Fool’s Errand (Tawny Man Trilogy Book One) by Robin Hobb (23)

I had expected darkness and disorientation. I had expected the Skill pulling at me, and a struggle to hold the Prince and myself together. I forced myself to be aware of both of us, and to keep him intact. Holding onto him within my Skill-barriers was much like clutching a handful of salt in a deluge. There was the same sensation that if I relaxed my grip at all, he would trickle away from me. There was all that, and an illogical sensation that we fell upwards. I clutched Dutiful to me, promising myself that it would soon be over. I was not prepared to fall from the pillar into icy seawater.

Saltwater flooded my mouth and nose as I gasped in shock. We tumbled together in the water. My shoulder struck something. Dutiful struggled wildly, and I nearly lost my grip on him. The water sucked at us, and then, just as I saw light through a layer of murky green and deduced which way was up, a wave gathered us and flung us against a rocky beach.

The impact broke my grip on the Prince. The wave rolled us on the rocky shore without letting us reach air. The mussel-and-barnacle-encrusted rocks tore at me. Then, as the wave retreated, my body snagged on the rocks hooking my sword-belt and the water stranded me there. I lifted my head, choking and gagging out water and sand. I blinked, trying to see Dutiful, and spotted him still in the water. He was belly-down on the beach, scrabbling to catch hold of rocks as the outgoing wave sucked at him. He slid backwards towards deeper water, then managed to find a grip and lay still, gasping. I found a breath.

‘Get up!’ I yelled. It came out as a hoarse caw. ‘Before the next wave. Get up.’

He looked at me without comprehension. I staggered upright and flung myself towards him. Catching the back of his collar, I dragged him over the shredding barnacles and up the rocky beach towards the higher shoreline. A wave still caught us and flung me to my knees, but the water was not powerful enough to drag us out again. The next time the wave went out, Dutiful managed to get to his feet. Holding on to one another, we staggered up past the toothy rocks and into a belt of black sand festooned with squelching strands of tangled kelp. When we reached the loose dry sand, I let go of Prince Dutiful. He took perhaps three more steps and then dropped to the ground. For a time he just lay on his side, breathing. Then he sat up, spat out sand and wiped his nose on his wet sleeve. He looked all around us with no comprehension, and when his eyes came back to me, his expression was that of a confused child.

‘What happened?’

The sand in my teeth gritted whenever I moved my mouth. I spat. ‘We came through a Skill-pillar.’ I spat again.

‘A what?’

‘A Skill-pillar,’ I repeated. I looked back to point it out to him.

There was nothing out there but ocean. Another wave rushed in, reaching higher up the beach. Scummy white foam laced the sand as the water retreated. I came awkwardly to my feet and stared out over the incoming tide. Just water. Moving waves. Crying gulls above the waves. No Skill-pillar of black stone broke that heaving green surface. There was not even a clue as to where it had spat us out offshore.

No way back.

I had left my friends to die. Regardless of what the Fool had said, I had resolved to return immediately via the pillar. Otherwise, I would not have gone. I would not have done it if I had thought I was not going back to them. Telling myself that did not make me feel a shard less cowardly.

Nighteyes! I quested desperately, flinging the call with all my strength.

No one answered.

‘Fool!’ The word ripped out of me, a futile scream of Wit and Skill and voice. Distant gulls seemed to echo it mockingly. My hope faded with their dwindling cries over the windswept sea.

Unmoving, I stared out over the water until an incoming wave lapped against my feet. The Prince had not moved, except to fall back onto his side on the wet sand. He lay, staring blankly and shivering. I slowly turned away from the surf and surveyed the land. Black cliffs rose up before us. The tide was coming in. My mind put the pieces together.

‘Get up. We have to move before the tide traps us.’

To the south, the rocky cliffs gave way to a half-moon of black sand. A grassy tableland backed it. I reached down and seized the Prince’s arm. ‘Up,’ I repeated. ‘Unless you want to drown here.’

The lad lurched to his feet without protest. We trudged down the shore as the waves reached ever higher towards us. Desolation was a cold weight inside me. I dared not look at what I had just done. It was too monstrous to consider. While I walked down this beach, did their blood flow down swords? I stopped my mind. As if I were setting walls against an intrusive mind, I blocked all feelings from myself. I stopped all thoughts and became a wolf, concerned only with the ‘now’.

