Fool's Quest (23 page)

Nettle opened her mouth to object but Riddle spoke quickly. “Fitz is right. Let him go. Fitz, do you want me with you?”

I did. He had Skill-strength to lend and was good with a sword, and I had no idea what I was going into. But I would not again leave a daughter unguarded. “No. But thank you, my friend. Guard what we love here and my mind will be easier for that.”

I had one glimpse of Nettle's grateful face and then the door closed behind us.

“Let's get you on your way,” Chade insisted. From somewhere he had summoned the strength of a much younger man. He hastened down the corridor and up the grand stairs. He took them two at a time and I kept pace with him.

“Chade?” I began and “Not yet,” he replied breathlessly. His stride lengthened. He ran and I followed. He slammed into his room, startling his valet and a servant stoking the hearth fire. He dismissed them both abruptly, and they went with much bowing to me, a performance that made me uncomfortable until Chade shut the door on them. Once we were alone, he threw open his wardrobe. “Your feet are smaller than mine. Can you manage in my boots?”

“I imagine so,” I said, and he pulled out a heavy pair of riding boots. A thick cloak and a woolen shirt followed, billowing as he threw them toward me.

“Change while I talk,” he instructed me, and his voice was fraught with emotion. I was already dragging on the boots.

“I had bits of Skilling from Sildwell before I asked Nettle to help me. All of it was disturbing. He could find no sign of Lady Bee or Lady Shun. ‘They are unknown here,' he said at one point. Or seemed to say, through a fog and a roaring. He described a ‘great fire' and I think he told me that your folk there seemed unconcerned by it. You experienced what it was like, trying to receive his thoughts.”

“When?” I demanded. How dare he hide this from me! “How long ago?”

He stared at me, his anger rising to meet mine. “Moments before I asked Nettle for help. Did you think I would wait?” He handed me a very plain sword in a leather sheath. There was dust on it, and the belt that held it was stiff. I buckled it round me without comment. I drew it out, looked at it, and sheathed it again. Plain but very well made.

“Give me that,” Chade suggested, and I realized I was still wearing the sword crown. I pulled it free and handed it to him. He tossed it on his bed. I dragged the woolen shirt over my head and shoved my arms out the sleeves. As I swept the cloak over my shoulders, I told him, “Tell the Fool why I've gone. He'll understand.”

“Skill to me as soon as you arrive there. Please.”

“I shall.”

I did not care who turned as I passed or who stared after me as I pounded down the great stair, through the halls of Buckkeep Castle, and out into the courtyard where a boy held the reins of a fine roan mare. Her eyes were bright with intelligence, her long legs straight and strong. “Thank you,” I called as I seized her reins and mounted. As I wheeled her toward the gate, the lad shouted something about Lord Derrick's horse, and I saw that a long-legged black was being led toward the steps. I'd taken the wrong horse. But too late. Nothing would turn me back now.

“Go!” I told her, voice and heels, and leaned forward.

The roan mare lifted herself into a gallop and we were through the gate before anyone had a chance to either challenge us or wave us through. She was a spirited creature and seemed to relish the idea of a night gallop. Her Wit shimmered between us, seeking a confirmation from me that we would become the best of friends. But my heart was frozen with fear and I held myself small and still. Her hooves threw up chunks of packed snow from the carriageway, and the wind of our passage squeezed my face in an icy grip. A cart trail turned off toward the Witness Stones. The snowy road was less packed, and her pace slowed despite my efforts to hurry her. I blessed the brief break in the storms that let the moon and starlight reflect from the snowy fields. I pressed her and as the trail became just a rumpling in the deep snow, she lunged and surged through it. Long before we reached the stones, I had made my decision. Regal's apprentices and journeymen had taken horses through Skill-pillars before. True, some had lost their wits doing it, but I was far more seasoned at the Skill than they had been. And my need was far greater.

At the summit of the hill, I pulled her in, let her breathe, and then reined her close to the stones.
Roan. With me.
I pressed my Wit against all her senses, and it shocked me when she welcomed me. She tossed her head and showed me one white-rimmed eye as I slapped the stone with a bared hand and simultaneously wheeled her in. For a long moment she leapt through a starlit sky, and then we plunged out and she landed, stiff-legged and heaving under me, on the top of Gallows Hill. A three-day journey done in an instant. Wind and falling snow had erased almost every trace of my previous passage. The roan tossed her head, eyes and nostrils wide. Her strange exhilaration swept through me. I fought through a wave of vertigo before I found both common sense and my Wit, then wrapped her in reassurance and comfort, praised her, and promised her warmth and oats and fresh water. I walked her down the snowy hill. A small bit of patience now would pay off in the stamina to finish the ride.

Once our path met with a packed trail, I nudged her to a trot, and then as we came to a road, I pushed her up to a gallop. When I felt her begin to labor beneath me, I pulled her in, and again we walked. I had never had a deep faith in either Eda or El, but that night I prayed to Eda that I would find my child hidden but safe. I tormented myself with a thousand theories as to what might have happened. She had been trapped in the walls without food or water. She had been in the stables when they burned. Smoke had overcome her. Shun had done something dreadful to her and then fled after setting the house afire.

