I blinked my eyes and shifted my gaze. Someone cradled me in his arms. His arm beneath my raw back was a scarlet welt of agony, but I lacked the strength to move away from it. I looked up into my own face. It was different from seeing myself in a mirror. I was older than I thought. He had taken off the crown, but there was a standing welt on my brow where it had scored my flesh with its grip. My eyes were closed and tears from beneath the closed lids slid down my cheeks. I wondered why I wept. How could anyone weep on such a dawn? With great effort, I lifted one hand slowly and touched my own face. My eyes snapped open and I stared at them in wonder. I had not known they were so dark or that they could be so wide. I looked down at myself incredulously. “Fitz?” The inflection was the Fool's but the hoarse voice was mine.
I smiled. “Beloved.”
His arms closed around me almost convulsively. I arched away from that pain but he seemed unaware of it. Sobs shook him. “I don't understand!” he wailed to the sky. “I don't understand.” He looked around, my face wild with his uncertainty and fear. “I have never seen this moment. I am out of my time, beyond where I ended. What has happened? What has become of us?”
I tried to move, but I had so little strength. For a time, I had to ignore his weeping while I assessed myself. There was a lot of damage, but the body was striving to repair. I felt terribly, terribly frail. I drew a breath, and told him quietly, “The skin on my back is new and tender yet.”
He gulped for air. Breath ragged, he protested, “But I died. I was in that body, and she sliced the skin free from my back. I died.” His voice cracked on the words. “I remember it. I died.”
“It was your turn to die,” I agreed. “And my turn to bring you back.”
“But how? Where are we? No, I know where, but when? How can we be here, alive? How can we be like this?”
“Be calm.” I had the Fool's voice. I tried for his lilt of amusement, and almost found it. “All will be well.”
I found my wrist with his hand. The fingertips knew where to fall. For a moment, our gazes held as we mingled in unity. One person. We had always been one person. Nighteyes had voiced it long ago. It was good to be whole again. I used our strength to pull myself up, to press his brow to mine. I did not close his eyes. Our gazes locked. I felt my frightened breath against his mouth. “Take your body back from me,” I bade him quietly. And so we passed, one into the other, but for a space we had been one. The boundaries between us had melted in the mingling. “No limits,” I recalled him saying, and suddenly understood. No boundaries between us. Slowly I drew back from him. I straightened my back and looked down at the Fool in my arms. For an instant, he gazed clear-eyed at me with only wonder in his face. Then the pain of his wracked body demanded his attention. I saw him clench his eyes to it and wince away from my touch. “I'm sorry,” I said softly. I eased him down onto the cloak. The evergreen boughs that had been his funeral pyre were his mattress now. “You did not have the reserves for me to perform a complete healing. Perhaps, in a day or two...”
But he already slept. I lifted a corner of the cloak and draped it over his eyes to shield them from the rising sun. I sniffed the air and it came to me that it would be a good time to hunt.
I took the whole morning for the hunt, and came back with a brace of rabbits and some greens. The Fool still lay as I had left him. I cleaned the rabbits and hung the meat to bleed. I set up his tent in the shade. I found the Elderling robe he had once given to me and laid it out inside the tent. I checked on the Fool. He slept on. I studied him critically. Biting insects had found him. They, and the growing strength of the sun on his skin, convinced me that I should move him.
“Beloved,” I said quietly. He made no response. I spoke to him anyway, knowing that sometimes we are aware of the things we hear when we are sleeping. “I'm going to move you. It may hurt.”
He made no response. I worked my arms under the cloak and lifted him as gently as I could. Still, he cried out wordlessly, squirming in my arms as he tried to escape the pain. His eyes opened as I carried him across the ancient plaza to the tent in the shade of the trees. He looked at me and through me, not knowing me, not truly awake. “Please,” he begged me brokenly. “Please stop. Don't hurt me any more. Please.”
“You're safe now,” I comforted him. “It's over. It's all done.”
“Please!” he cried out again, loudly.
I had to drop to one knee to get him inside the tent. He shrieked as the fabric brushed over his raw back in passing. I set him down as gently as I could. “You'll be out of the sun and away from the insects here,” I told him. I don't think he heard me.
