Fool's Fate (43 page)

    “A wise suggestion from a wise head. I'll wish you good luck and good night, then.” Arkon acceded quickly to Peottre's suggestion.

    Well. That was neatly turned, Chade observed as the men dispersed from the deck. Arkon must have realized he was telling tales that Peottre didn't wish shared. See what else you can discover there, Fitz.

    How did the Fool react to that tale? I demanded of him.

    I really didn't notice. Chade's reply was brusque.

    How did the Fool get here? Why is he here? Why are you keeping him where I can't talk to him? I could no longer suppress the question, nor completely conceal my annoyance that they had not yet shared the answers with me.

    Oh, don't sulk. Chade dismissed my irritation. He's told us little enough. You know how he is. Let it ride until tomorrow, Fitz, when we're all on shore together and you can quiz him as much as you wish. Doubtless he'll be more open with you than he is with us. As to why I've kept him close to us, it's more to keep him away from the Hetgurd warriors than from you. He's already revealed that he will do all he can to persuade us not to slay the dragon. And he's been sufficiently puzzling, charming, and mysterious to intrigue Peottre and Bloodblade, but I think the Narcheska still fears him. She does not meet his eyes.

    The Prince broke in on Chade's thoughts. Initially the Hetgurd men thought he was some kind of a cheat on our part, a secret ally we'd smuggled in. When we pointed out that we had no way of knowing the terms that the Hetgurd would set for us, they admitted that didn't seem likely.

    How did the Narcheska and Peottre react to his claim that he would help the dragon? I demanded of them both.

    Chade's thoughts seemed well considered. They reacted strangely. I expected that Peottre and the Narcheska would resent him, but Peottre seems relieved, almost glad to see him here. As for me, I am grateful he said no more than he did. And I'm asking you to keep any discussions you have with him out of earshot of Peottre or the Narcheska. If they discover how long you have been friends, they may well think that you are opposed to our quest as well.

    There was a warning for me in Chade's thought, a slight testing of my loyalty. I ignored it. I'll wait and talk to him privately, I told Chade.

    Yes. You will. His words fell between confirmation and command.

    The folk on the ship were already dispersing toward their beds. I glanced back at our camp. It looked as if almost everyone had already gone to bed. The fire had burned low. I hadn't even eaten my share of the evening rations. Hot porridge would probably seem a treat before this quest was over, but for now it did not entice me.

    The sea had retreated enough now that I could walk around the entire dragon without getting more than ankle-wet. I knew I'd regret my soggy shoes in the morning, but if there was something to discover about this stone creature, now was my best opportunity. No Skill coterie had carved this being, but the minions of the Pale Woman. I thought I knew why. I had long suspected that Regal and Skillmaster Galen had sold off portions of the Skill library. Had Kebal Rawbread, the war leader of the Outislanders during the Red Ship War, come to possess them? Had he and his ally, the Pale Woman, attempted to create dragons of their own to battle our Six Duchies? I was almost certain it was so.

    I came close to the gleaming wet stone, noticing that neither seaweed nor barnacles clung to it. It was as clean and black as the day it had been shaped. Gingerly, I set a hand to it. It was cold, wet, and hard, and it hummed with Wit under my touch. Just as the drowsing stone dragons had. And yet it was different. I could not decide how until I touched the adjacent block. It too harbored that hidden seething of life. And yet the two were different things. Cautiously, fearing some arcane trap, I ventured toward them with my Skill. There was nothing there. I ran my hand along the wet surface where neither seaweed nor barnacle clung. And then there was suddenly something, a confusion of voices lifted in agitation, and then nothing again.

    I turned my head slowly, and then realized how foolish that was. The Skill-furor I had sensed was not a conversation muffled by distance or a barrier. As gingerly as if I caressed a hot coal, I slid my fingertips over the wet stone before me. Again, I received a confused impression of many voices, all speaking at once, at a great distance from me. I wiped my hand reflexively down the front of my shirt and stepped away. Uneasily, I examined the thought that had come to me.

