But Verity himself would cease to exist.
I drew back in fascinated horror. I don’t think there is anything more frightening than to encounter the true will for self-destruction. Despite my own attraction to the river, it touched off an anger in me. This was not worthy of Verity. Neither the man nor the prince I had known could be capable of such a cowardly act. I looked at him as if I had never seen him.
And realized how long it had been since I had seen him.
The bright blackness of his eyes had become a dull darkness. The cloak that the wind snapped about him was a rent rag of a thing. The leather of his boots had long ago cracked, the stitches of the seams giving way and gaping open. The steps he took were uncertain, uneven things. Even if the wind had not buffeted him, I doubted his stride would have been steady. His lips were pale and cracked and his flesh had a grayish overtone to it as if the very blood of his body had forsaken it. There had been summers when he Skilled against the Red Ships to such an extent that the flesh and muscle fell from his body, leaving him a gaunt skeleton of a man with no physical stamina. Now he was a man of stamina alone, ropy muscles stretched on a framework of bones that was scarcely cloaked in flesh at all. He was the embodiment of weary purpose. Only his will kept him upright and moving. Toward the magic flow.
I do not know where I found my own will to resist it. Possibly it was because I had paused and focused myself on Verity for an instant, and seen all the world would lose if he ceased to exist as himself. Whatever the source of my strength, I pitted it against his. I threw myself into his path but he walked through me. There was nothing to me, here. “Verity, please, stop, wait!” I cried and flung myself at him, a furious feather on the wind. I had no effect on him. He didn’t even pause.
“Someone has to do it,” he said quietly. Three steps later he added, “For a time, I hoped it would not be me. But over and over, I have asked myself, “Who else, then?’ ” He turned to look at me with those burnt-to-ashes eyes. “No other answer has ever come. It has to be me.”
“Verity, stop,” I pleaded, but he continued to walk. Not hurrying, not lagging, but simply trudging along the way a man does when he has measured the distance he must go and matched his strength to it. He had the endurance to get there if he walked.
I withdrew a bit, feeling my strength ebbing. For a moment, I feared I would lose him by being drawn back to my sleeping body. Then I realized an equally potent fear. Linked so long, and even now being pulled along after him, I might find myself drowned alongside him in that vein of magic. If I had had a body in that realm, I probably would have seized onto something and held on. As I pleaded with Verity to stop and listen to me, I instead anchored myself in the only other way I could imagine. I reached with my Skill, grasping after those others whose lives touched mine: Molly, my daughter, Chade and the Fool, Burrich and Kettricken. I had no true Skill links with any of them so my grip was a tenuous one at best, lessened by my frantic fear that at any moment Will or Carrod or even Burl might somehow become aware of me. It seemed to me that it slowed Verity. “Please wait,” I said again.
“No,” he said quietly. “Don’t seek to dissuade me, Fitz. It’s what I have to do.”
I had never thought to measure my Skill-strength against Verity’s. I had never imagined we could be opposed to each other. But as I proceeded to batter myself against him, I felt very much like a child kicking and screaming as his father calmly carried him off to bed. Verity not only ignored my attack, I sensed that his will and concentration were elsewhere. He moved implacably on toward the black flow, and my consciousness was borne along with him. Self-preservation lent a frantic new strength to my struggles. I strove to push him away, to drag him back, but it availed me nothing.
But there was a terrible duality to my struggle. I longed for him to win. If he overpowered me and dragged me down with him, then I need take no responsibility for it. I could open myself to that flow of power and be quenched in it. It would be an end to all torments, surcease at last. I was so tired of doubts and guilts, so weary of duties and debts. If Verity carried me into that flow of Skill with him I could finally surrender with no shame.
There came a moment when we stood on the brink of that iridescent flow of power. I stared down at it with his eyes. There was no gradual shore. Instead there was a knife’s-edge brink where solid earth gave way to a streaming otherness. I stared at it, seeing it as a foreign thing in our world, a warping of our very world’s nature. Ponderously Verity lowered himself to one knee. He stared into that black luminescence. I did not know if he hesitated to say farewell to our world, or if he paused to gather his will to destroy himself. My will to resist was suspended. This was a door to an otherness I could not even imagine. Hunger and curiosity drew us closer to the brink.
