Golden Fool (26 page)

Shock that a Witted person could do so cruel a thing froze me like an icy wave. It was evil past my imagining. I felt tainted that people who shared my magic could stoop to such wickedness. It gave substance to all the evil things said of the Witted.

She took a sudden gasping breath and turned to me blindly. Her face was panicky with a pain she did not want to admit. I lifted my arm and she put her face against my chest as I folded her in my embrace. “I’m sorry,” I whispered by her ear. “I’m so sorry, Laurel.” She didn’t weep, but only took long, shuddering breaths as I held her. She was past weeping, and nearly past fear. I thought to myself that if the Piebalds succeeded in pushing her to fury, they might face a stronger foe than they intended to create. If they didn’t kill her first. I shifted in my chair. Habit had made me place my back to the wall. Now I deliberately sought a full view of the tavern and any who might have followed her here.

It was then that I saw Jinna. She had probably come to the tavern to look for me after speaking with her niece. She stood by the door she had just entered. For a fraction of an instant, our gazes met. She stared stricken at the woman I embraced. My eyes pleaded with her, but her face went cold. Then her gaze skated past me as if she had neither seen nor recognized me. She turned about and departed, her stiff back speaking volumes to me.

Frustration squeezed my heart. I was doing nothing wrong, and yet Jinna’s posture as she left the tavern told me how affronted she was. Nor could I leave Laurel sitting alone and inebriated to hurry after Jinna and explain to her, even if I had felt inclined to do so. So I sat stewing in my discomfort while Laurel took several more deep breaths and recovered herself. She sat up abruptly, almost pushing me away. I released her from my embrace. She rubbed her eyes and then picked up her mug and drained it off. I had scarcely touched mine.

“This is stupid of me,” Laurel suddenly announced. “I am here because I’d heard a rumor that Witted ones congregated here. I came hoping someone would come over to me so I could kill him. I’d probably just be killed. I don’t know how to fight that way.”

I saw a disturbing thing in her eyes then. They had gone calculating and cold as she considered just how she did know how to fight. “You should leave the fighting to those who—”

“They should have left my horse alone,” she broke in blackly, and I knew she would not hear anything else I said on that topic.

“Let’s go home,” I offered.

She gave me a weary nod, and we left the tavern. The cold streets were lit only by what lamplight leaked from the windows. As we left the houses behind and began the long walk up the dark road to the keep, I asked her unwillingly, “What will you do? Will you leave Buckkeep?”

“And go where? Take this home to my family? I think not.” She drew a breath and sighed it out, steaming, in the cold night. “Yet I think you are right. I cannot stay here. What will they do next? What is worse than killing my horse?”

We both knew several answers to that. The rest of the way, we walked in silence. Yet she was neither angry nor taciturn. I could sense her eyes straining through the uncertain moonlight, and her head turned to every small sound. My vigilance matched hers. I broke the silence once, to ask, “Is it true, that Witted go to the Stuck Pig?”

She gave a shrug. “So it is said of that tavern. Folk say it of many dives. ‘Fit for the Witted.’ Surely you’ve heard that phrase before.”

I hadn’t, but I filed the information away. Perhaps in that slander lurked a germ of truth. Was there a tavern in Buckkeep Town where the Witted congregated? Who would know? What might I learn there?

Just past the gates of Buckkeep Castle, I saw her “apprentice” hastening to meet us. He wore a worried expression. At the sight of me, it changed to a snarl. Laurel sighed and took her hand from my arm. She walked unsteadily toward him and he all but swooped her up. Despite whatever her soft words were, he glared at me suspiciously before escorting her toward her chambers. Before I sought my own room for the night, I made a quick and quiet tour of the stables. Myblack greeted me with her usual warm show of indifference. I could scarcely blame the horse; I had not had much time for her lately. In truth, she was to me “just a horse.” I rode her when Lord Golden rode Malta, but other than that, I trusted her care to the stable hands. It suddenly seemed a callous way to treat her, but I knew that I had no time to give her more. I wondered what the Piebalds had intended. If our horses had been left in the far paddock, would they have been stolen? Or worse?

