“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?
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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. ”
“Take what?” I demanded.
Breathlessly, he replied, “Your pain. Your life. ”
I stood frozen and uncomprehending as he lifted his mouth to mine.
I think he tried to be gentle. Nonetheless, it was more like a serpent's strike than a tender kiss as his mouth fastened to mine and the venom of pain flowed. I think that if there had not been his love mixed with the anguish he gave back to me, I would have died of it, human or not. It was a searing, scalding kiss, a flow of memories, and once they began, I could not deny them. No man, in the fullness of his years, should have to experience afresh all the passion that a youngster is capable of embracing. Our hearts grow brittle as we age. Mine near shattered in that onslaught.
It was a storm of emotion. I had not forgotten my mother. Never forgotten, I had banished her to a part of my heart and refused to open the door to it, but she was there, her long gold hair smelling of marigolds. And I remembered my grandmother, also of Mountain stock, but my grandfather had been no more than a common guardsman, posted too long at Moonseye and taking on the Mountain ways. All that I knew in a flash, and recalled how my mother had summoned me in from the pastures where, even at five, I had a share of the shepherding. “Keppet, Keppet!” her clear voice would ring out, and I would run to her, barefoot over wet grass.
And Molly . . . how had I ever banished the smell and taste of her, honey and herbs, and the way her laugh rang like chimes when I had chased down the beach after her, her red skirts whipping wildly around her bare calves as she ran, or the feel of her hair in my hands, the heavy strands of it tangling and snagging on the rough skin of my palms? Her eyes were dark, but they'd held the light of the candles when I'd looked down on them below me as I made love to her in her servant's room in the upper reaches of Buckkeep Castle. I had thought that light seen there would always belong only to me.
And Burrich. He'd been father to me in every way he could, and friend to me when I'd been tall enough to stand at his side. A part of me understood how he had fallen in love with Molly when he'd thought I was dead, but a part of me was outraged and hurt beyond common sense or rationality that he could have taken to wife the mother of my daughter. In ignorance and passion, he had stolen from me both woman and child.
Blow after blow rained on me. I was pounded iron on an anvil of memory. I languished again in Regal's dungeons. I smelled the rotting straw on the floor and felt the cold of the stone against my smashed mouth and pulped cheek as I lay there, trying to die so he could not hurt me anymore. It was a sharp echo of the beating Galen had given me years before, on the stone tower top we had called the Queen's Garden. He had assaulted me physically and with the Skill, and to finish the task, he had crippled my magic, putting it firmly in my mind that I had no ability and would do better to kill myself than live on in shame to my family. He had given me, forever, the memory of teetering on the brink of taking my own life.
It was new, it all happened to me afresh, flaying my soul and leaving me bared to a salty wind.
I came back to summer and the sun's slackening strength. The shadows were darker under the trees. I sprawled on the forest humus, my face hidden in my hands, beyond tears. The Fool sat next to me in the leaves and grass, patting my back as if I were an infant and singing some gentle, silly song in his old tongue. Slowly it caught my attention and my shuddering breaths calmed. When at last I was still, he spoke to me quietly. “It's all right now, Fitz. You're whole again. This time, when we go back, you'll go all the way ba
ck to your old life. All of it. ”
After a time, I found I could breathe deeply again. Gradually I got to my feet. I moved so cautiously that the Fool came to take my arm. But it was not weakness but wonder that slowed my steps. I was like a man given back his sight. The edges of every leaf stood out when I glanced at it, and there, the veins, and a lacy heart where insects had fed. Birds called overhead and answered, and my Wit of them was so keen that I could not focus on the soft questions the Fool kept asking me. Light broke in streams through the canopy of leaves overhead, sending shafts of gold arrowing through the forest. Floating pollen sparked briefly in those beams. We came to the stream and I knelt to drink its cold, sweet water. But as I bent over it, the rippling of the water over the stones suddenly captured me and drew me in to the clear, darkling world beneath the moving water. Silt was layered in patterns over the smoothed pebbles and water plants swayed gently in the current of water. A silver fingerling angled through the plants to disappear beneath a trapped brown leaf. I poked at it with a finger and had to laugh aloud at how he darted away from me. I looked up at the Fool, to see if he had also seen it, and found him looking down on me fondly but solemnly. He set his hand to my head as if he were a father blessing a child and said, “If I think of all that befell me as a linked chain that brings me finally to this place, with you kneeling by the water, alive and whole, then . . . then the price was not too high. To see you whole again heals me. ”
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He was right. I was whole again.