In the next moment he plunged his hands and forearms into the magic.
I shared that sudden knowledge with him. So I screamed with him as the hot current ate the flesh and muscle from his arms. I swear I felt the acid lick of it across the bared bones of his fingers and wrist and forearm. I knew his pain. Yet it was crowded from his features by the rapturous smile that overwhelmed his face. My link with him was suddenly a clumsy thing that barred me from sensing in full what he felt. I longed to be beside him, to bare my own flesh to that magic river. I shared his conviction that he could end all pain if only he would give in and plunge the rest of himself into the stream. So easy. All he had to do was lean forward a bit and let go. He crouched over the stream on his knees, sweat dripping from his face only to disappear as tiny puffs of steam when it fell into the flow. His head was bowed, and his shoulders moved up and down with the strength of his panting. Then he begged me suddenly, in a tiny voice, “Pull me back.”
I had not had the strength to oppose his determination. But when I joined my will to his and together we fought the terrible allure of the power, it was just enough. He was able to draw his forearms and hands free from the stuff, though it felt as if he drew them out of solid stone. It gave him up reluctantly and as he staggered back I sensed in full for a moment what he had shared. There was the oneness of the world flowing there, like a single sweet note drawn purely out. It was not the song of humanity but an older, greater song of vast balances and pure being. Had Verity surrendered to it, it would have ended all his torments.
Instead, he tottered to his feet and turned away from it. He carried his forearms stretched out before him, palms up, the fingers curled into cups as if he begged something. In shape they had not changed. But now arms and fingers gleamed silver with the power that had penetrated and fused with his flesh. As he began to walk away from the stream with the same studied purposefulness with which he had approached it, I felt how his arms and hands burned as if with frostbite.
“I don’t understand,” I said to him.
“I don’t want you to. Not yet.” I felt a duality in him. The Skill burned in him like a forge-fire of incredible heat, but the strength of his body was only sufficient to keep him walking. It was effortless for him to shield my mind from the pull of that river now. But for him to move his own body up the path taxed both his flesh and his will. “Fitz. Come to me. Please.” It was no Skill-order this time, not even the command of a prince, only the plea of a man to another. “I have no coterie, Fitz. Only you. If the coterie that Galen created for me had been true, then I would have more faith that what I must do is possible. Yet not only are they false to me, but they seek to defeat me. They peck at me like birds on a dying buck. I do not think their attacks can destroy me, but I fear they may weaken me enough that I do not succeed. Or worse yet, that they may distract me and succeed in my place. We cannot allow that, boy. You and I are all that stand between them and their triumph. You and I. The Farseers.”
I was not there in any physical sense. Yet he smiled at me and lifted one terrible gleaming hand to cup my face. Did he intend what he did? I do not know. The jolt was as powerful as if a warrior had slammed his shield into my face. But not pain. Awareness. Like sunlight bursting through clouds to illuminate a clearing in the forest. Everything suddenly stood out clearly, and I saw all the hidden reasons and purposes for what we did, and I understood with a painful purity of enlightenment why it was necessary I follow the path before me.
Then all was gone, and I dwindled off into blackness. Verity was gone and my understanding with him. But for one brief instant, I had glimpsed the completeness of it. Only I remained now, but my self was so tiny I could only exist if I held on with all my might. So I did.
From a world away I heard Starling cry out in fear, “What’s wrong with him?” And Chade replied gruffly, “It’s only a seizure, such as he has from time to time. His head, Fool, hold his head or he’ll dash his own brains out.” Distantly I felt hands gripping and restraining me. I surrendered myself to their care and sank into the darkness. I came to, for a bit, some time later. I recall little of it. The Fool raised my shoulders and steadied my head that I could drink from a cup a concerned Chade held to my lips. The familiar bitterness of elfbark puckered my mouth. I had a glimpse of Kettle standing over me, lips folded in a tight line of disapproval. Starling stood away, her eyes huge as a cornered animal’s, not deigning to touch me. “That should bring him round,” I heard Chade say as I sank into a deep sleep.
