The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (12 page)

If her day’s journey to reach my cabin had wearied her, she did not show it. Rather it was as if she had grown restive with her steady pace and now relished the chance to stretch her muscles. We flowed beneath the overarching trees, and her hooves making music on the hard-packed earth woke a like song in my heart.

Where my lane met the road, I pulled her in. She was not even blowing; instead she arched her neck and gave the tiniest tug at her bit to let me know she would be glad to continue.
I held her still, and looked both up and down the road. Odd, how that small change in perspective altered my whole sense of the world around me. Astride this fine animal, the road was like a ribbon unfurled before me. The day was fading, but even so I blinked in the gentling light, seeing possibilities in the blueing hills and the mountains edging into the evening horizon. The horse between my thighs brought the whole world closer to my door. I sat her quietly, and let my eyes travel a road that could eventually take me back to Buckkeep, or indeed to anywhere in the entire world. My quiet life in the cabin with Hap seemed as tight and confining as an outworn skin. I longed to writhe like a snake and cast it off, to emerge gleaming and new into a wider world.

Malta shook her head, mane and tassels flying, awakening me to how long I had sat and stared. The sun was kissing the horizon. The horse ventured a step or two against my firm rein. She had a will of her own, and was as willing to gallop down the road as to walk sedately back to my cabin. So we compromised; I turned her back up my lane, but let her set her own pace. This proved to be a rhythmic canter. When I pulled her in before my cabin, the Fool peered out the door at me. ‘I’ve put the kettle on,’ he called. ‘Bring in my saddle pack, would you? There’s Bingtown coffee in it.’

I stabled Malta beside the pony and gave her fresh water and such hay as I had. It was not much; the pony was an adept forager, and did not mind the scrubby pasturage on the hillside behind the cabin. The Fool’s sumptuous tack gleamed oddly against the rough walls. I slung his saddle pack over my shoulder. The summer dusk was thickening as I made my way back to my cabin. There were lights in the windows and the pleasant clatter of cooking pots. As I entered to set the packs on my table, the wolf was sprawled before the fire drying his damp fur and the Fool was stepping around him to set a kettle on the hook. I blinked my eyes, and for an instant I was back in the Fool’s hut in the Mountains, healing from my old injury
while he stood between the world and me that I might rest. Then as now he created reality around himself, bringing order and peace to a small island of warm firelight and the simple smell of hearth-bread cooking.

He swung his pale eyes to meet mine, the gold of them mirroring the firelight. Light ran up his cheekbones and dwindled as it merged with his hair. I gave my head a small shake. ‘In the space of a sundown, you show me the wide world from a horse’s back, and the soul of the world within my own walls.’

‘Oh, my friend,’ he said quietly. No more than that needed to be said.

We are whole.

The Fool cocked his head to that thought. He looked like a man trying to recall something important. I shared a glance with the wolf. He was right. Like sundered pieces of crockery that snick back together so precisely that the crack becomes invisible, the Fool joined us and completed us. Whereas Chade’s visit had filled me with questions and needs, the Fool’s presence was in itself an answer and a satisfaction.

He had made free with my garden and my pantry. There were new potatoes and carrots and little purple-and-white turnips simmering in one pot. Fresh fish layered with basil steamed and rattled a tight-fitting lid. When I raised my brows to that, the Fool merely observed, ‘The wolf seems to recall my fondness for fresh fish.’ Nighteyes set his ears back and lolled his tongue out at me. Hearthcakes and blackberry preserves rounded out our simple meal. He had ferreted out my Sandsedge brandy. It waited on the table.

He dug through his pack and produced a cloth bag of dark beans shining with oil. ‘Smell this,’ he demanded, and then put me to crushing the beans while he filled my last available pot with water and set it to boil. There was little conversation. He hummed to himself and the fire crackled while pot lids tapped and occasional escaping drips steamed away on the fire. The pestle against the mortar made a homely sound as
I ground the aromatic beans. We moved for a space in wolf time, in the contentment of the present, not worrying about what had passed or what was to come. That evening remains for me always a moment to cherish, as golden and fragrant as brandy in crystal glasses.