“Please. No more. Whatever you want, anything. Just stop. Stop.”
“It has stopped,” I told him. “You're safe now.”
“Please.” His eyes fluttered closed again. He was still. He had never truly wakened.
I went out of the tent. I had to be away from him. I was sick at heart for him, and wretched with my own sudden memories. I had known torture. Regal's methods had been crude but effective. But I had had a small shield that the Fool had lacked. I had known that as long as I held out against him, as long as I could refuse to give him proof that I was Witted, he could not simply kill me. So, I had held firm against the beatings and deprivations; I had not given Regal what he wanted. Giving him that would have allowed him to kill me, without compunction, with the sanction of the Dukes of the Six Duchies. And in the end, when I knew that I could not hold out any longer, I had snatched my death from him, taking poison rather than allowing him to break me.
But for the Fool, there had been nothing he could hold back. He had nothing that the Pale Woman wanted, except his pain. What had she made him beg for, what had she made him promise, only to laugh at his capitulation and begin again on his tormented flesh? I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know, and it shamed me that I fled his pain. By refusing to acknowledge what he had suffered, could I pretend it had not happened?
Little tasks are how I have always hidden from my thoughts. I refilled my water skin with clean cold water from the creek. I stole fuel from the former funeral pyre and built a small cook fire from it. When it was burning well, I set one rabbit to roast on a skewer and the other to bubbling in a pot. I gathered up my strewn winter garments, beat some of the dirt from them, and hung them on bushes to air. In the course of my tasks I found the Rooster Crown where the Fool had apparently flung it in a pique. I brought it back and set it just inside the flap of the tent. I went to the stream and scrubbed myself clean with horsetails and then bound my dripping hair back in a warrior's tail. I did not feel like a warrior. I wondered if I would have felt better if I'd killed her. I thought of going back and killing the Pale Woman and bringing her head to the Fool.
I did not think it would help, or quite likely I would have done it.
I set the rabbit soup aside to cool, and ate the roasted one. Nothing quite compares to fresh meat when one has gone a long time without it. It was bloody near the bone and succulent. I ate like a wolf, immersing myself in the moment and in the sensation of feeding. But eventually I had to toss the last gnawed bone into the fire and contemplate the evening ahead of me.
I took the kettle of soup into the tent. The Fool was awake. He lay on his belly and stared at the corner of the tent. The long light of late afternoon shone through the tent's panels and dappled him with color. I had known he was awake. The renewal of our Skill-bond made it impossible for me not to know. I could block most of the physical pain he felt. It was harder to block his anguish.
“I brought you food,” I said to him.
After some silence had passed, I told him, “Beloved, you need to eat. And drink. I've brought fresh water.”
I waited. “I could make tea for you if you'd like.”
Eventually, I fetched a mug and poured the cooling broth into it. “Just drink this, and I'll stop bothering you. But only if you drink this.”
Crickets were chirping in the dusk. “Beloved, I mean it. I won't leave you in peace until you at least drink this.”
He spoke. His voice was flat and he did not look at me. “Could you not call me that?”
“Beloved?” I asked, confused.
He winced to the word. “Yes. That.”
I sat holding the mug of cold broth in both hands. After a time I said, stiffly, “If that is what you wish, Fool. But I'm still not leaving until you drink this.”
He moved in the dimness of the tent, turning his head toward me and then reaching a hand for the mug. “She mocked me with that name,” he said quietly.
“Oh.”
He took the mug awkwardly from me, protecting his torn fingertips from contact. He levered himself up on an elbow, quivering with pain and effort. I wanted to help him. I knew better than to offer. He drank the broth in two long draughts, and then held the mug out to me shakily. I took it and he sank down on his belly again. When I continued to sit there, he pointed out wearily, “I drank it.”
I took the kettle and the mug out into the night with me. I added more water to the kettle of soup and set it near the fire. Let it simmer until morning. I sat staring into the fire, recalling things I didn't want to think about and chewing on my thumbnail until I bit it too close to the quick and tore it. I grimaced, and then, staring out into the night, shook my head. I had been able to retreat into being a wolf. As a wolf, I had not been humiliated and degraded. As a wolf, I'd kept my dignity and power over my life. The Fool had nowhere to go.
