“You are none of those things to me. To me, you are the man I love.”
He shook his head. Her answer had only baffled him more. “And after what you just said about bad luck? You would stand before a Witness Stone and lie?”
She smiled a different sort of smile at him. One I had not seen in a long time. One that broke my heart. “It need not be a lie,” she pointed out quietly.
His nostrils flared like a stallion’s as he surged to his feet. The breath he drew swelled his chest.
“Wait,” she commanded him softly, and he did. She licked her thumb and forefinger. She swiftly pinched out all but one candle. Then she crossed the darkened room to his arms.
I fled.
“Oh, my boy. I am so sorry.”
I shook my head silently. My eyes were squeezed tight shut, but tears leaked from them anyway. I found my voice. “He will be good to her. And Nettle. He is the sort of man she deserves. No, Verity. I should take comfort in it. To know he will be with her, caring for them both.”
Comfort. I could find no comfort in it. Only pain.
“It seems a very poor bargain I have made you.” Verity sounded genuinely grieved for me.
“No. It’s all right.” I caught my breath. “Now, Verity. I would it were done quickly.”
“Are you sure?”
“As you will.”
He took my life from me.
It was a dream I had had before. I knew the feel of an old man’s body. The other time, I had been King Shrewd, in a soft nightshirt, in a clean bed. This time was harsher. I ached in every joint of my body. My gut burned inside me. And I had scalded myself, on my face and hands. There was more pain than life left in this body. Like a candle almost burned to the socket. I opened my eyes stickily. I sprawled on cold, gritty stone. A wolf sat watching me.
This is wrong,
he told me.
I could think of nothing to say to that. It certainly did not feel right. After a time, I pushed myself up to my hands and knees. My hands hurt. My knees hurt. Every joint in my body creaked and complained as I drew myself up and looked around. The night was warm, but I still shivered. Above me, on a dais, an incomplete dragon slumbered.
I do not understand.
Nighteyes pleaded for an explanation.
I do not wish to understand. I do not want to know.
But whether I wished it or not, I did know. I walked slowly and the wolf came at my heels. We walked past a dying fire between two tents. No one kept watch. From Kettricken’s tent, there were small noises. Verity’s face was what she saw in the dimness. Verity’s dark eyes, looking into hers. She believed her husband had finally come to her.
In truth, he had.
I did not want to hear, I did not want to know. I walked on with my old man’s careful pacing. Great black blocks of stone loomed around us. Ahead of us, something clicked and chinked softly. I walked through the sharp-edged stone shadows and into moonlight again.
Once you shared my body. Is this like that?
“No.” I spoke the word aloud, and in the wake of my voice, I heard a small scrabbling.
What’s that?
I’ll go and see.
The wolf melted into the shadows. He returned instantly.
It’s only the Scentless One. He hides from you. He does not know you.
I knew where I would find him. I took my time. This body had all it could do to move, let alone move swiftly. When I came to Girl-on-a-Dragon, it was horribly hard to clamber up on her dais. Once I was up, I could see the fresh rock chips everywhere. I sat down by the dragon’s feet, a cautious lowering of my body to cold stone. I looked at his work. He had almost cut her free. “Fool?” I called out softly in the night.
He came slowly, from the shadows, to stand eyes down before me. “My king,” he said softly. “I tried. But I cannot help myself. I cannot just leave her here. . . .”
I nodded slowly, wordlessly. At the base of the dais, Nighteyes whined. The Fool glanced down at him, then back up at me. Puzzlement crossed his face. “My lord?” he asked.
I reached for the thread of Skill-bond between us and found it. The Fool’s face grew very still as he struggled to understand. He came to sit beside me. He stared at me, as if he could see through Verity’s skin. “I like this not,” he said at last.
“Nor I,” I agreed.
“Why have you . . .”
“Better not to know,” I said briefly.
For a time we sat in silence. Then the Fool reached back to brush a handful of fresh stone chips from about the dragon’s foot. He met my eyes, but there was still furtiveness as he drew a chisel from his shirt. His hammer was a stone.
“That’s Verity’s chisel.”
“I know. He doesn’t need it anymore, and my knife broke.” He set the edge carefully to the rock. “It works much better anyway.” I watched him tap another small chip free. I aligned my thoughts with his.