With a knack I’ve never attained, the Fool made all the food ready at once, so that the deep brown coffee steamed alongside the fish and the vegetables, while a stack of hearthcakes held their warmth under a clean cloth. We sat down to the table together, and the Fool set out a slab of the tender fish for the wolf, who dutifully ate it though he would have preferred it raw and cold. The cabin door stood open on a starry night; the fellowship of shared food on a pleasantly mild evening filled the house and overflowed.

We heaped the dirty dishes aside to deal with later, and took more coffee out onto the porch. It was my first experience of the foreign stuff. The hot brown liquid smelled better than it tasted, but sharpened the mind pleasantly. Somehow we ended up walking down to the stream together, our cups warm in our hands. The wolf drank long there of the cool water, and then we strolled back, to pause by the garden. The Fool spun the beads on Jinna’s charm as I told him the tale of it. He flicked the bell with a long fingertip, and a single silver chime spun spreading into the night. We visited his horse, and I shut the door on the chicken-house to keep the poultry safe for the night. We wandered back to the cabin and I sat down on the edge of the porch. Without a word, the Fool took my empty cup back into the house.

When he returned, Sandsedge brandy brimmed the cup. He sat down beside me on one side; the wolf claimed a place on the other side, and set his head on my knee. I took a sip of the brandy, silked the wolf’s ears through my fingers and waited. The Fool gave a small sigh. ‘I stayed away from you as long as I could.’ He offered the words like an apology.

I lifted an eyebrow to that. ‘Any time that you returned
to visit me would not have been too soon. I often wondered what had become of you.’

He nodded gravely. ‘I stayed away, hoping that you would finally find a measure of peace and contentment.’

‘I did,’ I assured him. ‘I have.’

‘And now I have returned to take it away from you.’ He did not look at me as he said those words. He stared off into the night, at the darkness beneath the crowding trees. He swung his legs like a child, and then took a sip of his brandy.

My heart gave a little lurch. I had thought he had come to see me for my own sake. Carefully I asked, ‘Chade sent you then? To ask me to come back to Buckkeep? I already gave him my answer.’

‘Did you? Ah.’ He paused a moment, swirling the brandy in his cup as he pondered. ‘I should have known that he would have been here already. No, my friend, I have not seen Chade in all these years. But that he has already sought you out but proves what I already dreaded. A time is upon us when the White Prophet must once more employ his Catalyst. Believe me, if there were any other way, if I could leave you in peace, I would. Truly I would.’

‘What do you need of me?’ I asked him in a low voice. But he was no better at giving me a straight answer now than when he had been King Shrewd’s Fool and I was the King’s bastard grandson.

‘I need what I have always needed from you, ever since I discovered that you existed. If I am to change time in its course, if I am to set the world on a truer path than it has ever followed before, then I must have you. Your life is the wedge I use to make the future jump from its rut.’

He looked at my disgruntled face and laughed aloud at me. ‘I try, Fitz, indeed I do. I speak as plainly as I can, but your ears will not believe what they hear. I first came to the Six Duchies, and to Shrewd’s court all those years ago, to seek a way to fend off a disaster. I came not knowing how I would do
it, only that I must. And what did I discover? You. A bastard, but nonetheless an heir to the Farseer line. In no future that I had glimpsed had I seen you, yet when I recalled all I knew of the prophecies of my kind, I discovered you, again and again. In sideways mentions and sly hints, there you were. And so I did all that I could to keep you alive, which mostly was bestirring you to keep yourself alive. I groped through the mists with no more than a snail’s glinting trail of prescience to guide me. I acted, based on what I knew I must prevent, rather than what I must cause. We cheated all those other futures. I urged you into danger and I dragged you back from death, heedless of what it cost you in pain and scars and dreams denied. Yet you survived, and when all the cataclysms of the Cleansing of Buck were done, there was a trueborn heir to the Farseer line. Because of you. And suddenly it was as if I were lifted onto a peak above a valley brimmed with fog. I do not say that my eyes can pierce the fog; only that I stand above it and see, in the vast distance, the peaks of a new and possible future. A future founded on you.’

He looked at me with golden eyes that seemed almost luminous in the dim light from the open door. He just looked at me, and I suddenly felt old and the arrow scar by my spine gave me a twist of pain that made me catch my breath for an instant. A throb like a dull red foreboding followed it. I told myself I had sat too long in one position; that was all.

‘Well?’ he prompted me. His eyes moved over my face almost hungrily.

‘I think I need more brandy,’ I confessed, for somehow my cup had become empty.

