Fool's Errand (3 page)

“Chade.” The softness of my voice cut him off. I had known a moment of outrage when he admitted he’d read the scrolls. He’d had no right, I’d thought, and then known that if his Queen gave them to him to read, he had as much right as anyone. Who else should read them? There was no Skillmaster anymore. That line of ability had died out. No. I had killed it. Killed off, one by one, the last trained Skill-users, the last coterie ever created at Buckkeep. They had been faithless to their King, so I had destroyed them and the magic with them. The part of me that was rational knew that it was magic better left dead. “I am no Skillmaster, Chade. It’s not only that my knowledge of the Skill is incomplete, but that my talent was erratic. If you’ve read the scrolls, then I’m sure you’ve discovered for yourself, or heard from Kettricken, that using elfbark is the worst thing a Skilled one can do. It suppresses or kills the talent. I’ve tried to stay away from it; I don’t like what it does to me. But even the bleakness it brings on is better than the Skill-hunger. Sometimes I’ve used elfbark steadily for days at a time, when the craving was bad.” I looked away from the concern on his face. “Whatever talent I ever had is probably stunted beyond recall now.”

His voice was soft as he observed, “It seems to me that your continued craving would indicate the opposite, Fitz. I’m sorry to hear you’ve been suffering; we truly had no idea. I had assumed the Skill-hunger would be like a man’s craving for drink or smoke, and that after a period of enforced abstinence, the longing would grow less.”

“No. It does not. Sometimes it lies dormant. Months pass, even years. Then, for no reason I can tell, it stirs to life again.” I squeezed my eyes shut for an instant. Talking about it, thinking about it was like prodding at a boil. “Chade. I know that this is why you came all this way to find me. And you’ve heard me say no. Now can we speak of other things? This conversation . . . pains me.”

For a time he was silent. There was a false heartiness in his voice when he abruptly said, “Of course we can. I told Kettricken that I doubted you’d fall in with our plan.” He gave a brief sigh. “I’ll simply have to do the best I can with what I’ve gleaned from the scrolls. Now. I’ve had my say. What would you like to hear about?”

“You can’t mean that you’ll try to teach Dutiful the Skill from what you’ve read in some old scrolls?” I was suddenly on the edge of anger.

“You leave me no choice,” he pointed out pleasantly.

“Do you grasp the danger you’d be exposing him to? The Skill draws a man, Chade. It pulls at the mind and heart like a lodestone. He will want to be one with it. If the Prince yields to that attraction for even an instant while he’s learning, he’ll be gone. And there will be no Skilled one to go after him, to put him back together and drag him from the current.”

I could tell from the expression on Chade’s face that he had no understanding of what I was telling him. He only replied stubbornly, “What I read in the scrolls is that there is danger to leaving one with a strong Skill-talent completely untrained. In some cases, such youngsters have begun to Skill almost instinctively, but with no concept of the danger or how to control it. I should think that even a little knowledge might be better than to leave the young Prince in total ignorance.”

I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it again. I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I won’t be drawn into it, Chade. I refuse. Years ago I promised myself. I sat by Will and watched him die. I didn’t kill him. Because I’d promised myself I was no longer an assassin, and no longer a tool. I won’t be manipulated and I won’t be used. I’ve made enough sacrifices. I think I’ve earned this retirement. And if you and Kettricken disagree with that and no longer wish to provide me with coin, well, I can cope with that as well.”

As well to have that out in the open. The first time I’d found a bag of coins by my bed after Starling had visited, I was insulted. I’d hoarded the affront for months until she visited me again. She’d only laughed at me, and told me they weren’t largesse from her for my services, if that’s what I’d thought, but a pension from the Six Duchies. That was when I’d forced myself to admit that whatever Starling knew of me, Chade knew as well. He was also the source of the fine paper and good inks she sometimes brought. She probably reported to him each time she returned to Buckkeep. I’d told myself it didn’t bother me. But now I wondered if all those years of keeping track of me had been Chade waiting for me to be useful again. I think he read my face.

“Fitz, Fitz, calm down.” The old man reached across the table to pat my hand reassuringly. “There’s been no talk of anything like that. We are both well aware of not only what we owe you, but also what the whole Six Duchies owes you. As long as you live, the Six Duchies will provide for you. As for Prince Dutiful’s training, put it out of your head. It’s not truly your concern at all.”

