The crone spoke sense to me. “Did we know how to undo death, would we be what we are, feathers in a fool's cap? We are lucky to have this much of life left to us. A pity that your friend did not have the favor of a dragon, or perhaps he too could share this boon.”
“What are you?” I demanded.
“We are sweet preserves of song, stored away so that in the winter of our deaths you can taste again the tang of our summers.” It was the young man, so conscious of his imagery that he ruined it for me.
“Someone else!” I begged when the young man fell silent.
“We were favored of dragons,” a calm voice said. She was one who had not spoken before. Her voice was a deep calm pond, huskier than the voice of most women. I heard it in my mind even as my own throat rusted her words. "I lived by the river of black sand, in a little town called Junket. I went one day to fetch water from the river, and there I met my dragon. She was a young thing, just at the end of her first summer, and I was in the spring of my years. Oh, she was green, a thousand greens, with eyes like deep pots of melted gold. She stood in the river and the waters rushed by her. Then she looked at me, and my heart fell into her whirlpool eyes, never to surface again. I had to sing to her; speaking would not have been enough. So she charmed me and I sang to her, and charmed her in return. I was her minstrel and her bard for all the days of my life. And when my time to end was approaching, she came to me, with the gift that only a dragon may give. It was a sliver of wood from a dragon's womb...do you know whereof I speak? The cradles they spin for the serpents to sleep in until they emerge as dragons? Sometimes, there is one who does not survive that stage, who dies in the sleep between serpent and dragon. Slow is the womb wood to erode, and the dragons forbid that humans touch any of it, save by their leave. But to me, fair Smokewing brought a sliver of it. She bid me wet it well with my own blood, and work the blood into it with my fingers, all the while thinking of a feather.
“I knew what such a favor meant. It was rarely granted, even to minstrels who had served their dragons well. It meant I would take a place in the crown of minstrels, so that my songs and words and my way of thinking would go on, long after I died. The crown is the property of the Ruler of all the River Lands. The Ruler alone declares who may wear the crown and sing with the voices of minstrels long dead. It is a great honor, for only a dragon can select you to become a feather, and only the Ruler can bestow the gift of wearing the crown. Such an honor. I remember how I clasped my feather as I died...for die I did. Just like your friend. A pity that your friend was not favored of dragons, to have been granted such a boon.”
I was hammered by the irony of it. “He should have been. He died to waken a dragon, the last male dragon in the world, so that Icefyre might rise to partner Tintaglia, the last female. So that there might be dragons again in this world.”
The moment of silence told me that I had impressed them. “Now, here is a tale worth the telling! Give us the memories of that, and each of us will make you a song, for surely there are at least a score of songs in such an event!” It was the crone who spoke, my mouth going soft with her words.
“But I don't want a song about him. I want the Fool as he was, alive and whole.”
“Dead is dead,” the bull-voiced man said. But he said it gently. “If you wish to open your memories to us, we will weave you songs. Even with your voice, they will be songs that will live, for true minstrels will hear you sing them, and wish to sing them as they should be sung. Do you want to do that?”
“No. Please, Fitz, no. Leave it be. Let it be over.”
It was a whisper against my senses, scarce a breathing of the words. I shivered to it, wild with hope and fear.
“Fool,” I breathed, praying there would be some response.
Instead, there was a cacophony, the thoughts indistinguishable from one another, as the five feather minstrels all shouted a dozen unanswerable questions at me. At last, Bull-throat roared through them with a reply.
“He's here! With us. In the crown, of all places. He put his blood in the crown!”
But from the Fool, there was no reply. I spoke for him. “The crown was broken. He used his blood to mend it.”
“The crown was broken?” The crone was aghast. “It would have ended all of us! Forever!”
“He cannot stay in the crown! He was not chosen. Besides, the crown belongs to all of us. If he takes it, we shall not be able to speak, save through him.” The young man was outraged at the Fool's rash assumption of his territory.
“He must go,” the bull-voiced man concluded. “We are very sorry, but he must go. It is not right or fitting that he be here.”
“He was not chosen.”
“He was not invited.”
“He is not welcome.”
