Fool's Errand (58 page)

“When will it be safe to stop?” the Fool asked me during a period when we had slowed to let the horses breathe.

“When we reach Buckkeep Castle. Perhaps.” I did not add that the Prince would not be safe until I had turned back and killed the cat. We had only his body in our keeping. The Piebalds still had his soul.

At mid-morning, we passed the tree where their archer had ambushed us. It made me realize how much I was trusting the wolf to choose our path. He had decided this way was safe and I was following him unquestioningly.

Are we not pack? Of course you must follow your leader.
The tease in his thought could not quite mask his weariness.

We were all tired; men, wolf, and horses. A sustained trot was the best I could wring from Myblack now. Dutiful was a lolling weight in my arms as we jolted along. The pain in my back and shoulders from supporting his weight vied with the dull throbbing in my head. The Fool still sat his horse well but made no attempt at conversation of any kind. He had offered once to take the Prince on Malta with him, but I had declined. It was not that I thought that he or his horse lacked the strength. I could not define exactly why I felt I must keep possession of Dutiful’s body. I worried that he had been so long insensible. Somewhere, I knew his mind worked, that he saw with the cat’s eyes, felt with the cat’s body. Sooner or later, he would realize—

The Prince stirred in my arms. I kept silent. It took him some little while to come back to himself. As he regained his senses, he twitched unpleasantly in my arms, reminding me of my own seizures. Then he sat up with a sudden hoarse gasp of breath. Breath after breath he took, as he turned his head wildly from side to side, trying to make sense of his situation. I heard him swallow. In a dry and cracked voice he asked, “Where are we?”

Useless to lie. Above us on the hill, Laurel’s mysterious standing stones cast their shadows. He would surely recognize them. I didn’t bother to answer him at all. Lord Golden rode closer to us.

“My Prince, are you well? You have been long unconscious.”

“I am—well. Where are you taking me?”

They come!

In a breath, our situation had changed. I saw the wolf fleeing back toward us. On the road behind him, horsemen had suddenly appeared. I made them five at a quick count. Two hounds, Wit-beasts both, ran alongside them. I swiveled in my saddle. Two rises back, other riders were cresting a hill. I saw one lift an arm, waving a triumphant greeting to the other group of riders.

“They’ve caught us,” I said calmly to the Fool.

He looked ill.

“Up the hill. We’ll put one of those barrows at our back.” I reined Myblack from the road, and my companions followed.

“Let me go!” my Prince commanded me. He struggled in my arms, but his long insensibility had left him weak. It was not easy to keep my grip on him, but we had not far to go. As we came abreast of the barrow and the adjacent standing stone, I reined in Myblack. My dismount was not graceful, but I pulled the Prince down with me. Myblack stepped wearily away from us, and then turned to give me a look of rebuke. In an instant the Fool was beside us. I sidestepped Dutiful’s swing at me, caught his wrist and stepped behind him with it. I caught his other shoulder and held him firmly, one arm twisted high behind his back. I was no rougher than I had to be, but he did not give in easily. “Breaking your arm or dislocating your shoulder wouldn’t kill you,” I pointed out to him harshly. “But it would keep you from being a nuisance for a time.”

He subsided, grunting with pain. The wolf was a gray streak pouring himself up the hill toward us. “Now what?” the Fool asked me as he stared around us wide-eyed.

“Now we make a stand,” I said. The riders below us were already spreading wide. The barrow at our backs would be a poor barrier against attack from behind, blinding us as much as it shielded us. The wolf stood with us, panting.

“You’ll die here,” the Prince pointed out through gritted teeth. I still held him quite firmly.

“That seems very likely,” I conceded.

“You’ll die, and I’ll go with them.” His voice was strained with pain. “So why be stupid? Release me now. I’ll go to them. You can run. I promise I’ll ask them to let you go.”

My eyes met the Fool’s over the boy’s head. I knew what my answer to that would be, but then I knew what I’d be sending the Prince to face. It might buy us an opportunity to come after him again, but I doubted it. The woman-cat would see to it that they hunted us down and killed us. Death standing and waiting, or death after flight? I didn’t want to choose how my friends would die.