“She draws on your strength,” I observed quietly.
“I know.” Another chip came free. “I was curious. And my touch hurt her.” He placed his chisel again. “I feel I owe her something.”
“Fool. She could take all you offer her and it would still not be enough.”
“How do you know?”
I shrugged. “This body knows.”
Then I stared as he laid his Skill-fingers to the place where he had chiseled. I winced, but sensed no pain from her. She took something from him. But he had not the Skill to shape her with his hands. What he gave her was only enough to torment her.
“She reminds me of my older sister,” he said into the night. “She had golden hair.”
I sat in stunned silence. He did not look at me as he added, “I should have liked to see her again. She used to spoil me outrageously. I would have liked to have seen all my family again.” His tone was no more than wistful as he moved his fingers idly against the chiseled stone.
“Fool? Let me try?”
He gave me a look that was almost jealous. “She may not accept you,” he warned me.
I smiled at him. Verity’s smile, through his beard. “There is a link between us. Fine as thread and neither the elfbark nor your weariness aid it. But it is there. Put your hand to my shoulder.”
I did not know why I did it. Perhaps because he had never before spoken to me of a sister or a home he missed. I refused to stop and wonder. Not thinking was so much easier, and not feeling was easiest of all. He put his unskilled hand, not to my shoulder, but to the side of my neck. Instinctively, he was right. Skin to skin, I knew him better. I held Verity’s silver hands up before my eyes and marveled at them. Silver to the eye, scalded and raw to the senses. Then, before I could change my mind, I reached down and grasped the dragon’s shapeless forefoot between my two hands.
Instantly, I could feel the dragon. Almost it squirmed within the stone. I knew the edge of each scale, the tip of each wicked claw. And I knew the woman who had carved it. The women. A coterie, so long ago. Salt’s Coterie. But Salt had been too proud. Her features were on the carven face, and she had sought to remain in her own form, carving herself upon the dragon that her coterie shaped around her. They had been too loyal to object. And almost she had succeeded. The dragon had been finished, and almost filled. The dragon had quickened and began to rise as the coterie was absorbed into it. But Salt had striven to remain only within the carved girl. She had held back from the dragon. And the dragon had fallen before it could even rise, sinking back into the stone, miring down forever. Leaving the coterie trapped in the dragon and Salt trapped in the girl.
All this I knew, swifter than lightning. I felt too, the hunger of the dragon. It pulled at me, pleading for sustenance. Much had it taken from the Fool. I sensed what he had given, light and dark. The jeering taunts of gardeners and chamberlains when he was young at Buckkeep. A branch of apple blossoms outside a window in spring. An image of me, my jerkin flapping as I hurried across the yard at Burrich’s heels, trying to make my shorter legs match his long stride. A silver fish leaping above a silent pond at dawn.
The dragon tugged at me insistently. I suddenly knew what had really drawn me here.
Take my memories of my mother, and the feelings that went with them. I do not want to know them at all. Take the ache in my throat when I think of Molly, take all the sharp-edged, bright-colored days I recall with her. Take their brilliance and leave me but the shadows of what I saw and felt. Let me recall them without cutting myself on their sharpness. Take my days and nights in Regal’s dungeons. It is enough to know what was done to me. Take it to keep, and let me stop feeling my face against that stone floor, hearing the sound of my nose breaking, smelling and tasting my own blood. Take my hurt that I never knew my father, take my hours of staring up at his portrait when the great hall was empty and I could do so alone. Take my—
Fitz. Stop. You give her too much, there will be nothing left of you.
The Fool’s voice inside me was horror-stricken at what he had encouraged.
—memories of that tower-top, of the bare windswept Queen’s Garden and Galen standing over me. Take that image of Molly going so willingly to Burrich’s arms. Take it and quench it and seal it away where it can never sear me again. Take—
My brother. Enough.
Nighteyes was suddenly between me and the dragon. I knew I still gripped that scaly foreleg, but he snarled at it, defying it to take more of me.
I do not care if it all is taken,
I told Nighteyes.
But I do. I would sooner not be bonded with a Forged one. Get back, Cold One.
He snarled in spirit as well as beside me.