The next morning I arose early despite my pounding head and sought the baths. I slipped out so silently that the Fool did not waken, but Nighteyes arose and ghosted out with me.
Where did you go, last night?
he demanded, but I had no answer for him. He sensed my reluctance to think about it.
I go to hunt now,
he informed me tartly.
I advise you to drink but water after this.
I assented humbly and he left me at the door of the bathhouse.
Within was the mineral stink of the hot water that bubbled up from the earth. The Mountain folk trapped it in great tanks, and channeled it through pipes to other tubs so that one might choose the heat and depth one wished. I scrubbed myself off in a washing tub, then submerged myself in the hottest water I could stand and tried not to recall the scalding of the Skill on Verity’s forearms. I emerged red as a boiled crab. At the cool end of the bath-hut there were several mirrors on the wall. I tried not to see my own face as I shaved. It reminded me too vividly of Verity’s. Some of the gauntness had left it in the last week or so, but the streak of white at my brow was back and showed even more plainly when I bound my hair back in a warrior’s tail. I would not have been surprised to see Verity’s handprint on my face, or to find my scar eradicated and my nose straightened, such had been the power of that touch. But Regal’s scar on my face stood out pallidly against my steam-reddened face. Nothing had improved the broken nose. There was no outward sign of my encounter last night at all. Again and again, my mind circled back to that moment, to that touch of purest power. I fumbled to recall it and almost could. But the absolute experience of it, like pain or pleasure, could not be recalled in full, but only in pale memory. I knew I had experienced something extraordinary. The pleasures of Skilling, which all Skill users were cautioned against, were like a tiny ember compared to the bonfire of knowing, feeling, and being that I had briefly shared last night.
It had changed me. The anger I had been nursing toward Kettricken and Chade was gutted. I could find the emotion still, but I could not bring it back in force. I had briefly seen not only my child but the entire situation from all possible views. There was no malice in their intent, nor even selfishness. They believed in the morality of what they did. I did not. But I could no longer deny entirely the sense of what they sought. It left me feeling soulless. They would take my child away from Molly and me. I could hate what they did, but I could not focus that anger at them.
I shook my head, drawing myself back to the moment. I looked at myself in the mirror, wondering how Kettricken would see me. Did she still see the young man who had dogged Verity’s steps and so often served her at court? Or would she look at my scarred face and think she did not know me, that the Fitz she had known was gone? Well, she knew by now how I had gained my scars. My queen should not be surprised. I would let her judge who stood behind those marks.
I braced my nerves, then turned my back to the mirror. I looked over my shoulder. The center of injury in my back reminded me of a sunken red starfish in my flesh. Around it the skin was tight and shiny. I flexed my shoulders and watched the skin tug against the scar. I extended my sword arm and felt the tiny pull of resistance there. Well, no sense worrying about it. I pulled on my shirt.
I returned to the Fool’s hut to clothe myself afresh and found to my surprise that he was dressed and ready to accompany me. Clothes were laid out on my cot: a white loose-sleeved shirt of soft warm wool, and dark leggings of a heavier woolen weave. There was a short dark surcoat to match the leggings. He told me that Chade had left them. It was all very simple and plain.
“It suits you,” the Fool observed. He himself had dressed much as he did every day, in a woolen robe, but this one was dark blue with embroidery at the sleeves and hem. It was closer to what I had seen the Mountain folk wear. It accentuated his pallor far more than the white one had, and made plainer to my eyes the slight tawniness his skin, eyes, and hair were beginning to possess. His hair was as fine as ever. Left to itself, it still seemed to float freely around his face, but today he was binding it back.
“I did not know Kettricken had summoned you,” I observed, to which he grimly replied, “All the more reason to present myself. Chade came to check on you this morning, and was concerned to find you gone. I think he half fears that you have run off with the wolf again. But in case you had not, he left a message for you. Other than those who have been in this hut, no one in Jhaampe has been told your true name. Much as it must surprise you to find that the minstrel had that much discretion. Not even the healer knows who she healed. Remember, you are Tom the shepherd until such time as Queen Kettricken feels she can speak more plainly to you. Understand?”