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“Fitz is dead.”
The room that you are in is dingy, small, the worst that money can buy, sung and tumbled for by an emaciated jester two days from his last meal. You are still Sacrifice before you are queen, so surely it does not bother you as much as it might some other well-bred lady, reduced to begging on the roadside.
Though you wonder, sometimes, on your third day of fasting, sleeping in the mud, if this particular sacrifice will mean anything. Your brother would be so ashamed. And, Verity, too. Oh, Verity.
One of your hands is over the swell of your stomach, and when the Fool enters your shabby room with a bang that almost spells the end for the splintered and mildewed door the life inside of you gives one kick, strong, the first one that you’ve felt in a month.You gasp and fold over your belly.
The Fool says to you again, “Fitz is dead.”
He had entered so strongly, blown in by a violent wind, but now he stands in the middle of the room like a lost child. He looks at you, a queen huddled on the pallet with your one blanket around your grubby shoulders. For a third time, he says, “Fitz is dead,” and then his face crumples in on itself and he puts his hands over that horrible expression, and stands there and cries.
The words that he says finally make sense to you, on this last repetition. You stand, the blanket falling from you, one hand still on your stomach.
“What?”
Your voice sounds hysterical to your own ears, high and whining. The Fool makes no answer, still but for the wild shaking of his shoulders. You cross the room to him and pry his hands from his face, searching his tear-stained mien for the truth. He cannot meet your eyes.
If your voice is hysterical, his is an open wound.
“I failed,” he says. “Fitz is dead, and so is the world.” His face is threatening to collapse in on itself, and you fear that you won’t be able to unfold it again if it does. Your voice is hard and terrified when you demand, “Tell me what you heard.”
He untangles himself from you and crosses over to the bed as if in a dream. Once there, he slumps like a puppet with his strings cut, his shoulders a clean line leading down to the floor. He is so thin. He draws in a ragged heaving breath, and tells you.
“We must be the last people in any of the Six Duchies to know. I was downstairs in the tavern, juggling. I wanted to find some dinner for you.” He doesn’t smile, but it looks like he thinks that he should.
“One of the men there asked me to sing about the Wit-Bastard’s demise. I almost dropped my apples, but I asked him what he meant with what wits I had left. He looked at me like I was a simpleton, and asked me how it was that I did not know that the Witted Bastard of Buckkeep had died in Regal’s dungeons, after an extended period of torture. The man wasn’t very clear on the point, but he says that he was hung and quartered above water. I don’t think he really knows, in any case.”
Throughout this entire telling, his voice has been so detached, but now it breaks at the very end. You think that he must be crying again. Your feet go out from under you, and you slump to the floor, your heart falling through your feet.
“And then,” he continues, faintly, “I crossed the street to the tavern next door, the nice one that wouldn’t let us in. I asked the minstrel there, who told me the same. And then I went to the center of town, and spent a while harassing every traveller who came through, and they all told me the same. And on the way up here to tell you, I stopped the tavern’s houseboy, all but nine years old, and he told me the same.”
You say, “In the dungeons.”
The Fool says, high and tight, “Yes.”
You had known that they existed, distantly, like some bad dream slumbering beneath you for your entire time at Buckkeep. To think of Fitz there, your one friend in all of your lonely days as a wife and your lonelier days as a hostage, bleeding on some vague and cold stone floor, hollows you out inside.
“What do we do?” You feel cruel for demanding a plan from him now, as curled in on himself as he is, but you must. You are not living only for yourself, even still. You place a shaking hand over your stomach, hoping to feel that life within you move, but he is motionless, like Fitz is, still and cold somewhere. You bring that hand to your mouth and bite down, hard.
The Fool’s voice is desolate, the emptiest thing that you’ve ever heard, but he answers you. “There is still a Farseer heir.” He says it like someone else might pray. “I will see him delivered to safety, and then…” he is so lost that it hurts you, more than you already hurt.
“And I will keep you safe,” you say, to have something to say. It feels like there is a body between you, which there is. “You have done the crown,” your voice is choking you, ”an unimaginable service.” He looks at you, and it is terrible.
“Forgive me,” he intones, “but without him none of this matters.”
You both sit in that terrible space, with the words eating holes through you. What a miserable pilgrimage this is, what miserable companions you make. Where you would usually think, oh, Verity, you now think, oh, Fitz.
Oh, Fitz.
“And he was Witted, truly. The wolf. Oh, I wonder what happened to the wolf.” You had not been afraid of him, but now you are afraid for him, that shaggy gray beast with the lolling tongue.
“The wolf,” the Fool repeats miserably. “Nighteyes,” you say.
