Free Queen's Own Fool by Jane Yolen Page A

“Yes?”
    â€œMadam, is it true that we leave in the morning for the royal palace?”
    â€œWe leave for Blois, if that is what you mean.”
    Was there more than one royal palace then? “Is that the one where everything is made of gold and silver, even the knives and spoons? Like in the fairy stories my mother told me.”
    â€œI’m afraid there is nowhere as grand as that.” The queen laughed. “Not even in France. But I am sure you will like the château at Blois when we get there.”

10
    LESSONS
    I did not like Blois, which was a great château in the valley of the river Loire. Or at least we were not there long enough for me to learn to like it. Soon after, we moved on to another château named Varteuil. Then to Chateau Chatelherault. And then to somewhere else.
    I should have been happy. Did I not have all that I could possibly want and certainly more than I had ever dreamed of? Clothes as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale. Food at my command. A soft bed. And the companionship of a queen.
    Well—not quite all.
    Perhaps it was foolish of me, but I had thought that once I became part of the court, my wandering days would be at an end. But it seems that the royal court is not a building. It is a great crowd of people who never stay in any place for more than a few months at a time. Where Troupe Brufort had followed a trail of fairs and festivals in search of coins, the royal court moved for its own reasons.
    â€œIt is too cold,” the king would say, and off we would go to the south.
    Then “It is too hot,” he would complain, and off we traveled, like geese in summer, to the north.
    Sometimes we stopped to host the Grand Council of France, where all the great men of the realm gathered. Then we would be gone again to some new place where there was good hunting to be had, or there was a special wine that did not travel well.
    The king and his people were performers traveling from one place to the next, and the next, in the great play that was the court. Oh, we were warmer and better fed than Troupe Brufort. We did not worry about bedding or a roof over our heads. But we were just as often on the road.
    â€œTravel,” I said one time to the queen, “however it is done, is tiring. The brain simply longs for familiar things.”
    â€œOh, my wonderful fool,” she told me, “that is exactly why we take along those things which remind us of home. The cook has his pots. The king has his dogs. And I—well now that my dear royal sister Elisabeth has gone to her king in Spain, I have you! To remind me...”
    â€œThat thou art but a mortal?” I said.
    She clapped her hands happily. “Exactly.”
    Â 
    What a great train the traveling court made. As well as the king and queen and their family, there were other nobles who traveled with them and served as ministers and these, in turn, were served by dozens of clerks and scribes. There were priests, chamberlains, doctors, pages, porters, valets, stable hands, maids, barbers, laundresses, soup makers, musicians, seamstresses, guards—and fools. In fact there were more folk in the traveling court than in the village I had lived in with Maman and Papa.
    One would think that with all of these folk I would have found at least one good friend amongst them. But I was neither a servant nor a noble, only somewhere in-between.
    â€œNeither fish nor fowl,” Maman used to say of such situations. Whenever I found myself moping, I remembered that. And forgot it again each time the queen called me in to play her fool.
    It took me some time, all through winter and into spring, but at last I understood: I would never truly be Marie-in-the-Ashes, for at story’s end she turns into a princess, and that did not happen in real life. However, I would never again be put out in the rain and cold like a traveling player. What I had lost in the exchange were good friends like Pierre.
    At the