The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (159 page)

His greed for the Skill won out. He added his voice to Dutiful’s. ‘Please, Lord Golden, take a seat with us. If nothing else, you may find our efforts amusing.’

‘Well, then, I shall,’ the Fool declared almost gladly. He pulled out a chair and sat down expectantly. I wondered if any of the others could see the darker tides running behind the placid affability he presented to them. Chade and I took the chairs on either side of him while Dutiful persuaded Thick to come and join us at the table. When he was settled, four of us simultaneously took a deep breath and reached for that state of openness where we could all reach the Skill. As we did so, I had an insight both affirming and alarming. The Fool was an intruder here. In our short time of striving to become a coterie, we had achieved a unity. I had not perceived it until the Fool interrupted it. As I joined my awareness to Dutiful’s and Thick’s, I could feel Chade fluttering like a frantic butterfly at the edge of our union. Thick reached a reassuring hand to draw him into firmer contact with the rest of us. He belonged with us, but the Fool did not.

He was not so much a presence as an absence. I had noticed years ago that he was invisible to my Wit-sense. Now, as I deliberately reached toward him with the Skill, it was like trying to lift sun dazzle off a still pond.

‘Lord Golden, do you avoid us?’ Chade asked very softly.

‘I am here,’ he replied. His words seemed to ripple softly in the room, as if I felt them as well as heard them.

‘Give me your hand,’ Chade suggested. He set his own, palm up, on the table, outstretched toward my friend. It seemed as much a challenge as an invitation.

I felt a minuscule tickle of fear. It quivered along the Skill-bond between the Fool and me, letting me know that link still existed. Then the Fool lifted his gloved hand and set it in Chade’s.

I could feel him then, but not in any way that is easy to describe. If our combined Skill was a quiet pool, then the Fool was a leaf floating upon it. ‘Reach for him,’ Chade suggested, and we all did. My awareness of the Fool’s uneasiness grew stronger via our bond, but I did not think the others could sense that. They could almost touch him, but he parted before them and joined after
them, as if they dragged their fingers through water. It disturbed his presence without making it accessible to them. His fear intensified. I reached along our bond surreptitiously, trying to discover what frightened him.

Possession. He did not wish to be touched in a way that might let another possess him. Belatedly I recalled what Regal and his coterie had once done to him. They had found him, through the link I shared with him, and taken a bit of his consciousness and used it against me, to spy upon me and gain knowledge of Molly’s whereabouts. That betrayal still shamed and pained him. He still carried that burden of guilt for something that had happened so long ago. It stabbed deeper that soon he would know that I had betrayed him as well.

It wasn’t your fault.
I offered him comfort through our link. He refused it. Then, as if from a distance and yet clear, his thoughts reached mine.

I knew it would happen. I’d foretold it myself, when I was a child. That the one closest to you would betray you. Yet I could not believe that it would be me. And so I fulfilled my own prophecy.

We all survived.

Barely.

‘Are you Skilling to one another?’ Chade asked testily. I both heard and felt his words.

I took a deeper breath and sank deeper into the Skill. ‘Yes,’ I breathed. ‘I can reach him. But only just. And only because we have been Skill-linked before.’

‘Would you have more than this?’ The Fool’s voice was less than a whisper. I discerned a challenge in his words, but could not understand it.

‘Yes, please. Try,’ I bade him.

Beside me at the table, I was aware of the Fool making some small movement but my vision was unfocused on the room and I had no warning of his intentions until his hand settled on my wrist. His fingertips unerringly found their own faded grey fingerprints, left on my flesh so many years ago. His touch was gentle, but the sensation was an arrow in my heart. I physically spasmed, a speared fish, and then froze. The Fool ran through my veins, hot as liquor, cold
as ice. For a flashing instant, we shared physical awareness. The intensity of it went beyond any joining I’d ever experienced. It was more intimate than a kiss and deeper than a knife thrust, beyond a Skill-link and beyond sexual coupling, even beyond my Wit-bond with Nighteyes. It was not a sharing, it was a becoming. Neither pain nor pleasure could encompass it. Worse, I felt myself turning and opening to it, as if it were my lover’s mouth upon mine, yet I did not know if I would devour or be devoured. In another heartbeat, we would be one another, know one another more perfectly than two separate beings ever should.

