Our camp was pitched on a gentle slope of snow. Not far away, a ridge of black rock broke jaggedly through the snow's crust. Above me towered a steep mountain. It was like a cup with a piece broken out of its lip. Here and there, black stone outcropped from the snow crust. Its bowl cupped ice and snow, a frozen cascade that sloped down toward us. We were camped on the final, flattest spread of the spill.
“You're very quiet,” Web observed gently. “Are you in pain?”
“No. Thank you for your concern. I've just been given a great deal to think about.”
“And your Skill Magic has been stolen from you.”
At the glance I gave him, he held up a fending hand. “No one else has deciphered that secret. Thick was the one who accidentally explained it to me. He was quite distressed for you. Annoyed by you too, but worried for you. Last night, he tried to explain to me that it wasn't just your bleak mood and constant talking and fidgeting that alarmed him, but that you were gone from his mind. He told me a story from when he was small. His mother let go of his hand one night on a crowded street during a fair. He was lost for hours, and he could not find her, not with his eyes or his mind. From the way he told his tale, I think she abandoned him, and then thought better of it later that night and came back for him. But he took a long time to explain to me that he knew his mother was there, but she wouldn't let him touch her thoughts. With you, he says, you are just gone. As if you were dead, as his mother is dead now. And yet you walk around and he sees you. You frighten him, now.”
“Like a Forged One I must seem to him.”
Web winced sympathetically. I knew then that he had experienced the chilling presence of Forged Ones, for he said, “No, my friend. I feel you still, with my Wit. You have not lost that magic.”
“And yet what use is it to me, without a partner?” I asked the question bitterly.
He was silent for a moment, then spoke resignedly. “And that is yet another thing I could teach you, if ever you have the time to sit and learn.”
There seemed little I could say to that. So I asked a question. “Why haven't we moved on yet today?”
He gave me a quizzical look, then smiled. “We are here, my friend. This is as close a camping site as we shall find. Peottre says the dragon used to be hazily visible in the ice near here. Prince Dutiful and Chade and the others are following Peottre and the Narcheska up to the dragon. The Hetgurd witnesses have gone with them. Up there.” He pointed.
The glacier's polished and sculpted surface was deceptive. Where it appeared smooth and continuous, there were actually many falls and rises in its surface. Now, as I watched, our people emerged in a long line like a trail of ants higher on the icy hillside. I spotted Peottre in his furs leading them, with the Narcheska at his heels. Everyone was there, following Peottre up the hillside immediately above us. Only Web and I had remained in camp. I commented on that.
“I didn't want you to wake alone. Riddle said you had spoken of ending your own life.” He shook his head sternly. “I believed better of you. And yet, having seen your black mood yesterday, I did not want to take the chance.”
“I would not kill myself. That was a passing madness, the herb's toxin speaking rather than any true thought of mine,” I excused myself. In truth, looking back on the wild words I had uttered the night before, I was ashamed that I had even spoken such a thought aloud. Suicide has always been deemed a coward's act in the Six Duchies.
“And why would you use such an herb, knowing it would affect you so?” he asked severely.
I bit my tongue, wishing that I knew what Chade had said of my debilitation. “I've used it in the past, for great pain or weariness,” I said quietly. “This time, the dose was far stronger than I thought.”
Web sighed in a great breath. “I see,” he said, and no more than that, but his disapproval was strong.
I ate the congealing mass in the kettle. It was Outislander food, stinking of oily fish. They made a soup from sticky dry cubes of cooked fish mashed with oil to bind it. Heated with snow water, it made a greasy chowder. Despite the foul flavor, I felt more myself after I had eaten it. There was still a strange absence all around me. It was more than Thick's music silenced. I had grown accustomed to threads of awareness that extended to Dutiful, Chade, the Fool, and Nettle. I had been torn free of that web of contact.
Web watched me eat, and then clean the kettle. I banked the tiny fire in the clay pot with small hope it would survive. Then, “Shall we join them?” he invited me, and I nodded grimly.