I’m too tired to flee. I’m dying here.

The Fool’s eyes wavered to Nighteyes. I do not know if he grasped that flicker of thought, or if he simply saw the wolf’s weariness. “Stand and fight,” he said faintly.

He drew his sword from its sheath. I knew he had never fought in his life. As he lifted his blade, he looked very uncertain. Then he took a breath, and set his face in the lines of Lord Golden’s expression. He squared his shoulders and an expression of cold competence came into his eyes.

He can’t fight. Don’t be stupid.

The riders were closing in. They walked their horses up the hill toward us, unhurried, letting us watch our deaths come.
You have an alternative?

“You can’t hold me and fight!” Dutiful’s voice was elated. He obviously believed that they had already won. “The moment you let go, I’ll run. You’ll die for nothing! Let me go now, let me talk to them. Maybe I can bargain for your life.”

Do not let her have him. Kill him before you let them take him.

I felt a great coward, but shared the thought anyway.
I do not know if I can do that.

You must. We both know what they intend. If you cannot kill him then . . . then take him into the pillar. The boy can Skill, and you were linked with the Scentless One once. It may be enough. Go into the pillar. Take them with you.

The riders below conferred with one another briefly, then fanned out to flank us as they came. As the woman had promised, they would take no chances. They were grinning and shouting to one another. Like the Prince, they believed they had us trapped.

It won’t work. Don’t you remember what it was like? It took all my strength to hold you together in that passage, and we were tightly linked. I might be able to hold the boy together through the journey, or you, but not both of you. I do not know if I could even pull the Fool in with me. Our Skill-link is old and thin. I might lose you all.

You don’t have to choose. I cannot go with you. I’m too tired, my brother. But I will stay here and hold them back for as long as I can, while you escape.

“No,” I groaned, even as the Fool suddenly said, “The pillar. You said the boy was Skilling. Could not you—?”

“No!” I cried out. “I will not leave Nighteyes to die alone! How can you suggest it?”

“Alone?” The Fool looked puzzled. A very odd smile twisted his mouth. “But he will not be alone. I will be here with him. And”—he drew himself up, squaring his shoulders—“I will die before I allow them to kill him.”

Ah, that would be so much better.
Every hackle on Nighteyes’ body was standing as he watched the advancing line of men and horses, but his eyes glinted merriment at me.

“Send the lad down to us!” a tall man shouted. We ignored him.

“Do you think that makes it better for me?” I demanded of the Fool. They were mad, both of them. “I might be able to go through the pillar. I might even be able to drag the boy through, though I wonder if his mind would come through intact. But I doubt that I can take you with me, Fool. And Nighteyes refuses to go.”

“Go where?” Dutiful demanded. He tried to shake off my grip and I twisted his arm tighter. He subsided.

“For the last time, will you yield?” the tall horseman shouted up at us.

“I seek to reason with him!” Lord Golden called back. “Give me time, man!” He put a note of panic in his voice.

“My friend.” The Fool set his hand on my shoulder. He pushed me softly, backward toward the stone. I gave ground and took Dutiful with me. The Fool’s eyes never left mine. He spoke softly and carefully, as if we were alone and had all the time in the world. “I know I can’t go with you. It grieves me that the wolf will not. But I still tell you that you must go and take the boy. Don’t you understand? This is what you were born for, why you have stayed alive despite all the odds against you all these years. Why I have forced you to stay alive, despite all that was done to you. There must be a Farseer heir. If you keep him alive and restore him to Buckkeep, that is all that matters. We keep the future on the path I have set for it, even if it must go on without me. But if we fail, if he dies . . .”

“What are you talking about?” the Prince demanded angrily.