‘What was that?’ Dutiful demanded suddenly. ‘That … feeling. That pulling …’ Words failed him. ‘Was that the Skill?’

‘Part of it,’ I answered brusquely. He seemed entirely too interested in what he had just experienced. Had it called to him that strongly? The Skill’s attraction was a terrible trap for the unwary.

‘I … he tried to teach me, but he couldn’t tell me what it felt like. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it or not, and neither could he. But that!’

He expected a response to his excitement. I gave him none. The Skill was the last thing I wanted to talk about just now. I didn’t want to speak at all. I did not want to break the numbness that wrapped me.

When we reached the black sand, I kept Prince Dutiful walking. His wet clothes flapped around his body, and he hugged himself against the chill. I listened to his shivering breaths. A greenish sheen on the sand proved to be a flow of freshwater over the beach to the sea. I walked him upstream, away from the sandy beach and into a field of coarse sedge grasses until I reached a place where the trickle was deep enough for me to cup handfuls of it. I washed out my mouth several times and then drank. I was splashing water on my face to get sand out of my eyes and ears when the Prince spoke again.

‘What about Lord Golden and the wolf? Where are they, what happened to them?’ He looked out over the water as if he expected to see them there.

‘They couldn’t come. By now, I imagine your friends have killed them.’

It amazed me that I could speak the words so flatly. No choking tears, no gasping breath. It was a thought too terrible to be real. I could not allow myself to consider it. Instead, I flung the words at him, hoping to see him flinch from them. Instead he just shook his head, as if my words made no sense, then asked numbly ‘Where are we?’

‘We are here,’ I replied, and laughed. I had never known that anger and despair could make a man laugh. It was not a pleasant sound, and the Prince cowered away from me for an instant. Then in the next, he stood up very straight and pointed an accusing finger at me. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, as if he had suddenly discovered the one mystery that underlay all his questions.

I looked up from where I still crouched by the water. I drank another handful before I answered. ‘Tom Badgerlock.’ I slicked my hair back with my wet hands. ‘For this. I was born with this white streak at my temple, and so my parents named me.’

‘Liar.’ He spoke the word with flat contempt. ‘You’re a Farseer. You may not have the looks of a Farseer, but you have the Skill of one. Who are you? A distant cousin? Someone’s by-blow?’

I’d been called a bastard many times in my life, but never by someone I might call a son. I looked up at Dutiful, Verity’s and Kettricken’s heir from the seed of my body. Well, if I’m a bastard, I wonder what that makes you? What I said instead was ‘Does it matter?’

While he was still struggling to find an answer to that, I scanned our surroundings. I was stuck here with him, at least until the tide went out. If I was fortunate, it would bare the pillar that brought us here, and I could use it to return. If I was unfortunate, the water wouldn’t retreat that far, and then I’d have to discover just where we truly were and how to get back to Buckkeep from here.

The Prince spoke angrily to mask his sudden uncertainty. ‘We can’t be that far. It only took us a moment to get here.’

‘Magic such as we used makes little of distance. We may not even be in the Six Duchies any more.’ I abruptly decided he needed to know no more than that. Whatever I told him, the woman would likely know as well. The less said, the better.

Slowly he sat down on the ground. ‘But –’ he said, and then fell silent. After a time, I sensed his Wit-keening. The look on his face was that of an apprehensive child reaching out desperately for something familiar. But my heart did not go out to him. Instead, I repressed an urge to give him a firm whack on the back of the head. For this whimpering self-obsessed juvenile, I’d traded the lives of my wolf and my friend. It seemed the poorest bargain I’d ever made. Nettle, I reminded myself. Keeping him alive might keep her safe. Farseer heir or not, it was the only value that I could see in him just then.

I am disappointed in my son.