Peottre had marked a trail with bright scraps of red fabric on sticks driven into the snow both to the left and right. Web and I followed the meandering path up the face of the glacier. At first, we spoke little. Then, as we walked, Web began to speak to me, and finally, I listened.
"You asked what the use of the Wit is, when you do not have a companion. I understand that you mourn your wolf still, and that is only fitting. I'd think less of you if you rushed into another bonding simply for the sake of assuaging your own loneliness. That is not the Old Blood way, any more than a widowed man should wed someone simply to provide a mother for his bereaved children and someone to warm his bed. So, you are right to wait. But in the meantime, you should not turn your back on your magic.
“You speak little to the rest of us Witted ones. Those who do not know you share our magic think you avoid us because you despise it, Swift included. Even if you do not wish to let them know you too are Old Blood, I think you should correct that impression. I do not understand, fully, why you keep both your magics a secret. The Queen has said she will no longer allow persecution of the Witted, and I have seen that you fall under her protection in any case. And if you have the Farseer magic, the Skill, as I believe you do, well, that has always been an honorable and well-regarded magic in the Six Duchies. Why cloak that you serve your queen and prince with it?”
I pretended that I was too winded to answer immediately. The climb was steep and steady, but I was not that taxed by it. Finally, I surrendered to his silence. “I'd be giving away too many pieces of who I am. Someone will put them all together, look at me, and say, The Witted Bastard lives. The killer of King Shrewd, the ungrateful bastard who turned on the old man who sheltered him. I do not think our queen's policy of tolerance toward the Witted is ready for that yet.”
“So you will live out all the rest of your years as Tom Badgerlock.”
“It seems likely to me.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice and failed.
“Do you feel that?” Web asked me suddenly.
“I feel it's the wisest thing to do, if not the easiest,” I replied reluctantly.
“No, no. Open your Wit, man. Do you feel something, something more immense than you've ever felt before?”
I halted and stood silent. The Wit is like any other sense. One becomes so accustomed to the sounds of the day or the smells of the cook fires that one ceases to pay full attention to them. Now I stood still, as if listening, but actually unfolding my awareness of the life-net around me. There was Web, warm and hearty and near. Farther up the trail, I sensed the others, a confused string of beings emanating various degrees of fatigue and discomfort. My sensation of those who were Witted was slightly sharper and clearer than for the ordinary folk of the party. I could not feel Web's bird; I suspected she was out over the water, feeding. “Only the ordinary--” I began to say, and then stopped. Had I felt something? A very large, subtle swelling of the Wit? It was as if a door had opened briefly and then closed again. I grew more still, and closed my eyes. No. “Nothing,” I commented, opening them again.
He had been watching my face. “You felt it,” he told me. “And I feel it still. Next time you sense it, hook on to it.”
“Hook on to it?”
He shook his head regretfully. “Never mind. That is one of those things that 'one day' you'll have time to learn from me.”
It was the closest he had come to a rebuke, and I was surprised by how much it stung. I knew I deserved it. I found the strength to be humble and asked, “Do you think you could explain it to me as we walk?”
He turned his head and lifted his eyebrows in gentle mock surprise. “Why, yes, Fitz. I could do that, now that you ask me to. Choose someone in the party ahead of us, someone unWitted, and I'll try to explain to you how it is done. Some Old Bloods theorize that it is how pack hunters settle on one animal in a herd and mark it out as their prey. Perhaps you've seen young wolves or other predators that fail to make that first step in hunting. Instead of selecting a single animal to hunt, they charge the entire herd or flock, and all prey evades them. That is, of course, one of the strengths of a herd. Prey animals cloak their individuality from the hunters, and hide in plain sight of them.”
And so, very belatedly, began my lessons with Web. By the time we had caught up with the others, I had been able to single out Chade and be aware of him, even at the moments when he was not in my line of sight. I had also felt, twice more, that immense heave of presence in my Wit-sense. But unlike Web, I had felt such a sensation before. I kept that piece of knowledge to myself, though it made my heart sink to do so. I knew a dragon when I felt one. I expected the wide shadow of wings to sweep over me, for I knew of no other way to explain how I could sense so large a creature, and then feel no trace of it. But the skies above me remained blue, clear and empty.