I'd had Burrich, and his calm, familiar ways. I'd had isolation and peace and the wolf. I thought of Nighteyes, and rose, and went to the hunt.
My first night's luck did not hold. I came back to the camp after sunrise, with no meat, but a shirt full of ripe plums. The Fool was gone. A kettle of tea had been left to stay warm by the fire. I resisted the urge to call out his name and waited, almost patiently, by the fire until I saw him coming up the path from the stream. He wore the Elderling robe and his hair was slicked flat to his skull with water. He walked without grace in a lurching limp and his shoulders were bowed. With difficulty, I restrained myself from going to him. He reached the fire at last and, “I found plums,” I told him.
He took one solemnly and bit into it. “They're sweet,” he said, as if it surprised him. With an old man's caution, he lowered himself to the ground. I saw him run his tongue around the inside of his mouth and winced with him when he found the gap of missing teeth on one side. “Tell me what happened,” he requested quietly.
So I did. I began with her guards throwing me out into the snow, and reported in as much detail as if it were Chade sitting there, nodding to my words. His face changed slowly as I began to speak about the dragons. Slowly he sat up straighter. I felt the Skill-link between us intensify as he reached for my heart to confirm what he was hearing, as if mere words could not be enough to convey it to him. Willingly, I opened myself to him and let him share my experience of that day. When I told him that Icefyre and Tintaglia had mated in flight and then disappeared, a sob shook him. But he was tearless as he asked me incredulously, “Then...we triumphed. She failed. There will be dragons in the skies of this world again.”
“Of course,” I said, and only then realized that he could not have known that. “We walk in your future now. On the path you set for us.”
He choked again, audibly. He rose stiffly and paced a turn or two. He turned back to me, his heart in his eyes. “But...I am blind here. I never foresaw any of this. Always, in every vision, if there was triumph, I bought it with my death. I always died.”
He cocked his head slowly and asked me, as if for confirmation, “I did die?”
“You did,” I admitted slowly. But I could not help the grin that crept over my face. “But, as I told you in Buckkeep, I am the Catalyst. I am the Changer.”
He stood still as stone, and when comprehension seeped into him, it was like watching a stone dragon come to wakefulness. Life infused him. He began to tremble, and this time I did not fear to take his arm and help him sit down. “The rest,” he demanded shakily. “Tell me the rest.”
And so I told him, the rest of that day, as we ate plums and drank his tea and then finished the rabbit broth from the night before. I told him what I knew of the Black Man, and his eyes grew wide. I spoke of searching for his body, and reluctantly told how I had found him. He looked aside from me as I spoke and I felt our Skill-link fade as if he would vanish from my sight if he could. Nonetheless, I told him, and told him too of my encounter with the Pale Woman. He sat rubbing his arms while I spoke of her, and when he asked, “Then, she lives still? She did not die?” his voice shook.
“I did not kill her,” I admitted.
And, “Why?” he demanded shrilly, incredulously. “But why didn't you kill her, Fitz? Why?”
That outburst shocked me and I felt stupid and defensive as I said, “I don't know. Perhaps because I thought she wanted me to.” The words seemed foolish to me, but I said them anyway. “First the Black Man and then the Pale Woman said I was the Catalyst for this time. The Changer. I did not want to cause any change to what you had done.”
For a time, silence held between us. He rocked back and forth, very slightly, breathing through his mouth. After a time, he seemed to calm, or perhaps he only deadened. Then with an effort he tried to conceal, he said, “I'm sure you did what was best, Fitz. I don't hold it against you.”
Perhaps he meant those words, but I think it was hard for either of us to believe them just then. It dimmed the glow of his triumph and made a small shadowy wall between us. Nevertheless, I continued my account, and when I spoke of how we had come here through a Skill-pillar I'd found in the ice palace, he grew very still. “I never saw that,” he admitted with a shade of wonder. “Never even guessed it.”