The Fool’s voice faded. He stared down the hill at the steadily advancing men, but his gaze seemed to go farther than that. My back was nearly touching the monolith. Dutiful was suddenly quiescent in my grip, as if spelled by the Fool’s soft voice. “If we all die here,” he said faintly. “Then . . . it ends. For us. But he is not the only change we have wrought . . . time must seek to flow as it always has, washing all obstacles away. So . . . fate finds her. In all times, fate battles against a Farseer surviving. Here and now, we guard Dutiful. But if we all fall, if Nettle becomes the lone focus of that battle . . .” He blinked his eyes a number of times, then he drew a ragged breath before he turned back to me. He seemed to be returning from a far journey. He spoke softly, breaking ill tidings to me gently. “I can find no future in which Nettle survives after the Prince has died.” His face went sallow and his eyes were old as he admitted, “There are not even any swift, kind ends for her.” He drew a deep breath. “If you care anything at all for me, do this thing. Take the boy. Keep him alive.”

Every hair on my body stood up in horror. “But—” I choked. All the sacrifices I had made to keep her safe? All for nothing? My mind completed the picture. Burrich, Molly, and their sons would stand beside her, would fall with her. I could not get my breath.

“Please go,” the Fool begged me.

I could not tell what the boy made of our talk. He was a weight I grasped, firmly immobilizing him as my mind raced furiously. I knew there was no escape from this maze fate had set us. The wolf formed my thought for me.
If you stay, we all still die. If the boy does not die, the Witted take him, and use him to their own ends. Dying would be kinder. You cannot save us, but you can save the boy.

I cannot leave you here. We cannot end like this, you and I.
Tears blinded me just when I needed to see most clearly.

We not only can, we must. The pack does not die if the cub survives. Be a wolf, my brother. Things are clearer so. Leave us to fight while you save the cub. Save Nettle, too. Live well, for both of us, and someday, tell Nettle tales of me.

And then there was no more time. “Too late now!” a man shouted up at us. The line of men and horses had curved to surround us. “Send us the lad, and we’ll end you quick! If not—” And he laughed aloud.

Don’t fear for us. I’ll force them to kill us quickly.

The Fool rolled his shoulders. He lifted his sword in a two-handed grip. He swung it once, experimentally, then held it aloft. “Go quickly, Beloved.” Poised, he looked more a dancer than a warrior.

I could either draw my sword or keep a grip on the Prince. The standing stone was right behind me. I gave it one hasty glance over my shoulder. I could not identify the wind-eroded symbol carved in this face of it. Wherever it took me would have to be good enough. I did not recognize my voice as I demanded of the world, “How can the hardest thing I have ever done in my life also be the most cowardly?”

“What are you doing?” the boy demanded. He sensed something was about to happen, and though he could not have guessed what it was, he began to struggle wildly. “Help me!” he cried to the encircling Piebalds. “Free me now!”

The thunder of charging horses was his answer.

Inspiration struck me. As I tightened my grip on the struggling boy, I spoke to the Fool. “I’ll come back. I’ll take him through and come back.”

“Don’t risk the Prince!” The Fool was horrified. “Stay with him and guard him. If you came back for us and were killed, he’d be alone in . . . wherever. Go! Now!” The last smile he gave me was his old Fool’s smile, tremulous and yet mocking the world’s ability to hurt him. There was a wildness in his golden eyes that was not fear of death, but acceptance of it. I could not bear to look at it. The closing circle of horsemen engulfed us. The Fool swung his sword and it cut a gleaming arc in the blue day. Then a Piebald charged between us, swinging his blade and yelling. I dragged the Prince back with me.

I caught a last glimpse of the Fool standing over the wolf, a sword in his hands. It was the first time I had ever seen him hold a weapon as if he actually intended to use it. I heard the clash of metal on metal and the wolf’s rising snarl as he sprang for a horseman’s leg.

The Prince yelled wildly, a wordless cry of fury that was more cat than human. A rider charged straight at us, blade lifted high. But the towering black stone was at my back. “I’ll return!” I promised them. Then I tightened one arm around Dutiful, clasping him to my chest. I spoke right by his ear. “Hold tight to who you are!” It was the only warning I could give him. Then I twisted, and pressed my hand against the stone’s graven symbol.

chapter
XXIII

THE BEACH

The Skill is infinitely large, and yet intimately small. It is as large as the world and the sky above it, and as small as a man’s secret heart. The way the Skill flows means that one can ride it, or experience its passage, or encompass the whole of it within one’s self. The same sense of immediacy pervades all.

