Royal Assassin

He helped me to my feet and I tolerated his touch. I found my voice. I floated, the focus of my eyes coming and going. One moment I could feel his hand on my arm, the next it seemed as if I dreamed the room and the men who spoke there. I managed to speak. “I have to know if that was Molly. I have to know if she is dying. Fool, I have to know.”

The Fool sighed heavily. “It is not a thing I can command, my King. You know that. Like your visions, mine rule me, not the reverse. I cannot pluck a thread from the tapestry, but must look where my eyes are pointed. The future, my King, is like a current in a channel. I cannot tell you where one drop of water goes, but I can tell you where the flow is strongest.”

“A woman at Siltbay,” I insisted. Part of me pitied my poor fool, but another part insisted. “I would not have seen her so clearly if she were not important. Try. Who was she?”

“She is significant?”

“Yes. I am sure of it. Oh, yes.”

The Fool sat cross-legged on the floor. He put his long thin fingers to his temples and pressed as if trying to open a door. “I know not. I don’t understand . . . All is a muddle, all is a crossroads. The tracks are trampled, the scents gone awry. . . .” He looked up at me. Somehow I had stood, but he sat on the floor at my feet, looking up at me. His pale eyes goggled in his eggshell face. He swayed from the strain, smiled foolishly. He considered his rat scepter, went nose to nose with it. “Did you know any such Molly, Ratsy? No? I didn’t think you would. Perhaps he should ask someone more in a position to know. The worms, perhaps.” A silly giggling seized him. Useless creature. Silly riddling soothsayer. Well, he could not help what he was. I left him and walked slowly back to my bed.

I sat on the edge of it.

I found I was shaking as if with an ague. A seizure, I told myself. I must calm myself or risk a seizure. Did I want the Fool to see me twitching and gasping? I didn’t care. Nothing mattered, except finding out if that was my Molly, and if so, had she perished? I had to know. I had to know if she had died, and if she had died, how she had died. Never had the knowing of something been so essential to me.

The Fool crouched on the rug like a pale toad. He wet his lips and smiled at me. Pain sometimes can wring such a smile from a man. “It’s a very glad song, the one they sing about Siltbay,” he observed. “A triumphant song. The villagers won, you see. Didn’t win life for themselves, no, but clean death. Well, death anyway. Death, not Forging. At least that’s something. Something to make a song about and hold on to these days. That’s how it is in Six Duchies now. We kill our own so the Raiders can’t, and then we make victory songs about it. Amazing what folk will take comfort in when there’s nothing else to hold on to.”

My vision softened. I knew suddenly that I dreamed. “I’m not even here,” I said faintly. “This is a dream. I dream that I am King Shrewd.”

He held his pale hand up to the firelight, considered the bones limned so plainly in the thin flesh. “If you say so, my liege, it must be so. I, too, then, dream you are King Shrewd. If I pinch you, perhaps, shall I awaken myself?”

I looked down at my hands. They were old and scarred. I closed them, watched veins and tendons bulge beneath the papery surface, felt the sandy resistance of my own swollen knuckles. I’m an old man now, I thought to myself. This is what it really feels like to be old. Not sick, where one might get better. Old. When each day can only be more difficult, each month is another burden to the body. Everything was slipping sideways. I had thought, briefly, that I was fifteen. From somewhere came the scent of scorching flesh and burning hair. No, rich beef stew. No, Jonqui’s healing incense. The mingling scents made me nauseous. I had lost track of who I was, of what was important. I scrabbled at the slippery logic, trying to surmount it. It was hopeless. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“Ah,” said the Fool. “As I told you. You can only understand a thing when you become it.”

“Is this what it means to be King Shrewd, then?” I demanded. It shook me to my core. I had never seen him like this, racked by the pains of age but still relentlessly confronted by the pains of his subjects. “Is this what he must endure, day after day?”

“I fear it is, my liege,” the Fool replied gently. “Come. Let me help you back into your bed. Surely, tomorrow you will feel better.”