Fool's Errand (Tawny Man #1) 49

When I looked up from my work in midafternoon, I saw him come in with chunks of seasoned wood from my woodpile. I leaned back from my desk to watch him as he turned and considered each one, studying them and tracing their grain with his Skill fingers as if he could read their secrets hidden to my eyes. At length he selected one with a knee in it and started in on it. He hummed to himself as he worked, and I left him to it.

Nighteyes woke once during the day. He clumped down from my bed with a sigh and tottered outside. I offered him food when he returned but he turned his nose up at it. He had drunk deeply, all the water he could hold, and he lay himself down with a sigh on the cool floor of the cabin. He slept again, but not as deeply.

And so I passed that day in pleasure, which is to say, in the sort of work I wanted to do rather than the work that I thought I ought to be doing. Chade came often to my mind that day. I wondered, as I seldom had before, at how the old assassin had passed his long hours and days up in his isolated tower before I had come to be his apprentice. Then I sniffed disdainfully at that image of him. Long before I had arrived, Chade had been the royal assassin, bearing the King's Justice in the form of quiet work wherever it neededto go. The sizable library of scrolls in his apartments and his endless experiments with poisons and deadly artifice were proof that he had known how to occupy his days. And he had had the welfare of the Farseer reign to give him a purpose in life.

Once, I too had shared that purpose. I had shrugged free of it to have a life of my own. Odd, that in the process I had somehow wrenched myself free of the very life I had thought to have to myself. To gain the freedom to enjoy my life, I had severed all connections with that old life. I had lost contact with all who had loved me and all had loved.

That wasn't the complete truth, but it suited my mood. An instant later, I realized I was wallowing in selfpity. My last three attempts at a purple ink were drying to brown, though one did have a very nice shade of rose to the brown. I set aside that scrap of paper, after making notes on it as to how I had gotten the color. It would be good ink for botanical illustrations, I thought.

I unfolded my legs from my chair and rose, stretching. The Fool looked up from his work. “Hungry?” I asked him.

He considered a moment. “ could eat. Let me cook. The food you make fills the stomach but does little more than that.”

He set aside the figurine he was working on. He saw me glance at it, and covered it, almost jealously. “When I'm finished,” he promised, and began a purposeful ransacking of my cupboards. While he was tsking over my lack of any interesting spices, I wandered outside. I crossed the stream, which could have led me gently down to the beach. Idly I walked up the hill, past both horse and pony grazing freely. At the crest of the hill I walked more slowly until I reached my bench. I sat down on it. Only a few steps away, the grassy hill gave way to sudden slate cliffs and the rocky beach below them. Seated on my bench, all I could see was the wide vista of ocean spread out before me. Restlessness walked through my bones again. I thought of my dream of the boy and the hunting cat out in the night and smiled to myself. Run away from it all, the cat had urged the boy, and the thought had all my sympathy.

Yet, years ago, that was what I had done, and this was what it had brought me. A life of peace and selfsufficiency, a life that should have satisfied me; yet, here I sat.

A time later, the Fool joined me. Nighteyes too came at his heels, to lie down at my feet with a martyred sigh. “Is it the Skillhunger?” the Fool asked with quiet sympathy.

“No,” I replied, and almost laughed. The hunger he had unknowingly waked in me yesterday was temporarily crippled by the elfbark I had consumed. I might long to Skill, but right now my mind was numbed to that ability.

“I've put dinner to cook slowly over a little fire, to keep from driving us out of the house. We've plenty of time.” He paused, and then asked carefully, “And after you left the Old Blood folk, where did you go?”

I sighed. The wolf was right. Talking to the Fool did help me to think. But perhaps he made me think too much. I looked back through the years and gathered up the threads of my tale.

“Everywhere. When we left there, we had no destination. So we wandered.” I stared out across the water. “For four years, we wandered, all through the Six Duchies. I've seen Tilth in winter, when snow but a few inches deep blows across the wide plains but the cold seems to go down to the earth's very bones. I crossed all of Farrow to reach Rippon, and then walked on to the coast. Sometimes I took work as a man, and bought bread, and sometimes the two of us hunted as wolves and ate our meat dripping.”