The Farseer Series Books 2 and 3: Royal Assassin, Assassin’s Quest. Robin Hobb
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of my words could have had the impact of seeing for yourself. Nor do you pause to think what it would have been like, had I not been there every single day, emptying chamberpots, sweeping, dusting, carrying out dishes, combing his hair and his beard …’
Again he had shocked me into silence. I crossed the room, sat down heavily upon my clothing chest. ‘He’s not the king I remember,’ I said bluntly. ‘It frightens me that he could sink so far, so fast.’
‘Frightens you? Appals me. At least you’ve another king when this one’s been played.’ The Fool flipped another scroll onto the pile.
‘We all do,’ I pointed out carefully.
‘Some more than others,’ the Fool said shortly.
Without thinking, my hand rose to tuck the pin tighter in my jerkin. I’d almost lost it today. It had made me think of all it had symbolized all these years. The King’s protection, for a bastard grandson that a more ruthless man would have done away with quietly. And now that he needed protection? What did it symbolize to me now?
‘So. What do we do?’
‘You and I? Precious little. I’m but a Fool, and you are a Bastard.’
I nodded grudgingly. ‘I wish Chade were here. I wish I knew when he was coming back.’ I looked to the Fool, wondering how much he knew.
‘Shade? Shade returns when the sun does, I’ve heard.’ Evasive as always. ‘Too late for the King, I imagine,’ he added more quietly.
‘So we are powerless?’
‘You and I? Never. We’ve too much power to act here; that is all. In this area, the powerless ones are always the most powerful. Perhaps you are right; they are who we should consult in this. And now,’ here he rose and made a show of shaking all his joints loose as if he were a marionette with tangled strings. He set every bell he had to jingling. I could not help but smile. ‘My king will be coming into his best time of day. And I will be there, to do what little I can for him.’
He stepped carefully out of his ring of sorted scrolls and tablets. He yawned. ‘Farewell, Fitz.’
‘Farewell.’
He halted, puzzled, by the door. ‘You have no objections to my going?’
‘I believe I objected first to your staying.’
‘Never bandy words with a Fool. But do you forget? I offered you a bargain. A secret for a secret.’
I had not forgotten. But I was not sure, suddenly, that I wanted to know. ‘Whence comes the Fool, and why?’ I asked softly.
‘Ah.’ He stood a moment, then asked gravely, ‘You are certain you wish the answers to these questions?’
‘Whence comes the Fool, and why?’ I repeated slowly.
For an instant he was dumb. I saw him then. Saw him as I had not in years, not as the Fool, glib-tongued and wits as cutting as any barnacle, but as a small and slender person, all so fragile, pale flesh, bird-boned, even his hair seemed less substantial than that of other mortals. His motley of black and white trimmed with silver bells, his ridiculous rat sceptre were all the armour and sword he had in this court of intrigues and treachery. And his mystery. The invisible cloak of his mystery. I wished for an instant he had not offered the bargain, and that my curiosity had been less consuming.
He sighed. He glanced about my room, then walked over to stand before the tapestry of King Wisdom greeting the Elderling. He glanced up at it, then smiled sourly, finding some humour there I had never seen. He assumed the stance of a poet about to recite. Then he halted, looked at me squarely once more. ‘You are certain you wish to know, Fitzy-Fitz?’
Like a liturgy, I repeated the question. ‘Whence comes the Fool and why?’
‘Whence? Ah, whence?’ He went nose to nose with Ratsy for a moment, formulating a reply to his own question. Then he met my eyes. ‘Go south, Fitz. To lands past the edges of every map that Verity has ever seen. And past the edges of the maps made in those countries as well. Go south, and then east across a sea you have no name for. Eventually, you would come to a long peninsula, and on its snaking tip you would find the village where a Fool was born. You might even find, still, a mother who recalled her wormy-white babe, and how she cradled me against her warm breast and sang.’ He glanced up at my incredulous, enraptured face and gave a short laugh. ‘You cannot even picture it, can you? Let me make it harder for you. Her hair was long and dark and curling, and her eyes were green. Fancy that! Of such rich colours was this transparency made. And the fathers of the colourless child? Two cousins, for that was the custom of that land. One broad and swarthy and full of laughter, ruddy-lipped and brown-eyed, a farmer smelling of rich earth and open air. The other as narrow as the one was wide, and gold to his bronze, a poet and songster, blue-eyed. And, oh, how they loved me and rejoiced in me! All the three of them, and the village as well. I was so loved.’ His voice grew soft, and for a moment he fell silent. I knew with great certainty that I was hearing what no other had ever heard from him. I remembered the time I had ventured into his room, and the exquisite little doll in its cradle that I had found there. Cherished as the Fool had once been cherished. I waited.
‘When I was … old enough, I bade them all farewell. I set off to find my place in history, and choose where I would thwart it. This was the place I selected; the time had been destined by the hour of my birth. I came here, and became Shrewd’s. I gathered up whatever threads the fates put into my hands, and I began to twist them and colour them as I could, in the hopes of affecting what was woven after me.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand a thing you just said.’
‘Ah.’ He shook his head, setting his bells to jingling. ‘I offered to tell you my secret. I didn’t promise to make you understand it.’
‘A message is not delivered until it is understood,’ I countered. This was a direct quote from Chade.
The Fool teetered on accepting it. ‘You do understand what I said,’ he compromised. ‘You simply do not accept it. Never before have I spoken so plainly to you. Perhaps that is what confuses you.’
He was serious. I shook my head again. ‘You make no sense! You went somewhere to discover your place in history? How can that be? History is what is done and behind us.’
He shook his head, slowly this time. ‘History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.’ He smiled enigmatically. ‘The future is another kind of history.’
‘No man can know the future,’ I agreed.
His smile widened. ‘Cannot they?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘Perhaps, Fitz, somewhere, there is written down all that is the future. Not written down by one person, know, but if the hints and visions and premonitions and foreseeings of an entire race were written down, and cross-referenced and related to one another, might not such a people create a loom to hold the weaving of the future?’
‘Preposterous,’ I objected. ‘How would anyone know if any of it were true?’
‘If such a loom were made, and such a tapestry of predictions woven, not for a few years, but for tens of hundreds of years, after a time, it could be shown that it presented a surprisingly accurate foretelling. Bear in mind that those who keep these records are another race, an exceedingly long-lived one. A pale, lovely race, that occasionally mingled its blood-lines with that of men. And then!’ He spun in a circle, suddenly fey, pleased insufferably with himself, ‘And then, when certain ones were born, ones marked so clearly that history must recall them, they are called to step forward, to find their places in that future history. And they might further be exhorted to examine that place, that juncture of a hundred threads, and say, these threads, here, these are the ones I shall tweak, and in the tweaking, I shall change the tapestry, I shall warp the weft, alter the colour of what is to come. I shall change the destiny of the world.’
He was mocking me. I was certain of it now. ‘Once, in perhaps a thousand years, there