Once again, I wondered uneasily how much he knew. Then I steeled myself. “As you say, it’s not truly my concern. All I can do is warn you to be cautious.”

“Ah, Fitz, have you ever known me to be otherwise?” His eyes smiled at me over the rim of his cup.

I set it aside, but forbidding myself the idea was like tearing a tree up by the roots. Part of it was my fear that Chade’s inexperienced tutelage of the young Prince would lead him into danger. But by far the biggest part of my desire to teach a new coterie was simply so that I could furnish myself with a way to satisfy my own craving. Having recognized that, there was no way I could in good conscience inflict this addiction on another generation.

Chade was as good as his word. He spoke no more about Skilling. Instead, we talked for hours of all the folk I had once known at Buckkeep and what had become of them. Blade was a grandfather, and Lacey was plagued with aching joints that had finally forced her to set her endless tatting aside. Hands was the Stablemaster at Buckkeep now. He had married an inland woman with fiery red hair and a temper to match. All of their children had red hair. She kept Hands on a short leash, and according to Chade, he seemed only happier for it. Of late, she was nagging him to return to Farrow, her homeland, and he seemed prone to indulge her; thus Chade’s trip to see Burrich and offer him his old position again. So on and on, he peeled callus away from my memories and brought all the old faces fresh to my mind again. It made me ache for Buckkeep and I could not forbear to ask my questions. When we ran out of folk to gossip about, I walked him about my place as if we were two old aunties visiting one another. I showed him my chickens and my birch trees, my garden and my walks. I showed him my work shed, where I made the dyes and colored inks that Hap took to market for me. Those, at least, surprised him. “I brought you inks from Buckkeep, but now I wonder if your own are not the better.” He patted my shoulder, just as he once had when I mixed a poison correctly, and the old wash of pleasure at his pride in me rushed through me.

I showed him probably far more than I intended. When he looked at my herb beds, he no doubt marked the preponderance of sedatives and painkillers among my drug plants. When I showed him my bench on the cliffs overlooking the sea, he even said quietly, “Yes, Verity would have liked this.” But despite what he saw and guessed, he spoke no more of the Skill.

We stayed up late that night, and I taught him the basics of Kettle’s stone game. Nighteyes grew bored with our long talk and went hunting. I sensed a bit of jealousy from the wolf, but resolved to settle it with him later. When we set our game aside, I turned our talk to Chade himself and how he fared. He smilingly conceded that he enjoyed his return to court and society. He spoke to me, as he seldom had before, of his youth. He’d led a gay life before his mishandling of a potion had scarred him and made him so ashamed of his appearance that he had retreated into a secretive shadow life as a king’s assassin. In these late years, he seemed to have resumed the life of that young man who had so enjoyed dancing and private dinners with witty ladies. I was glad for him, and spoke mostly in jest when I asked, “But how then do you fit in your quiet work for the crown, with all these other assignations and entertainments?”

His reply was frank. “I manage. And my current apprentice is proving both quick and adept. The time will not be long before I can set those old tasks completely into younger hands.”

I knew an unsettling moment of jealousy that he had taken another in my place. An instant later, I recognized how foolish that was. The Farseers would ever have need of a man capable of quietly dispensing the King’s Justice. I had declared I would no longer be a royal assassin; that did not mean the need for one had disappeared. I tried to recover my aplomb. “Then the old experiments and lessons still continue in the tower.”

He nodded once, gravely. “They do. As a matter of fact . . .” He rose suddenly from his seat by the fire. Out of long habit reawakened, we had resumed our old postures, him sitting in a chair before the fire and me on the hearth by his feet. Only at that moment did I realize how odd that was, and wonder at how natural it had seemed. I shook my head at myself as Chade rummaged through the saddlebags on the table. He came out with a stained flask of hard leather. “I brought this to show to you, and then in all our talk, I nearly forgot it. You recall my fascination with unnatural fires and smokes and the like?”

