“When I was … old enough, I bade them all farewell. I set off to find my place in history, and choose where I would thwart it. This was the place I selected; the time had been destined by the hour of my birth. I came here, and became Shrewd’s. I gathered up whatever threads the fates put into my hands, and I began to twist them and color them as I could, in the hopes of affecting what was woven after me.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand a thing you just said.”
“Ah.” He shook his head, setting his bells to jingling. “I offered to tell you my secret. I didn’t promise to make you understand it.”
“A message is not delivered until it is understood,” I countered. This was a direct quote from Chade.
The Fool teetered on accepting it. “You do understand what I said,” he compromised. “You simply do not accept it. Never before have I spoken so plainly to you. Perhaps that is what confuses you.”
He was serious. I shook my head again. “You make no sense! You went somewhere to discover your place in history? How can that be? History is what is done and behind us.”
He shook his head, slowly this time. “History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.” He smiled enigmatically. “The future is another kind of history.”
“No man can know the future,” I agreed.
His smile widened. “Cannot they?” he asked in a whisper. “Perhaps, Fitz, somewhere, there is written down all that is the future. Not written down by one person, know, but if the hints and visions and premonitions and foreseeings of an entire race were written down, and cross-referenced and related to one another, might not such a people create a loom to hold the weaving of the future?”