Assassin's Quest (68 page)

We were not as swift to be packed and on our way. A thick layer of damp snow overlay everything, making breaking camp that much more difficult. We cut up what was left of the boar and took it with us. The jeppas were rounded up; despite the storm, they had not wandered far. The secret seemed to be in the bag of sweetened grain that Kettricken kept to lure the leader. When we were loaded and finally ready to leave, Kettle announced that I must not be allowed to walk on the road, and that someone must always be with me. I bristled a bit at that, but they ignored me. The Fool volunteered quickly to be my first partner. Starling gave him an odd smile and a shake of her head over that. I accepted their ridicule by sulking manfully. They ignored that, too.

In a short time the women and the jeppas were moving easily up the road, while the Fool and I scrabbled alongside on the berm that marked the edge of it. Kettle turned to shake her walking stick. “Get him farther away than that!” she scolded the Fool. “Get to where you can just see us to follow us. Go on, now. Go on.”

So we obediently edged back into the woods. As soon as we were out of sight of the others, the Fool turned to me and excitedly demanded, “Who is Kettle?”

“You know as much as I do,” I pointed out shortly. And added a question of my own, “What is between you and Starling now?”

He lifted his eyebrows at me and winked slyly.

“I doubt that very much,” I retorted.

“Ah, not all are as immune to my wiles as you are, Fitz. What can I tell you? She pines for me, she yearns for me in the depths of her soul, but knows not how to express it, poor thing.”

I gave it up as a bad question. “What do you mean by asking me, “Who is Kettle?’ ”

He gave me a pitying glance. “It is not so complex a question, princeling. Who is this woman who knows so much of what troubles you, who suddenly fishes out of a pocket a game I have only seen mentioned once in a very old scroll, who sings for us “Six Wise Men Went to Jhaampe-Town’ with two additional verses I’ve never heard anywhere. Who, O light of my life, is Kettle, and why does so ancient a woman choose to spend her last days hiking up a mountain with us?”

“You’re in fine spirits this morning,” I observed sourly.

“Aren’t I?” he agreed. “And you are almost as adept at avoiding my question. Surely, you must have some musings on this mystery to share with a poor Fool?”

“She doesn’t give me enough information about herself to base any wondering on,” I returned.

“So. What can we surmise about one who guards her tongue as closely as all that? About someone who seems to know something of the Skill as well? And the ancient games of Buck, and old poetry? How old do you suppose she is?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t like my song about Crossfire’s coterie,” I offered suddenly.

“Ah, but that could easily have been just your singing. Let’s not grasp at straws, here.”

In spite of myself, I smiled. “It has been so long since your tongue has had an edge to it, it’s almost a relief to hear you mock me.”

“Had I known you missed it, I would have been rude to you much sooner.” He grinned. Then he grew more serious. “FitzChivalry, mystery hovers about that woman like flies on . . . spilt beer. She absolutely reeks of omens and portents and prophecies coming into focus. I think it is time one of us asked her a few direct questions.” He smiled at me. “Your best chance will be when she is shepherding you along this afternoon. Be subtle, of course. Ask her who was king when she was a girl. And why she was exiled.”

“Exiled?” I laughed aloud. “There’s a leap of the imagination.”

“Do you think so? I don’t. Ask her. And be sure to tell me whatever she doesn’t say.”

“And in return for all this, you will tell me what is truly going on between you and Starling?”

He gave me a sideways glance. “Are you sure you want to know? The last time we made such a trade, when I gave you the secret you’d bargained for, you found you did not want it.”

“Is this such a secret?”

He arched one eyebrow at me. “You know, I am hardly certain of the answer to that myself. Sometimes you surprise me, Fitz. More often, you don’t, of course. Most often I surprise myself. Such as when I volunteer to slog through loose snow and dodge trees with some bastard when I could be parading up a perfectly straight avenue with a string of charming jeppas.”

I got as little information from him the rest of the morning. When afternoon came, it was not Kettle but Starling who was my walking companion. I expected that to be uncomfortable. I still had not forgotten that she had bargained her knowledge of my child in order to be part of this expedition. But somehow in the days since we had begun our journey, my anger had become a weary wariness toward her. I knew now there was no bit of information she would scruple to use against me, and so I guarded my tongue, resolving to say nothing at all of Molly or my daughter. Not that it would do much good now.

