Fool's Errand (53 page)

“If we had pressed on yesterday after we encountered the archer, we would have caught them up here,” I said remorsefully. “I should have guessed that. They put him in place, knowing that they would not go much farther. He had no horse. It’s so obvious now. Damn, Fool, the Prince was within our grasp yesterday.”

“Then likely he is today, also. This is better, Fitz. Fate has played into our hands. Today we go unencumbered, and we yet may hope to surprise them.”

I frowned as I studied the tracks. “There is no sign that Laurel and the ambusher came this way. So a man was sent back to pick up their sentry and returned alone, with the news that he’d been taken. What they will make of that is hard to say, but they definitely left in a hurry, without their archer. We should assume they’ll be on their guard now.”

I took a breath. “They will fight us when we try to take the Prince.” I bit my lip, then added, “We’d best assume that the Prince will fight us, also. Even if he doesn’t, he’s going to be of little help to us. He was so vague last night . . .” I shook my head and discarded my concerns.

“So our plan is?”

“Surprise them if we can, hit them hard, take what we want, and get out fast. And ride for Buckkeep as swiftly as we can, because we won’t be safe until we are there.”

He followed the thought further than I had been willing to. “Myblack is swift and strong. You may have to leave Malta and me behind once you have the Prince. Don’t hesitate.”

And me.

The Fool glanced at Nighteyes as if he had heard him.

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said carefully.

Don’t fear. I’ll protect him for you.

I felt a terrible sinking in my heart. I kept severely to myself the worry,
But who will protect you?
I would not let it come to that, I promised myself. I would not leave either of them. “I’m hungry,” the Fool noted. It was not a complaint, merely an observation, but I wished he had not said it. Some things are easier to ignore than acknowledge.

We rode on, the trail much plainer now in the rain-dampened earth. They had cut their losses and pushed on without the archer, just as they had left one of their own behind to die when they had fled the village. Such cold determination spoke loudly to me of how valuable the Prince was to them. They would be willing to fight to the death. They might even kill the Prince rather than let us take him. The fact that we knew so little of their motives would force me to be totally ruthless. I discarded the idea of attempting to talk to them first. I suspected their answer would be the same greeting that their archer had had for us yesterday.

I thought longingly of a time when I would have sent Nighteyes ahead to spy out the way for us. Now, with the trail so clear, the panting wolf was holding us back. I knew the moment when he realized it, for he abruptly sat down beside the trail. I pulled in Myblack, and the Fool halted also.

My brother?

Go on without me. The hunt belongs to the swift and keen.

Shall I go on without my eyes and nose, then?

And without your brain, too, alas. Be on your way, little brother, and save your flattery for someone who might believe it. A cat, perhaps.
He came to his feet, and despite his weariness, in a few steps he had melted into the surrounding brush in his deceptively effortless way. The Fool looked askance at me.

“We go on without him,” I said quietly. I glanced away from the troubled look in his eyes. I nudged Myblack and we went on, but faster now. We pushed our horses and the tracks before us grew fresher. At a stream, we stopped to let the horses water and to refill our skins. There were late blackberries there, sour and hard, the ones that had turned color but in the shade, without the direct heat of the sun to sweeten them. We ate handfuls of them anyway, glad of anything we could chew and swallow. Reluctantly, we left fruit on the bushes, mounting as soon as the horses had fairly slaked their thirsts. We pushed on.

“I make out six of them,” the Fool observed as we rode.

I nodded. “At least. There were cat tracks near the water. Two different sizes.”

“We know one rode a warhorse. Should we expect at least one large warrior?”

I shrugged reluctantly. “I think we should expect anything. Including more than six opposing us. They ride toward safety of some kind, Fool. Perhaps an Old Blood settlement, or a Piebald stronghold. And perhaps we are watched even now as we follow.” I glanced up. I had not noticed any birds paying us undue attention, but that did not mean there weren’t any. With the folk we pursued now, a bird in the air or a fox in a bush could be a spy. We could take nothing for granted.

“How long has it been happening to you?” the Fool asked as we rode.