This is why, to master the Skill, one must first master the self.

— HAILFIRE, SKILLMASTER TO QUEEN FRUGAL

I had expected darkness and disorientation. I had expected the Skill pulling at me, and a struggle to hold the Prince and myself together. I forced myself to be aware of both of us, and to keep him intact. Holding on to him within my Skill-barriers was much like clutching a handful of salt in a deluge. There was the same sensation that if I relaxed my grip at all, he would trickle away from me. There was all that, and an illogical sensation that we fell upward. I clutched Dutiful to me, promising myself that it would soon be over. I was not prepared to fall from the pillar into icy seawater.

Saltwater flooded my mouth and nose as I gasped in shock. We tumbled together in the water. My shoulder struck something. Dutiful struggled wildly, and I nearly lost my grip on him. The water sucked at us, and then, just as I saw light through a layer of murky green and deduced which way was up, a wave gathered us and flung us against a rocky beach.

The impact broke my grip on the Prince. The wave rolled us on the rocky shore without letting us reach air. The mussel-and-barnacle-encrusted rocks tore at me. Then, as the wave retreated, my body snagged on the rocks, hooking my sword belt, and the water stranded me there. I lifted my head, choking and gagging out water and sand. I blinked, trying to see Dutiful, and spotted him still in the water. He was belly-down on the beach, scrabbling to catch hold of rocks as the outgoing wave sucked at him. He slid backward toward deeper water, then managed to find a grip and lay still, gasping. I found a breath.

“Get up!” I yelled. It came out as a hoarse caw. “Before the next wave. Get up.”

He looked at me without comprehension. I staggered upright and flung myself toward him. Catching the back of his collar, I dragged him over the shredding barnacles and up the rocky beach toward the higher shoreline. A wave still caught us and flung me to my knees, but the water was not powerful enough to drag us out again. The next time the wave went out, Dutiful managed to get to his feet. Holding on to one another, we staggered up past the toothy rocks and into a belt of black sand festooned with squelching strands of tangled kelp. When we reached the loose dry sand, I let go of Prince Dutiful. He took perhaps three more steps and then dropped to the ground. For a time he just lay on his side, breathing. Then he sat up, spat out sand, and wiped his nose on his wet sleeve. He looked all around us with no comprehension, and when his eyes came back to me, his expression was that of a confused child.

“What happened?”

The sand in my teeth gritted whenever I moved my mouth. I spat. “We came through a Skill-pillar.” I spat again.

“A what?”

“A Skill-pillar,” I repeated. I looked back to point it out to him.

There was nothing out there but ocean. Another wave rushed in, reaching higher up the beach. Scummy white foam laced the sand as the water retreated. I came awkwardly to my feet and stared out over the incoming tide. Just water. Moving waves. Crying gulls above the waves. No Skill-pillar of black stone broke that heaving green surface. There was not even a clue as to where it had deposited us out offshore.

No way back.

I had left my friends to die. Regardless of what the Fool had said, I had resolved to return immediately via the pillar. Otherwise, I would not have gone. I would not have done it if I had thought I was not going back to them. Telling myself that did not make me feel a shard less cowardly.

Nighteyes!
I quested desperately, flinging the call with all my strength.

No one answered.

“Fool!” The word ripped out of me, a futile scream of Wit and Skill and voice. Distant gulls seemed to echo it mockingly. My hope faded with their dwindling cries over the windswept sea.

Unmoving, I stared out over the water until an incoming wave lapped against my feet. The Prince had not moved, except to fall back onto his side on the wet sand. He lay, staring blankly and shivering. I slowly turned away from the surf and surveyed the land. Black cliffs rose up before us. The tide was coming in. My mind put the pieces together.

“Get up. We have to move before the tide traps us.”

To the south, the rocky cliffs gave way to a half-moon of black sand. A grassy tableland backed it. I reached down and seized the Prince’s arm. “Up,” I repeated. “Unless you want to drown here.”