But to my surprise, Starling was affable and chatty. She plied me with questions, not about Molly, but about the Fool, to the point at which I began to wonder if she
had
conceived a sudden affection for him. There had been a few times at court when women had taken an interest in him and pursued him. To those who were attracted by the novelty of his appearance, he had been mercilessly cruel in exposing the shallowness of their interest. There had been one gardener maid who was impressed with his wit so much that she was tongue-tied in his presence. I heard kitchen gossip that she left bouquets of flowers for him at the base of his tower stairs, and some surmised that she had occasionally been invited to ascend those steps. She had had to leave Buckkeep Castle to care for her elderly mother in a distant town, and that had been where it ended, as far as I knew.

Yet as slight as this knowledge of the Fool was, I kept it from Starling, turning aside her questions with banalities that the two of us were childhood friends whose duties had left us very little time for socializing. This was actually very close to the truth, but I could see it both frustrated and amused her. Her other questions were as odd. She asked if I had ever wondered what his true name was. I told her that not being able to recall the name my own mother had given me had left me chary of asking others such questions. That quieted her for a time, but then she demanded to know how he had dressed as a child. My descriptions of his seasonal motleys did not suit her, but I truthfully told her that until Jhaampe I had never seen him dressed in other than his jester’s clothes. By afternoon’s end, her questions and my answers had more of sparring in them than conversation. I was glad to join the others in a camp, pitched at quite a distance from the Skill road.

Even so, Kettle kept me busy, letting me do her chores as well as my own for the sake of occupying my mind. The Fool concocted a respectable stew from our supplies and the pork. The wolf contented himself with another leg off the animal. When the meal things were finally cleared away, Kettle immediately set out the gamecloth and pouch of stones. “Now we shall see what you have learned,” she promised me.

But half a dozen games later, she squinted up at me with a frown. “You were not lying!” she accused me.

“About what?”

“About the wolf devising the solution. Had you mastered that strategy yourself, you would play a different game now. Because someone gave you the answer rather than your discovering it yourself, you don’t fully understand it.”

At the moment the wolf rose and stretched.
I weary of stones and cloth,
he informed me.
My hunting is more fun, and offers real meat at the end of it.

So you are hungry?

No. Bored.
He nosed the flap of the tent open and slipped out into the night.

Kettle watched him go with pursed lips. “I was about to ask if you could not team together to play this game. It would interest me to see how you played.”

“I think he suspected that,” I muttered, a bit disgruntled that he had not invited me to join him.

Five games later, I grasped the brilliant simplicity of Nighteyes’ noose tactic. It had lain before me all that time, but suddenly it was as if I saw the stones in motion rather than resting on the vertices of the cloth’s pattern. In my next move, I employed it to win easily. I won the next three games handily, for I saw how it could be employed in a reverse situation as well.

At the fourth win, Kettle cleared the cloth of stones. Around us the others had already sunk into sleep. Kettle added a handful of twigs to the brazier to give us one last burst of light. Rapidly her knotted old fingers set out the stones on the cloth. “Again, this is your game, and it is your move,” she informed me. “But this time, you have only a white stone to place. A little weak white stone, but it can win for you. Think well on this one. And no cheating. Leave the wolf out of it.”

I stared at the situation to fix the game in my mind and then lay down to sleep. The game she had set out for me looked hopeless. I did not see how it could be won with a black stone, let alone a white one. I do not know if it were the stone game or our distance from the road, but I sank quickly into a sleep that was dreamless until near dawn. Then I joined the wolf in his wild running. Nighteyes had left the road far behind him and was joyously exploring the surrounding hillsides. We came on two snow cats feeding off a kill, and for a time he taunted them, circling just out of reach to make them hiss and spit at us. Neither would be lured from the meat and after a time we gave up the game to head back for the yurt. As we approached the tent, we circled stealthily about the jeppas, scaring them into a defensive bunch and then nudging them along to mill about just outside the tent. When the wolf crept back into the tent, I was still with him as he poked the Fool rudely with an icy nose.