I examined that, and reasserted to myself that Dutiful was not my son and since I had never accepted any responsibility for his rearing, I had no right to be either disappointed or pleased by him. I walked away from him. I let the wolf in me have ascendancy, and he spoke to me of the need for immediate creature comfort. The wind along the beach was constant and chill, slapping my wet garments against my body. Find wood, get a fire going if I could. Dry out. Look for food at the same time. There was no point to agonizing about what had become of Nighteyes and the Fool. The tide was still coming in. That meant that the next low tide would probably come in the dark of night. The following low tide would be sometime the next morning. I had to be resigned that my next opportunity to return to my friends was nearly a full day away. So, for now, gather strength and rest.

I looked across the grassy tableland at the forest that backed it. The trees here were the green of summer still, yet somehow it impressed me as an unfriendly and lifeless place. I decided that there was no point in hiking across the meadow and hunting under the trees. I had no heart for a chase and a kill. The small creatures of the beach would suffice.

It was a poor decision to make during an incoming tide. There was driftwood to gather for a fire, flung high by a previous storm tide, out of reach of today’s water. The blue mussels and other shellfish were already underwater, however. I chose a place where the cliffs subsided into the tableland, a spot somewhat sheltered from the wind, and kindled a small fire. Once I had it going, I took off my boots and socks and shirt, and wrung as much water from everything as I could. I propped the garments on driftwood sticks to dry near the fire, and put my boots upside-down on two stakes to drain. I sat by the fire, hugging myself against the chill of the fading day. Expecting nothing, I still ventured to quest again. Nighteyes?

There was no response. It meant nothing, I told myself. If he and the Fool had managed to escape, then he would not reach out towards me for fear of being detected by the Piebalds. It might mean only that he was choosing to be silent. Or it might mean he was dead. I wrapped my own arms around myself and held tight. I must not think such thoughts or grief would tear me apart. The Fool had asked me to keep Prince Dutiful alive. I’d do that. And the Piebalds would not dare to kill my friends. They would want to know what had become of the Prince, how he could have vanished before their eyes.

What would they do to the Fool to wring answers from him? Don’t think such things.

Reluctantly, I rose to seek out the Prince.

The boy had not moved from where I had left him. I walked up behind him, and when he did not even turn towards me, I nudged him rudely with my foot. ‘I’ve a fire,’ I said gruffly.

He didn’t respond.

‘Prince Dutiful?’ I could not keep the sneer from my voice. He did not flinch.

I crouched down next to him and set a hand on his shoulder. ‘Dutiful.’ I leaned around him to look into his face.

He wasn’t there.

His expression was slack, his eyes dull. His mouth hung slightly ajar. I groped towards our tenuous Skill-bond. It was like tugging at a broken fishing line. There was no resistance, no sense that anyone had ever been at the other side of that bond.

A terrible echo of a long-ago lesson came to me. ‘If you give in to the Skill, if you do not hold firm against its attraction, then the Skill can tatter you away and you will become as a great drooling babe, seeing nothing, hearing nothing …’ The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I shook the Prince, but his head just lolled and nodded on his neck. ‘Damn me!’ I roared to the sky. I should have foreseen he would try to reach the cat, I should have known this could happen.

I tried to force calmness on myself. Stooping, I lifted his arm and set it across my shoulders. I set my arm around his waist and drew him to his feet. As I hauled him down the beach, his toes dragged in the sand. When I reached the fire, I put him down beside it. He sprawled over on his side.

I spent several minutes replenishing the blaze with nearby driftwood. I built it large and hot, not caring who or what it might draw. My hunger and my weariness were forgotten. I dragged the Prince’s boots from his feet, emptied them of water and set them upside-down to dry. My own shirt was steaming warm now. I peeled Dutiful’s wet shirt from his back and hung it out. I spoke to him the whole time, rebuking him and taunting him at first, but before long I was pleading with him. He made no response at all. His skin was chill. I wrestled his arms into the sleeves and dragged my warmed shirt onto him. I chafed his arms, but his stillness seemed to invite the cold to fill him. With every passing moment, his body seemed to have less life in it. It was not that his breathing laboured or that his heart beat more slowly, but more that my Wit-sense of his presence was fading, exactly as if he were travelling away from me.

