Fool’s Quest

I resented that he was right. I longed to do something more than sit and listen to my people recount how they had been brutalized. I excused myself from the remainder of his tea parties, knowing that if he discovered anything of great significance, he would summon me. I checked on Thick to be sure he was occupied and comfortable, and found him with FitzVigilant. No. Lant, I reminded myself. A bastard, but never Vigilant’s. The two were well known to each other from their time together at Buckkeep and I was pleased that Lant seemed genuinely fond of Thick. A somewhat subdued Lant was allowing Thick to draw on the wax tablets we had acquired for his students, and he was fascinated that he could scribe onto the surface and then watch it smoothed away.

I left them and moved slowly through Withywoods. Nowhere could I hide from the disaster that had befallen me. The faces of the servants I encountered were pale and troubled. The raiders had wantonly destroyed items too large to carry off with them. Blinded by forgetfulness, my people had not cleaned or repaired any of the damage. An arc of blood droplets on one wall spoke of someone’s death; I did not even know whose.

My people and my home, I would have said at one time. I’d been proud of how I’d taken care of the folk here, paid them well, and treated them well. Now that illusion was as broken as a smashed egg. I’d failed to protect them. The pretty rainbow of rooms that we had restored for Bee and Shun seemed a useless vanity. The heart of my home had been stolen; I could not even bring myself to visit the mounded snow on Molly’s grave. As a holder and as a father, I had failed miserably. I’d grown slovenly and careless, let my guard down so far that it had protected nothing at all. I could not distinguish the shame I felt from the fear that coiled and writhed in my guts. Was Bee alive and abused and terrified? Or dead and discarded in the snow at the edge of some seldom-used road? If they believed her the son and discovered she was a girl, how would they react? None of my answers to that question pleased me. Would they torment her before they killed her? Did they torture her even now, as they had tortured the Fool? I could not stand to consider those questions and I could not afford to focus on them.

I put people to work. It was the only exercise I knew that might occupy their minds as they absorbed what had been done to them. I visited the temporary quarters for what horses remained to us and found my stableworkers already mustering there. I spoke briefly of our losses, and listened longer to what they had to tell me. None of them faulted me, and somehow that woke the coals of my shame and guilt to a hotter fire. I told Cinch to step up to being stablemaster for Withywoods. He’d served under Tallerman, and I valued Perseverance’s tight nod to my decision. I gave him the authority to send for carpenters and lumber, and to order the cleanup of the burnt building.

“We’ll set a fire and burn what remains, then,” he informed me. “There are bodies of men in there, alongside the remains of creatures they cared for. We’ll let them go to smoke and ash together, and this time as they burn, we’ll remember well who they were.”

I thanked him. My hair had not grown much in the months since I’d sheared it for Molly’s death; I could not even band it into a warrior’s tail. But with my knife I cut as long a lock as I could from my scalp and gave it to Cinch, asking that he be sure it was burned when they torched the stable again. He took my emblem of mourning from me gravely and promised me it would burn alongside his own.

I asked for a keeper for the messenger birds, and a woman of perhaps fourteen years presented herself, saying it had been her parents’ task and now it would be her own. A shy young man from the stables said he’d be certain to help her tidy the dovecote and she accepted his offer gratefully.

And so it went. Dixon was blithely forgetful still, but many of my household staff had begun to get back to work. By the time I returned to the manor, I found that several damaged tapestries had been removed, and the front entry doors temporarily repaired so that they could fully close.

The evening meal was a gloomy affair. The captain of the Rousters joined us at table with his lieutenant. Captain Stout was a match for me in years and had belatedly connected that Tom Badgerlock and FitzChivalry Farseer were one and the same. He surprised me by recalling my duties against the Forged during the Red-Ship Wars. “That was dirty, bloody work. Dangerous, too. I admired you then. Not always in the years that followed, but I always knew you had grit.” Plainspoken he was, and direct. He’d been commander of the Rousters for two years now and was well on the way to making something of them other than a band of brigands and horse thieves.