Robin Hobb - Fool's Assassin

“Can you find the towels and robe?”

“I’ll manage,” he said shortly.

I’d finished reading the scroll and was struggling to stay awake when I heard him say, “I’ve lost my bearings. Where are you?”

“Over here. On Chade’s old bed.”

Even freshly bathed and attired in clean garments, he still looked terrible. He stood, the old blue robe hanging on him like slack canvas on a derelict ship as he clung to the back of the chair. What hair he had left was still weighted with water; it scarcely reached past his ears. His blind eyes were terrible dead things in his gaunt living face. His breathing sounded like leaking bellows. I rose and took his arm to guide him to the bed.

“Fed, clean, and warm. New garments. A soft bed. If I were not so weary, I’d weep with gratitude.”

“Go to sleep instead.” I opened the bedding for him. He sat down on the edge of it. His hands patted the clean linens, moved up to the plump pillow. It was an effort for him to swing his legs up onto the bed. When he lay back on the pillows, I did not wait, but covered him as if he were Bee. His hands gripped the top edge of the coverlet.

“Will you stay here for the night?” It was a question rather than a request.

“If you wish.”

“I do. If you don’t mind.”

I stared at him unabashedly. Freed of grime, the lines of inflicted scars on his face were perfectly etched. “I don’t mind,” I said quietly.

He closed his filmed-over eyes. “Do you remember … a time I asked you to stay beside me for the night?”

“In the Elderling tent. On Aslevjal.” I remembered. We were both quiet for a time, and then the silence stretched out longer. I thought he had fallen asleep. I was suddenly exhausted. I walked around to the other side of the bed, sat down on the edge of it and then stretched out beside him, as carefully as if he were infant Bee. My thoughts went to her. What a day I had given her! Would she sleep well tonight or battle nightmares? Would she stay in her bed or creep off to hide herself behind the wall of my study? Strange little mite of a girl. I had to do better by her. I meant to, with every drop of my heart’s blood I meant to, but it seemed things always got in the way. And here I was, days away from her, trusting her care to a man I scarcely knew. And had insulted.

“No questions?” the Fool asked of the dim room.

He was the one, I thought, who should have questions. Starting with, Why did you stab me? “I thought you were asleep.”

“Soon.” He sighed the weight of the world away. “You take me on such faith, Fitz. Years pass, I step back into your life, and you kill me. And then save me.”

I didn’t want to talk about how I had knifed him. “Your messenger reached me.”

“Which one?”

“A pale girl.”

He was silent and then spoke in a voice full of sorrow. “I sent seven pairs of messengers to you. Over eight years, I sent them to you. And only one got through?”

Seven pairs. Of fourteen messengers, one had reached me. Perhaps two. A great wave of dread rose in me. What had he fled, and did it still pursue him? “She died soon after reaching me. Those who chased her had shot some sort of parasites into her, and they were eating her from the inside.”

He was silent for a long time. “They love that sort of thing. Slow pain that inevitably gets worse. They love it when those they torment hope and beg for death.”

“Who loves it?” I asked quietly.

“The Servants.” All life had gone from his voice.

“The servants?”

“They used to be servants. When the Whites existed, their ancestors served the Whites. The prophet folk. My ancestors.”

“You’re a White.” There was little written of them, and what I knew, I had learned mostly from the Fool. Once, they had lived alongside and among humanity. Long-lived and gifted with prophecy and the ability to see all futures. As they had dwindled and interbred with humans, they had lost their unique characteristics, but every few generations one such as he was born. A true White, such as the Fool, was a rarity.

He made a small sound of skepticism in his throat. “So they would have you believe. And me. The truth is, Fitz, that I am a creature with enough White blood in me that it manifests almost completely.” He took a deep breath as if to say more and then sighed deeply instead.

I was confused. “That wasn’t what you told me years ago.”

He turned his head on the pillow, as if he could look at me. “That wasn’t what I believed, years ago. I didn’t lie to you, Fitz. I repeated to you the lie I had been told, the lie I believed all my life.”

I told myself I had never believed it anyway. But I had to ask him, “Then you are not a White Prophet? And I am not your Catalyst?”

“What? Of course I am. And you are! But I am not a full White. No full Whites have walked this world for hundreds of years.”

“Then … the Black Man?”

“Prilkop? Far older than me, and probably of purer blood. And like the Whites of old, as he aged, he darkened.”

“I thought he darkened as he was able to fulfill his mission as a White Prophet? That as much as he was successful in setting the world on a better path, so he darkened?”

“Oh, Fitz.” He sounded weary and sad. After a long pause, he said, “I don’t know. That’s what the Servants took from me. Everything I thought I knew, every certainty. Have you ever stood on a sandy beach when the tide is coming in? Felt the waves come up around your feet and suck the sand from under you? That’s my life now. With every day, I feel I sink deeper into uncertainty.”

A hundred questions filled my mind. And I suddenly knew that, yes, I had believed that he was a prophet and I was his Catalyst. I had believed it, and I had endured the things he had foretold for me, and I had trusted. And if it had all been a lie, a deception practiced on him that he had perpetuated upon me in turn? No. That was what I could not believe. It was what I must not believe.

“Is there anything more to eat? Suddenly I’m hungry again.”

“I’ll see.” I rolled off the bed and went to the hearth. Whoever Chade had dispatched had been thorough. There was a covered pot on the kettle hook, swung to the edge of the coals where it would stay warm but not burn. I hooked it over the hearth and peeked in. A chicken had been stewed down to a morass of thready flesh in a thick brown broth. Onion and celery and parsnip mingled together in a friendly sauce. “Stewed chicken,” I told him. “Shall I bring you some?”

“I’ll get up.”

His answer surprised me. “Earlier today, when I brought you here so quickly, I thought you balanced on the knife’s edge of death. Now you sound almost like yourself.”

“I’ve always been tougher than I looked.” He sat up slowly and swung his legs out, feet groping for the floor. “But don’t deceive yourself. I doubted I would have survived longer than a couple more nights in the cold. I scarcely remember the last few days. Cold and hunger and pain. No difference between night and day, save that nights were colder.” He stood and swayed. “I don’t know where you are,” he complained helplessly.

“Stand still,” I bade him, as if he could do otherwise. I put a small table near Chade’s old chair, and then guided the Fool to his seat. I found dishes and cutlery on a shelf; Lady Rosemary kept a much more orderly lair than Chade had. I brought him a bowl of the chicken and a spoon, and then found a bottle of brandy and some cups. “How hungry are you?” I asked, eyeing what was left in the pot. My own appetite had wakened at the smell of the food. The toil of the Skill-journey I had mostly transferred to Riddle, but it had still been a long and taxing time since I’d last eaten.