Burrich had told you his name, on the night you made your escape. He had said, “This is Nighteyes. He is Fitz’s…” and then, just, “He is Fitz’s.” You had a shawl wrapped around your head, the Fool a dead-eyed mess besides you. “How do you know?” you had demanded of him.
Burrich had looked at you, then, and something had passed between you. A faint current, like the din of a conversation in the next room. He told you, “Believe me, my Queen, I know,” and then glared at the wolf, who snarled vaguely at him, but never at you.
Your son will owe his life to the wolf, one day. You vow to remember the name, to teach him.
“I suppose he too is chopped up and spread out,” says the Fool morosely. To hear him speak so bluntly, after everything that you have known of his playful evasiveness, terrifies you.
He sees your face, thinks better of his current track, and amends, “Let’s not speculate.” The statement is lessened by the tears coursing down his cheeks, but you find that you are likewise weeping.
You think of your brother, then, as you do so often. You think about Sacrifice.
“He truly is dead,” you say, and it has not quite hit you until you do. “I will never see him again.” You had often mused on how like Verity Fitz had looked, if years and toil were sloughed off of his shoulders. In this last year, he had grown ever more similar as the weight of the world settled upon him. The closest thing that you may ever see to either of them ever again is your son, who may never know his father.
You bow forwards over your stomach and just cry. It is so hopeless, now, so painful.
The Fool edges off of the bed and comes over to where you are collapsed on the floor, sinking down with crossed legs beside you. He holds out one hand to you, and you take it.
“The last words I said to him were in anger.” His voice is an admission. “And he never knew a kind word again.”
You realize with a lurch that you cannot remember your own last words to him. Had you thanked him? Had you told him that he was Sacrifice? Somehow, your own not-knowing is worse than the Fool’s miserable surety.
There is a hand on your shoulder now, and then a head. You lean into one another, the only pilgrims on the worst of roads. The Fool whispers to you: “I am so sorry, my Queen. They were right. All of them were right, and now my failure has killed everything and everyone. I must apologize, to you and to your child for the world that he will inherit. It is all my doing, and it never should have been. They were right.”
You bring an arm up his back, around his shoulders, and squeeze. “You were only a fool. What change can you have wrought, to cause this?” His entire body shudders against yours, one great heaving surge. “None, anymore. Not one more change, not on my own.” And then, so quietly that you must strain against your pounding heart to hear it: “And the wheel sinks into the rut, for the pebble is crushed beneath it.”
You fear his vagary as you had just feared his forthrightness.
“You must believe that FitzChivalry was for a reason. Not only his death, but the whole of him. And then you must accept his Sacrifice, and keep moving tomorrow.” He looks at you blearily. You grip both of his shoulders and jostle him slightly. “We have gotten this far. I do not intend for anything given for us to do so to have been given in vain. I will drag you, if I must.”
He blinks once, and then twice.
He asks, “Are you hungry?”
“What?”
He reaches into his pocket and withdraws three tiny withered apples. “I was juggling, downstairs. I said that I had almost dropped them, not that I had dropped them. I am a far better juggler than that.”
You reach for one, as if in a trance. You are so weary, and so sad, and so hungry. The Fool tips a second one into your hand. At your sound of protest, the shadow of a shadow of a smile touches his ravaged face.
“One for you,” he tells you gravely, looking at your stomach, “and one for the unexpected son.”
“Fitz is dead.”
You look up at him, and are surprised distantly to find him looking back. The last time that you had seen him, his eyes were clouded and dull, his body a wasted trunk. He does not look healthy now, but he looks moderately more whole.
The Fool tells you, “We have Bee.” And then: “And Fitz is dead.”
Your heart is an old ticking thing, but it gives a valiant effort at stopping in this moment, so that you don’t have to hear what he will say to you. He crosses to you, from where you have been dozing in your armchair, waiting for news, and kneels before you. He takes your wizened hand with a gloved one of his own.
“They were going to send a runner, but I wouldn’t do that to you. You should hear it from–” his voice breaks, “from someone who was there.”
You ask, before anything else, “Bee is alright?” His face is like a mask. “Bee is alive, yes.” You cannot help but notice that this is not what you had asked, exactly.
“How?” You are not asking about Bee, any longer, which he knows. You have no idea where you are finding this strength.
“He saved Bee,” he says. “He saved Bee and I, which is what he wanted. It is always what he wanted.”
“No,” you say, voice rising, “Fool. How?” You will not be spared this.
His face is verging on the edge of becoming something other-than-a-face, just a collection of angles and scar tissue. He says, very carefully. “He drowned. Or was crushed. Or was burned alive. Kettricken, I have no way of knowing. I could not–” he falters. “I could not find his body.”
