Fool's Assassin - Страница 77

There was a roaring in my ears and darkness at the edges of my vision.

“Papa?” Bee tugged at my sleeve, and I realized she had been worrying it for some minutes. I was on my knees by the Fool. I could not say how long I had been transfixed there.

“It will be all right, Bee,” I told her, certain it would be nothing of the kind. “Run along back to the house. I’ll take care of this.”

Some other man took charge of my body. I set my fingers to his throat under the angle of his jaw. I waited and when I was certain there was no pulse, I felt one. He wasn’t dead, not quite. His flesh, never warm to the touch, was cold as meat. I bunched the butterfly cloak around him and lifted him, heedless of his wounds. He’d carried them for some time. Delaying to be careful of them now would not save him, but keeping him longer in the cold might finish him. He did not make a sound. He was very light in my arms, but then, he had never weighed much.

Bee had not obeyed me and I found I didn’t care. She trotted at my side, crackling questions like a sap log in the fire, very much my child again. I ignored them. Her peculiar fit seemed to have passed. It still concerned me, but not as much as the unconscious man in my arms. I would tend to my crises one at a time. Calmly. Dispassionately.

Abruptly, I wondered what I was feeling. The answer came to me quite clearly. Nothing. Nothing at all. He was going to die and I was determined to stop feeling anything about it before it happened. I’d had enough pain with Molly’s death. I wasn’t going to feel any more. He had been gone from my life for years. If he’d never come back, I wouldn’t have experienced any new sense of loss. No. There was no sense in feeling anything about regaining him when it was so obvious I was about to lose him again. Wherever he had come from, he had journeyed a long way to bring agony to my door.

I wasn’t having it.

I found that somehow I had retraced the whole length of my wild garden chase of Bee. She waited for me by the door to Patience’s garden room. I didn’t look at her. “Open the door,” I said, and she did, and I carried him inside. My mind halted for an instant, fighting to decide what to do, but my body and my daughter did not. She ran ahead of me, opening doors, and I followed her without thinking.

“Put him there. On that table,” she said, and I realized she had led me to the small workroom where Molly had done her hive-work. It was tidy, as she always left it, but still it smelled of her and her work, the fragrant honey, the wax, even the musky scent of dead bees from when she had cleaned out a wooden hive. It was actually a good choice, for there were cloths, washed and dried and folded, and buckets and …

He made a small gasping sound as I lowered him to the table, and I caught his meaning. As gently as I could, I turned him, putting him on his belly. He still gave a whimper of pain, but I knew the injuries to his back would be the worst ones.

Bee had watched in silence. Now she picked up two small buckets meant for honey. “Hot water or cold?” she asked me gravely.

“Some of each,” I told her.

She paused at the door. “Honey is good for infections,” she told me gravely. “The butterfly man will feel more at home here, for bees are not, perhaps, so different from butterflies.”

She left and I heard her small feet pattering down the hall. I wondered what Riddle thought of my sudden abandonment of him, and what he would say to Nettle and Chade. It was so rude of me. I unfastened the glorious cloak and set it aside. Strange garment; it weighed scarcely more than spider silk. It reminded me of the amazing tent that the Fool had brought with him to the Out Islands. I thrust the memory down. I hoped Shun was not feeling neglected. Would her temporary chambers please her? I thought about that carefully, and what excuses I could make for any delay, as my hands cut away his bloody tunic. I peeled his garment away from his back as if I were skinning a deer. The blood-soaked fabric was stiff as a frozen hide and clung to the wounds. I gritted my teeth and tried to be gentle as I tugged it free. Two of the injuries broke open afresh, leaking watery blood. He lay very still, and only when I had stripped his clothes away did I pause to think how very gaunt he was. I could count the knobs of his spine below the nape of his neck, and his ribs pushed tight against the skin of his back.

The wounds had come from some sort of missiles, I guessed. Not arrows, but something smaller that had penetrated deeply. Darts? He’d managed to pull them out, I judged. At least, nothing projected from any of the crusted, swollen wounds.