It is good to see you have not lost all spirit and fun,
he told me as I unlocked my mind from his and roused up in my own body.

Very good,
I agreed with him. And rose to face the day.

26

Signposts

O
NE THING I
have learned well in my travels. The riches of one region are taken for granted in another. Fish we would not feed to a cat in Buckkeep is prized as a delicacy in the inland cities. In some places water is wealth, in others the constant flooding of the river is both an annoyance and a peril. Fine leather, graceful pottery, glass as transparent as air, exotic flowers . . . all of these I have seen in such plentiful supply that the folk who possess them no longer see them as wealth.

So perhaps, in sufficient quantity, magic becomes ordinary. Instead of a thing of wonder and awe, it becomes the stuff of roadbeds and signposts, used with a profligacy that astounds those who have it not.

That day I traveled, as before, across the face of a wooded hillside. At first the flank of the hill was broad and gentle. I could walk in sight of the road and only slightly below it on the hillside. The huge evergreens held most of the burden of winter snow above me. The footing was uneven and there were occasional patches of deep snow but walking was not too difficult. By the end of that day, however, the trees were beginning to dwindle in size and the slope of the hill was markedly steeper. The road hugged the hillside, and I walked below it. When it came time to camp that night, my companions and I were hard-pressed to find a level place to pitch the tent. We scrabbled quite a way down the hill before we found a place where it leveled. When we did have the yurt up, Kettricken stood looking back up at the road and frowning to herself. She took out her map and was consulting it by the waning daylight when I asked her what the matter was.

She tapped the map with a mittened finger and then gestured to the slope above us. “By tomorrow, if the road keeps climbing and the slopes get steeper, you won’t be able to keep pace with us. We’ll be leaving the trees behind us by evening tomorrow. The country is going to be bare, steep and rocky. We should take firewood with us now, as much as the jeppas can easily carry.” She frowned. “We may have to slow our pace to allow you to match us.”

“I’ll keep up,” I promised her.

Her blue eyes met mine. “By the day after tomorrow, you may have to join us on the road.” She looked at me steadily.

“If I do, then I’ll have to cope with it.” I shrugged and tried to smile despite my uneasiness. “What else can I do?”

“What else can any of us do?” she muttered to herself in reply.

That night when I had finished cleaning the cooking pots, Kettle once again set out her cloth and stones. I looked at the spread of pieces and shook my head. “I haven’t worked it out,” I told her.

“Well, that is a relief,” she told me. “If you, or even if you and your wolf had, I would have been too astonished for words. It’s a difficult problem. But we shall play a few games tonight, and if you keep your eyes open and your wits sharp, you may see the solution to your problem.”

But I did not, and lay down to sleep with gamecloth and pieces scattered in my brain.

The next day’s walk went as Kettricken had foretold. By noon I was scrabbling through brushy places and over tumbles of bared rock with Starling at my heels. Despite the breathless effort the terrain demanded, she was full of questions, and all about the Fool. What did I know of his parentage? Who had made his clothing for him? Had he ever been seriously ill? It had become routine for me to answer her by giving her little or no information. I had expected her to weary of this game, but she was as tenacious as a bulldog. Finally, I rounded on her in exasperation and demanded to know exactly what it was about him that fascinated her so.

A strange look came to her face, as one who steels oneself to a dare. She started to speak, paused, and then could not resist. Her eyes were avid on my face as she announced, “The Fool is a woman, and she is in love with you.”

For a moment it was as if she had spoken in a foreign language. I stood looking down on her and trying to puzzle out what she had meant. Had she not begun to laugh, I might have thought of a reply. But something in her laughter offended me so deeply that I turned my back on her and continued making my way across the steep slope.

“You’re blushing!” she called from behind me. Merriment choked her voice. “I can tell from the back of your neck! All these years, and you never even knew? Never even suspected?”

“I think it’s a ridiculous idea,” I said without even looking back.

“Really? What part of it?”

“All of it,” I said coldly.

“Tell me you absolutely know that I’m wrong.”

