Fool’s Quest

“Yes. You should. But not just yet.” He reached out and unerringly seized my hand. “Stay here, Fitz. For I think I know at least part of the answer to your most important question. And I have answers to the other questions that you do not even know to ask. That last one is the one I answer first. Fitz. You can deny it. But I have been with you, in every way that matters. As you have been with me. We’ve shared our thoughts and our food, bound each other’s wounds, slept close when the warmth of our bodies was all we had left to share. Your tears have fallen on my face, and my blood has been on your hands. You’ve carried me when I was dead, and I carried you when I did not even recognize you. You’ve breathed my breath for me, sheltered me inside your own body. So, yes, Fitz, in every way that matters, I’ve been with you. We’ve shared the stuff of our beings. Just as a captain does with her liveship. Just as a dragon does with his Elderling. We’ve been together in so many ways that we have mingled. So close have we been that when you made love to your Molly, she begat our child. Yours. Mine. Molly’s. A little Buck girl with a wild streak of White in her.

“Oh, gods. Such a jest and such a joy. A jest I played upon you? Hardly! A joy you have given me. Tell me. Does she look like me at all?”

“No.” Yes. The twin peaks of her upper lip. Her long pale lashes against her cheeks. Her blond hair, curly as mine, wild as his had been. Her round chin, not the Fool’s as he was now but twin to him as a child.

“Oh, how you lie!” the Fool rejoiced. “She does! I know it in your affronted silence. Bee looks like me! Yours and mine, and doubtless the most beautiful and clever child that ever existed!”

“She is that.” Don’t think of his ridiculous claim. Of all the people I could lie to, I’d always been best at lying to myself. Bee was mine. Only mine. Her paleness came from my Mountain mother. I could believe that. It was easier to believe that than to agree that the Fool had shared in her making. Wasn’t it?

“And now the most important of your questions I answer.” His voice went deadly solemn. He sat straighter at the table. His shoulders were squared and his peculiar gaze distant. “At this instant, I do not know where they are. But I know where they must take her. Back to Clerres and the school. Back to the den of the Servants. She will be a precious prize to them. Not an Unexpected Son, no, but a trueborn shaysa, unseen and unpredicted. And not created by them. How astonished they will be by that.” He paused and thought for a short time. “And how determined to use her. Fitz, I do not think you need to fear for her life, yet. But all the same, we must fear for her and recover her as quickly as possible.”

“Can we intercept them?” Hope flared in me at the first possibility of actually doing something rather than simply floundering and agonizing. I pushed all else he had said aside. All those thoughts could wait until I held Bee in my arms again.

“Only if we are very clever. Exceedingly clever. It will be like that guessing game they play in the market, the one with the pea under one of three walnut shells. We must decide which route they will be smartest to take, and then that they will certainly not take the route as we will have deduced it. And then we must think of the route they would choose as the one we would think most unlikely, and discard that as well. We must thwart the future as they know it. It’s a puzzle, Fitz, and they have far more information than we do. But there is one piece of information they may have but do not understand. They may know she is our child, but they have no idea to what lengths we will go to recover her.”

He stopped speaking. Cradling his chin in one hand, he turned his face toward the firelight. He pulled at his lips as if his mouth pained him. I stared at him. The scars on his cheeks were fading but his silhouette looked wrong to me. He turned his face back to me. The shifting gold in his eyes was like molten metal seething in a pot. “I will need to ponder this, Fitz. I must try to dredge from my memory every prophecy or dream about the Unexpected Son that I ever memorized. And I do not know if any of them will be useful. Do any of them truly apply to Bee? Or is she a chance find for them, a treasure discovered when they were seeking something very different? Will they split their group, and send some home with Bee while others continue to seek the Unexpected Son?

“And since my Catalyst and I changed the world, have they harvested new prophecies from their stables of Whites and part-Whites? I think it likely. How can we outwit something like that? How do we outfox a fox who knows every path and den, when they seem able to fog every witness who might be able to help us?”