When we reached the others, they were standing in the scant shelter of an outcropping of rock. Outislander runes were cut into the surface of it in a wavering line that wandered back beneath the ice level. The Hetgurd witnesses stood near the rock, and their displeasure at being here was writ large on their faces. Yet most of them looked sourly amused, too. I wondered why. One of their men was on his knees, doggedly digging at the ice that had pushed up against the rock. His tool was his belt knife, and he clashed the iron blade against the stubborn ice as if he were stabbing someone. He'd make a dozen strokes and then brush away a negligible amount of chipped ice. It seemed a futile task, but he was intent on it.
Longwick's men had brought their tools up with them. They carried shovels and picks and pry bars, but as yet they had not put any of them to work. They stood at the ready, bored and uninterested as any good soldiers usually are, and waited to be assigned their task. I did not wonder long why they had not yet begun. As we approached, Chade and Dutiful were face-to-face with the Narcheska and Peottre. The other members of the Wit coterie stood idly nearby. Thick had sat down in the snow behind them and was humming aloud to himself, nodding his head in a rhythmic counterpoint.
“Yes, but where?” Chade demanded, and from his tone, I knew it was not the first time he had asked his question.
“Here,” Peottre replied patiently. “Here.” He swept one arm wide, indicating the small plateau we stood on. “As the runes on the rock say, 'Here sleeps the dragon Icefyre.' I have brought you to him, as we agreed we would do, and the Narcheska has accompanied us to witness your task. Now, it is up to you. You are the ones who must unearth him and take his head. Is not that the task the Prince agreed to, within his own mothershouse?”
“Yes, but I didn't think he'd have to chip a whole glacier into shards to do it! I thought there would be some indication of where he was. There's nothing here, just ice and snow and rock. Where do we begin?”
Peottre lifted his shoulders in a heavy shrug. “Anywhere you like, I suppose.” One of the Hetgurd witnesses gave a bitter chuckle at his words. Chade glanced about almost wildly. His brief look acknowledged that I was finally present but he seemed to think I would not be of much use. He tried again with Peottre.
“The last time you were here and could see the dragon, where was he?”
Peottre shook his head slowly. “I've only been here twice before, with my aunt, when I was a boy. She brought me here to teach me the way. But we never saw the dragon, only the writing that marks his place. It has been at least a generation since the dragon was visible through the ice.”
This seemed to spark something in the Owl clanmember, for he suddenly stepped forward from the huddle of Hetgurd witnesses. He smiled slightly when he spoke, nodding to himself. “My grandmother saw him, when she was a girl. I shall tell you what she told me, and perhaps you will gain wisdom from it. She came here with her own mother's mother, to leave a gift for Icefyre and ask for greater fertility amongst our sheep. When they got here, her mother's mother showed her a dark shadow, just visible through the ice when the day's sun was strongest. 'There he is,' she told my grandmother. 'He used to be much easier to see, but every year the ice grows and he sinks farther away. Now he is only a shadow, and there will come a time when people will doubt he ever existed. So look well, and make sure that no descendant of ours shames us by doubting the wisdom of their own people.' ” The bard ceased his telling as abruptly as he had begun it. He stood, his cheeks reddened by the wind that blew his long hair, and nodded to himself, pleased.
“And would you know, then, where we would begin to look for the dragon?”
The Owl laughed. “I do not know. And I would not tell you if I did.”
“I am curious,” the Prince said more gently. “What was the offering made to the dragon, and how did he accept it?”
“Blood,” Owl replied promptly. “They cut a sheep's throat and let it bleed out on the ice. The mothers studied the shape of the puddle it made and where it sank in and where it pooled on the surface. They judged that they had pleased Icefyre with their gift. Then they left the sheep's carcass here for the Black Man, and went home. The next spring, many of our sheep dropped two lambs instead of just one, and none of them were touched by the flux. We had a good year.” Owl glanced sourly around at us. “That is the sort of luck we used to receive for honoring Icefyre. Dishonor and doubt him, and I dread to think of the misfortune that will befall your houses.”