Fool’s Quest

“You are going to escort me back to my sitting room. There will be food waiting there. Fitz, you will not leave. Nor will I allow you to waste away. I see every bone in your face, and your hands are skeletal. Come. Walk with me.”

I did not want to. I wanted to go to my room and sleep forever. Or get on a horse and ride off into the darkening winter night. Instead Kettricken took my arm and we paced through Buckkeep, up the stairs, and to the door of her sitting room, adjacent to her bedchamber. We entered, and she shooed away two ladies waiting for her.

A table of food and tea awaited us. The soup had been covered to stay warm, and the bread was soft and fresh. The tea had mint in it, and chamomile, and a rich spice I did not know. I ate without appetite, because it was easier than resisting her. I drank the warming tea and felt like a hard-ridden horse that had finally reached the stables. My sorrow had not eased, but it was giving way to weariness. Kettricken put another log on the fire. She came back to the table but did not sit down. Instead she walked behind me, set her hands to my shoulders, and kneaded them. I stiffened at her touch. She leaned down to speak by my ear. “There comes a time to stop thinking. For you that time is now. Drop your head forward.”

And I did. She rubbed my shoulders and my neck and spoke of other times. She made me remember the Mountains and how she had tried to poison me the first time we met. She spoke of our long trek in search of Verity, and recalled to me my wolf and how we had once moved as one. She spoke of the pain of finding Verity, and finding him so changed. And giving him up to his dragon.

The fire burned low, and outside the narrow window the winter day faded. “Get up. You need to sleep.” She led me to her bedchamber and drew back the rich purple coverlet to expose the clean white linens. “Rest here. No one will come to find you or ask you questions. Just sleep.”

“In the tea,” I said, and she nodded.

“For your own good,” she replied, “and fitting, after what you did to Riddle.”

I could not find an argument. I lay down on her clean sheets in the clothing I’d worn for days. She pulled the boots from my feet and covered me over as if I were a child.

In the dead of night I stirred. Wakefulness flowed back into me. I was a cup full of sorrow, but that sorrow was stilled, like a pain that abates as long as one does not move. Slowly it came to me that I was not in my own bed. Kettricken’s scent was all around me. There was warmth and pressure down my back. She slept beside me, against my back with her arms around me. So wrong. So right. I took both her hands in mine and held them against my chest. I felt no desire other than to be held, for someone to sleep beside me and guard my back. She drew a deeper breath and sighed it out on a word. “Verity.”

Sorrow and loss never die. We can put them away in a chest and lock it tight, but whenever it is opened, even a crack, the aroma of lost sweetness will rise to fill our lungs to heaviness. Verity, lost to the Skill just as Bee was. Sometimes, to share a loss is the closest to balm. I missed my king and wished I had his strength. “Verity,” I agreed softly. “And Bee,” I added. I closed my eyes and sleep pulled me under again.

Before dawn she woke me. She wore her thick winter nightrobe, and her short hair stood out in a gray halo around her pink scalp. “You should go by the secret door,” she said, and I nodded. There was enough troubling Dutiful without scandal between his mother and his cousin. My body ached and I did not put on my boots, but carried them. She followed me to the door of the garderobe. My concealed exit was in the wall of that small chamber. There she caught my arm, turned me, and embraced me again. I kissed her brow, and then her cheek. As I let her go, she leaned up to kiss my mouth. “Do not punish yourself, Fitz. Grieve, but do not punish yourself. And do not run away from us, please. We need you here, now more than ever.”

I nodded but did not answer. Did she know what a heavy harness she had just put upon me?

The passage I entered, like all things that touched Kettricken, was clean and bare. There were no mouse droppings, no cobwebs there, and I traversed the distance by touch to Chade’s old den. I entered it as softly as I could, hoping not to wake the Fool.

But he was in a chair before the fire. His hands were held up in front of him, and he moved his fingers against the dancing light of the flames. “There you are,” he greeted me. “I was worried about you when you didn’t come by.”

I stopped. “You thought I’d run away.” It was a bit daunting to realize how many of my friends believed I’d do that.

He wagged his head in a dismissive way. “There’s a pattern.”

“I did that once!”

He folded his lips and said nothing. His fingers continued their dance.

“Can you see your fingers?”

“I see darkness against a lighter background. And it limbers them. Even though it hurts.” He waggled them again. “Fitz. Words can’t express—”