“The shared dreams with the Prince?” I had not the energy to try to dissemble with him. “Oh, for some time.”

“Even before that night you dreamed he was at Galekeep?”

I answered reluctantly. “I’d had a few odd dreams before then. I didn’t realize they were the Prince’s.”

“You hadn’t told me of them, only that you’d dreamed of Molly and Burrich and Nettle.” He cleared his throat and added, “But Chade had mentioned some of his suspicions to me.”

“Did he?” I was not pleased to hear that. I did not like to think of Chade and the Fool discussing me behind my back.

“Was it always the Prince, or only the Prince? Or are there other dreams?” The Fool tried to conceal the depth of his interest, but I had known him too long.

“Besides the dreams you already know about?” I deferred. I debated swiftly, not whether to lie to him, but how much of the truth I wished to share. Lying to the Fool was wasted effort. He had always known when I lied to him, and managed to deduce the truth from it. Limiting his knowledge was the better tactic. And I felt no scruples about it, for it was the device he most often employed against me. “You know that I dreamed of you. And, as I told you, once I dreamed clearly of Burrich, clear enough that I nearly went to him. Those, I would say, are the same types of dreams as those I have had about the Prince.”

“You do not, then, dream of dragons?”

I thought I knew what he meant. “Of Verity-as-Dragon? No.” I looked away from his keen yellow glance. I mourned my King still. “Even when I touched the stone that had held him, I felt no trace of him. Only that distant Wit-humming, like a beehive far under the earth. No. Even in my dreams, I do not reach him.”

“Then you have no dragon-dreams?” he pressed me.

I sighed. “Probably no more than you do. Or anyone who lived through that summer and watched them fly through the skies over the Six Duchies. What man could have seen that sight, and never dream of it again?” And what Skill-addicted bastard could have watched Verity carve his dragon and enter into it, and not have dreamed of ending that way himself? Flowing into the stone, and taking it on as flesh, and rising into the sky to soar over the world. Of course, I dreamed sometimes of being a dragon. I suspected, nay, I knew, that when old age found me, I would make a futile trek into the Mountains and back to that quarry. But like Verity, I would have no coterie to assist me in the carving of my dragon. Somehow it did not matter that I knew I could not succeed. I could imagine no other death than one devoted to the attempt to carve a dragon.

I rode on, distracted, and tried to ignore the odd looks the Fool cast my way from time to time. I did not deserve the next bolt of luck that struck me, but I was glad of it all the same. As we came to the lip of a small valley, a trick of the terrain provided me with a single glimpse of those we pursued. The narrow valley was forested, but divided by a noisy watercourse swollen by last night’s storm. Those we followed were in the midst of fording it. They would have had to turn in their saddles and look up to see us. I reined in, motioning the Fool to do likewise, and silently watched the party below. Seven horses, one riderless. There were two women and three men, one on an immense horse. There were three cats, not two, though in fairness to my tracking skills, two were similar in size. All three cats rode behind their owners’ saddles. The smallest cat rode behind a boy, dark haired in a voluminous cloak of Buckkeep blue. The Prince. Dutiful.

His cat’s distaste for the water they crossed was evident in her tense posture and the set of her claws. I saw them for but an instant, and felt an odd giddiness at the sight. Then tree branches cloaked them. As I watched, the final rider and her mount lurched from the rocky streambed and up the slick clay bank beyond it. As she vanished into the forest, I wondered if she was the Prince’s ladylove.

“That was a big man on the big horse,” the Fool observed reluctantly.

“Yes. And they will fight as one. They were bonded, those two.”

“How could you tell?” he demanded curiously.

“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “It is the same as seeing an old married couple in the market. No one has to tell you. You can just see it, in how they move together and how they speak to one another.”

“A horse. Well, that may present some challenges I hadn’t expected.” It was my turn to give him a puzzled look, but he glanced away from it.

We followed, but more cautiously. We wanted to catch glimpses of them without being seen ourselves. As we did not know where they were going, we could not race ahead to intercept them, even if the rough and wild terrain had offered us that possibility. “Our best option may be to wait until they’ve settled for the night, and then go in after the Prince,” the Fool suggested.