I didn’t dignify her taunt with an answer. I did forge through a patch of thick brush without pausing to hold the branches back for her. I know she knew I was getting angry, because she was laughing. I pushed my way clear of the last of the trees and stood looking out over a nearly sheer rock face. There was almost no brush, and cracked gray stone pushed up in icy ridges through the snow. “Stay back!” I warned Starling as she pushed up beside me. She looked around me and sucked in her breath.

I looked up the steep hillside to where the road was scored across the mountain’s face like a gouge in a piece of wood. It was the only safe way across that sheer mountain face. Above us was the steep boulder-strewn mountainside. It was not quite sheer enough to call it a cliff. There was a scattering of wind-warped trees and bushes, some with roots straggling over the rocky soil as much as in it. Snow frosted it unevenly. Climbing up to the road would be a challenge. The slope we traversed had been getting steeper all morning. I should not have been surprised, but I had been so intent on picking the best path that it had been some time since I had looked up to the road.

“We’ll have to return to the road,” I told Starling and she nodded mutely.

It was easier said than done. In several places I felt rock and scree slew under my feet, and more than once I went on all fours. I could hear Starling panting behind me. “Only a little farther!” I called back to her as Nighteyes came toiling up the slope beside us. He passed us effortlessly, moving by leaps up the slope until he reached the edge of the road. He disappeared over the edge of it, and then returned to stand on the lip looking down at us. In a moment the Fool appeared beside him, to gaze down at us anxiously. “Need any help?” he called down.

“No. We’ll make it!” I called back up to him. I paused, crouching and clinging to the trunk of a stunted tree, to catch my breath and wipe the sweat from my eyes. Starling halted behind me. And suddenly I felt the road above me. It had a current like a river, and as the current of a river stirs the air to wind over it, so did the road. It was a wind not of winter cold, but of lives, both distant and near. The Fool’s strange essence floated on it, and Kettle’s closemouthed fear and Kettricken’s sad determination. They were as separate and recognizable as the bouquets of different wines.

“FitzChivalry!” Starling emphasized my name by hitting me between the shoulder blades.

“What?” I asked her absently.

“Keep moving! I can’t cling here much longer, my calves are cramping!”

“Oh.” I found my body and climbed the remaining distance to the lip of the road. The flowing Skill made me effortlessly aware of Starling behind me. I could feel her placing her feet and gripping the scraggly mountain willow at the edge of the cliff. I stood for an instant on the lip of the road’s edge. Then I stepped down, onto the smooth surface of the road, slipping into its pull like a child slipping into a river.

The Fool had waited for us. Kettricken was at the head of the line of jeppas, looking back anxiously to watch us join them. I took a deep breath and felt as if I were gathering myself together. Beside me, Nighteyes suddenly flipped my hand with his nose.

Stay with me,
he suggested. I felt him groping for a firmer grip on our bond. That I could not help him alarmed me. I looked down into his deep eyes and suddenly found a question.

You’re on the road. I didn’t think animals could come on the road.

He gave a sneeze of disgust.
There’s a difference between thinking an action is wise and doing it. And you might have noticed that the jeppas have been traveling on the road for some days.

It was too obvious.
Why do the wild animals avoid it then?

Because we still depend on ourselves for survival. The jeppas depend on humans, and will follow them into any danger, no matter how foolish it seems to them. Thus they have not the sense to run from a wolf, either. Instead they flee back to you humans when I scare them. It’s a lot like horses or cattle and rivers. Left to themselves, they swim them only if death is right behind them, from predators or starvation. But humans convince them to swim rivers any time the human wishes to be on the other side. I think they are rather stupid.

So why are you on this road?
I asked him with a smile.

Do not question friendship,
he told me seriously.

“Fitz!”

I startled, and turned to Kettle. “I’m fine,” I told her, even as I knew I was not. My Wit-sense usually made me very aware of others around me. But Kettle had walked up right behind me and I’d not noticed until she spoke to me. Something about the Skill road was dulling my Wit. When I did not think specifically of Nighteyes, he faded into a vague shadow in my mind.

I’d be less than that, were I not striving to stay with you,
he pointed out worriedly.

“It will be all right. I just have to pay attention,” I told him.