Wit sense straining, I strolled past every stall and scrutinized every drowsy stable boy and hand there. I saw no one that I recognized, and Laudwine was not lurking beneath the stairs or outside the door. Nonetheless, I did not feel at ease until I was in Chade’s upper chambers that night. He was not there, but I left him a full written account.

We discussed it the next day, but came to no real conclusion. He would rebuke Laurel’s bodyguard for letting her slip away alone. He could not think of any way to keep Laurel safer without confining her even more tightly. “And she would not care for that. She does not like that I have a man beside her. Yet, what more can I do, Fitz? She is valuable to us, for it may be she will draw these Piebalds out of hiding.”

“At what cost?” I had asked him harshly.

“As little as we can make it,” he replied grimly.

“Why did they want my horse and Lord Golden’s?”

Chade lifted a brow at me. “You know more of Witted magic than I do. Could they ensorcel them to throw you, or somehow use them to listen in on your words?”

“The Wit doesn’t work that way,” I said wearily. “Why our horses? Why not Prince Dutiful’s? It is almost as if the Fool and I were their targets rather than the Prince.”

Chade looked uncomfortable. Almost reluctantly, he suggested quietly, “A cautious man might wish to follow that thought and see where it led.”

I stared at him, wondering what the old assassin was telling me in his obscure way. He folded his lips and shook his head at me, as if he regretted having spoken the words. Shortly after that, he made an excuse to leave. I sat pondering before the fire.

In the days that followed, I felt too uncomfortable to call on Jinna. I knew it was foolish, but there it was. I did not feel I owed her an explanation, but I was sure she would expect one. No convenient lie came to me to explain why I had been embracing Laurel in the Stuck Pig. I did not want to discuss Laurel with Jinna at all. It would lead her too close to dangerous topics. Hence, I did not visit Jinna at all.

On the occasions when I went down to Buckkeep Town, I sought Hap at his workplace. Our conversations there were brief and unsatisfactory. The boy seemed very aware of the other apprentices watching us talk, and spoke his words to me as if he were displaying to them his anger with his master. He was frustrated too with his stalled courtship of Svanja. Her father was putting up barriers to his seeing the girl, and refused to speak with Hap on the streets. I sensed that some of Hap’s anger was for me. He seemed to think I neglected him, yet when it came to finding time to meet with me in the evening, he preferred Svanja’s company. I kept resolving that I would do better with Hap and make amends with Jinna, but somehow the days dribbled past and I could not find the time to accomplish either task.

Within Buckkeep, the festivities and trade negotiations of the Prince’s betrothal continued. Winter Fest came and went, grander than ever I had seen it in the castle. Our Outislander guests enjoyed it tremendously. In the time that followed, there were trading discussions every day and aristocratic amusements every night. The puppeteers, minstrels, jugglers, and other entertainers of the Six Duchies prospered. The Outislanders became a familiar sight in the halls of Buckkeep Castle. Some formed genuine friendships, both with the nobles staying at the keep and with the merchant-traders from Buckkeep Town. In the town below, our ancient trade with the Out Islands began to revive. Trading vessels arrived, and goods were bartered. Messages were exchanged as well, and it was no longer socially unacceptable to admit to a cousin or two in the Out Islands. Kettricken’s plans seemed to be prospering.

The late nights of the court gaiety showed me a Buckkeep I had never known. As a servant, I was almost as invisible as I had been when I was a nameless young boy. The difference was that as Lord Golden’s man, I attended him on socially lofty occasions when our nobility was gaming, dining, and dancing. I saw them in their best clothes and worst behavior. Drunk with wine or vapid with Smoke, besotted with lust or frantic to recover gaming losses . . . if ever I had supposed that our lords and ladies were made of finer stuff than the fishers and tailors that crowded the Buckkeep Town taverns, I was disillusioned that winter.