They gave me no time to express an opinion. The crown was tight to my brow and suddenly it became tighter. I lifted my hands to it, for they seemed to have retreated from my body into the crown, to do whatever they were doing now. For the nonce, my body was my own again. I tried to tear the crown from my head, but I could not get so much as a nail between it and my skin. In a wave of horror, I realized it was melding to my flesh, melting into me like a coterie seeping into a stone dragon. “No!” I roared. I shook my head and clawed at it. It would not budge. Worse, it no longer felt like wood beneath my fingers. It felt like a band of flesh. When I queasily lifted my fingers to investigate the feathers, they flexed softly as cockerel plumes against my fingers. I felt sick.
Trembling, I went back to the funeral pyre and sank down onto it beside the Fool. I sensed no battle in the crown, only a concerted effort by the five minstrels. The Fool did not resist them; he simply did not know how to do what they demanded of him. I no longer had any voice in what they did. Theirs was a quarrel heard across the market, a conflict I was aware of but had no part in. They would force him out of the crown, and then he would be truly gone, forever. I could not stop it.
I took his body in my lap and held it. It had passed through stiffness now to laxness. His hand flopped to one side, and I lifted it by the wrist to fold it back in to his chest. Something in the way it moved so lifelessly woke an ancient memory. I scowled after it. It was not my recall. It was Nighteyes, and he saw it through a wolf's eyes. We were in hunting light and the colors were muted. Yet I had been there. Somehow. And then it came back to me.
The Gray One, Chade, leaning on a shovel, his breath white in the cold air. He stands some distance away, so as not to frighten us. Heart of the Pack is the one who sits on the edge of my grave. His feet dangle in the hole before him, my splintered coffin at his feet. He holds my corpse in his lap. He waves the hand of it at me, beckoning the wolf in closer. His Wit is strong, and Nighteyes cannot bring himself to disobey Heart of the Pack. Heart of the Pack is speaking to us, a steady stream of calm words. “Come back to this. This is yours, Changer. Come back to it.”
Nighteyes lifts a lip and snarls. We know death when we smell it. That body is dead. It is carrion, not fit for an honest meal. Nighteyes conveys the message to Heart of the Pack. “It smells bad. It is spoiled meat, we do not want it. There is better meat by the pond than that.”
“Come closer,” Burrich bids us. For that moment, I perceive him as both Burrich and Heart of the Pack. I slide sideways from the wolf's perception of him into my human memory of that moment. I had long suspected that I had truly died, despite Chade's assurances that his poisons had only feigned my death. My body had been too battered to withstand any amount of poison. In the memory, my wolf's nose is mercilessly truthful. That body was dead. But the wolf's keener Wit-awareness tells me what I had never guessed before. Heart of the Pack does more than hold my flesh. He has prepared it for me; it is ready to begin again, if only he can coax me into it. Nighteyes is a reassuring whisper against my senses.
The Wit. Not the Skill. Burrich did it with the Wit. But he was much stronger in that magic than I was, and far more wise. I stroked the Fool's slackening face, willing his body to align with mine, but I could not find a way into him. He did not have the Wit. Was that the difference? I did not know. But I knew that there was a way, once, a place where we had linked, he and I. Once, he had dragged me from the wolf's body back into my own. I turned my own wrist up to the faltering moonlight and found there the duskiness of his fingerprints. I took his mangled hand in mine. The fingernails had been peeled from three of his slender, delicate fingers. I pushed away my awareness of that agony he had endured. My hand overshadowed his as I carefully set each fingertip of his to each print on my wrist. I groped for the slender Skill-link, spun between us so many years before.
And it was there, faint as gossamer, but there. I gathered my courage, knowing well that I was going into death itself. But go I would. Had not I just said that I would, that I would take his death for him? I could feel that the crown minstrels were forcing him out, expelling him into my own flesh, but I had no time to wait and make explanations for him. I took a deep breath and trickled down the Skill-link, leaving my body to his awakening awareness and entering the ruin of his.
For the briefest moment, my perception was doubled. The Fool was in my flesh, looking out of my eyes. He stared down aghast at his own lax corpse in my arms. He lifted a hand to touch my whiskered chin. “Beloved!” he groaned. “Oh, Beloved, what have you done? What have you done?”
