There was little enough to prepare for us to leave. I tried to take down his Elderling tent, but he shook his head, almost wildly, and then said hoarsely, “No. Leave it. Leave it.” That surprised me. True, he had not slept in it since the nightmare, preferring to sleep between me and the fire, but I had thought he would want it. Nonetheless, I did not argue with him. In fact, as I gave it a last glance, and saw how the dragons and serpents on the fine fabric rippled in the light breeze, I found I could think only of his peeled skin on the ice. I shuddered and turned away from it.
In passing, I picked up the Rooster Crown from the ground. It had returned to its wooden state, if indeed it had ever been otherwise save in my imagination. The silvery gray feathers stood up in their stiff row around the circlet. It still seemed to whisper and buzz in my hand. I held it out to him and asked, “What of this? A circle of jesters. Do you want it still? Shall we leave it on top of the pillar, to remember she who once wore it?”
He gave me an odd look, and then said softly, “I told you. I did not want it for myself. It was for a bargain I struck, long ago.” He looked at me very carefully and nodded very slightly as he said, “And I think it is time that I honored it.”
And so we did not go straight to the pillar, but walked again down that fading path under the overarching trees, past the creek and back to the Stone Garden. It was as long a hike as I recalled, and little stinging midges found us once we had entered the shade. The Fool made no comment at them, but only pressed on. Birds flitted overhead, moving shadows that crossed our path. The forest teemed with life.
I recalled my wonder the first time I had glimpsed the stone dragons hidden in their sleep under the trees. I had been terrified, literally awestruck by them. Even though I had walked amongst them several times since then, and even seen them called to life and flight to battle the Red Ships for us, I still found them no less astounding. I quested ahead of us with my Wit-sense, and found them, dark green pools of waiting life beneath the shadowing trees.
This was the resting place of all the carved dragons that had awakened to defend the Six Duchies from the Red Ships. Here we had found them, here we had wakened them with blood, Wit, and Skill, and here they had returned when the year of battle was over. Dragons I had called them and called them still, from long habit, but not all of them took that shape. Some spoke of other fancies or of heraldic beasts of legend. Vines draped the immense figures of carved stone, and the winged boar had a cap of last year's leaves on his head. They were stone to the eye and alive to my Wit-touch, gleaming with color and detail. I could sense the life that teemed deep within the stone, but could not rouse it.
I walked amongst them with more knowledge now than when I had first discovered them here, and even fancied I could tell which ones had been worked by Elderling hands and which were the work of Six Duchies Skill coteries. The Winged Buck was a Six Duchies dragon and no mistake. Those that were more dragonlike in form, I now suspected were the Elderlings' work. I went first, of course, to Verity-as-Dragon. I did not torment myself with trying to rouse him from whatever stone dream held him. I did take off my shirt and dust the forest debris from his scaled brow and muscled back and folded wings. Buck blue he gleamed in the dappling sunlight after I had polished the length of he who had been my king. After all I had endured lately, the sleeping creature looked peaceful to me now. I hoped he truly was.
The Fool had gone, of course, to Girl-on-a-Dragon. As I approached them, I saw that he stood quietly before her, the crown in one hand. The other hand rested lightly on the dragon's shoulder, and I noted that his Skilled fingers touched the creature. His face was very still as he looked up at the figure of the girl astride the dragon. She was breathtakingly lovely. Her hair was more golden than the Fool's; it fell to her shoulders and caressed them with its loose curls. Her skin was like cream. She wore a jerkin of hunter green, but her legs and feet were bare. Her dragon was even more glorious, his scales the shining green of dark emeralds. He possessed the lax grace of a sleeping hunting cat. When last I had seen her, she had been posed in sleep upon the dragon, her rounded arms wrapped around his lithe neck. Now she sat upright on her mount. Her eyes were closed, but she lifted her face as if she could feel the errant sunbeams that touched her cheek. A very faint smile curved her lips. Crushed green plants beneath her sleeping steed indicated how recently she had flown. She had carried the Fool to Aslevjal Island, and then returned here, to rejoin her fellows in sleep.
I thought I had walked quietly, but as I approached, the Fool turned his head and looked at me. “Do you recall how we attempted to free her, that night?”