But none of my wild theories would explain why my household staff would claim to know nothing of Lady Bee or Lady Shun. I chewed my information a dozen different ways but made a meal from none of it. The night was cold and weariness welled in me. The closer I came to Withywoods, the less inclination I felt to be there. I should have stopped at Oaksbywater for the night. The thought surprised me and I shook my head to clear it from my mind. I pushed the mare back to a gallop, but I felt more heavyhearted than ever when I saw the lights of Withywoods through the trees.

Steam was rising from the roan's withers when I pulled her in before the manor house. Even in the cold night, I could smell the stench of the burnt stables and the animals that had been in it. The loss of the building and the horses was a separate stabbing blow that made real the possibility that I had lost my little daughter as well. But as I swung down from the saddle, shouting for servants and stable boys, my heart lifted that I could see no damage to the house. The fire had not spread. I suddenly felt incredibly weary and woolly-witted.
Bee,
I said to myself, and pushed the haze of sleepiness away.

Chade. I'm here. Stables burned.

My Skill-message went nowhere. It was a terrible sensation, as if for one moment I was smothered and fighting for breath.
Chade! Nettle! Dutiful! Thick!
With each effort, the sense of suffocation increased. The Skill-current was there, I could almost touch it, but something shredded my sending into scattered threads. Exhaustion rose like a tide, stifling my terror. My fear became despair and I abandoned the effort. I shouted again and was relieved to hear my own voice.

A houseman pulled the door open for me and I heard it drag across the threshold. In the light from the lamp he lifted, I saw the damage that had been done. Someone had beaten the doors of my home in. That stung me to full alertness again. “What's happened here?” I demanded breathlessly. “Where's Revel? Where's FitzVigilant? And Bee and Shun?”

The man goggled at me. “Who?” he demanded, and then, “The scribe is long abed, sir. Since his accident, he has been poorly. The whole household is abed, except for me. I can fetch Steward Dixon, but Holder Badgerlock, you look exhausted. Mayn't I build up the fire in your chamber and see you there? And in the morning—”

“How did the stable burn down? Where is my daughter? Where is Lord Chade's messenger Sildwell?”

“Lady Nettle?” the man queried me earnestly, and I gave him up for an idiot. Don't ask questions of idiots: Find the likeliest person to have an answer. “Wake the steward and have him meet me in my private study immediately. Not the estate study, my private study! Have him bring FitzVigilant!”

I strode past the man, snatching the lamp from his hands and shouting over my shoulder, “And find someone to see to that horse!” before I broke into a run. Bee would be there. I knew she would be there. It was the one place she always felt safe, the secret that only she and I shared. I tried to ignore other damage to the house as I raced through corridors and up stairs. I passed a door that had been forced and still hung off its hinges. A tapestry had sustained a slash and hung crookedly, one corner puddled on the floor. My mind could not encompass it. My stables had been burned, someone had attacked Withywoods and marauded through its corridors, my daughter was missing, and the door servant seemed completely at ease with whatever had happened. “Bee!” I shouted as I ran, and I continued to shout her name until I reached the door of the study. Throughout the house, I heard doors opening and querying voices raised. I didn't care who I roused. Why should anyone be sleeping when the daughter of the house was missing?

The doors of my study had been forced, the fine wood splintered. Two of my scroll racks leaned drunkenly against each other, their contents spilled to the floor. My desk had been ransacked, my chair overturned. I cared nothing for that destruction, nor for any stolen secrets. Where was my little girl? I was panting as I strove to align the doors so that I could close them and work the catch to the hidden labyrinth. “Bee,” I told her, my voice cracking with hope. “Papa's home, I'm coming. Oh, Bee, please be there.”

I worked the catch hidden in the door hinge and then hunched over to enter the secret spy-ways that wended behind the paneled corridors of Withywoods. I found her tiny hidey-hole. It was empty and looked untouched, her cushions and pens just as she had left them. The fragrance of one of her mother's candles still hung in the air. “Bee!” I called, still hoping I might hear an answer from her. Hunched over, I followed her chalk marks toward the entry in the pantry. I was horrified to see other markings on the walls, her clear letters indicating passageways that I'd never explored.

I saw a litter of objects on the floor of the passage ahead and smelled urine. When I reached a spill of unused candles and the mouse-gnawed remains of a loaf of bread, I was completely puzzled. I traveled on toward the pantry exit. There were burnt candle stubs discarded on the floor, a wet shawl that was not Bee's moldering in a pile, and then I found the pantry entry door ajar. I shouldered it wider and squeezed out, then shut it firmly behind me. Not even I could see where it had been.