    This was memory stone. Although quarried on this island, it was unmistakably the same sort of stone that Verity had used to carve his dragon. All of the dragons I had encountered in the Stone Garden in the Mountain Kingdom had originally been carved from this stuff, some by Skill coteries seeking to store permanently their memories and being; others, perhaps, by Elderlings. The dragons I had seen had been shaped as much by the memories and thoughts poured into them as by the tools the carvers had wielded. Those dragons had eventually completely absorbed the people who had created them. I had witnessed Verity's passing into his dragon. It had demanded all of his memories and life force as well as Kettle's to satiate and saturate the stone, waking it to life. The old woman had sacrificed herself as willingly as Verity had. She had been the last of her Skill coterie, a lone woman who had outlived her time and her monarch, but returned nonetheless to serve the Farseer line. Kettle's extended years and Verity's passions had been barely enough to rouse the dragon. I knew that well. Verity had taken a bit of me for his dragon, and later I had impetuously fed other memories into the Girl-on-a-Dragon carving. I had felt the pull of a stone dragon's voracity. It would have been easy to let Girl-on-a-Dragon take all of me; it would have been a release, of a sort.

    Or perhaps an imprisonment. What happened to a stone dragon that did not have enough memories to take life and flight? I had seen what had happened to Girl-on-a-Dragon. She had remained there in the quarry, mired in unformed stone. In her case, I did not think it had been lack of memories, but her creator's lack of willingness to surrender individuality to the whole. The leader of the coterie who had carved her had tried to hold back, and isolate her memories into the figure of the Girl astride the dragon rather than release them into the sculpture as a whole. Or so Kettle had told me, when I asked her why that statue had not taken life and flown away. She had told me the tale to warn me away from Verity's dragon, I think; to help me understand that the dragon would not be content with any less than all of me.

    I wished Kettle stood beside me now, to tell me this dragon's story. But I suspected I knew it. The stone had not been shaped as a whole, but worked in blocks. Nor had the carvers put their own memories into the stone. Instead, I suspected that I stood by a dark memorial to the Red Ship War. What had become of the memories and emotions of the Forged folk? The disjointed clues came together in this disjointed creature. Blocks of memory stone had been ballast in the holds of White Ships. Had the Pale Woman and Kebal Rawbread learned the magic of waking a stone dragon from a purloined and sold Skill scroll? What had stopped them, then, from creating an Out Island dragon to ravage the coast of the Six Duchies? Had they lacked the willingness to sacrifice their own lives to give life to their creation? Had they thought they could create a dragon from the memories they had stolen from the Six Duchies folk?

    Here before me was the evidence of their failure to grasp the fundamental reason why a coterie might journey to Jhaampe and beyond to create a stone dragon. They could steal the memories of Six Duchies folk and imprison them in stone forever. But they could not Forge from those memories the singleness of purpose that was required to breathe life into a dragon. Not even all the coteries that set out for the Mountains succeeded in that goal. Some had taken Mountain women as wives and settled down to end their lives in love. Others who had gone to carve their dragons had failed. It was not an easy task, even for a single-minded Skill coterie. A dragon filled with the memories of divergent folk forced into a single stone, a dragon born of terror and anger and hopelessness, would have been an insane creature if ever they'd managed to wake it.

    Had that been what Kebal Rawbread and the Pale Woman had intended?

    There had been a time when plunging myself into a stone dragon had been very tempting, indeed. I could still recall my hurt that Verity had excluded me from the creation of his. In retrospect, as a man grown, I could understand why. Sometimes, when Nighteyes had still been alive, I had toyed with the idea. What sort of a dragon could we two have made? I had wondered. And now, willing or no, I was part of a coterie again. Yet I had never considered that at some time Dutiful, Thick, Chade, and I might wish to make a dragon of ourselves. We were a coterie born more of chance than intent. I could not imagine us finding the devotion and purpose to carve a dragon, let alone the will to simultaneously end our human lives and memorialize our joining in a dragon.

    I turned and slowly walked away from the shaped stone. I tried not to wonder about the Forged memories imprisoned in it. Was awareness imprisoned in the rock? If not, exactly what was it?

    I reached again for Dutiful and Chade. I think I've found some of the memories and feelings Forged away from Six Duchies folk during the war.

    What? Chade was incredulous.

    When I had explained, a long moment of aghast horror lingered between us. Then Dutiful asked hesitantly, Can we free them?