We did not leave the forest plaza that evening. Instead, I built a new fire, and stared into it for most of the night. As if I were sorting scrolls or storing herbs for Chade, I went through all the years since I had given half my life away, and reordered my experience of them. Half-passions. Relationships in which I had invested nothing and received it in return. Retreats and evasions. Withdrawal. The Fool lay between the fire and me, pretending to sleep. I knew he kept vigil with me. Toward dawn, he asked me, “Did I do you a wrong?”
“No,” I said quietly. “I did myself a wrong, long ago. You've put me on the path to righting it. ” I did not know how I would do it, but I knew I would.
In the morning, I scattered the ashes of our fire on the plaza. We left the Elderling tent billowing in the wind and fled a promised summer squall. We shared out my winter clothing between us, and then, his fingers pressed to my wrist, and Skill-linked, we entered the pillar.
We stepped out into the pillar room of the Pale Woman's ice castle. The Fool gasped and went to his knees after two staggering steps into the room. The trip through the pillar did not affect me as badly, though I knew a moment's vertigo. Almost immediately, the chill of the place seized me. I helped the Fool to his feet. He stared around himself in wonder, hugging himself against the cold. I gave him some time to recover, and time to explore the frost-rimed windowpanes, the snowy view, and the Skill-pillar that dominated the room, and then told him quietly, “Come on. ”
We went down the stairs, and halted again in the map room. He looked down at the world portrayed there. His long fingers wandered over the rippling sea and then returned, to hover over Buck. Without touching them, he indicated the four jewels set near Buckkeep. “These gems . . . they indicate Skill pillars?”
“I think so,” I replied. “And those would be the Witness Stones. ”
He touched, a wistful caress, the coast of a land far to the south and east of Buckkeep. No gem winked there. He shook his head. “No one who knew me lives there anymore. Silly even to think of it. ”
“It's never silly to think of going home,” I assured him. “If I asked Kettricken, she—”
“No, no, no,” he said quietly. “It was but a passing fancy, Fitz. I cannot go back there. ”
When he had finished gazing at the map, we went down the stairs, deeper into the pale blue light of the labyrinth. I felt as if we descended back into old nightmare. As we went, I saw his trepidation grow. He grew paler, not just from the cold. The half-healed bruises on his face stood out like shadows of the Pale Woman's power over us. I tried to stay to the stone passages and find some egress from there, without success. As we wandered from room to room, the beauty of the place touched me even as I worried about the Fool's growing silence and weariness. Perhaps we had misjudged, and he was not yet ready to confront the place where he had been so tormented.
Many of the chambers on this stone level seemed untouched by the vandalism and degradation I had seen elsewhere in the ice fortress. Themes of forest and flowers or fish and birds were lovingly chiseled into the stone lintels, and were echoed in the friezes within the chambers. The friezes seemed exotic and foreign, the colors either too pastel or too smoky for my Six Duchies taste. The figures of the humans were elongated, with fancifully colored eyes and strange markings on their faces. They called to mind Selden, the Bingtown Trader, with his unnatural growth and scaled face. I said as much to the Fool, and he nodded. Sometime later, as we walked down yet another stone passageway, he asked me, “Have you ever seen a white rose that has grown for years in proximity to a red?”
“Probably,” I said, thinking of the gardens at Buckkeep. “Why?”
