Royal Assassin. Robin Hobb

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      ‘She is significant?’

      ‘Yes. I am sure of it. Oh, yes.’

      The Fool sat cross-legged on the floor. He put his long 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 sceptre, 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 onto 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 onto.’

      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 to your bed. Surely, tomorrow you will feel better.’

      ‘No. We both know I will not.’ I did not speak those terrible words. They came from King Shrewd’s lips, and I heard them, and knew that this was the debilitating truth King Shrewd bore every day. I was so terribly tired. Every part of me ached. I had not known that flesh could be so heavy, that the mere bending of a finger could demand a painful effort. I wanted to rest. To sleep again. Was it I, or Shrewd? I should let the Fool put me to bed, let my king have his rest. But the Fool kept holding that one key morsel of information just above my snapping jaws. He juggled away the one mote of knowledge I must possess to be whole.

      ‘Did she die there?’ I demanded.

      He looked at me sadly. He stooped abruptly, picked up his rat sceptre again. A tiny pearl of a tear trickled down Ratsy’s cheek. He focused on it and his eyes went afar again, wandering across a tundra of pain. He spoke in a whisper. ‘A woman in Siltbay. A drop of water in the current of all the women of Siltbay. What might have befallen her? Did she die? Yes. No. Badly burned, but alive. Her arm severed at the shoulder. Cornered and raped while they killed her children, but left alive. Sort of.’ The Fool’s eyes became even emptier. It was as if he read aloud from a roster. His voice had no inflection. ‘Roasted alive with the children when the burning structure fell on them. Took poison as soon as her husband awoke her. Choked to death on smoke. And died of an infection in a sword wound only a few days later. Died of a sword thrust. Strangled on her own blood as she was raped. Cut her own throat after she had killed the children while Raiders were hacking her door down. Survived, and gave birth to a Raider’s child the next summer. Was found wandering days later, badly burned, but recalling nothing. Had her face burned and her hands hacked off, but lived a short …’

      ‘Stop!’ I commanded him. ‘Stop it! I beg you, stop.’

      He paused and drew a breath. His eyes came back to me, focused on me. ‘Stop it?’ he sighed. He put his face into his hands, spoke through muffling fingers. ‘Stop it? So shrieked the women of Siltbay. But it is done already, my liege. We cannot stop what’s already happening. Once it’s come to pass, it’s too late.’ He lifted his face from his hands. He looked very weary.

      ‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Cannot you tell me of the one woman I saw?’ I suddenly could not recall her name, only that she was very important to me.

      He shook his head, and the small silver bells on his cap jingled wearily. ‘The only way to find out would be to go there.’ He looked up at me. ‘If you command it, I shall do so.’

      ‘Summon Verity,’ I told him instead. ‘I have instructions for him.’

      ‘Our soldiers cannot arrive in time to stop this raid,’ he reminded me. ‘Only to help to douse the fires and assist the folk there in picking from the ruins what is left to them.’

      ‘Then so they shall do,’ I said heavily.

      ‘First, let me help you return to your bed, my king. Before you take a chill. And let me bring you food.’

      ‘No, Fool,’ I told him sadly. ‘Shall I eat and be warm, while the bodies of children are cooling in the mud? Fetch me instead my robe and buskins. And then be off to find Verity.’

      The Fool stood his ground boldly. ‘Do you think the discomfort you inflict on yourself will give even one child another breath, my liege? What happened at Siltbay is done. Why must you suffer?’

      ‘Why must I suffer?’ I found a smile for the Fool. ‘Surely that is the same question that every inhabitant of Siltbay asked tonight of the fog. I suffer, my Fool, because they did. Because I am king. But more, because I am a man, and I saw what happened there. Consider it, Fool. What if every man in the Six Duchies said to himself, “Well, the worst that can befall them has already happened. Why should I give up my meal and warm bed to concern myself with it?” Fool, by the blood that is in me, these are my folk. Do I suffer more tonight than any one of them did? What is the pain and trembling of one man compared to what happened at Siltbay? Why should I shelter myself, while my folk are slaughtered like cattle?’

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