He drained his own cup and took mine. When he rose, the wolf and I did also. We followed him into the cabin. He rucked about in his pack and took out a bottle. It was about a quarter empty. I tucked the observation away in my mind; so he had fortified himself against this meeting. I wondered what part of it he had dreaded. He uncorked the bottle and refilled both
our cups. My chair and Hap’s stool were by the hearth, but we ended up sitting on the hearthstones by the dying fire. With a heavy sigh the wolf stretched out between us, his head in my lap. I rubbed his head, and caught a sudden twinge of pain from him. I moved my hand down him to his hip joints and massaged them gently. Nighteyes gave a low groan as the touch eased him.

How bad is it?

Mind your own business.

You are my business.

Sharing pain doesn’t lessen it.

I’m not sure about that.

‘He’s getting old.’ The Fool interrupted our chained thoughts.

‘So am I,’ I pointed out. ‘You, however, look as young as ever.’

‘Yet I’m substantially older than both of you put together. And tonight I feel every one of my years.’ As if to give the lie to his own words, he lithely drew his knees up tight to his chest and rested his chin upon them as he hugged his own legs.

If you drank some willow bark tea, it might ease you.

Spare me your swill and keep rubbing.

A small smile bowed the Fool’s mouth. ‘I can almost hear you two. It’s like a gnat humming near my ear, or the itch of something forgotten. Or trying to recall the sweet taste of something from a passing whiff of its fragrance.’ His golden eyes suddenly met mine squarely. ‘It makes me feel lonely.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, not knowing what else I could say. That Nighteyes and I spoke as we did was not an effort to exclude him from our circle. It was that our circle made us one in a fundamental way we could not share.

Yet once we did
, Nighteyes reminded me.
Once we did, and it was good
.

I do not think that I glanced at the Fool’s gloved hand. Perhaps he was closer to us than he realized, for he lifted his hand and tugged the finely-woven glove from it. His long-fingered,
elegant hand emerged. Once, a chancing touch of his had brushed his fingers against Verity’s Skill-impregnated hands. That touch had silvered his fingers, and given him a tactile Skill that let him know the history of things simply by touching them. I turned my own wrist to look down at it. Dusky grey fingerprints still marked the inside of my wrist where he had touched me. For a time, our minds had been joined, almost as if he and Nighteyes and I were a true Skill coterie. But the silver on his fingers had faded, as had the fingerprints on my wrist and the link that had bonded us.

He lifted one slender finger as if in a warning. Then he turned his hand and extended his hand to me as if he proffered an invisible gift on those outstretched fingertips. I closed my eyes to steady myself against the temptation. I shook my head slowly. ‘It would not be wise,’ I said thickly.

‘And a Fool is supposed to be wise?’

‘You have always been the wisest creature I’ve known.’ I opened my eyes to his earnest gaze. ‘I want it as I want breath itself, Fool. Take it away, please.’

‘If you’re sure … no, that was a cruel question. Look, it is gone.’ He gloved the hand, held it up to show me and then clasped it with his naked one.

‘Thank you.’ I took a long sip of my brandy, and tasted a summer orchard and bees bumbling in the hot sunshine among the ripe and fallen fruit. Honey and apricots danced along the edges of my tongue. It was decadently good. ‘I’ve never tasted anything like this,’ I observed, glad to change the subject.

‘Ah, yes. I’m afraid I’ve spoiled myself, now that I can afford the best. There’s a good stock of it in Bingtown, awaiting a message from me to tell them where to ship it.’

I cocked my head at him, trying to find the jest in his words. Slowly it sank in that he was speaking the plain truth. The fine clothes, the blooded horse, exotic Bingtown coffee and now this … ‘You’re rich?’ I hazarded sagely.

‘The word doesn’t touch the reality.’ Pink suffused his amber cheeks. He looked almost chagrined to admit it.

‘Tell!’ I demanded, grinning at his good fortune.

He shook his head. ‘Far too long a tale. Let me condense it for you. Friends insisted on sharing with me a windfall of wealth. I doubt that even they knew the full value of all they pressed upon me. I’ve a friend in a trading town, far to the south, and as she sells it off for the best prices such rare goods can command, she sends me letters of credit to Bingtown.’ He shook his head ruefully, appalled at his good fortune. ‘No matter how well I spend it, there always seems to be more.’