Fool's Fate (19 page)

    For Nettle asked, as I knew she must, “And where is 'safe with you'? And how do I know he is safe? How do I know you are a true thing at all? Perhaps you are like the rest of this dream, a thing I made. Look at you, man-wolf! You are not real and you offer me false hope.”

    “I am not real as you see me,” I replied slowly. “But I am real. And once upon a time, your father knew me.”

    “'Once upon a time,' ” she said scornfully. “Another tale from Shadow Wolf. Take your silly stories away.” She took a shuddering breath and fresh tears started down her face. “I'm not a child any longer. Your stupid stories can't help me.”

    So I knew I had lost her. Lost her trust, lost her friendship. Lost my chance of knowing my child as a child. Terrible sadness welled up in me, but it was laced with the music of brambles growing. I glanced behind me. The thorn vines and fog had crept higher. Was it just my own dream threatening me, or had Thick's music become even more menacing? I didn't know. “And I came here seeking your help,” I reminded myself bitterly.

    “My help?” Nettle asked in a choked voice.

    I had spoken without thinking. “I know I don't have the right to ask you for anything.”

    “No. You don't.” She was looking past me. “What is that, anyway?”

    “A dream. A nightmare, actually.”

    “I thought your nightmares were about falling.” She sounded intrigued.

    “That's not my nightmare. It belongs to someone else. He is...It's a very strong nightmare. Strong enough to spread out from him and take over the dreams of other people. It's threatening lives. And I don't think the man whose dream it is can control it.”

    “Just wake him up, then.” She offered the solution disdainfully.

    “That might help, for a little time. But I need a more permanent solution.” For a brief moment, I considered telling her that the man's nightmare endangered Swift, as well. I pushed the thought aside. There was no use frightening her, especially when I wasn't sure she could help me.

    “What did you think I could do about it?”

    “I thought you could help me go into his dream and change it. Make it pleasant and calm. Convince him that what is happening to him won't kill him, that he'll be fine. Then his dreams might be calmer. And we could all rest.”

    “How could I do that?” And then, more sharply, “And why should I do that? What do you offer me in exchange, Shadow Wolf?”

    I did not like that it had come down to barter, but I had only myself to blame. It was cruelest of all that the only thing I had to offer her would bring pain and guilt for her father. I spoke slowly. “As to how, you are very strong in the magic that lets one person walk into another person's dreams and change them. Strong enough, perhaps, to shape my friend's dream for him, even though he himself is also very strong in magic. And very frightened.”

    “I have no magic.”

    I ignored her words. “As for why...I have told you that Swift is with me, and safe. You doubt me. I don't blame you, for it appears I have failed you in my earlier assurance. But I will give you words, to say to your father. They will...they will be hard for him to hear. But when he hears them, he will know that what I say is true. That your brother is alive and well. And with me.”

    “Tell me the words, then.”

    For one brief Chade-ish moment, I thought of demanding that first she help me with Thick's dreaming. Then I harshly rejected that notion. My daughter owed me exactly what I had given her: nothing. Perhaps there was also the fear that if I did not speak to her then, I would lose my courage. Uttering those words was like touching my tongue to a glowing coal. I spoke them. “Tell him that you dreamed of a wolf with porcupine quills in his muzzle. And that the wolf said to you, 'As once you did, so I do now. I shelter and guide your son. I will put my life between him and any harm, and when my task is done, I will bring him safely home to you.' ”

    I had cloaked my message as best I could, under the circumstances. Nettle still struck far too close to the truth when she eagerly asked, “My father cared for your son, years ago?”

    Some decisions are easier if you don't allow yourself time to think. “Yes,” I lied to my daughter. “Exactly.”

    I watched her mull this for a moment. Slowly her tower of glass began to melt into water. It flowed, warm and harmless, past my feet until her balcony had descended to the ground. She offered me her hand to help her climb over the railing. I took it, touching and yet not touching my daughter for the first time in her life. Her tanned fingers rested briefly on my black-clawed paw. Then she stood clear of me and looked down at the fog and creeping briars that were ascending the hillside toward us.

