Chapter 86: Naught

The old woman stared at him, and then she laughed, one sharp bark.

"You, with that funeral face? Fools are supposed to make people laugh, boy!"

"Fools fall down, and that’s what actually makes people laugh. They get hit, they fall down, and they get up again." He shrugged. "And I happen to be very good at getting hit."

’Possibly the truest thing I’ve ever said out loud!’

The old woman studied him with her small black eyes, and then she turned her head without taking them off him.

"Tibbet!"

A man came out of the nearest wagon. He was thin and grey-haired, with very quick hands and a belt across his chest holding a dozen throwing knives.

"This one says he’s a fool, so show me if he’s lying."

Tibbet looked at Aren and sighed heavily, a man who has been asked to do something stupid many times in his life, and drew a knife.

"Stand by the wagon, lad."

Aren went and stood obediently by the wagon.

The first knife went into the wood a finger from his left ear, and he didn’t blink. The second went a finger from his right, and the third came straight at his chest.

He fell over.

He did it exactly as the clowns did at the summer fair in the lower city when he was small, arms flying and legs going out from under him, landing flat on his back in the frozen mud with a heavy thud. The knife thunked into the wagon precisely where his heart had been a moment before.

Then he sat up, looked at the knife, looked at Tibbet, and fell over again, backward and very slowly, as if he had fainted.

Somebody laughed, a child behind the washing, and then another one joined in.

Tibbet threw the fourth knife low, at his legs, while he was still lying down. Aren rolled sideways much too fast for a fool and had to turn it into a clumsy scramble at the last moment, and the children laughed even harder.

The fifth knife went at his face, and he caught it.

He hadn’t meant to at all, but his hand simply went up on its own. He looked at the knife in his fingers, and so did Tibbet, and so did the old woman, and for a heartbeat nobody was laughing at all.

’That’s the clumsiest catch in history!’

So he stared at the knife in his hand as if he had never seen one before, screamed in a very high voice, threw it up in the air, and ran three times around the wagon with his hands over his head.

The children shrieked with laughter, and two little girls in patched tights came out from behind the washing and chased him, and on the third lap he let them catch him, tripped over his own feet, and went down in a heap with both girls sitting triumphantly on his back.

When he finally got up, panting, in front of the old woman, she wasn’t laughing. She had her head on one side and her eyes narrowed to slits.

"Fools don’t catch knives."

"That one was lucky."

"Mm," she grunted, and she plainly didn’t believe him. She looked at him a while longer, at the wolf pelt and the hollow cheeks and the hands, and whatever she saw there, she kept to herself. "You’ve got papers?"

"No."

"You’ve got a name?"

He opened his mouth to say Ren, but Ren was dead. He opened it to say Aren, but Aren was dead too, with a stone in the paupers’ field that the Ashgraves had paid for.

’Two names and two graves, and I’m running out of people to be.’

"No," he admitted.

"Everybody’s got a name, boy, even the dogs."

"Then I’ll take whatever you give me."

The old woman snorted and looked him over once more from top to bottom, and then glanced at the old fool’s trunk standing open by the wagon steps, where a white mask lay on top of a heap of checkered cloth.

"So you’ve got no name, no papers, no past, no money, and a face as cheerful as a wet week, which makes you nothing at all." She jerked her chin at the trunk. "So that’s what we’ll call you, then: Naught the Fool."

A laugh very nearly escaped him.

Zero had been the name the whole Academy had called him, because the crystal said his combat aptitude was nothing, and here it was again in a field in the Empire, handed to him by an old woman who had no idea what she was saying.

’Zero again! The world has exactly one joke, and it’s me.’

"Naught," he repeated. "All right."

"I’m Mother Grell." The old woman stuck out a hand as thin as a bundle of sticks. "This is Grell’s Company. You eat what we eat and sleep where we sleep, you get one copper in ten of what the hat brings in, and if you steal from me, I’ll feed you to the horse." She paused. "And the company’s papers say we’ve got a fool. The Throne doesn’t take fools for the army, because fools are useless. That’s actually in the law."

So that was it. A fool was a man nobody bothered to count.

’Perfect. I’ve basically been training for this role my whole life.’

He took her hand.

[New identity established: Naught the Fool, of Grell’s Company.]

He went to the trunk and picked up the mask. It was white, plain and smooth, with narrow eye holes and a painted black mouth that curved up at one corner and down at the other, so that it smiled and frowned at the same time. There was a checkered cap in the trunk too, with a long floppy point.

He put them both on, and the cap covered every hair on his head, the white streak and all.

In the little mirror nailed to the side of the wagon, a fool looked back at him, with a white face and a crooked mouth and nobody at all underneath.

The two little girls cheered loudly, delighted.

That afternoon they packed up the tent, hitched the horses, and rolled the four wagons through the gate of Frostgate, past the soldiers and the line of young men and the officer at his table. Mother Grell showed the papers. The guard counted the people in the wagons and checked them against the list, and when he reached the fool, he took one look at the white mask and the checkered cap, snorted, and waved them through.

Just inside the gate, on the wall of the guardhouse, hung a board covered in notices. Most of them were old, but one was new, its paper still white and its nails still bright.

He could feel those nails from the wagon. Iron Sense picked them out without being asked, four small cold points in the wood, and then his eyes found the paper they held, and he kept his head perfectly still.

It was a charcoal drawing of a face, a young face, thin, with dark untidy hair. It was a very good drawing. Whoever had made it had looked at that face closely, in bad light, from very near.

REN, of Aldermere. Water carrier. Wanted alive.

To be delivered to Captain Kaela Voss of Kharn, in person.

No other questions are to be asked.

’Three breaths in the dark, that’s all she had. And she remembered every single line!’

Behind his white mask, Naught the Fool watched the notice slowly go by.

The wagon jolted on through the gate. A young guard leaning on his spear glanced up at the fool sitting on the tailboard, then at the drawing on the wall, then back again, and Aren felt the moment stretch out as thin as a wire.

The guard grinned and waved his spear lazily at the mask. "Smile for us, clown!"

Aren tipped his checkered cap so that the long floppy point flopped over his eyes, and the guard laughed and looked away. Behind them, the white paper with his face on it shrank slowly into the shadow of the gate, and then it was gone.

He breathed out very slowly through the narrow slit of the painted mouth.

’Delivered to Kaela, in person. So she doesn’t want me hanged, at least not yet. She wants to ask me something first, face to face, and I can’t think of a single answer I’d enjoy giving her.’

When he turned around, Tibbet was sitting on the step of the next wagon with a knife in his hand, slowly paring an apple, and watching him.

He hadn’t looked at the notice once. He was looking at the fool’s hands, which rested on the tailboard perfectly relaxed, and which hadn’t trembled at all while the guard was laughing.

Tibbet didn’t say a word. He simply went back to his apple, thoughtfully, and the wagons rolled on north into the snow.