He drew breath and sipped at the tea. “Eat first and then tell stories,” I suggested to him.
“Tell me yours while I eat. Something momentous has happened to you. It’s in your bearing and eyes.”
And so I spoke to him, as I could have to no other, divulging all that had befallen me. He smiled but it seemed weighted with sadness, and nodded to himself as if I were but confirming things that he already knew. When I had finished, he tossed his plum pit into the fire and said quietly, “Well. It is nice to know that my last vision and prophecy was a true one.”
“So. I’ll live happily ever after, as the minstrels sing?”
He twisted his mouth at me and shook his head. “You’ll live among people who love you and have expectations of you. That will make your life horribly complicated and they will worry you sick half the time. And the other half, annoy you. And delight you.” He turned away from me and took up his cup and looked into it, like a hedge-witch reading tea leaves. “Fate has given up on you, FitzChivalry Farseer. You’ve won. In the future that you now have found, it’s almost likely that you’ll live to a ripe old age, rather than that fate will try to sweep you from the playing board at every opportunity.”
I tried to lighten his words. “I was getting a bit tired of being hauled back from death’s door and beyond every time I turned around.”
“It’s nasty. I know how nasty now. You’ve shown me that.” He almost had his old smile as he asked me, “Let’s leave it at this and call it even, shall we? One time pays for all?”
I nodded to that. Then, as if he had to say it swiftly before I interrupted, “Prilkop and I have been talking about what should happen next.”
I smiled. “A new plan to save the world? One that doesn’t involve me dying quite so often?”
“One that doesn’t involve you at all,” he said quietly. “You could say that we are going home, after a fashion. Back to the place that shaped us.”
“You said no one there would remember you; that there was little point to going back there.” I was starting to feel alarm.
“Not to the home that birthed me; I am sure I am no longer recalled there. But to the place that prepared both of us to face our destinies. It was a sort of school, you might say. I know I’ve spoken of it to you, and told you too that I ran away from it when they refused to recognize the truth of what I told them. There, I will be well remembered, and Prilkop also. Every White Prophet who has ever passed through there is well remembered.”
“So let them remember you there. It seems to me they did not treat you well. Why go back?”
“To see that it never happens to any child again. To do what has never been done before, to return, and interpret for them the old prophecies in light of what we now know. To expunge from their libraries all that the Pale Woman planted there, or at least to cast it in a different light. To bring back our experiences of the world to them.”
I was silent for a long time. “How will you get there?”
“Prilkop says he can use the pillars. Together, we could travel quite a way south before we needed to find another way to travel. We’ll get there. Eventually.”
“He can use the pillars?” I was stunned. “Why did he remain here, in cold and privation, all those years?” The Fool looked at me as if it were obvious. “I think he can use them, but he dreads them. Even in our language, there are Elderling concepts he has difficulty in explaining to me. The magic that makes the pillars work takes something from you, each time you use it. Not even the Elderlings used them casually. A courier of an important item might use one or even two pillars to travel, but then the task was passed on to another. But that is not the whole of why he stayed. He stayed to protect the dragon. And to await the coming of the White Prophet and the Catalyst, the ones he had seen who could, perhaps, finish his task. That was, after all, the focus of his life.”
“I cannot imagine such devotion.”
“Cannot you? I think I can.”
I heard the scrape of the door and Prilkop entered. He looked startled to see me there, as well he might, but then exclaimed something to the Fool. The Fool translated. “He is amazed to see you return here so soon, and asks what pressing business had led you to brave the pillars again.”
I made a dismissive gesture and spoke to Prilkop. “I wished to bring food for you; see, here is bread and cheese, as you wished, and wine and plums. I had hoped to find you both ready to travel to my home with me. But the Fool still seems weak.”
“Travel to your home with you?” he asked me, and I nodded, smiling.
He turned to the Fool and spoke softly to him at length in their tongue. The Fool replied more briefly. Then he turned and spoke reluctantly to me. “Fitz. My friend. Please. Come and sit with me by the fire. I need to talk to you.”
He got up stiffly, draped a blanket loosely around his shoulders, and moved slowly to a grass cushion by the hearth. He eased himself down onto it and I took one beside him. Prilkop was investigating the food. He broke off a piece of cheese, put it into his mouth and then closed his eyes in sheer pleasure. When he opened them again, he bowed his head in thanks to me. I nodded back, pleased to have pleased him. When I turned back to the Fool, he took a deep breath and spoke.
“Prilkop does not intend to go back to Buckkeep with you. And neither do I.”
I stared at him, running his words through my mind over and over. They made no sense. “But why? His task here is finished, as is yours. Why remain in such a harsh place? It’s cold, and this is summer! Life is hard here, and barren. When winter comes… I cannot even imagine wintering here. There is no reason for you to stay here, none at all, and every reason in the world for you to come back to Buckkeep. Why would you want to stay here? I know you wish to return to your ‘school’ but surely you could come to Buckkeep first. Rest and recover for a time, and then take ship from there.”
He looked down at his long hands held loosely in his lap. “I have discussed this at length with Prilkop. There is so much that neither of us knows about this situation, this living beyond our time as White Prophets. He has experienced it longer than I have. He stayed here because it was the last place he had a vision of himself. He stayed in the hopes that his final view of another Prophet and Catalyst coming to finish his task was true. And it was. His last vision was true.” He looked into the fire and then leaned over to push the end of a piece of driftwood deeper into it. “I had a final vision, too. Of what would be after my death.” I waited.
“I saw you, Fitz. I saw you in the midst of what you are currently becoming. It did not seem to me that you were always happy, but I thought you were more complete than before.”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“It has to do with what I did not see. I was, of course, to be dead. I had seen clearly that my death was a part of your future. No, that sounds cruel, as if my death were a thing you had planned. Rather, say, that my death was a landmark on the journey to where you had gone. You had passed my death and gone on to that life.”
“I did pass your death. But, as you have told me so often, I am a Catalyst. I brought you back.”
“Yes. You did. I had never foreseen such a thing. Neither had Prilkop. And in all the records we studied and memorized when we were in training, there is nothing that either of us can recall that foreshadows such a thing.” He almost smiled. “I should have known that only you could work such a change, a change that may have carried us outside of any future that any White Prophet has ever foreseen.”