Now Starling looked as injured as the Fool. She stood up stiffly and her voice was brittle. “I but sought to help you. To help you do what you must do.” Behind Starling, the wind gusted the door open. “That woman has a right to know her husband is alive.”
“To which woman do you refer?” asked another icy voice. To my consternation, Kettricken swept into the room with Chade at her heels. She regarded me with a terrible face. Grief had ravaged her, had carved deep lines beside her mouth and eaten the flesh from her cheeks. Now anger raged in her eyes as well. The blast of cold wind that came with them cooled me for an instant. Then the door was closed and my eyes moved from face to familiar face. The small room seemed crowded with staring faces, with cold eyes looking at me. I blinked. There were so many of them and so close, and all stared at me. No one smiled. No welcome, no joy. Only the savage emotions that I had wakened with all the changes I had wrought. Thus was the Catalyst greeted. No one wore any expression I’d hoped to see.
None save Chade. He crossed the room to me in long strides, stripping off his riding gloves as he came. When he threw back the hood of his winter cloak, I saw that his white hair was bound back in a warrior’s tail. He wore a band of leather across his brow, and centered on his forehead was a medallion of silver. A buck with antlers lowered to charge. The sign Verity had given to me. Starling moved hastily from his path. He gave her not a glance as he folded easily to sit on the floor by my bed. He took my hand in his, narrowed his eyes at the sight of the frostbite. He held it softly. “Oh, my boy, my boy, I believed you were dead. When Burrich sent me word he had found your body, I thought my heart would break. The words we had when last we parted . . . but here you are, alive if not well.”
He bent and kissed me. The hand he set to my cheek was callused now, the pocks scarcely visible on the weathered flesh. I looked up in his eyes and saw welcome and joy. Tears clouded my own as I had to demand, “Would you truly take my daughter for the throne? Another bastard for the Farseer line . . . Would you have let her be used as we have been used?”
Something grew still in his face. The set of his mouth hardened into resolve. “I will do whatever I have to do to see a true hearted Farseer on the Six Duchies throne again. As I am sworn to do. As you are sworn also.” His eyes met mine.
I looked at him in dismay. He loved me. Worse, he believed in me. He believed that I had in me that strength and devotion to duty that had been the backbone of his life. Thus he could inflict on me things harder and colder than Regal’s hatred of me could imagine. His belief in me was such that he would not hesitate to plunge me into any battle, that he would expect any sacrifice of me. A dry sob suddenly racked me and tore at the arrow in my back. “There is no end!” I cried out. “That duty will hound me into death. Better I were dead! Let me be dead then!” I snatched my hand away from Chade, heedless of how much that motion hurt. “Leave me!”
Chade didn’t even flinch. “He is burning with fever,” he said accusingly to the Fool. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. You should have given him willowbark tea.”
A terrible smile crooked the Fool’s lips. Before he could reply, there was a sharp shredding sound. A gray head was forced through the greased hide window, flashing a muzzle full of white teeth. The rest of the wolf soon followed, oversetting a shelf of potted herbs onto some scrolls set out below them. Nighteyes sprang, nails skittering on the wood floor, and slid to a halt between me and the hastily standing Chade. He snarled all round. I will kill them all for you, if you say so. I dropped my head down to my pillows. My clean, wild wolf. This was what I had made of him. Was it any better than what Chade had made of me?
I looked around them again. Chade was standing, his face very still. Every single face held some shock, some sadness, some disappointment that I was responsible for. Despair and fever shook me. “I’m sorry,” I said weakly. “I have never been what you thought I was,” I confessed. “Never.”
Silence filled up the room. The fire crackled briefly.
I dropped my face to my pillow and closed my eyes. I spoke the words I was compelled to say. “But I shall go and find Verity. Somehow, I will bring him back to you. Not because I am what you believe me to be,” I added, slowly lifting my head. I saw hope kindle in Chade’s face. “But because I have no choice. I have never had any choices.”
“You do believe Verity is alive!” The hope in Kettricken’s voice was savagely hungry. She swept toward me like an ocean storm.
I nodded my head. Then, “Yes,” I managed. “Yes, I believe he lives. I have felt him strongly with me.” Her face was so close, huge in my sight. I blinked my eyes, and then could not focus them.
“Why has not he returned then? Is he lost? Injured? Does he have no care for those he left behind?” Her questions rattled against me like flung stones, one after another.
“I think,” I began, and then could not. Could not think, could not speak. I closed my eyes. I listened to a long silence. Nighteyes whined, then growled deep in his throat.
“Perhaps we should all leave for a time,” Starling ventured unevenly. “Fitz is not up to this just now.”
“You may leave,” the Fool told her grandly. “Unfortunately I still live here.”
Going hunting. It is time to go hunting. I look to where we came in, but the Scentless One has blocked that way, covering it over with another piece of deerskin. Door, part of us knows that is the door and we go to it, to whine softly and prod at it with our nose. It rattles against its catch like a trap about to spring shut. The Scentless One comes, stepping lightly, warily. He stretches his body past me, to put a pale paw on the door and open it for me. I slip out, back into a cool night world. It feels good to stretch my muscles again, and I flee the pain and the stuffy hut and the body that does not work to this wild sanctuary of flesh and fur. The night swallows us and we hunt.
It was another night, another time, before, after, I did not know, my days had come unlinked from one another. Someone lifted a warm compress from my brow and replaced it with a cooler one. “I’m sorry, Fool,” I said.
“Thirty-two,” said a voice wearily. Then, “Drink,” it added more gently. Cool hands raised my face. A cup lapped liquid against my mouth. I tried to drink. Willowbark tea. I turned my face away in disgust. The Fool wiped my mouth and sat down on the floor beside my bed. He leaned companionably close against it. He held his scroll up to the lamplight and went on reading. It was deep night. I closed my eyes and tried to find sleep again. All I could find were things I’d done wrong, trusts I’d betrayed.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Thirty-three,” said the Fool without looking up.
“Thirty-three what?” I asked.
He glanced over at me in surprise. “Oh. You’re truly awake and talking?”
“Of course. Thirty-three what?”
“Thirty-three ‘I’m sorry’s. To various people, but the greatest number of them to me. Seventeen calls for Burrich. I lost count of your calls for Molly, I’m afraid. And a grand total of sixty-two ‘I’m coming, Verity’s.”
“I must be driving you crazy. I’m sorry.”
“Thirty-four. No. You’ve just been raving, rather monotonously. It’s the fever, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
The Fool went back to reading. “I’m so tired of lying on my belly,” I ventured.
“There’s always your back,” the Fool suggested to see me wince. Then, “Do you want me to help you shift to your side?”
“No. That just hurts more.”
“Tell me if you change your mind.” His eyes went back to the scroll.
“Chade hasn’t been back to see me,” I observed.