“Water.” She spoke in a strange accent, her voice so different from my Fool’s voice that I knew instantaneously that I had been completely mistaken. The breath caught in my throat. Disappointment drenched me, even as buoyant joy that this dying person was not my old friend welled. What a dizzying trick my mind had played on me, taking me back to my adolescence and convincing me this was indeed the Fool! Yet she appeared almost identical to my recollection of him as he had been in those days. Relief nearly unmanned me more than my previous panic. I held to the edge of the table as my knees bent. Oh, how the years had changed me. Where was my iron resolve, my forged nerves? Would I faint? I would not. Yet I let my knees touch the floor and lowered my head, pretending I stooped to look into her face.

She was not the Fool. Only her coloring was the same. She had no scent, just as the Fool had lacked, and to my Wit she was not there at all. But her nose was more pointed, her chin more rounded than the Fool’s had ever been. However had I looked at her and thought she was him?

“The water is coming,” I said hoarsely. “I’ll let you drink first. Then we need to clean up these wounds.”

“Are you a healer?”

“No. I’m not. But years ago I had a friend like you.” I halted. The Fool had always refused to go to healers. He’d resisted anyone touching his body for such a purpose. I realized that might not be true for every White. “I’ll send for a healer, right away.”

“No.” She spoke quickly. Her voice was breathy with weakness and pain. “They don’t understand. We’re not like your people.” She moved her head in a feeble denial.

“I’ll do what I can for you, then. Clean and bind your wounds, at least.”

She moved her head. I couldn’t tell if she was acceding or denying me permission. She tried to clear her throat but her voice went huskier. “What did you call your friend?”

I stood quietly. My heart went to a very still place inside me. “He was a jester at King Shrewd Farseer’s court. Everyone just called him the Fool.”

“Not everyone.” She gathered her strength. “What you called him?” She spoke in a learned tongue, without accent, only the dropped words betraying her.

I swallowed fear and regret. This was not a time to lie. “Beloved. I called him Beloved.”

Her lips pulled back in what was intended as a smile. Her breath was foul with sickness. “Then, I have not failed. Not yet. Late as I am, I have done as he bid. I bring a message for you. And a warning.”

I heard a voice in the corridor. “Let me carry them. You’re spilling them trying to hurry.”

“I don’t think you should be following me.” Bee’s retort to Riddle was both tart and indignant. He’d followed her to track me. He was still Chade’s man. Probably Nettle’s as well, when it came to spying. Useless to try to avoid what was coming. But I could spare my guest a bit of humiliation. I took off my shirt and spread it lightly over her. She still gasped at the touch and then, “Oh, warm. From your body.” She sounded pathetically grateful.

A moment later Bee opened the door and Riddle came in bearing the little buckets. He looked at me in my woolen undershirt and then at the table. “An injured traveler,” I said. “Would you run down to the village and bring back the healer?” That would get him out of my way until I had time to wash and bind her wounds.

Riddle stepped in for a closer look. “She’s so pale!” he exclaimed. He studied her face. She stayed perfectly still, eyes closed, but I didn’t think she was unconscious, only feigning it. “She reminds me of someone …”

I didn’t let myself smile. I recalled now that he’d never met the Fool when he was so obviously a White. By the time Riddle knew him, he was the aptly named Lord Golden, a tawny man indeed. But this girl was as the Fool had been in his childhood: pale with colorless eyes and fine white hair.

Riddle’s gaze shifted to Bee. “And? You’re talking now?”

Her gaze flashed to me and then shifted back to Riddle. She smiled artlessly up at him. “Papa said I should try not to be so shy around you.”

“How long have you been able to speak so clearly?” he pressed her. She glanced at me again, seeking rescue.

“She’s lost a lot of blood,” I said, to hurry him away. It worked. He set the little buckets on the table and turned for the door.

“Bring Granny Wirk,” I said to his back. “She lives at the crossroads just on the other side of the Withy.” And she was older than most of the trees in the area and slow to move. A good healer, but it would take him time to return with her. And I hoped to be finished with my own ministrations by then.

Then the door was closing behind him, and I looked at Bee conspiratorially. “I know you couldn’t have kept him from following you,” I told her. “But do you think you can keep Shun occupied? Take her on a tour of the house that doesn’t bring her anywhere near here?”