The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (245 page)

I sighed heavily. It had been the night I had Skill-walked, and seen Molly take Burrich as her man. Later that evening, I had worn Verity’s body, for he had borrowed mine, to get himself a son. To get Dutiful upon Queen Kettricken. I had not known that had been his intent. In an old man’s aching body, I had wandered the memory stone quarry. Wandered it until Nighteyes and I had come upon the Fool at his forbidden task. He had been chipping at the stone around the dragon’s feet, trying to finish the dragon so it might be set free. I had felt sorry for him, so great was his empathy with the creature. I had known, too, what it truly took to quicken a dragon: not just the work of a man’s hands, but the surrender of his life and his memory, his loves and his pains and his joys. And so I had set Verity’s Skill-silvered hands to the rocky flesh of Girl on a Dragon, and I had poured forth into her all the misery and pain of my short life, that she might take it and take life with it. Into the dragon I had poured my parents’ abandonment of me to the care of strangers, and all I had suffered at Galen’s hands and in Regal’s dungeon. I had given those memories to the dragon to keep and to hold and to shape herself with. I had given her my loneliness as a child and every sharp-edged misery of that night. Given it willingly, and felt my pain ease even as the world dulled around me and my love of it dimmed slightly. I would have given far more if the wolf had not stopped me. Nighteyes had rebuked me, saying that he had no wish to be bonded to a Forged one. I had not, at that time, grasped what he meant. Having seen the warriors who served the Pale Woman, I thought I understood better now.

I thought I understood, too, what the Fool had in mind and why he had come here. ‘Don’t do it!’ I pleaded with him, and when he looked at me in sharp surprise, I said, ‘I know you are thinking of putting your memories of her torture of you into the dragon. Girl on a Dragon could drain them out of you and keep them forever locked away where they cannot stab you. It would work. I know that. But there is a cost to that surcease from pain, Fool. When you dull pain and hide it from yourself …’ My words trickled away. I did not want to sound self-pitying.

‘You dull your joys as well.’ He said it simply. He looked away from me for a time, his lips folded. I wondered if he weighed the one against the other. Would he decide to be rid of night terrors at the expense of taking fresh joy in every morning? ‘I saw that in you, afterwards,’ he said. ‘I felt guilty. If I had not been chipping away at Girl on a Dragon, you never would have done it. I wished to undo it. Years later, when I came to see you at your cottage, I thought, “surely he will be healed by now. Surely he will have recovered.”’ He swung his gaze to meet me. ‘But you had not. You had just … stopped. In some ways. Oh, you were older and wiser, I suppose. But you had not made any move on your own to reach out to life again. But for your wolf, I think it would have been even worse. As it was, you were living like a mouse in a wall, off the crumbs of affection that Starling tossed to you. As thick-skinned as she is, even she could see it. She gave you Hap and you took him in. But if she had not brought him to your doorstep and dumped him there, would you have sought out anyone to share your life?’ He leaned closer to me and said, ‘Even after you came back to Buckkeep and your old world, you held yourself apart from it. No matter what I did or offered. Myblack. You couldn’t even connect to a horse.’

I stood very still. His words stung but they were also true. ‘Done is done,’ I said at last. ‘The best I can do now is to say, if that is what you came here to do, don’t do it. It wasn’t worth it.’

He sighed. ‘I’ll admit I thought of it. I admit I longed for it. I will even tell you that this is not the first time I have visited Girl on a Dragon since we came here. I thought of offering her my memories. I know she would take them, just as she took yours. But … in a way … although I did not see this future, almost it seems as if it was meant to be. Fitz. What do you recall of her story?’

I took a breath. ‘Verity told me that she was part of a coterie making a dragon. I recall her name. Salt. I discovered that, the night I gave her my memories. But Salt could not give herself willingly to the dragon. She sought to remain a part of the coterie, and yet separate, to be only the Girl of Girl on a Dragon. And with that, she doomed them. Because she held back too much, they did not have enough life to take flight as a dragon. They nearly quickened, but then mired down in stone. Until you freed them.’

‘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 honour, 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 bitter-sweet 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, colour flowed into it from the dragon. The crown gleamed gold, the rooster heads that ringed it shone red and their jewelled 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?

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 any more. 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 back 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 into the clear, darkling world beneath the moving water. Silt was layered in patterns over the smoothed pebbles and water plants moved gently in the current. 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.’