Fool's Quest - Страница 77

“I haven’t had much time for scribing.”

“Well, make time, if you can.” He folded his lips tightly, thinking. His eyes were very bright. I knew his thoughts were outstripping mine, racing up ladders of logic. “Years ago, when the Fool isolated himself after getting Kettricken home to the Mountain Kingdom, when he thought you were dead and his plans all come to naught, folk came seeking him. Pilgrims. Seeking a White Prophet in the Mountains. How did they know where to find him?”

“I suppose from the prophecies …”

He spoke very rapidly. “Or were the so-called Servants seeking him even then? It’s fairly obvious to me that they disliked him being out of their control. Put it together, Fitz. They made the Pale Woman. She was their game-piece. They set her loose on the gaming cloth to shape the world as they wished. They kept him there intending that no one could compete with her, but he got away from them. Rolling and tumbling across their gaming cloth like a bad throw of the dice. They needed him back. What better way to find someone than to seed a search by releasing prophecies and letting others be your pack of hounds seeking him?”

I was silent. Chade’s mind often made those sorts of leaps. He made a small sound, not quite a cough. Was the brightness of his eyes the light of fever? I could hear him breathing through his nose as his mind raced.

He held up another finger. “When they started to arrive, he refused to see any of them. Denied he was a prophet and claimed to be just a toy maker.”

I nodded to that.

“And when you left Jhaampe, you left very quietly.”

“We did.”

“So they might have lost track of him there. He vanishes. He follows his vision of the future and helps you wake the dragons. He ensures that the queen returns to Buck, with a Farseer heir growing in her belly. He vanishes again, to Jamaillia, I suspect, and Bingtown.

“And years later, he reappears as Lord Golden at Buckkeep, just in time to help you assure the survival of the Farseer heir yet again. He is determined to return dragons to this world. He manages to outmaneuver both of us and get himself to Aslevjal Island. And there, at last, the Servants capture him. And they torture him nearly to death. They think they’ve killed him.”

“They did kill him, Chade. He told me they would.” His gaze met mine. He didn’t quite believe me, but I decided it didn’t matter if he did or not. “He went to Aslevjal believing that had to happen for Icefyre to be set free from the glacier and mate with Tintaglia. To bring dragons back to our world.”

“Yes, and how we’ve all enjoyed that!” Chade observed sourly.

For no reason I could explain, that stung. “You’ve enjoyed it enough to obtain dragon’s blood,” I retorted.

He narrowed his eyes slightly. “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” he observed.

I teetered on a decision. Conversations about morality were rare among assassins. We did as we were told to do. But Chade had undertaken obtaining the blood himself, not as a mission ordained by the king. I dared to question it.

“You don’t feel a bit … uncomfortable buying the blood of a creature that obviously thinks and speaks? A creature that was possibly murdered for the harvest of that blood?”

He stared at me. His green eyes narrowed and glittered like glacial ice. “That’s an odd line for you to draw, Fitz. Witted as you are, you ran with a wolf. Did not you bring down deer and rabbits and eat them? Yet those of Old Blood who bond to such creatures would tell you that they think and feel even as we do.”

But they are prey and we are predator. It is how we are meant to be to each other. I shook my mind clear of wolfish thoughts. “That’s true. A man bonded to a buck would agree with you. But it’s how the world is structured. Wolves eat meat. We took only what we needed. My wolf needed meat and we took it. Without it, he would have died.”

“Apparently, without the dragon’s blood, your Fool would have died.” His tone had become acerbic. I wished I had not begun the conversation. Despite all our years together, despite how he had trained me, we had diverged in our thinking. Burrich and Verity, I thought to myself, were perhaps not the best influences for a young assassin. Like a curtain parting to reveal daylight, it came to me that perhaps neither of them had ever truly seen me as a royal assassin. King Shrewd had. But Burrich had done his best to raise me as Chivalry’s son. And perhaps Verity had always seen me as his potential heir.