Women, young and old, single and married, flocked to Lord Golden’s charms, as well as young men desirous of distinguishing themselves as “the Jamaillian lord’s friend.” It amused me somewhat that not even Starling and Lord Fisher were immune to Lord Golden’s social allure. Often they joined him at the gaming table. Twice they even came to Lord Golden’s chambers to sample fine Jamaillian brandies with his other guests. It was difficult for me to maintain my attitude of servitude and disinterest in her presence. Her husband was a physically affectionate man, often drawing her body close to his and boyishly stealing a kiss. Then she would gaily rebuke him for such unseemly public conduct, yet often enough manage to snatch a glance at me as she did so, as if to be sure I had noticed how passionately Lord Fisher still courted his wife. At times, it was all I could do to keep a stoic expression on my face. It was not that my heart or flesh burned for her. The pang that assaulted me at such a time was that she deliberately flaunted her happiness in a way calculated to remind me of how solitary a life I led. In the midst of the fine court with its merriment and elaborate entertainment, I stood, a silent servant, witness only to their pleasures.

In this way, the long dark of winter dawdled on. The constant whirl of activity took a toll on the young Prince as well as myself. One early morning, we both arrived at the tower with absolutely no inclination for studies or tasks of any kind. The Prince had been up late the night before, gaming with Civil and the other young noblemen currently residing at the keep.

I had had the good sense to seek my own bed at a more reasonable hour, and had succeeded in several hours of deep sleep before Nettle had insinuated herself into my dreams. I was dreaming of catching river fish, sliding my hands into the water and abruptly flipping the lurking fish out onto the bank behind me. It was a good dream, a comforting dream. Unseen but felt, Nighteyes was with me. Then my groping fingers encountered a door handle under the chill water. I plunged my head under to look at it. As I stared at it through water-green light, it opened and pulled me in. Suddenly I stood, wet and dripping, in a small bedroom. I knew I was in the upper chambers of the house by the slanting ceiling. The house was silent around me, and only a guttering candle lighted the room. Wondering how I had arrived here, I turned back to the door. A girl stood before it, her back pressed resolutely to it, and her arms spread wide to bar it from me. She wore a long cotton nightdress and her dark hair hung in a single long braid over one shoulder. I stared at her in astonishment.

“If you will not let me into your dreams, then I will trap you in mine,” she observed triumphantly.

I stood very, very still and held my silence. On some level, I sensed that anything of myself I might give her, word or gesture or look, would only increase her hold on me. I took my gaze from her, for in recognizing her, I was entering into her dream more deeply. Instead, I forced my eyes down, to my own hands. With a curious elation, I realized they were not my own. She had trapped me here as she visualized me, not as I truly was. My fingers were short and stubby. The palms of my hand and the inside surface of my fingers were black and coarse as a wolf’s pads, and rough black hair coated the backs of my hands and my wrists.

“This isn’t me.” I spoke the words aloud, and they came out as a queer growl. I lifted my hands to my face, found a muzzle there.

“Yes it is!” she asserted, but already I was fading, drifting out of the form she had thought would contain me. The trap was the wrong shape to hold me. She leapt toward me and seized me by one wrist, only to find she grasped an empty wolf skin.

“I’ll catch you next time!” she declared angrily.

“No, Nettle. You won’t.”

My use of her name froze her. Even as she struggled to mouth the question, how did I know her name, I dissipated from her dream into my own wakefulness. I shifted on my hard bed, and briefly opened my eyes to the now familiar blackness of my servant’s chamber. “No, Nettle. You won’t.” I spoke the words aloud, reassuring myself that they were true. But I had not slept well the rest of the night.

And so the two of us, Dutiful and I, faced one another blearily over the table in the Skill tower the next dawn. It was dawn in name only. The winter sky outside the tower window was black, and the candles on our table reached vainly toward the darkness in the corners of the room. I had kindled a fire in the hearth, but it had not yet taken the edge off the chill in the room. “Is there anything so miserable as being sleepy and cold at the same time?” I asked him rhetorically.

He sighed, and I had the feeling he had not even heard my question. The one he asked me sent a different sort of chill up my back. “Have you ever used the Skill to make someone forget something?”

“I . . . no. No, I’ve never done anything like that.” Then, dreading the answer, “Why do you ask?”

He heaved an even deeper sigh. “Because if it could be used that way, it could make my life much simpler right now. I fear that I . . . I said something last night, to someone, never intending that . . . I didn’t even
mean
it that way, but she . . .” He faltered to a halt, looking miserable.

“Start at the beginning,” I suggested.

He took a deep breath, then puffed it out, exasperated with himself. “Civil and I were playing Stones and—”