“Two flaws,” I replied. “By nightfall, we may reach wherever it is they’re going. If we do, we may find them in a fortified location, or with many more companions. The second is that if they camp again, they will post sentries, just as they did before. We’d have to get past them first.”

“So your plan is?”

“Wait until they camp tonight,” I admitted gloomily. “Unless we see a better opportunity before then.”

My premonition of disaster grew as the afternoon passed. The trail we followed showed signs of use by more than deer and rabbits. Other people used this path; it led to somewhere, a town or village, or at the least, a meeting place. I dared not wait for nightfall and their camp.

We ghosted closer than we had before. The unevenness of the terrain we crossed favored us, for as soon as they began their descent of the ridge, we could venture closer. Several times we had to leave the trodden path to keep hidden below the ridgeline, but those we followed seemed confident that they were now in safer territory. They did not often look back. I studied their marching order as trees hid and then revealed them. The man on the big horse led the way, followed by the two women. The second woman led the riderless horse. Our Prince came fourth, with his cat behind him on the saddle. Following him were the two other men and their cats. They rode like folk determined to cover ground before nightfall.

“He looks like you did as a boy,” the Fool observed as we once more watched them wend out of sight.

“He looks like Verity to me,” I disagreed. It was true. The boy did look like Verity, but he looked even more like my father’s portrait. I could not say if he looked like me at that age. I had had little to do with looking glasses then. He had dark, thick hair, as unruly as Verity’s and mine. I wondered, briefly, if my father had ever struggled to get a comb through his. His portrait was my only image of him, and in that he was faultlessly groomed. Like my father, the young Prince was long of limb, rangier than stocky Verity, but he might fill out as he got older. He sat his horse well. And just as I had noted with the man on the large horse, I could see his bond with the cat that rode behind him. Dutiful held his head tipped back, as if to be aware always of the cat behind him. The cat was smallest of the three, yet larger than I had expected her to be. She was long legged and tawny, with a rippling pattern of pale and darker stripes. Sitting on her saddle cushion, her claws well dug in, the top of her head came to the nape of the Prince’s neck. Her head turned from side to side as they rode, taking in all that they passed. Her posture said that she was weary of riding, that she would have preferred to cross this ground on her own.

Getting rid of her might be the trickiest part of the whole “rescue.” Yet not for an instant did I consider taking her back to Buckkeep with the Prince. For his own good, he would have to be separated from his bond-beast, just as Burrich had once forced Nosey and I to part.

“It just isn’t a sound bond. It feels not so much that he has bonded as that he has been captured. Or captivated, I suppose. The cat dominates him. Yet . . . it is not the cat. One of those women is involved in this, perhaps a Wit-mentor as Black Rolf was to me, encouraging him to plunge into his Wit-bond with an unnatural intensity. And the Prince is so infatuated that he has suspended all his own judgment. That is what worries me.”

I looked at the Fool. I had spoken the thought aloud, with no preamble, but as often seemed with us, his mind had followed the same track. “So. Will it be easier to unseat the cat and take both Prince and horse, or snatch the Prince and hold him on Myblack with you?”

I shook my head. “I’ll let you know after we’ve done it.”

It was agonizing to shadow after them, hoping for an opportunity that might not come. I was tired and hungry, and my headache from the night before had never completely abated. I hoped that Nighteyes had managed to catch some food for himself and was resting. I longed to reach out to him, but dared not, lest I make the Piebalds aware of me.

Our route had taken us up into the rugged foothills. The gentle plain of the Buck River was far behind us now. As the late afternoon stole the strength of the sun from the day, I saw what might be our only chance. The Piebald party rode silhouetted against a ridgeline. Their trail led to a precipitous path that slashed steeply down and across the face of a sheer and rocky hill. Standing in my stirrups and staring through the thickening light, I decided the horses would have to go in single file. I pointed this out to the Fool.

“We need to catch them up before the Prince begins the descent,” I told him. It would be close. We had let them get almost too far ahead of us in an effort to remain hidden from them. Now I put my heels to Myblack, and she sprang forward, with little Malta right behind us.