It did not lessen Chade in my sight. Assassins, I believed, were different from but not inferior to gently raised men. They had their place in the world. Like wolves. But I regretted beginning a conversation that could only show us both how far we had diverged. A silence had fallen between us and it seemed a gulf. I thought of saying, I do not judge you, but it would have been a lie and only made things worse. Instead, I tried to resume an old role and asked him, “I am in awe that you were able to obtain it at all. What did you procure it for? Did you have plans for it?”

He raised his brows. “Several sources imply it’s a powerful restorative. Word came to me that the Duke of Chalced was employing every means at his command to obtain that vial. He believed it would restore him to health and vitality. And for many years, I’d taken a keen interest in the duke’s health.” A very slight but very triumphant smile twitched at his mouth. “That vial of blood was on its way to Chalced when it was … diverted. Instead, it came to me.” He waited a moment to allow that thought to penetrate my mind and then added, “The dragon was already dead. Refusing to buy the blood would not have brought it back to life. Diverting it from the Duke of Chalced perhaps saved lives.” The smile flickered over his face again. “Or perhaps not having it ended the duke’s life.”

“I had heard that he died when dragons tumbled his castle onto him. If it’s so, there’s some irony to it, isn’t there? The creatures he was hunting to preserve his life sought him out and killed him.”

“Irony. Or fate. But you’d have to ask your White Prophet about fate.”

He wasn’t serious. Perhaps. I answered as if he were. “After I brought him back from the dead, he lost his ability to see all the futures. He lives day-to-day now, just as we do, fumbling forward down the path to the future.”

Chade shook his head. “There is no path to the future, Fitz. The path is now. Now is all there is, or ever will be. You can change perhaps the next ten breaths in your life. But after that, random chance seizes you in its jaws again. A tree falls on you, a spider bites your ankle, and all your grand plans for winning a battle are for naught. Now is what we have, Fitz, and now is where we act to stay alive.”

The wolfness of the thought jolted me to quiet.

He took a breath, sighed it out fiercely, and gave me a look that was almost a glare. I waited. “There is something else you should know. I doubt it can help us regain our daughters, but you should know, in case it can.” He sounded almost angry at having to share his secret, whatever it was. I waited.

“Shine has the Skill. And strongly.”

“What?” My incredulous reaction pleased him.

He smiled. “Yes. Strange to say, the talent that is so thin in me, I still must fight to use it, blossomed in her at a young age. The Farseer blood runs strong in her veins.”

“How did you discover that?”

“When she was very small, she reached out for me. I had a dream of a little girl tugging at my sleeve. Calling me Papa and begging me to pick her up.” The proud smile grew stronger. “She is strong with it, Fitz. Strong enough to find me.”

“I thought she didn’t know you were her father.”

“She doesn’t. Her mother left her to be raised by her grandparents. Good enough people in their own way. I can recognize that, even if they bled me for money. Obviously they were not fond of me, but they were loyal to their own blood. She was undeniably their granddaughter, and they raised her as such. With the same haphazard raising they had bestowed upon her mother, I am sad to say. Benign but not intelligent. Keeping a child from harm is not the same as rearing one.” He shook his head, his mouth sour. “Her mother disdained her from the beginning, and even as a small child Shine knew that. But she also knew that she had a father, somewhere, and she yearned for him. And in her dreams, she followed that yearning. And our minds touched.”

The uncharacteristically tender smile on his face told me that was his real secret. His daughter had reached out and touched minds with him. And he was proud of her, so proud of her Skill. He regretted not being able to have her near him and shape the innate cleverness he sensed in her. Perhaps if he had had her from her beginnings, she could have inherited his role. Too late for that now, I thought. Those thoughts flashed like lightning through my mind, but my own concerns immediately overwhelmed them.

“Chade, I consider it very likely that you had actually touched her with Skill first. As I did with both Nettle and Dutiful, not even realizing what I was doing. And she then reached back to you. So you can reach her and she can tell us where she is and we can reclaim them! Chade, why didn’t you do that immediately?”

The smile vanished as if it had never been. “You’ll judge me harshly for this,” he warned me. “I sealed her. To everyone but me. While she was still small. Long before I brought her to you, I sealed her against the Skill. To protect her.”