Finally, I sat down behind him. I pulled him back against me, his back to my chest and put my arms around him in a vain effort to warm him. ‘Dutiful,’ I said by his ear. ‘Come back, boy. Come back. You’ve a throne to inherit, and a kingdom to rule. You can’t go like this. Come back, lad. It can’t all have been for nothing. Not the Fool and Nighteyes both spent for nothing. What will I say to Kettricken? What will Chade say to me? Gods, gods, what would Verity say to me now?’

It was not so much what Verity would have said to me as what Verity would have done for me. I held his son close to me, and then placed my face next to his beardless cheek. I took a deep breath and dropped all my walls. I closed my eyes, and slipped into the Skill in search of him.

I nearly lost myself.

There have been times when I could scarcely reach the flow of Skill, and in other times and places, I have experienced the Skill as a flowing river of power, incredibly swift and powerful. As a boy, I had nearly lost myself in that river, sustained and rescued only by Verity’s intervention. I had grown in strength and control since then. Or so I had thought. This sensation was like diving into a racing current of Skill. Never before had I felt it so strong and seductive. In my present frame of mind, it seemed to offer the complete and perfect answer to me. Just let go. Stop being this person Fitz trapped in a battle-scarred body. Stop bleeding sorrow for the death of my closest friends. Just let go. The Skill offered me existence without thought. It was not the suicide’s temptation to die and make the world stop for him. This was far more enticing. Change the shape of your being and leave all those considerations behind. Merge.

If I had had only myself to think of, I know I would have yielded to it. But the Fool had charged me with seeing that he did not die in vain, and my wolf had bid me live and tell Nettle of him. Kettricken had asked me to bring her son back to her. Chade was depending on me. And Hap. So I found myself in that seething current of streaming sensations, and I fought to remain who I was. I don’t know how long it took me to do that. Time has no meaning in that place. That alone is one of the Skill’s dangers. Some part of me knew I was burning my body’s strength, but when one is immersed in the Skill it is hard to care about physical things.

When I was sure of myself, I cautiously reached out in search of Dutiful.

I had thought it would be easy to find him. The night before, it had been effortless. I had but clasped his hand then, and found him within the Skill. Tonight, though I knew that somewhere I cradled his chilling body, I could not discover him. It is difficult to describe how I sought him. The Skill is not truly a place nor a time. Sometimes I think it can be described as being without the boundaries of self. At other times, that defining seems too narrow, for ‘self’ is not the only boundaries we set to how we experience being.

I opened myself to the Skill and let it stream through me like water through a sieve, and still I found no trace of the Prince. I stretched myself beneath the flow of the Skill like a hillside full of tiny grasses under sunlight and let it touch each blade of me, and still I could not sense him. I wove myself throughout the Skill, twining over it like ivy, and still I could not separate the lad from its flow.

He had left a sense of himself in the Skill, but like a bootmark in fine dust on a windy day that trace was crumbling to meaningless grains flowing with the Skill. I gathered what I could of him, but it was no more Prince Dutiful than the scent of a flower is the flower. Nevertheless, I took to myself the bits that I recognized and held them fiercely. It was becoming more difficult for me to recall what exactly was the essence of the Prince. I had never known him well, and the body that my body held was rapidly losing its connection to him.

In an effort to find the boy, I engaged completely with the Skill. I did not surrender myself, but I stepped free of all the safety holds that always before I had clung to. It was an eerie feeling. I was a kite cut free and flying, a tiny boat with no hand on the tiller. I had not lost my sense of self, but I had given up the absolute certainty that I could find my way back to my body. Yet it put me no closer to finding Dutiful. It only made me more aware of the vastness that surrounded me and the hopelessness of my task. It would have been easier to net the smoke from an extinguished fire than to gather the boy together again.

And all the while the Skill plucked at me, whispering promises. It was only cold and rushing so long as I resisted it. If I gave in, I knew it would become all warmth and comfort and belonging. If I surrendered to it, I would subside into peaceful existence without individual awareness. What would be so terrible about that? Nighteyes and the Fool were gone. I’d failed in my mission to bring Dutiful back to Kettricken. Molly did not wait for me; she had a life and a love. Hap, I told myself, trying to stir some sense of responsibility. What about Hap? But I knew that Chade would see to Hap’s needs, at first out of a sense of duty to me, but before long for the sake of the boy himself.

