He tipped back in my chair. ‘Were you expecting me to leave tomorrow?’
‘I thought you might.’ I watched his face as I added, ‘I didn’t hope it.’
He accepted me at my word. ‘That’s good, then, for you would have hoped in vain. To bed with you, Fitz. I’ll take the boy’s cot. Tomorrow is soon enough to begin to fill in nearly fifteen years of absence.’
The Fool’s apricot brandy was more potent than the Sandsedge, or perhaps I was simply wearier than usual. I staggered to my room, dragged off my shirt and dropped into my bed. I lay there, the room rocking gently around me, and listened to his light footfalls as he moved about in the main room, extinguishing candles and pulling in the latch string. Perhaps only I could have seen the slight unsteadiness in his movements. Then he sat down in my chair and stretched his legs towards the fire. At his feet, the wolf groaned and shifted in his sleep. I touched minds gently with Nighteyes; he was deeply asleep and welling contentment.
I closed my eyes, but the room spun sickeningly. I opened them a crack and stared at the Fool. He sat very still as he stared into the fire, but the dancing light of the flames lent their motion to his features. The angles of his face were hidden and then revealed as the shadows shifted. The gold of his skin and eyes seemed a trick of the firelight, but I knew they were not.
It was hard to realize he was no longer the impish jester who had both served and protected King Shrewd for all those years. His body had not changed, save in colouring. His graceful, long-fingered hands dangled off the arms of the chair. His hair, once as pale and airy as dandelion fluff, was now bound back from his face and confined to a golden queue. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair. Firelight bronzed his aristocratic profile. His present grand clothes might recall his old winter motley of black and white, but I wagered he would never again wear bells and ribbons and carry a rat-headed sceptre. His lively wit and sharp tongue no longer influenced the course of political events. His life was his own now. I tried to imagine him as a wealthy man, able to travel and live as he pleased. A sudden thought jolted me from my complacency.
‘Fool?’ I called aloud in the darkened rooms.
‘What?’ He did not open his eyes but his ready reply showed he had not yet slipped towards sleep.
‘You are not the Fool any more. What do they call you these days?’
A slow smile curved his lips in profile. ‘What do who call me when?’
He spoke in the baiting tone of the jester he had been. If I tried to sort out that question, he would tumble me in verbal acrobatics until I gave up hoping for an answer. I refused to be drawn into his game. I rephrased my question. ‘I should not call you Fool any more. What do you want me to call you?’
‘Ah, what do I want you to call me now? I see. An entirely different question.’ Mockery made music in his voice.
I drew a breath and made my question as plain as possible. ‘What is your name, your real name?’
‘Ah.’ His manner was suddenly grave. He took a slow breath. ‘My name. As in what my mother called me at my birth?’
‘Yes.’ And then I held my breath. He spoke seldom of his childhood. I suddenly realized the immensity of what I had asked him. It was the old naming magic: if I know how you are truly named, I have power over you. If I tell you my name, I grant you that power. Like all direct questions I had ever asked the Fool, I both dreaded and longed for the answer.
‘And if I tell you, you would call me by that name?’ His inflection told me to weigh my answer.
That gave me pause. His name was his, and not for me to bandy about. But, ‘In private, only. And only if you wished me to,’ I offered solemnly. I considered the words as binding as a vow.
‘Ah.’ He turned to face me. His face lit with delight. ‘Oh, but I would,’ he assured me.
‘Then?’ I asked again. I was suddenly uneasy, certain that somehow he had bested me yet again.
‘The name my mother gave me, I give now to you, to call me by in private.’ He took a breath and turned back to the fire. He closed his eyes again but his grin grew even wider. ‘Beloved. She called me only “Beloved”.’
‘Fool!’ I protested.
He laughed, a deep rich chuckle of pure enjoyment, completely pleased with himself. ‘She did,’ he insisted.
‘Fool, I’m serious.’ The room had begun to revolve slowly around me. If I did not go to sleep soon, I would be sick.
‘And you think I am not?’ He gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Well, if you cannot call me Beloved, then I suppose you should continue to call me Fool. For I am ever the Fool to your Fitz.’
‘Tom Badgerlock.’
‘What?’
‘I am Tom Badgerlock now. It is how I am known.’
He was silent for a time. Then, ‘Not by me,’ he replied decisively. ‘If you insist we must both take different names now, then I shall call you Beloved. And whenever I call you that, you may call me Fool.’ He opened his eyes and rolled his head to look at me. He simpered a lovesick smile, then heaved an exaggerated sigh. ‘Good night, Beloved. We have been apart far too long.’
I capitulated. Conversation was hopeless when he got into these moods. ‘Goodnight, Fool.’ I rolled over in my bed and closed my eyes. If he made any response, I was asleep before he uttered it.
I was born a bastard. The first six years of my life, I spent in the Mountain Kingdom with my mother. I have no clear recollections of that time. At six, my grandfather took me to the fort at Moonseye, and there turned me over to my paternal uncle, Verity Farseer. The revelation of my existence was the personal and political failure that led my father to renounce his claim to the Farseer throne and retire completely from court life. My care was initially given over to Burrich, the Stablemaster at Buckkeep. Later, King Shrewd saw fit to claim my loyalty, and apprentice me to his court assassin. With the death of Shrewd, by the treachery of his youngest son Regal, my loyalty passed to King Verity. Him I followed and served until the time I witnessed him pour his life and essence into a dragon of carved stone. Thus was Verity-as-Dragon animated, and thus were the Six Duchies saved from the depredations of the Red Ship Raiders of the Out Islands, for Verity-as-Dragon led the ancient Elderling dragons as they cleansed the Six Duchies of the invaders. Following that service to my king, injured in both body and spirit, I withdrew from court and society for fifteen years. I believed I would never return.
In those years, I attempted to write a history of the Six Duchies, and an accounting of my own life. In that time, I also obtained and studied various scrolls and writings on a wide variety of topics. The disparity of these pursuits was actually a concerted effort on my part to track down the truth. I strove to find and examine the pieces and forces that had determined why my life had gone as it had. Yet the more I studied and the more I entrusted my thoughts to paper, the more truth eluded me. What life showed me, in my years apart from the world, was that no man ever gets to know the whole of a truth. All I had once believed of all my experiences and myself, time alone illuminated anew. What had seemed clearly lit plunged into shadow, and details I had considered trivial leapt into prominence.
Burrich the Stablemaster, the man who raised me, once warned me ‘When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.’ I have discovered that to be true, from first hand experience. Yet