I bowed my head. I felt a bit ashamed, still, that I had ever been so young and rash.
“I've repented it ever since.” I had touched her with the Skill, thinking it might be enough to free her. Instead, it had only roused her to her torment.
He nodded slowly. “But what about the second time you touched her? Do you remember that?”
I sighed heavily. It had been the night I had Skill-walked, and seen Molly take Burrich as her man. Later that evening, I had worn Verity's body, for he had borrowed mine, to get himself a son. To get Dutiful upon Queen Kettricken. I had not known that had been his intent. In an old man's aching body, I had wandered the memory stone quarry. Wandered it until Nighteyes and I had come upon the Fool at his forbidden task. He had been chipping at the stone around the dragon's feet, trying to finish the dragon so it might be set free. I had felt sorry for him, so great was his empathy with the creature. I had known too what it truly took to quicken a dragon: not just the work of a man's hands, but the surrender of his life and his memory, his loves and his pains and his joys. And so I had set Verity's Skill-silvered hands to the rocky flesh of Girl-on-a-Dragon, and I had poured forth into her all the misery and pain of my short life, that she might take it and take life with it. Into the dragon I had poured my parents' abandonment of me to the care of strangers, and all I had suffered at Galen's hands and in Regal's dungeon. I had given those memories to the dragon to keep and to hold and to shape herself with. I had given her my loneliness as a child and every sharp-edged misery of that night. Given it willingly, and felt my pain ease even as the world dulled around me and my love of it dimmed slightly. I would have given far more if the wolf had not stopped me. Nighteyes had rebuked me, saying that he had no wish to be bonded to a Forged One. I had not, at that time, grasped what he meant. Having seen the warriors who served the Pale Woman, I thought I understood better now.
I thought I understood too what the Fool had in mind and why he had come here. “Don't do it!” I pleaded with him, and when he looked at me in sharp surprise, I said, “I know you are thinking of putting your memories of her torture of you into the dragon. Girl-on-a-Dragon could drain them out of you and keep them forever locked away where they cannot stab you. It would work. I know that. But there was a cost to that surcease from pain, Fool. When you dull pain and hide it from yourself...” My words trickled away. I did not want to sound self-pitying.
“You dull your joys as well.” He said it simply. He looked away from me for a time, his lips folded. I wondered if he weighed the one against the other. Would he decide to be rid of night terrors at the expense of taking fresh joy in every morning? “I saw that in you, afterward,” he said. “I felt guilty. If I had not been chipping away at Girl-on-a-Dragon, you never would have done it. I wished to undo it. Years later, when I came to see you at your cottage, I thought, 'Surely he will be healed by now. Surely he will have recovered.' ” He swung his gaze to meet me. “But you had not. You had just...stopped. In some ways. Oh, you were older and wiser, I suppose. But you had not made any move on your own to reach out to life again. But for your wolf, I think it would have been even worse. As it was, you were living like a mouse in a wall, off the crumbs of affection that Starling tossed to you. As thick-skinned as she is, even she could see it. She gave you Hap and you took him in. But if she had not brought him to your doorstep and dumped him there, would you have sought out anyone to share your life?” He leaned closer to me and said, “Even after you came back to Buckkeep and your old world, you held yourself apart from it. No matter what I did or offered. Myblack. You couldn't even connect to a horse.”
I stood very still. His words stung but they were also true. “Done is done,” I said at last. “The best I can do now is to say, if that is what you came here to do, don't do it. It wasn't worth it.”
He sighed. “I'll admit I thought of it. I admit I longed for it. I will even tell you that this is not the first time I have visited Girl-on-a-Dragon since we came here. I thought of offering her my memories. I know she would take them, just as she took yours. But...in a way...although I did not see this future, almost it seems as if it were meant to be. Fitz. What do you recall of her story?”
I took a breath. “Verity told me that she was part of a coterie making a dragon. I recall her name. Salt. I discovered that, the night I gave her my memories. But Salt could not give herself willingly to the dragon. She sought to remain a part of the coterie, and yet separate, to be only the Girl of Girl-on-a-Dragon. And with that, she doomed them. Because she held back too much, they did not have enough life to take flight as a dragon. They nearly quickened, but then mired down in stone. Until you freed them.”