But Nettle. What of Nettle?

The answer was terrible. I had already failed her. I knew I could not recover Dutiful, and without him, she was doomed. Did I wish to return to witness that? Could I be aware of it and stay sane? Then a worse thought came to me. In this timeless place, it had all already happened. Even now, she had perished.

That decided me. I let go of the bits of Dutiful and they streamed away from me. How to describe that? As if I stood on a sunny hillside and released a rainbow I had imprisoned in my hand. As he flowed away, I realized that those traces of him had become tangled with my own essence. My being flowed with his. It didn’t matter. FitzChivalry Farseer ribboned away from me, the thread of myself snagged and now unravelling in the streaming Skill.

Once, I had put memories into a stone dragon. I had gratefully thrust away pain and hopeless love and a dozen other experiences. I had given away that part of my life so that the dragon would have enough essence to come to life. This felt different. Imagine bleeding that feels pleasurable and yet is still just as deadly. I passively witnessed the draining.

Now stop that. Warm feminine amusement in the voice that filled my mind. I was helpless to prevent it as she wound the thread of my being around me as if she were gathering yarn back into a skein. I had forgotten how passionately dramatic humans can be at their silliest. No wonder we enjoyed you so. Such ardent little pets as you were.

Who? I could refine the thought no more than that. Her presence left me limp with happiness.

And this is yours too, I suppose. No wait, this is a different one. Two of you here, at once, and coming all apart! Are you lost, then?

Lost. I repeated the thought to her, unable to frame any concept of my own. I was a dandled infant, adored for my mere presence, and it left me helpless with delight. Her love transfused me with warmth. It was something I had never even been able to imagine before: I was loved enough, and valued enough, and I needed nothing more than what I presently had. This enough was more bountiful than plenty, more rich than a king’s gleaming hoard. Never in my life had I experienced this sensation.

Back you go. Be more careful next time. Most of the others would not even notice that they had attracted you.

Like plucking a burr off herself, I thought with dim dismay. While she held me, I was too giddy with pleasure to oppose her, even though I knew she was about to do the unthinkable. Wait wait wait I managed, but the thought was weightless and she gave me no heed. For less than a blink I was aware of Dutiful close beside me.

Then I was back in the horrid confines of my miserable little body. It ached, it was cold and damaged, old damage, new damage, it had never worked that well in the first place, and worst of all, it did not have enough of anything. It was riddled with wants and great gaping needs. In here, I had never had, I would never have enough love or regard or –

I flung myself out of it again.

All that happened was that my body gave a great twitch and fell over on the sand. I could not get out of it. I was cramped and stifling in the ill-fitting flesh that coated and confined me, and I could not find a way out. The discomfort was acute and alarming, akin to having a limb twisted or being choked. The more I struggled, the more I sank into the thrashing limbs of my flesh, until I was hopelessly embedded in my sweating, shaking self. I subsided, feeling the misery of having a physical self. Cold. Sand in the wet waistband of my leggings, sand at the corner of one eye and up my nose. Thirsty. Hungry. Bruised and cut.

Unloved.

I sat up slowly. The fire was nearly out; I’d been gone for quite a time. I got up stiffly and tossed the last piece of wood onto it. The world fell into place around me. My losses engulfed me as completely as the night that surrounded me. I stood perfectly still, mourning the Fool and Nighteyes, but devastated even beyond those losses by my abandonment by … by whatever she had been. It was not like waking from a dream. Rather, it was the opposite. In her, there had been truth and immediacy and the simplicity of being. Plunged back into this world, I sensed it as a tangling web of distractions and annoyances, illusions and tricks. I was cold and my shoulder hurt and the fire was going out, and all those discomforts plucked at me. Larger loomed the problem of Prince Verity and how we would get back to Buck and what had become of Nighteyes and the Fool. Yet even those things now seemed but diversions danced before my eyes to keep my attention from the immense reality beyond them. All of this existence was composed of trivial pains and searing agonies, and each of them was yet another mask between me and the face of the eternal.

