Assassin's Quest (67 page)

“Were we back at Jhaampe, I could let you fumble and scrape as much as you wanted. To do is truly the only way to learn. But for here, for now, even with such knives as we have, I think I might bring a more graceful shape out of this wood.” The Fool spoke openly.

“If you would,” she accepted quietly. I wondered when they had set aside their hostilities and realized I had not, for some days, paid much attention to anyone save myself. I had accepted that Starling wanted little more to do with me than to be present if I did something of vast import. I had not made any of friendship’s demands upon her. Both Kettricken’s rank and her grief had imposed a barrier between us that I had not ventured to breach. Kettle’s reticence about herself made any true conversation difficult. But I could think of no excuse for how I had excluded the Fool and the wolf from my thoughts lately.

When you throw up walls against those who would use Skill against you, you lock more than your Skill-sense inside,
Nighteyes observed.

I sat pondering that. It seemed to me that my Wit and my feeling for people had dimmed somewhat of late. Perhaps my companion was right. Kettle poked me suddenly, sharply. “Don’t wander!” she chided me.

“I was just thinking,” I said defensively.

“Well, think aloud then.”

“I’ve no thoughts worth sharing just now.”

Kettle glowered at me for being uncooperative.

“Recite then,” commanded the Fool. “Or sing something. Anything to keep yourself focused here.”

“That’s a good idea,” Kettle agreed, and it was my turn to glower at the Fool. But all eyes were on me. I took a breath and tried to think of something to recite. Almost everyone had a favorite story or bit of poetry memorized. But most of what I had possessed had to do with the poisoning herbs or others of the assassin’s arts. “I know one song,” I finally admitted. “ “Crossfire’s Sacrifice.’ ”

Now Kettle scowled, but Starling struck up the opening notes with an amused smile on her face. After one false start, I launched into it, and carried it off fairly well, though I saw Starling flinch a time or two at a soured note. For whatever reason, my choice of song displeased Kettle, who sat grim and staring at me defiantly. When I had finished, the turn was passed to Kettricken, who sang a hunting ballad from the Mountains. Then it was the Fool’s turn, and he humored us with a ribald folk song about courting a milkmaid. I believe I saw grudging admiration from Starling for that performance. That left Kettle, and I had expected her to beg off. Instead, she sang the old children’s nursery rhyme about “Six Wise Men went to Jhaampe-town, climbed a hill and never came down,” all the time eyeing me as if each word from her cracked old voice were a barb meant just for me. But if there was a veiled insult there, I missed it, as well as the reason for her ill will.

Wolves sing together,
Nighteyes observed, just as Kettricken suggested, “Play us something we all know, Starling. Something to give us heart.” So Starling played that ancient song about gathering flowers for one’s beloved, and we all sang along, some with more heart than others.

As the last note died away, Kettle observed, “The wind’s dropping.”

We all listened, and then Kettricken crawled from the tent. I followed her, and we stood quiet for a time in a wind that had gone quieter. Dusk had stolen the colors from the world. In the wake of the wind, snow had begun thickly falling. “The storm has almost blown itself out,” she observed. “We can be on our way tomorrow.”

“None too soon for me,” I said.
Come to me, come to me
still echoed in the beating of my heart. Somewhere up in those Mountains, or beyond them, was Verity.

And the river of Skill.

“As for me,” Kettricken said quietly. “Would that I had followed my instincts a year ago, and gone to the ends of the map. But I reasoned that I could do no better than Verity had done. And I feared to risk his child. A child I lost anyway, and thus failed him both ways.”

“Failed him?” I exclaimed in horror. “By losing his child?”

“His child, his crown, his kingdom. His father. What did he entrust me with that I did not lose, FitzChivalry? Even as I rush to be with him again, I wonder how I can meet his eyes.”

“Oh, my queen, you are mistaken in this, I assure you. He would not perceive that you have failed him, but fears only that he abandoned you in the greatest of danger.”

“He only went to do what he knew he must,” Kettricken said quietly. And then added plaintively, “Oh, Fitz, how can you speak for what he feels, when you cannot even tell me where he is?”

