Fool's Fate characters

Also known as Tom Badgerlock, Fitz

Appears from the start

The Farseer bastard the Six Duchies believe long dead, living at Buckkeep as the servant Tom Badgerlock, secret Skill master to Prince Dutiful and a member of the coterie Chade has rebuilt. He is bound for the Out Islands on a quest to kill a dragon, carrying a private decision about his oldest friend that he has not told anyone, and a stack of unfinished business: a daughter who does not know him, a woman he gave up, and a name he is not allowed to use.

Also known as Lord Golden

Appears from the start

The White Prophet, living at Buckkeep in the golden-skinned guise of the foreign noble Lord Golden. He and Fitz are barely speaking after the quarrel that ended their old ease, and he is insistent that he must sail to Aslevjal with the expedition, even though he has admitted that every vision he has of that island ends with his own death.

Appears from the start

The old assassin and royal adviser, now also a Skill student and the driving force behind the coterie. He plans the expedition, manages the politics behind it, and is prepared to be ruthless about individual people in the service of the Farseer line, including those he is fond of.

Appears from the start

The heir to the Six Duchies, publicly committed to bringing back the head of the dragon Icefyre as the price of his betrothal to the narcheska. He is growing into his responsibilities faster than he would like, still hiding the Wit that would cost him the throne, and Skill-linked to the servant who guards him.

Appears from the start

Queen of the Six Duchies and regent for her son, holding the kingdom together while its heir sails north on an errand she cannot refuse without losing the Outislander peace. She continues to defend the Witted against her nobles' appetite for hangings.

Appears from the start

The castle drudge whose enormous untrained Skill makes him indispensable to the coterie, taken along on the voyage because the prince's Skill link to home depends on him. He is small, stubborn, fond of sweets and pink sugar cakes, terrified of the sea, and completely unable to keep his misery to himself: what Thick feels, everyone with any Skill feels too.

Appears from the start

The Outislander girl betrothed to Dutiful, who set the dragon's head as her bride price before the whole Six Duchies court. Proud and brittle in equal measure, she is returning to her own islands with the expedition, and her arrogance keeps slipping to show something much closer to desperation underneath.

Appears from the start

Elliania's uncle and protector, an Outislander warrior of her mothershouse. He is grimly cooperative with the Six Duchies, unfailingly watchful of his niece, and carrying a burden he will not name to foreigners.

First appears in chapter 2

The Old Blood Wit-master who came to Buckkeep as the Queen's guest, bonded to a seabird named Risk. Calm, patient and impossible to intimidate, he joins the expedition as the Witted members' teacher and conscience, and he keeps quietly pointing out to Tom Badgerlock the things Tom would rather not look at.

First appears in chapter 2

The runaway boy in Web's charge, a fine archer, Witted, and utterly estranged from the father who tried to beat the magic out of him. He sails with the expedition rather than go home. His father is Burrich, which means Fitz spends the voyage in the company of a boy who is, unknowably to either of them, his own stepson.

First appears in chapter 2

Fitz's daughter, who has never been told he exists and who knows him only as a wolf in her dreams. She is a powerful natural Skill user, and with the coterie sailing beyond easy reach, Chade means to use her as the link that holds the expedition to Buckkeep whether Fitz consents or not.

First appears in chapter 3

The stablemaster who raised Fitz, and the man who has spent the last twenty years as Molly's husband and father to her children, believing Fitz dead. Blunt, upright, hard on his sons about the Wit he regards as a curse, and still the closest thing to a father Fitz ever had.

First appears in chapter 13

A pale, colourless woman out of the Red Ship war, who worked through the raider Kebal Rawbread to break the Six Duchies and who was believed destroyed with him. She set herself against the White Prophet's vision of the world and has never stopped, and she has made the frozen island of Aslevjal her own.

First appears in chapter 14

A dark-skinned man living alone on Aslevjal, weathered by decades of solitude and unsurprised by the arrival of foreigners. He was a White Prophet in his own time, long before the Fool, and he stayed on the island after his work was done.

First appears in chapter 17

The black dragon of Outislander legend, said to be buried in the glacier of Aslevjal. He is not a carving, a corpse or a story: he is an ancient dragon trapped alive in the ice, aware, furious and utterly indifferent to human purposes.

First appears in chapter 24

A great blue-and-silver queen dragon out of the south, the first true dragon to fly the world in generations, hatched from the last serpent cocoons of the Rain Wilds. She has spent years searching for another of her kind, and she does not negotiate with humans so much as instruct them.