The Fool

A jester in King Shrewd's court, the Fool (or Beloved as his mother named him) frequently speaks in riddles, and at times appears to be prescient. Although the Fool frequently teases him, Fitz considers him a close friend. The Fool is extremely pale, almost albino, with white hair and colourless eyes that many people find hard to meet. However, he gradually darkens throughout the books, appearing as golden or "tawny" in Fool's Errand. His actual gender is brought into question throughout the series and never definitively answered. When directly questioned on the matter he said that it was no one's business but his own. However, he admits to have no boundaries on his love for Fitz.

The Fool believes that he is the White Prophet of that age, and Fitz is his Catalyst: The Fool predicts the future and uses Fitz to change it to his vision, which is not always easy on the Catalyst. The Fool tells FitzChivalry that they are to save the world by saving the Six Duchies. If you save part of the world, you save all of it, as that is the only way it can be done, or so he says.

The Fool has traces of Skill on his fingers from an accidental encounter with Verity's Skill-coated arms. First silver, it fades to grey, allowing the Fool to know the history of anything he touches with those fingers, which lends him great abilities with wood carving. He also leaves his fingerprints on Fitz's wrist, creating a faint Skill-link between them, that was also a result of the Fool's visioning the scene in the town square, and seeing herself with the rooster crown, which he/she eventually claims for herself as Amber during the Liveship Trader Trilogy.

Not much is known of the Fool's family life, only that he was born in a small village; his mother had black hair and green eyes; his fathers (he had two, as was the custom in the land where he grew up) were cousins; and he had a sister with golden hair. This last gives him sympathy towards Girl-on-a-Dragon, and he strives to awaken her and set her free.

The Fool describes himself as having many facets, and masquerades as different characters through the Farseer, Liveship Trader, and Tawny Man Trilogies. At turns, he is seen as the beadworker Amber and the foppish Lord Golden.

The Fool cruelly at times embarrasses Fitz, but is also closer to him than any other person. The Fool tells Fitz, if obscurely, about his origin, something no one else knows. The Fool says that he was born on an island very far to the south from the Six Duchies, and is unique, even to his kind.

In the Tawny Man Trilogy, the Fool is tortured to the death by the Pale Woman, who is the false White Prophet, being beaten, and having a large part of the skin of his back, containing the Pale Woman's dragon tattoo, removed. Fitz searches the Pale Woman's stronghold to find the Fool's body and takes him to relative safety via a Skill-pillar. On the other side, in the Stone Garden, he resurrects the Fool by using the Wit to draw the Fool's spirit away from the rooster crown, where it fled to, and re-construct the Fool's body. Fitz then brings the Fool to Prilkop [the Black Man] on Aslevjal, one of the Fool's kind, whose skin is completely black, as one day the Fool's skin will become. Prilkop was the White Prophet of an earlier Age, that ended with the cataclysm in which the Elderlings and Dragons were destroyed. He had waited on Aslevjal for the next White Prophet, that having been his last vision. The Fool and Prilkop decide to return to their homeland to share all they learned as Prophets. It is implied that Fitz and the Fool will be reunited.

In the Fitz and the Fool trilogy, the Fool returns as a dirty blind beggar, and explains that the people he and Prilkop had returned to, the Servants, were corrupt and the ones who had actually sent the Pale Woman to do their bidding on the world. Now that the Pale Woman is dead and the Fool can no longer see the future, the Servants are desperate to find the next White Prophet, someone they identify as the Unexpected Son. Since they believe that the Fool knows where he is, they torture and torment him for years, leaving him only a shadow of who he used to be. Eventually the Fool does escape and returns to the Six Duchies, to Fitz, but in such a bad shape that Fitz does not recognize him and nearly kills him. Slowly he begins to heal and he becomes obsessed with avenging his torture by having all the Servants killed. He and Fitz depart on a mission for vengeance after the Servants kidnap Fitz's daughter, Bee, and seemingly lose her in a Stone-pillar.