His mouth quirked to one side. “I think you have looked at them without truly seeing them. After years of such closeness, there is an exchange. It shows most plainly in the white roses, for they may take on a rosy blush, or exhibit faint tendrils of red in what used to be snowy white blossoms. It happens because there has been an exchange of the very stuff of their beings. ”
I gave him a curious look, wondering if his mind was wandering and I should be concerned. He shook his head at me. “Be patient. Let me explain. Dragons and humans can live side by side. But when they do so for a long period, they influence one another. Elderlings show the effect of having been exposed to dragons for generations. ” He shook his head a bit sadly and added, “It is not always a graceful transformation. Sometimes, there is too much exposure, and the children do not survive much past birth, or suffer a shortened life span. For a few, life may be extended, at the expense of fertility. The Elderlings were a long-lived race, but they were not fecund. Children were rare and treasured. ”
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“And we are responsible for bringing dragons back into the world, so they may wreak this change upon us again?” I asked him.
“Yes. We are. ” He seemed quite calm about it. “Humanity will learn the cost of living in proximity to dragons. Some will pay it gladly. Elderlings will return. ”
We walked for a time in silence and another question came to me. “But what of dragons? Do they take no effect from their exposure to us?”
He was silent for a longer time. Then he said, “I suspect they do. But they find it shameful and banish such beings. You have been to Others Island. ”
That boggled my thoughts. I could think of nothing to say. Again we came to a junction of corridors, one of ice and two of stone. I chose one of the stone ones at random. As we paced along it, I tried to reconcile the Fool's notion of Elderlings with what I had experienced of them.
“I thought Elderlings were close to gods,” I said at last. “Far loftier than humans in both spirit and mind. So they have seemed when I've encountered them, Fool. ”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“In the Skill-current. Bodiless beings, of great power of mind. ”
He threw up his head suddenly and I halted beside him, listening. He turned to look at me, his eyes huge. My hand went to my sword. For a time, we stood frozen. I heard nothing. “It's all right,” I told him. “Air moves in these old passages. It sounds like someone whispering in the distance. ”
He nodded, but it took several minutes for his breath to slow. Then he said, “I suspect that the Skill is what remains to you from an older time. That it is the trailing end of a talent that developed between dragons and humans, as a way to communicate. I do not understand what you speak of when you talk
of the Skill-current, but perhaps the ability can allow one to transcend the need for a physical body. You have already shown me that it is a far more powerful magic than I ever suspected. Perhaps it was a result of living alongside the dragons, and perhaps it lingered. So that even after dragons were gone, the descendants of the Elderlings kept that ability, and passed it down to their children. Some inherited little of it. In others”—he gave me a sideways glance—“the Elderling blood ran stronger. ”
When I was silent for a time, he asked, almost mockingly, “You can't quite admit it aloud, can you? Not even to me. ”
“I think you are wrong. Would not I know such things if they were true, would not I feel them? You seem to be saying that I am descended, somehow, from the Elderlings. And that would mean that, in a sense, I am part dragon myself. ”
He gave a snort of laughter. It was so welcome a sound from him that I treasured it, even at my expense. “Only you would put it that way, Fitz. No. Not that you are part dragon, but rather that, somewhere, the stuff of dragons entered your family line. Some ancestor of yours may have ‘breathed the dragon's breath,' as the old tales say. And it has come down to you. ”
We walked on, our feet scuffing on stone. The passages echoed oddly, and several times the Fool glanced back over his shoulder. “Like a long-tailed kitten born from a long line of stump tails?” I asked him.
“I suppose you could think of it that way. ”
I nodded slowly to myself. “That would account for the Skill cropping up in odd places. Even in the Outislanders, it would seem. ”
“What's this?”
His eyes had always been sharper than mine. His long fingers touched a mark scratched on the wall. Incredulous, I stepped closer to peer at it. It was one of mine. “It's the way home,” I told him.