We've the world to save, you and I
“Too bad you didn’t manage to kill Regal,” the Fool observed suddenly.
“I know. I tried. As a conspirator and an assassin, I’m a failure.”
He shrugged for me. “You were never really good at it, you know. There was a naïveté to you that none of the ugliness could stain, as if you never truly believed in evil. It was what I liked best about you.” The Fool swayed slightly where he sat, but righted himself. “It was what I missed most, when you were dead.”
I smiled foolishly. “A while back, I thought it was my great beauty.”
For a time, the Fool just looked at me. Then he glanced aside and spoke quietly. “Unfair. Were I myself, I would never have spoken such words aloud. Still. Ah, Fitz.” He looked at me and shook his head fondly. He spoke without mockery, making almost a stranger of himself. “Perhaps half of it is that you were so unaware of it. Not like Regal. Now there’s a pretty man, but he knows it too well. You never see him with his hair tousled or the red of the wind on his cheeks.”
For a moment I felt oddly uncomfortable. Then I said, “Nor with an arrow in his back, more’s the pity,” and we both went off into the foolish laughter that only drunks understand.
…
“Tomorrow,” he told me gravely. “We shall be ourselves again. The Fool and the Bastard. Or the White Prophet and the Catalyst, if you will. We will have to take up those lives, as little as we care for them, and fulfill all fate has decreed for us. But for here, for now, just between us two, and for no other reason save I am me and you are you, I tell you this. I am glad, glad that you are alive. To see you take breath puts the breath back in my lungs. If there must be another my fate is twined around, I am glad it is you.”
He leaned forward then and for an instant pressed his brow to mine. Then he breathed a heavy sigh and drew back from me. “Go to sleep, boy,” he said in a fair imitation of Chade’s voice. “Tomorrow comes early. And we’ve work to do.” He laughed unevenly. “We’ve the world to save, you and I.”