“It's all right,” I assured him quietly. “If I fail, take my life and live it. I willingly take your death.” Then, like a stone falling into muck, I sank into the Fool's lifeless flesh.
I was in a body that was dead, that had been dead for days.
This body had no life left in it, and hence it was no longer a body. Lifeless as a rock, it was separating into its components and going back to the earth. My Skill did not know what to make of such a situation. I pushed aside my impulse to use it, to cry out to Thick and Chade and Dutiful. They would only have forced me back into my own body to save me.
The Wit is the awareness of life all around us. It is a web, a net that connects us to every living creature. Some were vital and complex, large healthy beasts that demanded my recognition. Trees and plants were subtler, but even more essential to the continuation of life than creatures that moved. They were the warp the world is woven upon, and without them we would all snarl and fall. Even so, I had successfully ignored them for most of my life, other than a passing interest in the green shadow life of the oldest trees. But beyond and beneath it all, there flowed an even more nebulous life.
It was death.
Death, the knots in the net that connected us all, was not death at all. In that twisting and tightening noose, life was re-formed, not destroyed. The Fool's body rioted with life. It was a simmering cauldron of life, bubbling its way to rebirth. Every element that had united to make his body a living creature was still there. The question was, could I persuade it to assume its old alignment rather than the simpler forms it was now reducing itself to?
Breathless, voiceless, senseless, I gave myself over to it. It was like a Skill-stream in its own way, for it plucked and tugged at the strings of the Fool's body, carrying away bits of him that it would use elsewhere. It fascinated me, this orderly dispersal, this re-sorting and reordering. It was rather like watching a well-played game of Stones. The bits moved in a pattern. I tried to coax one back to its old position, but it flowed away from me to join its fellows.
It is the old game again. Still, you will not see it. They are not individual hunters, but a pack. You do not set your will against the individuals. There are too many of them. You cannot stop them. So drive them. Use them. What they have made new, put back in place of the old.
It was a wolf's wisdom. As Black Rolf had told me it could be, so it was. Nighteyes was with me, not as he had been, but as we had been. It was his vision I used that night, his simple wolf's awareness that when one ate meat, one ate life as much as flesh. The elegant balance of the predator and the prey applied here as much as it did when we had hunted together. Death feeds life. What the body takes apart, it assembles again.
This was not a Skill-healing. It was a guiding of the changes, a herding of the bits into the alignment I recalled. I doubt that I was as adept as Burrich had been in my restoration. Time and again, the flows I had corrected reversed themselves and had to be persuaded again to build up, not tear down. Nor was the Fool completely human. That night, I confronted completely his strangeness. I thought I had known him. In those hours of rebuilding, I realized and accepted him as he was. That, in itself, was a revelation. I had always believed we were more alike than different. It simply was not true. He was human only in the same way that I was a wolf.
I stayed with my work, past the moment when I felt the blood begin to once more flow within his veins, beyond the slow perception that I could once more draw breath into his lungs. Some of his body had been repaired in the act of restoring it. Two of his ribs had been broken. Those bone ends had found their mates and begun knitting themselves together. Gossamer stitches of flesh closed the worst rents in his skin. But there was little I could do about the places where flesh or bone or nail was simply missing. Delicately, I set in motion his own healing. I dared not urge it much past its own careful reconstruction. He had already burned the reserves of his body. I closed the raw flesh of his back against the agonizing kiss of the air. I coaxed his split tongue into a whole again. Two of his teeth were missing, and there was nothing I could do about that. When I knew I had done all I could for his body, I drew a deeper breath into his lungs. I opened his eyes.
Night was fading into dawn. The weaker stars had already given way to the creeping light of day. A bird sang a dawn call. Another one challenged it. An insect hummed past my ear. I became aware of my body more slowly. Blood moved through me and I tasted air sliding from my lungs. It was good. There was pain, a great deal of pain. But pain is the body's messenger, the warning that something is wrong and must be repaired. Pain says that you are still alive. I heeded that message and reveled in it. For a long time, it seemed enough.