To my surprise the dragon yielded. My companion nipped at my shoulder.
Let go. Get away from that!
I let go of the dragon’s foreleg. I opened my eyes, surprised to find it was still night all around me.
The Fool had his arm around Nighteyes. “Fitz,” he said quietly. He spoke into the wolf’s ruff, but I heard him clearly. “Fitz, I am sorry. But you cannot throw away all your pain. If you stop feeling pain . . .”
I did not listen to the rest of what he said. I stared at the dragon’s foreleg. Where my two hands had rested against the lumpy stone there were two handprints now. Within those shapes, each scale stood fine and perfect. All of that, I thought. All of that, and this is how much dragon it brought me. Then I thought of Verity’s dragon. It was immense. How had he done it? What had he held inside him, all those years, to have enough for the shaping of such a dragon?
“He feels much, your uncle. Great loves. Vast loyalty. Sometimes I think that my two hundred-odd years pale beside what he has felt in his forty-some.”
All three of us turned to Kettle. I felt no surprise. I had known she was coming and I had not cared. She leaned heavily on a stick and her face seemed to hang from the bones of her skull. She met my eyes and I knew that she knew everything. Skill-linked as she was to Verity, she knew it all. “Get down from there. All of you, before you hurt yourselves.”
We obeyed slowly and I slowest of all. Verity’s joints ached and his body was weary. Kettle looked at me balefully when I finally stood beside her. “If you were going to do that, you might have put it in Verity’s dragon instead,” she pointed out.
“He wouldn’t let me. You wouldn’t let me.”
“No. We wouldn’t have. Let me tell you something, Fitz. You are going to miss what you gave away. You will recover some of the feelings in time, of course. All memories are connected, and like a man’s skin, they can heal. In time, left to themselves, those memories would have stopped hurting you. You may someday wish you could call up that pain.”
“I do not think so,” I said calmly, to cover my own doubt. “I still have plenty of pain left.”
Kettle lifted her old face to the night. She drew a long breath in through her nose. “Dawn comes,” she said, as if she had scented it. “You must return to the dragon. To Verity’s dragon. And you two,” her head swiveled to regard the Fool and Nighteyes. “You two should go up to that lookout point and see if Regal’s troops are in sight yet. Nighteyes, you let Fitz know what you see. Go on, both of you. And Fool. You leave Girl-on-a-Dragon alone after this. You would have to give her your entire life. And even then, it might not be enough. That being so, stop torturing yourself. And her. Go on, now!”
They went, but not without some backward looks. “Come on,” Kettle ordered me tersely. She began to hobble back the way she had come. I followed, walking as stiffly as she, through the black and silver shadows of the blocks that littered the quarry. She looked every bit of her two hundred-odd years. I felt even older. Aching body, joints that caught and creaked. I lifted my hand and scratched my ear. Then I snatched it down, chagrined. Verity would have a silver ear now. Already the skin of it burned, and it seemed the distant night insects chirred more loudly now.
“I am sorry, by the way. About your Molly girl and all. I did try to tell you.”
Kettle did not sound sorry. But I understood that now. Almost all of her feelings were in the dragon. She spoke of what she knew she would have felt, once. She still had pain for me, but she no longer recalled any pain of her own to compare it with. I only asked, quietly, “Is there nothing private anymore?”
“Only the things we keep from ourselves,” she replied sadly. She looked over at me. “It is a good thing you do this night. A kind thing.” Her lips started to smile but her eyes teared. “To give him one last night of youth and passion.” She studied me, the set look on my face. “I shall say no more of it, then.”
I walked the rest of the way beside her in silence.
I sat by the warm embers of last night’s fire and watched the dawn come. The shrilling of night insects changed gradually to the morning challenges of distant birds. I could hear them very well now. It was strange, I thought, to sit and wait for myself. Kettle said nothing. She breathed deep of the changing scent of the air as night turned to dawn and watched the lightening of the sky with avid eyes. Storing it all up to put into the dragon.
I heard the grate of boot against stone and looked up. I watched myself coming. My stride was confident and brisk, my head up. My face was freshly washed, my wet hair slicked back from my brow into a warrior’s tail. Verity wore my body well.