers he shooed me away. “Take some rest or visit Chade. I need to think alone.”

I shook my head, marveling at him. In the space of a conversation, he had gone from a quivering, fearful wreck to dismissing me as if he were my king. I wondered if the dragon blood was affecting his mood as well as his body.

The Fool nodded a farewell, already lost in thought. I rose, stiff from sitting, and descended to my room. Ash had been there. It had been meticulously tidied with a precision I could never have achieved. A merry little fire on the hearth waited to be fed. I gave it a log and sat down in the chair before it. I stared into the flames.