    “You know I've never done anything like this before?”

    “Neither have I,” I admitted.

    “Before we go into his dream, tell me something about him,” she suggested. The fog and bramble crept ever closer. Whatever I told her about Thick would be too much, and yet for her to enter his dream ignorant might be dangerous to all. I could not control what Thick revealed to her in the context of the dream. For one fleeting second, I wondered if I should have consulted Chade or Dutiful before seeking Nettle's aid. Then I smiled grimly to myself. I was Skillmaster, was I not? In that capacity, this decision was mine alone.

    And so I told my daughter that Thick was simple, a man with the mind and heart of a child, and the strength of an army when it came to Skill Magic. I even told her that he served the Farseer Prince, and that he journeyed with him on a ship. I told her how his powerful Skill-music and now his dreams were undermining morale on the ship. I told her of his conviction that he would always be seasick and that he would likely die from it. And as I told her these things, the thorns grew and twined toward us, and I watched her quickly drawing her own conclusions from what I said; that I was on board the ship also, and therefore that her brother was with me, on a sea voyage with the Farseer Prince. Rural as her home was, I wondered how much she had heard of the Narcheska and the Prince's quest. I didn't have to wonder long. She put the tale together for herself.

    “So that is the black dragon that the silver dragon keeps asking you about. The one the Prince goes to slay.”

    “Don't speak her name,” I begged her.

    She gave me a disdainful look that mocked my foolish fears. Then, “Here it comes,” she said quietly. And the brambles engulfed us.

    They made a crackling sound as they rose around our ankles and then our knees, like fire racing up a tree. The thorns bit into our flesh and then a dense fog swirled up about us, choking and menacing.

    “What is this?” Nettle exclaimed in annoyance. Then, as the fog stole her from my sight, she exclaimed, “Stop it. Shadow Wolf, stop it right now! This is all yours; you made this mess. Let go of it!”

    And she wrested my dream from me. It was rather like having someone snatch away your blankets. But most jarring for me was that it evoked a memory I both did and did not recognize: another time and an older woman, prying something fascinating and shiny from my chubby-fisted grasp, while saying, “No, Keppet. Not for little boys.”

    I was breathless in the sudden banishment of my dream, but in the next instant we literally plunged into Thick's. The fog and brambles vanished, and the cold salt water closed over my head. I was drowning. No matter how I struggled I could not get to the top of the water. Then a hand gripped mine, and as Nettle hauled me up to stand beside her, she exclaimed irritably, “You are so gullible! It's a dream, and that's all it is. Now it's my dream, and in my dream we can walk on the waves. Come on.”

    She said it and it was so. Still, I held on to her hand and walked beside her. All around us, the water stretched out, glittering shoreless from horizon to horizon. Thick's music was the wind blowing all around us. I squinted out over the water, wondering how we would ever find Thick in the trackless waves, but Nettle squeezed my hand and announced clearly through Thick's wild song, “We're very close to him now.”

    And that too was so. A few steps more and she dropped to her knees with an exclamation of pity. The blinding sunlight on the water hid whatever she stared at. I knelt beside her and felt my heart break.

    He knew it too well. He must have seen it, sometime. The drowned kitten floated just beneath the water. Too young even for his eyes to be opened, he dangled weightlessly in the sea's grip. His fur floated around him, but as Nettle reached in to grip him by the scruff of the neck and pull him out, his coat sleeked suddenly flat with the water. He dangled from her hand, water streaming from his tail and paws and dribbling from his nose and open red mouth. She cupped the little creature fearlessly in her hand. She bent over him intently, experimentally flexing the small rib cage between her thumb and forefingers. Then she held the tiny face close to hers and blew a sudden puff of air into the open red mouth. In those moments, she was entirely Burrich's daughter. So I had seen him clear birth mucus from a newborn puppy's throat.

    “You're all right now,” she told the kitten authoritatively. She stroked the tiny creature, and in the wake of her hand, his fur was dry and soft. He was striped orange and white, I suddenly saw. A moment before, I thought he had been black. “You're alive and safe, and I will not let any evil befall you. And you know that you can trust me. Because I love you.”