The lad lurched to his feet without protest. We trudged down the shore as the waves reached ever higher toward us. Desolation was a cold weight inside me. I dared not look at what I had just done. It was too monstrous to consider. While I walked down this beach, did their blood flow down swords? I stopped my mind. As if I were setting walls against an intrusive mind, I blocked all feelings from myself. I stopped all thoughts and became a wolf, concerned only with the “now.”

“What was that?” Dutiful demanded suddenly. “That . . . feeling. That pulling . . .” Words failed him. “Was that the Skill?”

“Part of it,” I answered brusquely. He seemed entirely too interested in what he had just experienced. Had it called to him that strongly? The Skill’s attraction was a terrible trap for the unwary.

“I . . . he tried to teach me, but he couldn’t tell me what it felt like. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it or not, and neither could he. But that!”

He expected a response to his excitement. I gave him none. The Skill was the last thing I wanted to talk about just now. I didn’t want to speak at all. I did not want to break the numbness that wrapped me.

When we reached the beach, I kept Prince Dutiful walking. His wet clothes flapped around his body, and he hugged himself against the chill. I listened to his shivering breaths. A greenish sheen on the sand proved to be the flow of a freshwater stream over the beach to the sea. I walked him upstream, away from the sandy beach and into a field of coarse sedge grasses until I reached a place where the trickle was deep enough for me to cup handfuls of it. I washed out my mouth several times and then drank. I was splashing water on my face to get sand out of my eyes and ears when the Prince spoke again.

“What about Lord Golden and the wolf? Where are they, what happened to them?” He looked out over the water as if he expected to see them there.

“They couldn’t come. By now, I imagine your friends have killed them.”

It amazed me that I could speak the words so flatly. No choking tears, no gasping breath. It was a thought too terrible to be real. I could not allow myself to consider it. Instead, I flung the words at him, hoping to see him flinch from them. But he just shook his head, as if my words made no sense, then asked numbly, “Where are we?”

“We are here,” I replied, and laughed. I had never known that anger and despair could make a man laugh. It was not a pleasant sound, and the Prince cowered away from me for an instant. Then in the next, he stood up very straight and pointed an accusing finger at me. “Who are you?” he demanded, as if he had suddenly discovered the one mystery that underlay all his questions.

I looked up from where I still crouched by the water. I drank another handful before I answered. “Tom Badgerlock.” I slicked my hair back with my wet hands. “For this. I was born with this white streak at my temple, and so my parents named me.”

“Liar.” He spoke the word with flat contempt. “You’re a Farseer. You may not have the looks of a Farseer, but you have the Skill of one. Who are you? A distant cousin? Someone’s by-blow?”

I’d been called a bastard many times in my life, but never by someone I might call a son. I looked up at Dutiful, Verity’s and Kettricken’s heir from the seed of my body. Well, if I’m a bastard, I wonder what that makes you? What I said instead was, “Does it matter?”

While he was still struggling to find an answer to that, I scanned our surroundings. I was stuck in this place with him, at least until the tide went out. If I was fortunate, it would bare the pillar that brought us here, and I could use it to return. If I was unfortunate, the water wouldn’t retreat that far, and then I’d have to discover just where we truly were and how to get back to Buckkeep.

The Prince spoke angrily to mask his sudden uncertainty. “We can’t be that far. It only took us a moment to arrive.”

“Magic such as we used makes little of distance. We may not even be in the Six Duchies anymore.” I abruptly decided he needed to know no more than that. Whatever I told him, the woman would likely know, as well. The less said, the better.

Slowly he sat down on the ground. “But—” he said, and then fell silent. The look on his face was that of an apprehensive child reaching out desperately for something familiar. But my heart did not go out to him. Instead, I repressed an urge to give him a firm whack on the back of the head. For this whimpering, self-obsessed juvenile, I’d traded the lives of my wolf and my friend. It seemed the poorest bargain I’d ever made. Nettle, I reminded myself. Keeping him alive might keep her safe. Farseer heir or not, it was the only value that I could see in him just then.

I am disappointed in my son.

