Fool's Quest by Hobb Robin

table. “I broke,” he admitted. “I broke that night. They hadn’t broken me, not with the pain or the lies or the starvation. But that moment, when you were there and then you were not … that was when I broke, Fitz.”
    I was silent. How had he broken? He had told me that when the Servants tormented him, they wanted him to tell them where his son was. A son he had no knowledge of. That, to me, had been the most horrific part of his tale. A tortured man who is concealing knowledge retains some small portion of control over his life. A tortured man who has no knowledge to barter has nothing. The Fool had had nothing. No tool, no weapon, no knowledge to trade to make his torment cease or lessen. The Fool had been powerless. How could he have told them something he didn’t know? He spoke on.
    â€œAfter a time, a long time, I realized there was no sound from them. No questions. But I was answering them. Telling them what they needed to know. I was screaming your name, over and over. And so they knew.”
    â€œKnew what, Fool?”
    â€œThey knew your name. I betrayed you.”
    His mind was not clear, that was obvious. “Fool, you gave them nothing they did not know. Their hunters were already there, in my home. They’d followed your messenger. That was how the blood got on the carving. How you felt me there with you. They’d already found me.” As I said those words, my mind went back to that long-ago night. The Servants’ hunters had tracked his messenger to my home and killed her there before she could deliver the Fool’s words to me. That had been years ago. But only weeks before, another of his messengers had reached Withywoods and conveyed his warning and his plea to me: Find his son. Hide him from the hunters. That dying messenger had insisted she was being pursued, that the hunters were hot on her trail. Yet I’d seen no sign of them. Or had I not recognized the signs they had left? There had been hoofprints in a pasture, the fence rails taken down. At the time, I’d dismissed it as coincidence, for surely if they’d been tracking the messenger, they would have made some attempt to determine her fate.
    â€œTheir hunters had not found you, ” the Fool insisted. “They’d trailed their prey there, I think. But they were not looking for you. The Servants who tormented me had no way of knowing where their hunters were at that moment. Not until I screamed your name, over and over, did they know how important you were. They had thought you were only my Catalyst. Only someone I had used. And abandoned … For that would be what they expected. A Catalyst to them is a tool, not a true companion. Not a friend. Not someone who shares the prophet’s heart.” We both held a silence for a time.
    â€œFool, there is something I do not understand. You say you have no knowledge of your son. Yet you seem to believe he must exist, on the word of those at Clerres who tormented you. Why would you believe they knew of such a child when you did not?”
    â€œBecause they have a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand predictions that if I succeeded as a White Prophet, then such an heir would follow me. Someone who would wreak even greater changes in this world.”
    I spoke carefully. I didn’t want to upset him. “But there were thousands of prophecies that said you would die. And you did not. So can we be sure these foretellings of a son are real?”
    He sat quietly for at time. “I cannot allow myself to doubt them. If my heir exists, we must find him and protect him. If I dismiss the possibility of his existence, and he does exist and they find him, then his life will be a misery and his death will be a tragedy for the world. So I must believe in him, even if I cannot tell clearly how such a child came to be.” He stared into darkness. “Fitz. There in the market. I seem to recall he was there. That I