He’d know my secret.

‘No!’ I cried before he could discover my plot against him. I wrenched myself free, mind and body. For a long time I fell, until I struck the cold stone floor. I rolled under the table to escape that touch, gasping. My time of blackness seemed to last for hours, yet it was only an instant before Chade dragged my curled body from under the table. He propped me against his chest as he knelt beside me. Dimly I was aware of him demanding, ‘What happened? Are you hurt? What did you do to him, Fool?’

I heard a sob escape Thick. He alone, perhaps, had sensed what had transpired. A prickling shiver ran over my body. I could not see anything. Then I realized my eyes were tightly clenched shut, my body huddled in a ball. Knowing those things, it still took me a time to persuade myself I could change them. Just as I opened my eyes, the Fool’s thought uncurled in my mind like leaf opening to sunlight.

And I set no limits on that love.

‘It’s too much,’ I said brokenly. ‘No one can give that much. No one.’

‘Here’s brandy,’ Dutiful said close by me. It was Chade who hauled me into a sitting position and put the cup to my lips. I gulped it as if it were water, then wheezed with the shock. When I managed to turn my head, the Fool was the only one still sitting in his chair at the table. His hands were gloved again, and the look he gave me was opaque. Thick crouched in a corner of the room, hugging himself and shivering. His Skill-music was his mother’s song, a desperate attempt to comfort himself.

‘What happened?’ Chade demanded in a fierce voice. I still leaned against his chest, and I could feel the anger emanating from him like heat. I knew he directed his accusatory glare at the Fool, but I answered anyway.

‘It was too intense. We formed a Skill-link that was so complete, I couldn’t find myself. As if we’d become one being.’ I called it the Skill yet I was not sure that was a proper name for it. As well call a spark the sun. I took a deeper breath. ‘It scared me. So I broke free of it. I wasn’t expecting anything like that.’ And those words were spoken as much to the Fool as to the others. I saw him hear them, but I think he took a different message from them than what I had intended.

‘And it affected you not at all?’ Chade demanded of him.

Dutiful helped me to my feet. I needed his aid. I sank down into a chair almost immediately. Yet it was not weariness I felt, but a loose energy. I could have scaled Buckkeep’s highest tower, if I could have recalled how to make my knees bend.

‘It affected me,’ the Fool said quietly. ‘But in a different way.’ He met my eyes and said, ‘It didn’t frighten me.’

‘Shall we try it again?’ Dutiful proposed innocently, and ‘No!’ Chade, the Fool and I all replied with varying degrees of emphasis.

‘No,’ the Fool repeated more quietly in the tiny silence that followed. ‘For myself, I’ve learned enough today.’

‘Perhaps we all have,’ Chade concurred gruffly. He cleared his throat and went on, ‘It’s time we dispersed to our own tasks anyway.’

‘We’ve still plenty of time,’ Dutiful protested.

‘Ordinarily, yes, that would be so,’ Chade agreed. ‘But the days run away from us now. You’ve much to do to prepare for our journey, Dutiful. Rehearse your speech thanking the Outislanders for their welcome again. Remember, the “ch” is sounded toward the back of the throat.’

‘I’ve read it a hundred times now,’ Dutiful groaned.

‘And when the time comes, the words must seem to come from your heart, not from a scroll.’

Dutiful nodded grudgingly to this. He gave one longing look at the bright and breezy day outside the window.

‘Off you both go, then,’ Chade told him, and it was suddenly clear he was dismissing both Thick and Dutiful.

Disappointment crossed the Prince’s face. He turned to Lord Golden. ‘When we are at sea, and have more time and fewer tasks, I’d like to hear of your time with my father. If you wouldn’t mind. I know that you cared for him when he … at the end of his days.’

‘I did,’ the Fool replied gently. ‘And I’d be glad to share my memories of those days with you.’

‘Thank you,’ Dutiful replied. He went to the corner, and gently chivvied Thick along, asking him what on earth had frightened him, for no one had been hurt. I was grateful that Thick had no intelligible answer to that.

They were nearly at the door when I recalled my earlier resolution. ‘Prince Dutiful, would you come to my workroom this evening? I’ve something for you.’

He raised an eyebrow, but when I said no more, he replied, ‘I’ll find time. I’ll see you then.’

