Fool’s Quest

“Well, make time, if you can.” He folded his lips tightly, thinking. His eyes were very bright. I knew his thoughts were outstripping mine, racing up ladders of logic. “Years ago, when the Fool isolated himself after getting Kettricken home to the Mountain Kingdom, when he thought you were dead and his plans all come to naught, folk came seeking him. Pilgrims. Seeking a White Prophet in the Mountains. How did they know where to find him?”

“I suppose from the prophecies . . .”

He spoke very rapidly. “Or were the so-called Servants seeking him even then? It’s fairly obvious to me that they disliked him being out of their control. Put it together, Fitz. They made the Pale Woman. She was their game-piece. They set her loose on the gaming cloth to shape the world as they wished. They kept him there intending that no one could compete with her, but he got away from them. Rolling and tumbling across their gaming cloth like a bad throw of the dice. They needed him back. What better way to find someone than to seed a search by releasing prophecies and letting others be your pack of hounds seeking him?”

I was silent. Chade’s mind often made those sorts of leaps. He made a small sound, not quite a cough. Was the brightness of his eyes the light of fever? I could hear him breathing through his nose as his mind raced.

He held up another finger. “When they started to arrive, he refused to see any of them. Denied he was a prophet and claimed to be just a toy maker.”

I nodded to that.

“And when you left Jhaampe, you left very quietly.”

“We did.”

“So they might have lost track of him there. He vanishes. He follows his vision of the future and helps you wake the dragons. He ensures that the queen returns to Buck, with a Farseer heir growing in her belly. He vanishes again, to Jamaillia, I suspect, and Bingtown.

“And years later, he reappears as Lord Golden at Buckkeep, just in time to help you assure the survival of the Farseer heir yet again. He is determined to return dragons to this world. He manages to outmaneuver both of us and get himself to Aslevjal Island. And there, at last, the Servants capture him. And they torture him nearly to death. They think they’ve killed him.”

“They did kill him, Chade. He told me they would.” His gaze met mine. He didn’t quite believe me, but I decided it didn’t matter if he did or not. “He went to Aslevjal believing that had to happen for Icefyre to be set free from the glacier and mate with Tintaglia. To bring dragons back to our world.”

“Yes, and how we’ve all enjoyed that!” Chade observed sourly.

For no reason I could explain, that stung. “You’ve enjoyed it enough to obtain dragon’s blood,” I retorted.

He narrowed his eyes slightly. “It’s an ill wind that blows no good,” he observed.

I teetered on a decision. Conversations about morality were rare among assassins. We did as we were told to do. But Chade had undertaken obtaining the blood himself, not as a mission ordained by the king. I dared to question it.

“You don’t feel a bit . . . uncomfortable buying the blood of a creature that obviously thinks and speaks? A creature that was possibly murdered for the harvest of that blood?”

He stared at me. His green eyes narrowed and glittered like glacial ice. “That’s an odd line for you to draw, Fitz. Witted as you are, you ran with a wolf. Did not you bring down deer and rabbits and eat them? Yet those of Old Blood who bond to such creatures would tell you that they think and feel even as we do.”

But they are prey and we are predator. It is how we are meant to be to each other. I shook my mind clear of wolfish thoughts. “That’s true. A man bonded to a buck would agree with you. But it’s how the world is structured. Wolves eat meat. We took only what we needed. My wolf needed meat and we took it. Without it, he would have died.”

“Apparently, without the dragon’s blood, your Fool would have died.” His tone had become acerbic. I wished I had not begun the conversation. Despite all our years together, despite how he had trained me, we had diverged in our thinking. Burrich and Verity, I thought to myself, were perhaps not the best influences for a young assassin. Like a curtain parting to reveal daylight, it came to me that perhaps neither of them had ever truly seen me as a royal assassin. King Shrewd had. But Burrich had done his best to raise me as Chivalry’s son. And perhaps Verity had always seen me as his potential heir.