“How deep is it?”
“Not over your head.” I ducked again and came up. Water streamed from my hair and down my back. Had hot water ever felt so good? It was hard to think of anything besides the sensation. “Why didn’t you go to your room?”
“This is my room. Spark and I were here earlier. My things are already in the closet. When the servants asked Perseverance and Spark who you were, they said you were my protector. So they did not separate us.”
“Oh.” I leaned back in the water and scrubbed at my face again. I wondered how unkempt I had appeared to the King and the Queen of the Elderlings. I hadn’t given it a thought earlier. And I realized I cared little what they thought of me. I pushed wet hair from my face, stood up, and shook water from my head. I was suddenly sleepy and the wide bed beckoned. “I’m going to bed. If you go in the pool, don’t drown.”
I walked to the shallow end and waded out. I took a towel from the stack but barely found the will to dry myself before walking toward the bed.
“Sleep well, Fitz,” the Fool said. And he was the Fool again.
“That tea. I can sleep, Fool. I can let go of everything. Stop worrying. Worrying doesn’t solve anything. I know that. In one way I know it but in another it seems wrong. It seems as if I don’t think about all the things that hurt, all the things I’ve done wrong, then I don’t really care. Tormenting myself with Bee’s death won’t bring her back. Why do I have to remember it all the time?” The bed was large and flat. There were no pillows and no coverings. I sat down on it, my towel around my shoulders. The surface was firm and slightly warm. Very slowly, it gave to the weight of my body. I lay back on it. “Molly is dead. Bee is gone. I can’t feel Nighteyes anymore. I should just accept those things and go on. Maybe. Or maybe you’re right. I should go kill all of the Servants. I’ve nothing better to do with what is left of my life. Why not do that?” I closed my eyes. When I spoke, I could hear the slurring of my words. I groped after what I was trying to say. “I’m like you now. I’ve gone beyond the end of my life, to a place where I never expected to be.”
His voice was kind. “Don’t fight it, Fitz. Don’t question it. For one night, let it all go.”
I did. I tumbled into sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Heroes and Thieves
Scrying is a little-respected magic and yet I have found it a small and useful talent to have. Some use a ball of polished crystal. That is well and good, for those who can afford such things. But for a boy born to a hardscrabble patch of dirt scarcely worth the name of farm, a milk pail with some water in the bottom to reflect the blue sky above works well enough. It was my hobby when I was a smallish boy. In a life that consisted largely of chores and boredom, staring into a milk pail and marveling at what I saw was a fascinating pastime. My stepfather thought me daft when he caught me at it. I was astonished to find that neither he nor my mother found anything fascinating in the water, while I watched a boy much like me but younger growing up in a castle.
—My Early Days, Chade Fallstar
I woke. I lay in the darkness. I could not remember that I had dreamed, yet words rang in my ears still. Verity says you gave up hope too easily. That you always did.
Bee’s voice? If that message was the pleasant dream the Elderling tea had promised me, it was a sad misrepresentation of what the tea actually did. I stared up at a ceiling painted a dark gray. Stars had been painstakingly dotted over the entire surface. As I stared at them through slitted eyes, the deep of night became darkest blue. I blinked. I was staring up at the sky. I was warm, cradled in softness. I smelled forest. Someone slept beside me.
I lifted my head and stared. The Fool. Only the Fool. In sleep, with his strange, blinded eyes hidden, I could see the lines of Lord Golden’s face with the coloring of my boyhood friend. But as the ceiling above me continued in its mimicry of dawn, I began to see the fine scaling along his brows. I wondered if it would progress until he looked fully like an Elderling or if the dragon’s blood had finished with him. He wore an Elderling robe of white or pale silver; it was hard to tell in the dawn light. His bared hand clasped his gloved hand to his breast as if to keep watch over it while he slept. His head was bowed over his hands, and he frowned in his sleep. His knees were drawn up to his chest, as if to protect himself from a kick. Men who have been tortured are slow to sleep carelessly. His curled body was too close to how I had found him, dead and frozen in the Pale Woman’s icy halls. I stared at him until I was sure I could see him breathing. Foolish. He was fine.