I examined that thought, and reasserted to myself that Dutiful was not my son, and since I had never accepted any responsibility for his rearing, I had no right to be either disappointed or pleased by him. I walked away from him. I let the wolf in me have ascendancy, and he spoke to me of the need for immediate creature comfort. The wind along the beach was constant and chill, slapping my wet garments against my body. Find wood, get a fire going if I could. Dry out. Look for food at the same time. There was no point to agonizing about what had become of Nighteyes and the Fool. The tide was still coming in. That meant that the next low tide would probably come in the dark of night. The following low tide would be sometime the next morning. I had to be resigned that my next opportunity to return to my friends was nearly a full day away. So, for now, gather strength and rest.

I looked across the grassy tableland at the forest that backed it. The trees here were the green of summer still, yet somehow it impressed me as an unfriendly and lifeless place. I decided that there was no point in hiking across the meadow and hunting under the trees. I had no heart for a chase and a kill. The small creatures of the beach would suffice.

It was a poor decision to make during an incoming tide. There was driftwood to gather for a fire, flung high by a previous storm tide, out of reach of today’s water. The blue mussels and other shellfish were already underwater, however. I chose a place where the cliffs subsided into the tableland, a spot somewhat sheltered from the wind, and kindled a small fire. Once I had it going, I took off my boots and socks and shirt, and wrung as much water from everything as I could. I propped the garments on driftwood sticks to dry near the fire, and put my boots upside down on two stakes to drain. I sat by the fire, hugging myself against the chill of the fading day. Expecting nothing, I still ventured to quest again.
Nighteyes?

There was no response. It meant nothing, I told myself. If he and the Fool had managed to escape, then he would not reach out toward me for fear of being detected by the Piebalds. It might mean only that he was choosing to be silent. Or it might mean he was dead. I wrapped my own arms around myself and held tight. I must not think such thoughts or grief would tear me apart. The Fool had asked me to keep Prince Dutiful alive. I’d do that. And the Piebalds would not dare to kill my friends. They would want to know what had become of the Prince, how he could have vanished before their eyes.

What would they do to the Fool to wring answers from him?

Don’t think such things.

Reluctantly, I rose to seek out the Prince.

The boy had not moved from where I had left him. I walked up behind him, and when he did not even turn toward me, I nudged him rudely with my foot. “I’ve a fire,” I said gruffly.

He didn’t respond.

“Prince Dutiful?” I could not keep the sneer from my voice. He did not flinch.

I crouched down next to him and set a hand on his shoulder. “Dutiful.” I leaned around him to look into his face.

He wasn’t there.

His expression was slack, his eyes dull. His mouth hung slightly ajar. I groped toward our tenuous Skill-bond. It was like tugging at a broken fishing line. There was no resistance, no sense that anyone had ever been at the other side of that bond.

A terrible echo of a long-ago lesson came to me. “If you give in to the Skill, if you do not hold firm against its attraction, then the Skill can tatter you away and you will become as a great drooling babe, seeing nothing, hearing nothing . . .” The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I shook the Prince, but his head just lolled and nodded on his neck. “Damn me!” I roared to the sky. I should have foreseen he would try to reach the cat, I should have known this could happen.

I tried to force calmness on myself. Stooping, I lifted his arm and set it across my shoulders. I set my arm around his waist and drew him to his feet. As I hauled him down the beach, his toes dragged in the sand. When I reached the fire, I put him down beside it. He sprawled over on his side.

I spent several minutes replenishing the blaze with nearby driftwood. I built it large and hot, not caring who or what it might draw. My hunger and my weariness were forgotten. I dragged the Prince’s boots from his feet, emptied them of water, and set them upside down to dry. My own shirt was steaming warm now. I peeled Dutiful’s wet shirt from his back and hung it out. I spoke to him the whole time, rebuking him and taunting him at first, but before long I was pleading with him. He made no response at all. His skin was chill. I wrestled his arms into the sleeves and dragged my warmed shirt onto him. I chafed his arms, but his stillness seemed to invite the cold to fill him. With every passing moment, his body seemed to have less life in it. It was not that his breathing labored or that his heart beat more slowly, but more that my Wit-sense of his presence was fading, exactly as if he were traveling away from me.