    For what purpose? Most of the people they belonged to are long dead. Some may have died at my hand, for all I know. Besides, I have no idea whether it can be done, let alone how. The more I thought on it, the uneasier I became.

    Chade's thought was full of calm resignation. For now, we must leave it as it is. Perhaps after we have dealt with this dragon, Peottre will be more willing to share what he knows. Or perhaps we can arrange for a Six Duchies ship to come here, quietly, and take home what is ours. I felt his mental shrug. Whatever it is.

    The cook fire near our tent had burned down to a faded red eye in the night. I poked at it a bit, pushing in the last nub ends of the firewood, and woke a pale flame or two. There was lukewarm tea in my weary kettle and a scraping of porridge in the bottom of the pot. Riddle himself had gone, either to watch duty or to his own blankets. I crawled into the tent's low entry and found my sea chest by touch in the dark. Thick was a shape huddled beneath blankets. I tried not to wake him as I rummaged for my cup. I was startled when he spoke into the darkness. “This is a bad place. I didn't want to be here.”

    Privately, I agreed with him. Aloud I said, “It seems wild and barren to me, but no worse than many a place I've been. None of us really wanted to come here. But we'll make the best of it and do what we must.”

    He coughed, and then said, “This is the worst place I've ever been. And you brought me here.” He coughed again, and I could feel how weary he was of coughing.

    “Are you warm enough?” I asked guiltily. “Do you want one of my blankets?”

    “I'm cold. I'm cold inside and outside, just like this place. The cold is eating me. The cold will eat us all to bones.”

    “I'm going to warm up the tea. Do you want some?”

    “Maybe. If there was honey?”

    “No.” Then, I gave way to temptation. “There might be. Here's my blanket. I'll put the tea on to get warm again while I see if anyone has any honey.”

    “I suppose,” he said dubiously.

    I tucked the blanket around him. It was the closest we had been to one another in days. “I don't like it when you're angry at me, Thick. I didn't want to come here, or to bring you here. It was just a thing we had to do. To help our prince.”

    He made no reply and I sensed no lessening in his coldness toward me, but at least he didn't strike out at me. I knew who might have honey. I left the tent and headed up the hill to where the larger tents for the Narcheska and the Prince had been pitched. Between them, and slightly above them, the Fool's multicolored dwelling billowed softly in the wind. Amid the deepening darkness, it seemed to gleam from within.

    I hesitated outside it. The flap was tied securely shut. Once before, when I was a boy, I had entered the Fool's private chambers, uninvited. I had lived to regret that intrusion, not only because it posed more mysteries than it solved, but also because it had made a small crack in the trust we had shared. Without ever uttering them, the Fool had taught me well the rules that governed retaining his friendship. He answered only the questions he wished to answer about himself, and any prying by me was regarded as an infringement of his privacy. This included efforts by me to find out anything about him other than what he had chosen to tell me himself. And so, I paused there, in the wind sweeping past me from the island's ice pack, and wondered if I wanted to take this chance. Were there not already too many cracks in our much-tested friendship?

    Then I stooped and untied the door flap and slipped inside.

    The tent was made from a fabric I didn't know, some sort of silk perhaps, but so tightly woven that no breath of air stirred inside it. The glow had come from a tiny brazier, set in a small pit dug in the floor of the chamber. The silk walls caught the heat it generated and held it well, while the light seemed multiplied by the sheen of the fabric. Even so, it was not bright inside the tent: rather it was lit warmly and intimately. A thin rug covered the rest of the floor, and a simple sleeping pallet of wool blankets was in one corner. To my wolf's nose, it smelled of the Fool's perfumes. In another corner was a small kit of clothing and a few significant items. I saw that he had brought the featherless Rooster Crown. Somehow it did not surprise me. The feathers from Others Island, the ones I had thought would fit in the crown, were in my sea chest. Some things are too significant to leave unattended.

    He had a meager supply of foodstuffs and a single cooking pot; obviously he had relied on our arrival for his long-term survival. I saw no sort of weapon amongst his things; the only knives were ones suitable for cooking. I wondered what ship he had found that had dropped him off here, and why he had not supplied himself better. Among his victuals I found a small pot of honey. I took it.