“Where he is, my queen, is but a bit of information, a spot on that map. But what he feels, and what he feels for you . . . that is what he breathes, and when we are together in the Skill, joined mind to mind, then I know such things, almost whether I would or no.” I recalled the other times I had been privy unwillingly to Verity’s feelings for his queen, and was glad the night hid my face from her.

“Would this Skill were a thing I could learn. . . . Do you know how often and how angry I have felt with you, solely because you could reach forth to the one I longed for, and know his mind and heart so easily? Jealousy is an ugly thing, and always I have tried to set it aside from me. But sometimes it seems so monstrously unfair that you are joined to him in such a way, and I am not.”

It had never occurred to me that she might feel such a thing. Awkwardly, I pointed out, “The Skill is as much curse as it is gift. Or so it has been to me. Even if it were a thing I could gift you with, my lady, I do not know that is a thing one would do to a friend.”

“To feel his presence and his love for even a moment, Fitz . . . for that I would accept any curse that rode with it. To know his touch again, in any form . . . can you imagine how I miss him?”

“I think I can, my lady,” I said quietly. Molly. Like a hand gripping my heart.
Chopping hard winter turnips on the tabletop. The knife was dull, she would ask Burrich to put an edge on it if he ever came in from the rain. He was cutting wood to take down to the village and sell tomorrow. The man worked too hard, his leg would be hurting him tonight.

“Fitz? FitzChivalry!”

I snapped back to Kettricken shaking me by the shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. I rubbed at my eyes and laughed. “Irony. All my life, it has been so difficult to use the Skill. It came and went like the wind in a ship’s sails. Now I am here, and suddenly Skilling is as effortless as breathing. And I hunger to use it, to find out what is happening to those I love best. But Verity warns me I must not, and I must believe he knows best.”

“As must I,” she agreed wearily.

We stood a moment longer in the dimness, and I fought a sudden impulse to put my arm around her shoulders and tell her it would be all right, that we would find her husband and king. Briefly, she seemed that tall slender girl who had come from the Mountains to be Verity’s bride. But now she was the Queen of the Six Duchies, and I had seen her strength. Surely she needed no comfort from one such as I.

We cut more slices of meat from the freezing boar and then rejoined our companions in the tent. Nighteyes was sleeping contentedly. The Fool had Starling’s harp clutched between his knees and was using a skinning knife as a makeshift drawknife to gentle some of the frame’s lines. Starling sat beside him, watching and trying not to look anxious. Kettle had taken off a little pouch she wore about her neck and opened it, and was sorting out a handful of polished stones. As Kettricken and I built up the small fire in the brazier and prepared to cook the meat, Kettle insisted on explaining the rules of a game to me. Or attempting to. She finally gave up, exclaiming, “You’ll understand it when you’ve lost a few times.”

I lost more than a few times. She kept me at it for long hours after we had eaten. The Fool continued to shave wood from Starling’s harp, with many pauses to put a fresh edge on the knife. Kettricken was silent, almost moody, until the Fool noticed her melancholy mood and began to tell tales of Buckkeep life before she had come there. I listened with one ear, and even I was drawn back to those days when the Red Ships were no more than a tale and my life had been almost secure if not happy. Somehow the talk rounded into the various minstrels that had played at Buckkeep, both famous and lesser, and Starling plied the Fool with questions about them.

I soon found myself caught up in the play of the stones. It was strangely soothing: the stones themselves were red, black, and white, smoothly polished and pleasant to hold. The game involved each player randomly drawing stones from the pouch and then placing them on the intersections of lines on a patterned cloth. It was a game at once simple and complex. Each time I won a game, Kettle immediately introduced me to more complicated strategies. It engrossed me and freed my mind from memories or ponderings. When finally all the others were already drowsing in their sleeping skins, she set up a game on the board and bade me study it.

“It can be won decisively in one move of a black stone,” she told me. “But the solution is not easy to see.”

I stared at the game layout and shook my head. “How long did it take you to learn to play?”

She smiled to herself. “As a child, I was a fast learner. But I will admit you are faster.”

“I thought this game came from some far land.”

“No, it is an old Buck game.”

“I’ve never seen it played before.”

“It was not uncommon when I was a girl, but it was not taught to everyone. But that is of no matter now. Study the layout of the pieces. In the morning, tell me the solution.”