    At her words, my throat closed up and choked me. I wondered how she knew them to say. All my life, without knowing it, I had wanted someone to say those words to me, and have them be true and believable. It was like watching someone give to another the gift you had always longed for. And yet, I did not feel bitterness or envy. All I felt was wonder that, at sixteen, she would have that in her to give to another. Even if I could have found Thick in his dream, even if someone had told me those were the words I must say, the words he most desperately needed to hear, I could not have said them and made them true as she did. She was my daughter, blood of my blood, and yet the wonder and amazement she made me feel at that moment made her a creation entirely apart from me.

    The kitten stirred in her hand. It looked about blindly. When the little red mouth opened wide, I was prepared for a yowl. Instead, it questioned in a hoarse little voice, “Mam?”

    “No,” Nettle replied. My daughter was braver than I. She did not even consider the easy lie. “But someone like her.” Nettle looked around the seascape as if noticing it for the first time. “And this is not a good place for someone like you. Let's change it, shall we? Where do you like to be?”

    His answers surprised me. She coaxed the information from him, detail by detail. When they were finished, we sat, doll-sized, in the center of an immense bed. In the distance, I could make out the hazy walls of a traveling wagon such as many puppeteer families and street performers lived in when they traveled from town to town. It smelled of the dried peppers and braided onions that were roped across one corner of the ceiling. Now I recognized the music around us, not just as Thick's Mothersong, but also the elements that comprised it: the steady breathing of a sleeping woman, the creak of wheels, and the slow-paced thudding of a team's hoofbeats, woven as a backdrop for a woman's humming and a childish tune on a whistle. It was a song of safety and acceptance and content. “I like it here,” Nettle told him when they were finished. “Perhaps, if you don't mind, I'll come and visit you here again. Would that be all right?”

    The kitten purred, and then curled up, not sleeping, but simply being safe in the middle of the huge bed. Nettle stood up to go. I think that was when I realized that I was watching Thick's dream but was no longer part of it. I had vanished from it, along with all other discordant and dangerous elements. I had no place in his mother's world.

    “Farewell for now,” Nettle told him. And added, “Now remember how easy it is to come here. When you decide to sleep, all you have to do is think of this cushion.” She touched one of the many brightly embroidered pillows on the bed. “Remember this, and when you dream, you'll come straight here. Can you do that?”

    The kitten rumbled a purr in response, and then Thick's dream began to fade around me. In a moment, I stood again on the hillside by the melted glass tower. The brambles and fog had vanished, leaving a vista of green valleys and shining rivers threading through them.

    “You didn't tell him he wouldn't be seasick anymore,” I suddenly remembered. Then I winced at how ungrateful my words sounded. Nettle scowled at me and I saw the weariness in her eyes.

    “Do you think it was easy to find all those things and assemble them around him? He kept trying to change it all back into cold seawater.” She rubbed her eyes. “I'm sleeping, and yet I suspect I'm going to wake exhausted.”

    “I apologize,” I answered gravely. “Well do I know that magic can take a toll. I spoke without thinking.”

    “Magic,” she snorted. “This dream-shaping is not magic. It is just a thing I can do.”

    And with that thought, she left me. I pushed from my mind the dread of what might be said when she gave Burrich my words. There was nothing I could do about any of that. I sat down at the base of her tower, but without Nettle to anchor it, the dream was already fading. I sank through it into a dreamless sleep of my own.

VOYAGE

    Do not make the error of thinking of the Out Islands as a kingdom under a sole monarch, such as we have in the Six Duchies, or even as an alliance of peoples such as we see in the Mountain Kingdom. Not even the individual islands, small as they may seem, are under the sole command of any single lord or noble. In fact, there are no “nobles or lords” recognized among the Outislanders. Men have status according to their prowess as warriors and the richness of the spoils they bring back. Some have the backing of their matriarchal clans to enhance whatever reputation they may claim by force of arms. Clans hold territory on the islands, it is true, but these lands are the matriarchal farmlands and gathering beaches, owned by the women and passed down through their daughters.