Yet the layers of masks were back in place, and must be recognized. My body shivered. The tide was going out again. I could not see anything beyond the ring of our firelight, but I could hear the waters retreat in the rhythm of the falling waves. The unmistakable smell of low tide, of bared kelp and shellfish was in the air.

The Prince lay on his back staring up at the sky. I looked down at him and thought at first that he was unconscious. In the fickle light of my dying fire, I saw only black cavities where his eyes should be. Then he spoke. ‘I had a dream.’ There was wonder and uncertainty in his voice.

‘How nice.’ It was a neutral sneer. I was incredibly relieved that he was back in his body and could speak. To an equal degree, I hated that I was trapped inside my own body again and had to listen to him.

He seemed immune to my nastiness. The edges of his voice were soft. ‘I’ve never had a dream like that. I could feel … everything. I dreamed my father held me together and told me that I was going to be fine. That was all. But the strangest part was, that was enough.’ Dutiful smiled up at me. It was a luminous smile, wise and young. It made him look like Kettricken.

‘I have to find more firewood,’ I said at last. I turned from the light and the fire and the smiling boy and walked away into the darkness.

I didn’t look for wood. The retreating waves had left the sand wet and packed under my bare feet. A fading slice of moon had risen. I looked at it, then up at the sky, and felt my stomach drop. According to the stars, we were substantially south of the Six Duchies. My previous experience with Skill-pillars was that they could save a few days of travel time. This evidence of their power was not reassuring. If tomorrow’s low tide did not bare the stone, we faced a long journey home, with no resources to aid us. The moon reminded me, too, that our time was dwindling. In eight nights, the new moon would herald Prince Dutiful’s betrothal ceremony. Would the Prince stand at the narcheska’s side? It was hard to make the question seem important.

There are times when not thinking requires all of one’s concentration. I don’t know how far I walked before I stepped on it. It shifted in the wet sand beneath my foot, and for an instant I thought I had stepped on a knife blade lying flat on the sand. In the darkness, I stooped and located it by touch. I picked it up. It was about the length of the blade of a butcher’s knife, and somewhat shaped the same. It was hard and cold, stone or metal, I could not tell which. But it was not a knife. I ran my fingers over it cautiously. There was no sharpened edge. A rib ran up the centre of it, and then the object was finely striated in parallel rows at an angle to the rib on both sides. It culminated in a sort of tube at one end. It was heavy, yet not as heavy as it seemed it should have been. I stood holding it in the darkness, feeling sure I knew what it was, but unable to summon up that knowledge. It was familiar in an eerie way, as if I picked up something that had been mine a long time ago.

The puzzle of the object was a welcome distraction from my own thoughts. I held it in my hand as I continued down the beach. I hadn’t gone a dozen steps before I stepped on another one. I picked it up. By touch I compared the two. They were not quite identical, one being slightly longer. I held them, weighing them in my hands.

When I stepped on the third one, I was almost expecting it. I lifted it from the sand and wiped the wet grit from it. Then I stood still where I was. I had a strange sense of something waiting for me. It hovered, unable to take shape without my volition. I had the strangest sensation of standing on the edge of a cliff. One more step, and I would either plummet to my death, or discover I could fly.

I stepped back from it. I turned around and walked back towards the dying campfire on the beach. As I watched, I saw Dutiful’s silhouette pass before the flames, and the sparks leapt up into the night as he dropped more wood on the fire. Well, at least he could do that much for himself.

It was hard to go back to the circle of that light. I didn’t want to face him, didn’t want his questions or his accusations. I did not want to pick up the reins of my life. But by the time I reached the fire, Dutiful was stretched out beside it, feigning sleep. He wore his own shirt, and mine had been draped on the stakes to warm and dry. I put it on silently. As I tugged up the collar, my fingers encountered Jinna’s charm. Ah. Well that explained his smile and kindly words. I lay down on my side of the fire.

Before I closed my eyes, I examined the objects I had found. They were feathers. Of stone or metal, I still could not say. In the fire’s deceptive light, they were dark grey. I instantly knew where they belonged. I doubted they would ever be there. I put them on the ground beside me and closed my eyes, fleeing into sleep.