In that moment, cold walked up my spine as I realized what I confronted. Chade was not the man he had been. He had aged, and despite his denials, the keen mind fought to shine past the fluttering curtains of his years. Only the structure of his spy-web, built so painstakingly through the years, sustained his power now. Whatever drugs he brewed in his teapot were not quite enough to firm the facade. To realize that was like missing a step on a dark steep stair. I suddenly grasped just how far and how swiftly we all could fall.
I reached across the table to set my hand atop his. I swear, I strove to will strength into him. I gripped his eyes with mine and sought to give him confidence. “Begin the night before he disappeared,” I suggested quietly. “And tell me all that you know.”
“After all these years, I should report to you, and let you draw the conclusions?” I thought I had affronted him, but then his smile dawned. “Ah, Fitz, thank you. Thank you, boy. After this long while, it is so good to have you back at my side. So good to have someone I can trust. The night before Prince Dutiful vanished. Well. Let me see, then.”
For a time, those green eyes looked far afield. I feared for a moment that I had sent his mind wandering, but then he suddenly looked back at me, and his glance was keen. “I’ll go back a bit further than that. We had quarreled that morning, the Prince and I. Well, not quarreled exactly. Dutiful is too mannered to quarrel with an elder. But I had lectured him, and he had sulked, much as you used to. I declare, sometimes it is a wonder to me how much that boy can put me in mind of you.” He huffed out a brief sigh. “Anyway. We had had a little confrontation. He came to me for his morning Skill lesson, but he could not keep his mind on it. There were circles under his eyes, and I knew he had been out late again with that hunting cat of his. And I warned him, sharply, that if he could not regulate himself so as to arrive refreshed and ready for lessons, it could be done for him. The cat could be put out in the stables with the other coursing beasts to assure that my Prince would get a good sleep every night.
“That, of course, ill suited him. He and that cat have been inseparable ever since the beast was given to him. But he did not speak of the cat or his late-night excursions, possibly because he thinks I am less well informed of them than I truly am. Instead he attacked the lessons, and his tutor, as being at fault. He told me that he had no head for the Skill and never would no matter how much sleep he got. I told him not to be ridiculous, that he was a Farseer and the Skill was in his blood. He had the nerve to tell me that I was the one being ridiculous, for I had but to look in the mirror to see a Farseer who had no Skill.”
Chade cleared his throat and sat back in his chair. It took me a moment to realize that he was amused, not annoyed. “He can be an insolent pup,” he growled, but in his complaint I heard a fondness, and a pride in the boy’s spirit. It amused me in a different way. A much milder remark from me at that age would have earned me a good rap on the head. The old man had mellowed. I hoped his tolerance for the boy’s insolence would not ruin him. Princes, I thought, needed more discipline than other boys, not less.
I offered a distraction of my own. “Then you’ve begun teaching him the Skill.” I put no judgment in my voice.
“I’ve begun trying,” Chade growled, and there was concession in his. “I feel like a mole telling an owl about the sun. I’ve read the scrolls, Fitz, and I’ve attempted the meditations and the exercises they suggest. And sometimes I almost feel… something. But I don’t know if it’s what I’m meant to feel or only an old man’s wistful imagining.”
“I told you,” I said, and I kept my voice gentle. “It can’t be learned, nor taught, from a scroll. The meditation can ready you for it, but then someone has to show it to you.”
“That’s why I sent for you,” he replied, too quickly. “Because you are not just the only one who can properly teach the Skill to the Prince. You are also the only one who can use it to find him.”
I sighed. “Chade, the Skill doesn’t work that way. It—”
“Say rather that you were never taught to use the Skill that way. It’s in the scrolls, Fitz. It says that two who have been joined by the Skill can find one another with it, if they need to. All my other efforts to find the Prince have failed. Dogs put on his scent ran well for half the morning, and then raced in circles, whimpering in confusion. My best spies have nothing to tell me, bribes have bought me nothing. The Skill is all that is left, I tell you.”
I thrust aside my piqued curiosity. I did not want to see the scrolls. “Even if the scrolls claim it can be done, you say it happens between two who have been joined by the Skill. The Prince and I have no such—”
“I think you do.”
There is a certain tone of voice Chade has that stops one from speaking. It warns that he knows far more than you think he does, and cautions you against telling him lies. It was extremely effective when I was a small boy. It was a bit of a shock to find it was no less effective now that I was a man. I slowly drew breath into my lungs but before I could ask, he answered me.
“Certain dreams the Prince has recounted to me first woke my suspicions. They started with occasional dreams when he was very small. He dreamed of a wolf bringing down a doe, and a man rushing up to cut her throat. In the dream, he was the man, and yet he could also see the man. That first dream excited him. For a day and a half, he spoke of little else. He told it as if it were something he had done himself.” He paused. “Dutiful was only five at the time. The detail of his dream far exceeded his own experience.” I still said nothing.
“It was years before he had another such dream. Or, perhaps I should say it was years before he spoke to me of one. He dreamed of a man fording a river. The water threatened to sweep him away, but at the last he managed to cross it. He was too wet and too cold to build a fire to warm himself, but he lay down in the shelter of a fallen tree. A wolf came to lie beside him and warm him. And again, the Prince told me this dream as something that he himself had done. ‘I love it,’ he told me. ‘It is almost as if there is another life that belongs to me, one that is far away and free of being a prince. A life that belongs to me alone, where I have a friend who is as close as my own skin.’ It was then that I suspected he had had other such Skill-dreams, but had not shared them with me.”
He waited, and this time I had to break my silence. I took a breath. “If I shared those moments of my life with the Prince, I was unaware of it. But, yes, those are true events.” I halted, suddenly wondering what else he had shared. I recalled Verity’s complaint that I did not guard my thoughts well, and that my dreams and experiences sometimes intruded on his. I thought of my trysts with Starling and prayed I would not blush. It had been a very long time since I had bothered to set Skill-walls round myself. Plainly, I must do so again. Another thought came in the wake of that. Obviously, my Skill-talent had not degraded as much as I believed. A surge of exhilaration came with that thought. It was probably, I told myself viciously, much the same as what a drunk felt on discovering a forgotten bottle beneath the bed.
“And you have shared moments of the Prince’s life?”
Chade pressed me.
“Perhaps. I suspect so. I often have vivid dreams, and to dream of being a boy in Buckkeep is not so foreign from my own experience. But,” I took a breath and forced myself on. “The important thing here is the cat, Chade. How long has he had it? Do you think he is Witted? Is he bonded to the cat?”