She left the pieces set up on the cloth by the brazier. Chade’s long training of my memory served me well. When I lay down, I visualized the board and gave myself one black stone with which to win. There were quite a variety of possible moves, as a black stone could also claim the place of a red stone and force it to another intersection, and a red stone had similar powers over a white. I closed my eyes, but held on to the game, playing the stone in various ways until I finally fell asleep. Either I dreamed of the game, or of nothing at all. It kept the Skill dreams safely at bay, but when I awoke in the morning, I still had no solution to the puzzle she had set me.

I was the first one awake. I crawled out of the tent and returned with a pot packed full of new wet snow to melt for morning tea. It was substantially warmer outside than it had been in days. It cheered me, even as it made me wonder if spring was already a reality in the lowlands. Before my mind could start wandering, I returned to puzzling about the game. Nighteyes came to rest his head on my shoulder where I sat.

I’m tired of dreaming of rocks. Lift up your eyes and see the whole thing, little brother. It is a hunting pack, not isolated hunters. See. That one. Put the black there, and do not use the red to displace a white, but set it there to close the trap. That is all.

I was still wondering at the marvelous simplicity of Nighteyes’ solution when Kettle awoke. With a grin she asked me if I had solved it yet. In answer, I took a black stone from the pouch and made the moves the wolf had suggested. Kettle’s face went slack with astonishment. Then she looked up at me in awe. “No one has ever figured it out that rapidly,” she told me.

“I had help,” I admitted sheepishly. “It’s the wolf’s game, not mine.”

Kettle’s eyes grew round. “You are jesting with an old woman,” she rebuked me carefully.

“No. I am not,” I told her, as I seemed to have hurt her feelings. “I thought about it for most of the night. I believe I even dreamed about game strategies. But when I woke, it was Nighteyes who had the solution.”

She was silent for a time. “I had thought that Nighteyes was . . . a clever pet. One who could hear your commands even if you did not speak them aloud. But now you say he can comprehend a game. Will you tell me he understands the words I speak?”

Across the tent, Starling was propped up on one elbow, listening to the conversation. I tried to think of a way to dissemble, then rejected it fiercely. I squared my shoulders as if I were reporting to Verity himself and spoke clearly. “We are Wit-bound. What I hear and understand, he comprehends as I do. What interests him, he learns. I do not say he could read a scroll, or remember a song. But if a thing intrigues him, he thinks on it, in his own way. As a wolf, usually, but sometimes almost as anyone might . . .” I struggled to try and put in words something I myself did not understand perfectly. “He saw the game as a pack of wolves driving game. Not as black and red and white markers. And he saw where he would go, were he hunting with that pack, to make their kill more likely. I suppose that sometimes I see things as he sees them . . . as a wolf. It is not wrong, I believe. Only a different way of perceiving the world.”

There was still a trace of superstitious fear in Kettle’s eyes as she glanced from me to the sleeping wolf. Nighteyes chose that moment to let his tail rise and fall in a sleepy wag to indicate he was fully cognizant that we spoke of him. Kettle gave a shiver. “What you do with him . . . is it like Skilling from human to human, only to a wolf?”

I started to shake my head, but then had to shrug. “The Wit begins more as a sharing of feelings. Especially when I was a child. Following smells, chasing a chicken because it would run, enjoying food together. But when you have been together as long as Nighteyes and I have, it starts to be something else. It goes beyond feelings, and it’s never really words. I am more aware of the animal that my mind lives inside. He is more aware of . . .”

Thinking. Of what comes before and after choosing to do an action. One becomes aware that one is always making choices, and considers what the best ones are.

Exactly.
I repeated his words aloud for Kettle. By now Nighteyes was sitting up. He made an elaborate show of stretching and then sat looking at her, his head cocked to one side.

“I see,” she said faintly. “I see.” Then she got up and left the tent.

Starling sat up and stretched. “It gives one an entirely different outlook on scratching his ears,” she observed. The Fool answered her with a snort of laughter, sat up in his bedding, and immediately reached to scratch Nighteyes behind the ears. The wolf fell over on him in appreciation. I growled at both of them and went back to making tea.