Dutiful left with Thick trudging at his heels. But at the door, Thick turned and gave the Fool an oddly appraising look before he transferred his gaze to me. I wondered uneasily how much he had sensed of what had passed between the Fool and me. Then Thick was gone, shutting the door rather too firmly behind himself.

For a moment, I feared that Chade would demand to know more of what had happened. But before he could speak, the Fool said, ‘Prince Dutiful must not kill Icefyre. That is the most important thing that I must tell you, Chade. At all costs, the dragon’s life must be preserved.’

Chade had crossed to the bottles of spirits. He selected one, poured from it silently, and then turned back to us. ‘As the creature is frozen in a glacier, don’t you think it might be a bit late to worry about preserving his life?’ He sipped from his glass. ‘Or do you truly think that any beast could survive that long, bereft of warmth, water and food?’

The Fool lifted his shoulders and shook his head. ‘What do any of us know of dragons? How long had the stone dragons slept before Fitz woke them? If they share any of their natures with true dragons, then perhaps some spark of life still glows within Icefyre.’

‘What do you know of Icefyre?’ Chade demanded suspiciously. He came back to the table and sat down. I remained standing, watching the two of them.

‘I know no more of him than you do, Chade.’

‘Then why forbid us the taking of his head, when you know the Narcheska has demanded this as a condition of the marriage? Or do you think the world would be set into a better path if our two realms remained at each other’s throats for another century or two?’

I winced at his sarcasm. Never would I have mocked the Fool’s stated goal to change the world. It shocked me that Chade did, and made me realize the depth of his antagonism.

‘I’ve no love of strife, Chade Fallstar,’ the Fool replied softly. ‘Yet even a war amongst men is not the worst thing that can occur. Better war than that we do deeper, graver damage to our world itself. Especially when we have the briefest grasp at a chance to repair an almost irreparable wrong.’

‘Which is?’

‘If Icefyre lives … and I concede it would be surpassing strange if he did … but if there is some spark of life in him yet, we must abandon all other quests to free him from the ice and restore him to full life.’

‘Why?’

‘You haven’t told him?’ He swung an accusing gaze to me. I didn’t meet it and he didn’t wait for me to reply. ‘Tintaglia, the Bingtown dragon, is the sole adult female dragon in the world. With every passing year, it becomes more apparent that the young ones which emerged from their cases will remain stunted and weak, unable to hunt or fly. Dragons mate in flight. If the hatchlings never fly, they can never mate. Dragons will die out in the world. And this time, it will be forever. Unless there remains one fully-formed male dragon. One who could rise to mate Tintaglia and sire a new generation of dragons.’

I had told Chade all those things. Did he ask his question to test the Fool’s frankness?

‘You are telling me,’ Chade enunciated carefully, ‘that we must put peace between the Out Islands and the Six Duchies at risk for the sake of reviving dragons. And this will benefit us how?’

‘It won’t,’ the Fool admitted. ‘On the contrary. It will present many drawbacks for men. And many adjustments. Dragons are an arrogant and aggressive species. They ignore boundaries and have no concept of ownership. If a hungry dragon sees a cow in a pen, he’ll eat it. To them, it’s simple. The world provides and you take what you need from it.’

Chade smiled archly. ‘Then perhaps I should do the same, on behalf of humanity. The world has provided us a time free of dragons. I think I shall take it.’

I watched the Fool. He was not upset by Chade’s words. For the space of two breaths he held his peace. Then he said, ‘As you will, sir. But when the time comes, that decision may not be yours. It may be mine. Or Fitz’s.’ As Chade’s eyes blazed with anger, he added, ‘And not only the world but humanity itself does need dragons.’

‘And why is that?’ Chade demanded disdainfully.

‘To keep the balance,’ the Fool replied. He glanced over at me, and then past me, out of the window and his eyes went far and pensive. ‘Humanity fears no rivals. You have forgotten what it was to share the world with creatures as arrogantly superior as yourselves. You think to arrange the world to your liking. So you map the land and draw lines across it, claiming ownership simply because you can draw a picture of it. The plants that grow and the beasts that rove, you mark as your own, claiming not only what lives today, but what might grow tomorrow, to do with as you please. Then, in your conceit and aggression, you wage wars and slay one another over the lines you have imagined on the world’s face.’