I rolled my eyes. His “fascination” had scorched us both more than once. I refused the memory of the last time I had witnessed his fire magic: he had made the torches of Buckkeep burn blue and sputter on the night Prince Regal falsely declared himself the immediate heir to the Farseer crown. That night had also seen the murder of King Shrewd and my subsequent arrest for it.

If Chade made that connection, he gave no sign of it. He returned eagerly to the fireside with his flask. “Have you a twist of paper? I didn’t bring any.”

I found him some, and watched dubiously as he took a long strip of my paper, folded it lengthwise, and then judiciously tapped a measure of powder down the groove of the fold. Carefully he folded the paper over it, folded it again, and then secured it with a spiraling twist. “Now watch this!” he invited me eagerly.

I watched with trepidation as he set the paper into the fire on the hearth. But whatever it was supposed to do, flash or sparkle or make a smoke, it didn’t. The paper turned brown, caught fire, and burned. There was a slight stink of sulfur. That was all. I raised an eyebrow at Chade.

“That’s not right!” he protested, flustered. Working swiftly, he prepared another twist of paper, but this time he was more generous with the powder from the small flask. He set the paper in the hottest part of the fire. I leaned back from the hearth, braced for the effect, but again we were disappointed. I rubbed my mouth to cover a grin at the chagrin on his face.

“You’ll think I’ve lost my touch!” he declared.

“Oh, never that,” I responded, but it was hard to keep the mirth from my voice. This time the paper he prepared was more like a fat tube, and powder leaked from it as he twisted it closed. I stood up and retreated from the fireplace as he set it onto the flames. But as before, it only burned.

He gave a great snort of disgust. He peered down the dark neck of the small flask, then shook it. With an exclamation of disgust, he stoppered it. “Damp got into it somehow. Well. That’s spoiled my show.” He tossed the flask into the fire, a mark of high dudgeon for Chade.

As I sat back down by the hearth, I sensed the keenness of his disappointment and felt a touch of pity for the old man. I tried to take the sting from it. “It reminds me of the time I confused the smoke powder with the powdered lancet root. Do you remember that? My eyes watered for hours.”

He gave a short laugh. “I do.” He was silent for a time, smiling to himself. I knew his mind wandered back to our old days together. Then he leaned forward to set his hand to my shoulder. “Fitz,” he demanded earnestly, his eyes locking with mine. “I never deceived you, did I? I was fair. I told you what I was teaching you, from the very beginning.”

I saw then the lump of the scar between us. I put my hand up to cover his. His knuckles were bony, his skin gone papery thin. I looked back into the flames as I spoke to him. “You were always honest with me, Chade. If anyone deceived me, it was myself. We each served our King, and did what we must in that cause. I won’t come back to Buckkeep. But it’s not because of anything you did, but only because of who I’ve become. I bear you no ill will, for anything.”

I turned to look up at him. His face was very grave, and I saw in his eyes what he had not said to me. He missed me. His asking me to return to Buckkeep was as much for himself as for any other reason. I discovered then a small share of healing and peace. I was still loved, by Chade at least. It moved me and I felt my throat tighten with it. I tried to find lighter words. “You never claimed that being your apprentice would give me a calm, safe life.”

As if to confirm those words, a sudden flash erupted from my fire. If my face had not been turned toward Chade, I suppose I might have been blinded. As it was, a blast like lightning and thunder together deafened me. Flying coals and sparks stung me, and the fire roared suddenly like an angry beast. We both sprang to our feet and scrambled back from the fireplace. An instant later, a fall of soot from my neglected chimney put out most of the hearth fire. Chade and I scurried about the room, stamping out the glowing sparks and kicking pieces of burning flask back onto the hearth before the floor could take fire. The door burst open under Nighteyes’ assault on it. He flew into the room, claws scrabbling for purchase as he slid to a halt.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I assured him, and then realized I was yelling past the ringing in my ears. Nighteyes gave a disgusted snort at the smell in the room. Without even sharing a thought with me, he stalked back into the night.

Chade suddenly slapped me several times on the shoulder. “Putting out a coal,” he assured me loudly. It took us some time to restore order and renew the fire in its rightful place. Even so, he pulled his chair back from it, and I did not sit down on the hearth. “Was that what the powder was supposed to do?” I asked belatedly when we were resettled with more Sandsedge brandy.