This time of year, there should have been a store of hams and smoked fish and strings of sausages swinging from the storage hooks. There was nothing. Taken as plunder? Sausages? It made no sense. I knew of no one who would attack Withywoods. Adding that the culprits had stolen sausages only made the riddle ridiculous.

I stepped from the pantry into the kitchen. A scullery maid was there, her winter shawl flung around her shoulders over her nightdress. Lark. That was her name, a second cousin to Cook Nutmeg and a recent hire. “Oh! Holder Badgerlock! Where did you come from? We didn't expect you home so soon, sir!”

“Obviously not! Where is my daughter? And where is Lady Shun?”

“Sir, I'm sure I don't know. I thought you had gone to Buckkeep Castle to see Lady Nettle. And I don't know Lady Shun. Still new here, sir.”

“What happened here while I was gone?” I met her question with one of my own.

She pulled her shawl more warmly around her shoulders. “Well, sir, you went to town. Scribe FitzVigilant returned and told us you had decided to travel on to Buckkeep Castle. And then we had the Winterfest. And the fire in the stables. And that fight, though no one saw that. Someone was drunk probably, or several someones. Scribe Lant couldn't even say who stabbed him or why. Some of the other men were knocked about, a black eye here, a tooth gone there. You know how menfolk are. And then we had that messenger, who I think is less than a half-wit, with his parcels for folk no one's heard of. And now, tonight, you popping out of the pantry. And that's all I know, sir. Oh, and the steward, shouting us out of bed and telling us to bring you a tray with hot tea and some food to your study. Is that why you're here in the kitchen, sir? Was there something else you wanted?”

I turned away from her prattling and ran once more through the halls of my home. My heart pounded in my ears and I was thirsty but there was no time to stop to drink. I was trapped in a hideous, twisted nightmare, a dragon-tainted dream in which nothing made sense and I could not wake. Bee's room was empty, the hearth fire burned out to ashes and the stones long cold, her wardrobe dragged open and her little tunics flung about. I looked under her bed, crying her name hopelessly. I felt I could not drag enough air into my lungs. I could not order my thoughts. I suddenly, desperately wanted to just curl up on her bed and sleep. Not think about any of this.

No. Onward.

I found Lady Shun's room in the same sort of chaos it always was. I could not tell if it had been ransacked. Her bed was cold and unslept in, the bedding dragged half onto the floor. One of the hangings had been torn loose. On I went. My chamber had been rummaged through as well. I didn't care. Where was my child? I left the corridors of bedrooms and ignored the few sleepy and frightened servants I passed in the hall as I ran again to the schoolroom and the scribe's quarters adjacent to it. I flung open the door to FitzVigilant's room and felt an unmanning wave of relief when he sat up in his bed. “What is it?” he demanded, face pale and eyes wide. “Oh. Badgerlock! Back so soon?”

“Thank Eda! Lant, where are they, where are Shun and Bee? What happened to the stables?”

The growing consternation on his face made me want to strike him. “The stables burned down on Winterfest eve. I suppose someone was careless with a lamp. Shunanbee? What is that?”

I was gasping for air now. “Lady Shun. My daughter, Lady Bee, my little girl. Where are they? Did they perish in the fire?”

“Holder Badgerlock, calm yourself. I do not know the ladies you speak of. Surely your stepdaughter is Lady Nettle, the Skillmistress at Buckkeep Castle?”

He sat up slowly and painfully, his blankets falling back to reveal heavy bandaging around his chest. It startled me. “What happened to you?” I demanded.

His eyes flew wide and for a moment his pupils became so large I felt I looked into blackness inside his head. Then he rubbed his face with both hands and when he looked at me again, a sickened and awkward smile spread over his face. “So embarrassing to admit this. I drank too much on Winterfest eve. I was found after the fire. Somehow I took a stab wound. Possibly from a hayfork or a tool of some kind during the fire? It seems to have missed anything vital, but given the injuries I was already recovering from, it has made me an invalid again. I must apologize to Lady Nettle that I have been quite unable to function as an instructor for the children since then.”

I staggered to a chair and sat down. The room whirled round me. Lant regarded me with deep concern. I could not stand his stupefied sympathy. I wanted to pound his face to a bloody ruin with my fists. I closed my eyes and reached out to the king's Skill-coterie.

I have been in howling storms in which a shout is reduced to a whisper, moved across the sea's featureless face in a gray fog that does not yield to human eyes. That was what I found. My Skill was quenched, damped like wet firewood that will not catch regardless of the flame put to it. I focused, I strained my Skill to a needle-point, then flung it wide to the sky. Nothing. I was trapped in my body. I could not reach for help. I wondered suddenly how I could be sure I was not in a dream of a dragon's making. Could I be sure I was not trapped inside the Skill-pillar and this all some insane illusion of my own making? What test could I give myself?

“Where is Revel?” I demanded of FitzVigilant. Again he stared at me blankly. “I told Dixon to bring you and Revel, and meet me in my private study. Oh.” Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect him to find me here in Lant's room. I rose. “Get up, Lant. I need you with me.”