A deep lowing sound escapes you then, and you rock forward over your knees to shrink away from it, the idea of Fitz rotting in some faraway land, his children mourning a mystery forever, you mourning a mystery forever. You do not want to mourn him, you want him here. You want to lock him up in Buckkeep, never let him run away again. You want to chain him to the crown and to you and to life.
The Fool, still on a knee in front of you, bends forward until his head is resting on your thigh. His arms lock around your shins. Your hands go to his ragged head.
He tells you, “I am so sorry.” The way he says it encompasses everything that a person might take fault for. He is sorry for himself, and for you, and for Bee and Nettle, and for Fitz, and for his failure. He is sorry for living. You are sorry, too.
He says, “We went to Kelsingra. He healed them… oh, Kettricken, you should have seen him. I had no sight, and yet I saw him, and the miracles he worked there. We will have favorable diplomacy with them until Buckkeep is dust, and they will always speak of him as a hero.”
You stare at his bowed head blankly. To have him report to you, as a Queen and subject, when Fitz is dead, as if you have a care for diplomacy in this darkest hour; you experience a brief and livid flash of rage belonging to a much younger woman.
It dies immediately when the Fool continues, “They will all know that he was good. That he was a good man. They will tell their children of the good works of Prince FitzChivalry.” You feel his tears beginning to soak through the fabric of your dress. You lift one hand from his head to touch your own cheek, and discover that you must have been crying also for some time.
He says, brokenly, “I wanted him to live.” You find that you are rocking back and forth minutely, like you had Dutiful as a boy, when he grew tearful and afraid. “I know,” you soothe him, “I know that you did.” You cannot see his face, and you are glad. You do not think that you could take it, if you could.
He shakes his head and sobs into your skirt. “Bee keeps asking me why.”
“Why Fitz is dead?” You ask it so gently, but saying it out loud makes it real. You might be ill.
The Fool wails, “Why I’m alive!”
This is so horrible that you have to take a deep breath, and then another, to keep from collapsing in on yourself. “She is young, Fool. She is grieving.”
“She is right, Kettricken. Everything that has ever been done to him has been my fault. And now he’s dead, and will never see justice, and still all that I can think about is how much I want him all for myself. I want to be a parent to Bee, but I am selfish and weak and I want Fitz alive more. But he is dead, and so neither of us may have him, and she still will not have me in her life.”
You think of the night that Fitz brought the Fool back to Buckkeep, when you had cleaned his broken body together. You can see in your mind, so vividly, the single-minded focus with which Fitz tended to him, the desperation in his voice, his shirtfront soaked in blood.
“He loved you, too. He wanted you to live, too. Bee has lost a father. You have lost…” you don’t know how to finish the sentence tactfully, so he does it for you. “Everything,” he says. “I have lost everything.” There is devastation creeping into his words, and it threatens to infect you as well.
You pull his head up to face you. “No,” you say forcefully. “You still have Bee. We will have to do the best by her that we can, for Fitz.”
“For Fitz,” he says, as if in a dream. “Yes, for Fitz.”
You tell him, “Sleep here tonight. I don’t want you to be alone with this grief.” He looks at you, tearstained and skeptical. You say, after a moment, “I do not want to be alone with this. Please, stay with me.” He nods.
It feels surreal, to stand. You think, absurdly, that the world should be lower, more close to the ground, with Fitz gone. It had felt like he assumed the weight of the ceiling every time he entered a room, and now the buttresses should sag and the turrets of the castle should slump without his strong shoulders to bolster them.
You are old, but you are stronger than the Fool right now, so you help him to his feet. You both stumble over to the bed, a two-headed and shambling creature. You help him under the covers, and then crawl in yourself. The fabric is richer than anything you had when you made your journey to the Mountains, what must have been five hundred years ago, but you remember how to keep warm in a blizzard.
You are both still crying, and you don’t think that you will be able to stop until you’re asleep. You close your eyes and see Fitz, not frowning as he so often was, but smiling. You see him as he was when you first met him, when your brother was still alive, when your father was still alive, when his nose was straight. You think about the night that Dutiful was made.
The Fool has his face turned towards you, but down so you can only see the faintest tears on the tops of his scarred cheeks. He whispers his confession:
“I am afraid that I won’t dream of him.”
You huddle closer to him, and whisper back:
“He will come to you. Verity still does for me, every night.”
When Dutiful was young, and had horrible night-terrors of wolves in the darkness, you bounced him on your lap and told him to count sheep until he dreamed a better dream. You lay awake for hours, tonight, and count Sacrifices.
On the long ride back home, Bee says, “My father is dead.”
You are still smiling. “No,” you say. She shakes her head at you in bewilderment. You reach across the gap between your horses and squeeze her hand.
“Now, I hope, he is finally living.”