“Until we freed them.” After a long time, he said, “It is like an echo of a dream to me. Salt was the leader of the coterie, and so it was called Salt's Coterie. But, when it came to the carving, the one willing to give heart to the dragon was Realder. So. When all believed that the dragon would be quickened, it was announced as Realder's Dragon.” He looked at me quietly. “You saw her. Crowned with the Rooster Crown. A rare honor, and even rarer for a foreigner. But she had come a long way to seek her Catalyst. And like me, she had taken on the role of performer. Jester, minstrel, tumbler.” He shook his head. “I had only that moment of being her. Just that brief dream, when I stood upon the pillar. I was, as I am, a White Prophet, and I stood high above the crowd and announced the flight of Realder's Dragon to the people of this Elderling town. But not without regrets. For I knew that my Catalyst would do that day what he had always been destined to do. He would enter a dragon, so that years hence, he could work a change.” He stopped and smiled a bittersweet smile, the first I had seen on his face in days. “How it must have grieved her, to see Realder's Dragon mire and fail due to Salt's hesitation. She probably thought that she had failed, too. But if Realder had not made a dragon, and if that dragon had not failed, and if we had not found them there, still, in the quarry...what then, FitzChivalry Farseer? You looked far back that day, to see a White Prophet clowning on top of a Skill-pillar. Did you see all that?”
I blinked slowly. It was like awakening from a dream, or perhaps returning to one. His words seemed to wake memories I could not possibly hold.
“I will give Realder's Dragon the Rooster Crown. That was the price he named for me, the first time I flew with him. He said that he wished to wear forever the crown the White Prophet wore, on the day his beloved said farewell to him right before he entered this dragon.”
“The price for what?” I asked him, but he did not answer. Instead, he looped the crown over one of his wrists and then began his cautious climb up the dragon. It saddened me to see him move so stiffly and cautiously. Almost I could feel the tightness of the new skin that pulled across his back. But I did not offer him my hand; I think that would have made it worse for both of us. Once he stood behind her on the dragon's haunches, he balanced himself. Then, taking the crown in both hands, he settled the circle on her brow. For a moment, it remained as it was, silvery wood. And then, color flowed into it from the dragon. The crown gleamed gold, the rooster heads that ringed it shone red, and their jeweled eyes winked. The feathers themselves took on the gloss of real feathers and lost all stiffness, to bow just as real cockerel plumes would have nodded.
A deeper flush seemed to suffuse the Girl's cheeks. She seemed to draw a breath. I was transfixed with amazement. And then her eyes opened, as green as her dragon's scales. She gave no look to me, but twisted in her seat to look up at the Fool still standing on the dragon's haunches behind her. She reached back a hand to cup his jaw. Her eyes locked with his. He leaned closer to her, captured by her gaze. Then her hand moved to the back of his head, and she pulled his mouth down onto hers.
She kissed him deeply. I had to witness the passion of what she shared with him. Yet it did not seem like gratitude, and as she prolonged the kiss, I think the Fool would have broken away if he could. He stiffened, and the muscles of his neck stood out. He never embraced her, but his hands went from wide open and forbidding to clenched fists clutched against his chest. And still she kissed him, and I feared to see him either melt into her or turn to stone in her embrace. I feared what he gave and feared more what she took from him. Had not he heard a word of what I had said to him? Why hadn't he heeded my warning?
And then, as suddenly as she had stirred to life, she released him. As if he no longer mattered, she turned away from him and once more stretched her face up to the sunlight. It seemed to me that she sighed once, deeply, and then closed her eyes. Stillness crept over her. The gleaming Rooster Crown had become a part of Girl-on-a-Dragon.
But the Fool, released from that unwelcome intimacy, was limp and falling. In a near swoon, he toppled from the dragon's back, and I was barely able to catch him and keep him from tearing loose all his newly healed hurts. Even so, he cried out as I closed my arms around him. I could feel him shuddering, like a man in an ague. He turned to me, his eyes blind, and cried out piteously, “It is too much. You are too human, Fitz. I am not made for such as this. Take it from me, take it, or I shall die of it.”