Fool’s Quest

The lack of formality shocked me. He turned, not to me, but toward Hap and Chivalry and Nimble. “We sent you word that Bee had been kidnapped. Today we give you worse tidings. She is lost to us.”

“No!” Chivalry’s voice shook as he uttered his low denial. “What happened? How was she taken, and how is it possible you could not track down her kidnappers?”

Hap looked around at us. His trained voice broke as he said, “She was so small. So delicate.”

Shine muffled a sob. Dutiful spoke. “Fitz, do you want to tell them? Or shall I?”

So. A public confession before judgment. It was fitting. Dutiful had not taken his proper place but I knew how things should proceed. I walked to the railing. I placed both hands on it. “It began two days before Winterfest. I wanted to give Bee a special day. She’d . . . things had been difficult in our household.” I hesitated. How much pain did I wish to cause? As little as possible. Chade, Lant, and Shine had tragedy enough. However they had failed me, I had failed them even more.

And so I took it all upon myself. I did not speak of Lant’s shortcomings as a teacher and I glossed over Shine’s greed and childishness. Of all I had done, I spoke true, from my interference in the dog’s death to how I had left my child to the care of others to try to save the Fool. I admitted that I had resisted the idea of having a Skilled one stationed in my home to relay information in my absence, and that I had never seen the need for a house guard.

Dispassionately, I recounted all that had happened in my absence. I did not stop for Shine’s gasping sobs. I spoke of the lives shattered at Withywoods and all my futile efforts to find Bee. I said only that the two Chalcedeans I’d questioned had confirmed all our Withywoods folk had told us. I did not say why they had spoken so freely. I confessed that I had taken elfbark and been unable to follow my daughter into the stone. And to those who had never used a Skill-portal, I explained that Bee was now lost. Not dead: no, nothing so simple as dead. Lost. Gone. Unraveled into the Skill-stream. All efforts to recover her failed.

Then in all ways, I was finished. I swayed. I looked down at the wooden block before me and realized I was kneeling. At some time during my account, my knees had folded and I had crumpled.

“Fitz?” Dutiful said, and there was only concern in his voice. “Fitz? Are you unwell?”

“Of course he’s unwell! We’re all unwell. None of this is right. Worst is that we have to gather here in secret to mourn the loss of a child. Fitz. Put your arm across my shoulders. Come. Stand up.”

It was Kettricken tugging at me, lifting my arm to put it across her shoulders. And then she stood, not effortlessly, for the years weighed more heavily on her than they did on me. I tottered as she escorted me to a chair near the hearth. I sat, feeling confused and older than I’d ever been. I did not understand what was happening until her cowl dropped and I saw that her head was shorn.

The others gathered round us. Dutiful spoke softly. “Oh, Mother, I told you we must be restrained.”

“Restrained?” This from Elliania. She snatched crown and scarf from her head, revealing only a short brush of what had always been her glossy black hair. “Restrained?” She lifted her crown as if she would dash it to the ground. Prosper caught her arm and she let him take it. She sank down to the floor, her royal robes puddling around her. She put her hands over her face and spoke through her fingers. “We have lost a child. A little girl! A Farseer daughter! Gone, just as my little sister was gone for years. Must we have this agony again? The not-knowing? The secrecy of the pain? Gone! And we must be restrained?”

She threw her head back, baring the long column of her throat, and keened as if she were a wolf mourning her cub. Prosper sank to his knees beside her and put his arm around his mother’s shoulders.

Chivalry lifted his voice. “Can we be sure she is gone forever? All know tales of folk who have emerged from the stones years later . . .”

Nettle replied. “She has no training, and she entered the stone as part of a company of untrained folk. She would be like a drop of wine splashing into a rushing river. I will hold no false hopes. We have to let her go.”

I found I was shaking. Kettricken took the chair beside me and put her arm protectively around me. “It’s all my fault,” I confessed to her.

“Oh, Fitz, always you are . . .” She bit back whatever it was she had started to say. More gently she added, “No one blames you.”

“I blame me.”

“Of course you do,” she said, as if I were a child insisting the moon was a cheese.

Elliania had overheard. “No! Blame them! The ones who took her. They all must be hunted down and killed! Killed like pigs screaming before the butcher!”