Kettle assumed I was speaking to her. “Yes, you do.” Pointedly she took my arm and started me walking. The others had gone ahead. Starling was walking with the Fool, and singing some love ditty as she walked, but he was looking over his shoulder worriedly at me. I gave him a nod and he nodded back uneasily. Beside me, Kettle pinched my arm. “Pay attention to me. Talk to me. Tell me. Have you solved the game problem I gave you?”

“Not yet,” I admitted. The days were warmer, but the wind that blew past us now still brought the threat of ice on the higher mountain peaks. If I thought about it, I could feel the cold on my cheeks, but the Skill road bade me ignore it. The road was steadily climbing now. Even so, I seemed to walk effortlessly on its surface. My eyes told me that we were going uphill, but I strode along as easily as if it were down.

Another pinch from Kettle. “Think about the problem,” she bade me curtly. “And do not be deceived. Your body labors and is cold. Simply because you are not constantly aware of it does not mean you can ignore it. Pace yourself.”

Her words seemed both foolish and wise. I realized that by hanging on to my arm, she was not only supporting herself but was forcing me to walk more slowly. I shortened and slowed my stride to match hers. “The others seem to take no harm from it,” I observed to her.

“True. But they are neither old nor Skill-sensitive. They will ache tonight, and tomorrow they will slow their pace. This road was built with the assumption that those who used it would be either unaware of its more subtle influences, or trained in how to manage them.”

“How do you know so much about it?” I demanded.

“Do you want to know about me, or about this road?” she snapped angrily.

“Both, actually,” I told her.

She didn’t answer that. After a time she asked me, “Do you know your nursery rhymes?”

I don’t know why it made me so angry. “I don’t know!” I retorted. “I don’t recall my earliest childhood, when most children learn them. I suppose you could say I learned stable rhymes instead. Shall I recite for you the fifteen points of a good horse?”

“Recite for me instead “Six Wisemen Went to Jhaampe-Town’!” she snarled. “In my days, children were not only taught their learning rhymes, they knew what they meant. This is the hill in the poem, you ignorant pup! The one no wise man goes up and expects to come down again!”

A shiver walked down my spine. There have been a few times in my life when I have recognized some symbolic truth in a way that stripped it down to its most frightening bones. This was one. Kettle had brought to the forefront of my mind a thing I had known for days. “The Wisemen were Skilled ones, weren’t they?” I asked softly. “Six, and five, and four . . . coteries, and the remains of coteries . . .” My mind skipped up the stair of logic, substituting intuition for most of the steps. “So that’s what became of the Skilled ones, the old one we could not find. When Galen’s coterie did not work well, and Verity needed more help to defend Buck, Verity and I sought for older Skilled ones, folk who had been trained by Solicity before Galen became Skillmaster,” I explained to Kettle. “We could find few records of names. And they had all either died, or disappeared. We suspected treachery.”

Kettle snorted. “Treachery would be nothing new to coteries. But what more commonly happened is that as people grew in the Skill, they became more and more attuned to it. Eventually the Skill called them. If one were strong enough in the Skill, one could survive the trip up this road. But if she were not, she perished.”

“And if one succeeded?” I asked.

Kettle gave me a sidelong glance, but said nothing.

“What is at the end of this road? Who built it, and where does it lead?”

“Verity,” she said quietly at last. “It leads to Verity. You and I need know no more than that.”

“But you know more than that!” I accused her. “As do I. It leads to the source of all Skill as well.”

Her glance became worried, then opaque. “I know nothing,” she told me sourly. Then, as conscience smote her, “There is much I suspect, and many half-truths have I heard. Legends, prophecies, rumors. Those are what I know.”

“And how do you know them?” I pressed.

She turned to regard me levelly. “Because I am fated to do so. Even as you are.”

And not another word on the subject would she say. Instead, she set up hypothetical game boards and demanded to know what moves I would make, given a black, red, or white stone. I tried to focus on the tasks, knowing that she gave them to me to keep my mind my own. But ignoring the Skill-force of that road was rather like ignoring a strong wind or a current of icy water. I could choose not to pay attention to it, but that did not make it stop. In the midst of puzzling out game strategy, I would wonder at the pattern of my own thoughts and believe them not my own at all, but those of another whom I had somehow tapped. While I could keep the game puzzle in front of me, it did not stop the gallery of voices whispering in the back of my mind.