In a short time the women and the jeppas were moving easily up the road, while the Fool and I scrabbled alongside on the berm that marked the edge of it. Kettle turned to shake her walking stick. “Get him farther away than that!” she scolded the Fool. “Get to where you can just see us to follow us. Go on, now. Go on.”
So we obediently edged back into the woods. As soon as we were out of sight of the others, the Fool turned to me and excitedly demanded, “Who is Kettle?”
“You know as much as I do,” I pointed out shortly. And added a question of my own, “What is between you and Starling now?”
He lifted his eyebrows at me and winked slyly.
“I doubt that very much,” I retorted.
“Ah, not all are as immune to my wiles as you are, Fitz. What can I tell you? She pines for me, she yearns for me in the depths of her soul, but knows not how to express it, poor thing.”
I gave it up as a bad question. “What do you mean by asking me, ‘Who is Kettle?’”
He gave me a pitying glance. “It is not so complex a question, princeling. Who is this woman who knows so much of what troubles you, who suddenly fishes out of a pocket a game I have only seen mentioned once in a very old scroll, who sings for us ‘Six Wise Men Went to Jhaampe-Town’ with two additional verses I’ve never heard anywhere. Who, O light of my life, is Kettle, and why does so ancient a woman choose to spend her last days hiking up a mountain with us?”
“You’re in fine spirits this morning,” I observed sourly.
“Aren’t I?” he agreed. “And you are almost as adept at avoiding my question. Surely, you must have some musings on this mystery to share with a poor Fool?”
“She doesn’t give me enough information about herself to base any wondering on,” I returned.
“So. What can we surmise about one who guards her tongue as closely as all that? About someone who seems to know something of the Skill as well? And the ancient games of Buck, and old poetry? How old do you suppose she is?”
I shrugged. “She didn’t like my song about Crossfire’s coterie,” I offered suddenly.
“Ah, but that could easily have been just your singing. Let’s not grasp at straws, here.”
In spite of myself, I smiled. “It has been so long since your tongue has had an edge to it, it’s almost a relief to hear you mock me.”
“Had I known you missed it, I would have been rude to you much sooner.” He grinned. Then he grew more serious. “FitzChivalry, mystery hovers about that woman like flies on . . . spilt beer. She absolutely reeks of omens and portents and prophecies coming into focus. I think it is time one of us asked her a few direct questions.” He smiled at me. “Your best chance will be when she is shepherding you along this afternoon. Be subtle, of course. Ask her who was king when she was a girl. And why she was exiled.”
“Exiled?” I laughed aloud. “There’s a leap of the imagination.”
“Do you think so?.. I don’t. Ask her. And be sure to tell me whatever she doesn’t say.”
“And in return for all this, you will tell me what is truly going on between you and Starling?”
He gave me a sideways glance. “Are you sure you want to know? The last time we made such a trade, when I gave you the secret you’d bargained for, you found you did not want it.”
“Is this such a secret?”
He arched one eyebrow at me. “You know, I am hardly certain of the answer to that myself. Sometimes you surprise me, Fitz. More often, you don’t, of course. Most often I surprise myself. Such as when I volunteer to slog through loose snow and dodge trees with some bastard when I could be parading up a perfectly straight avenue with a string of charming jeppas.”
I got as little information from him the rest of the morning. When afternoon came, it was not Kettle but Starling who was my walking companion. I expected that to be uncomfortable. I still had not forgotten that she had bargained her knowledge of my child in order to be part of this expedition. But somehow in the days since we had begun our journey, my anger had become a weary wariness toward her. I knew now there was no bit of information she would scruple to use against me, and so I guarded my tongue, resolving to say nothing at all of Molly or my daughter. Not that it would do much good now.
But to my surprise, Starling was affable and chatty. She plied me with questions, not about Molly, but about the Fool, to the point at which I began to wonder if she had conceived a sudden affection for him. There had been a few times at court when women had taken an interest in him and pursued him. To those who were attracted by the novelty of his appearance, he had been mercilessly cruel in exposing the shallowness of their interest. There had been one gardener maid who was impressed with his wit so much that she was tongue-tied in his presence. I heard kitchen gossip that she left bouquets of flowers for him at the base of his tower stairs, and some surmised that she had occasionally been invited to ascend those steps. She had had to leave Buckkeep Castle to care for her elderly mother in a distant town, and that had been where it ended, as far as I knew.
Yet as slight as this knowledge of the Fool was, I kept it from Starling, turning aside her questions with banalities that the two of us were childhood friends whose duties had left us very little time for socializing. This was actually very close to the truth, but I could see it both frustrated and amused her. Her other questions were as odd. She asked if I had ever wondered what his true name was. I told her that not being able to recall the name my own mother had given me had left me chary of asking others such questions. That quieted her for a time, but then she demanded to know how he had dressed as a child. My descriptions of his seasonal motleys did not suit her, but I truthfully told her that until Jhaampe I had never seen him dressed in other than his jester’s clothes. By afternoon’s end, her questions and my answers had more of sparring in them than conversation. I was glad to join the others in a camp, pitched at quite a distance from the Skill road.
Even so, Kettle kept me busy, letting me do her chores as well as my own for the sake of occupying my mind. The Fool concocted a respectable stew from our supplies and the pork. The wolf contented himself with another leg off the animal. When the meal things were finally cleared away, Kettle immediately set out the gamecloth and pouch of stones. “Now we shall see what you have learned,” she promised me.
But half a dozen games later, she squinted up at me with a frown. “You were not lying!” she accused me.
“About what?”
“About the wolf devising the solution. Had you mastered that strategy yourself, you would play a different game now. Because someone gave you the answer rather than your discovering it yourself, you don’t fully understand it.”
At the moment the wolf rose and stretched. I weary of stones and cloth, he informed me. My hunting is more fun, and offers real meat at the end of it.
So you are hungry?
No. Bored. He nosed the flap of the tent open and slipped out into the night.
Kettle watched him go with pursed lips. “I was about to ask if you could not team together to play this game. It would interest me to see how you played.”
“I think he suspected that,” I muttered, a bit disgruntled that he had not invited me to join him.
Five games later, I grasped the brilliant simplicity of Nighteyes’ noose tactic. It had lain before me all that time, but suddenly it was as if I saw the stones in motion rather than resting on the vertices of the cloth’s pattern. In my next move, I employed it to win easily. I won the next three games handily, for I saw how it could be employed in a reverse situation as well.