Fool's Quest (87 page)

“Tats, Thymara, do you think it wise to ask him to interfere? Will not both Fente and Sintara take this amiss when they return?” Queen Malta cautioned them.

“When they return, I will worry about it,” Thymara declared. “Until then, why should Fillia pay for their neglect? Six Duchies prince, can you help her?”

I studied the child. I could almost see the conflicting plans for her. One ear was tasseled, the other pointed. The discord rang against my senses like the chiming of a cracked bell. I tried to be cautious. “I don't know. And if I try, I may have to draw on her strength, on the reserves of her own body. It will be her own flesh that makes the changes. I can guide her, but I cannot supply what her body needs.”

“I don't understand,” Tats objected.

I pointed at her feet. “You can see that her feet strive to become the feet of a dragon. Some bone must go away, flesh must be added. I cannot cut nor can I add. Her body must do that.” I could hear the muttering of the gathered Elderlings as they discussed my words.

The green father dropped to one knee to look into his daughter's face. “You must decide, Fillia. Do you want to do this?”

She looked up at me, in fear and hope. “I want to run again and not have it hurt. My face is tight when I try to smile so that I think my lips will crack.” She touched her scaled scalp. “I would have hair, to keep me warmer!” She lifted her hands to me. Her nails were blue and tipped like claws. “Please,” she said.

“Yes,” I responded. I held my hands out to her and she set her fate in them. Two slender hands in my sword-callused ones. I felt her pain as she struggled to balance on her twisted feet. I sank down to sit on the floor and she folded gratefully. The Skill in me sent a tendril to touch her brow. This one, ah, this one was a puzzle. Here was her father and there her mother, and here the dragons that had touched her and quarreled over her like two children ripping at a single doll. There were so many possible ways. “What would you like?” I asked her, and her face lit. Her vision of herself surprised me. She did not mind her strong clawed feet, if only they would grow straight. She wished for a blue horse on one cheek, and for the darker green in her scaling to run up her back and down her arms like vines. She wanted black hair, thick and strong like her mother's, and ears that she could move to catch sound. She showed me and with the Skill, I persuaded her body to follow her will. I heard as at a distance her parents speaking in worried tones, but it was not their choice to make but hers. And when at last she stepped back from me, walking on the front pads of her high arched feet, shaking back a glossy mane, she cried out to them, “See me! This is me!”

Another child they brought to me, born with nostrils so flat to his face that he could scarcely breathe. We found the nose he should have had, and lengthened his fingers and set his hips so that he might walk upright. This child moaned and I was sorry for how he ached with the turning of his bones, but, “It must be done!” the Skill and I whispered to him. He was thin when I gifted him back to his fathers, and panting with pain. One stared at me, teeth bared, and the other wept, but the boy breathed and the hands that he reached to them had thumbs he could move.

“Fitz. You are finished. Stop.” Amber's voice trembled.

The Skill coursed through me and I recalled that this rush of pleasure was as dangerous as it was sweet. To some. To some it was dangerous. But I was learning, I'd learned so much this very day. I could control it in ways I'd never learned before, in ways I'd never thought were possible. To touch with a tendril, to read the makeup of a child, to allow someone to guide the Skill I wielded as if sharing a grip on a brush, all this I could do.

And I could cool the Skill, reduce it from a boil to a simmer. I could control it.

“Please!” a woman shouted suddenly. “Kind prince, if you would, cannot you open my womb! Let me conceive and bear a child! Please. I beg you, I beg you!”

She flung herself down at my feet and embraced my knees. Her head was bowed, her hair hanging past her heavily scaled face as she sobbed. She was no Elderling but one whose body had been distorted by contact with dragons. With every child I had touched, the influences of a dragon on a growing human body had become plainer to me. In some of the children, I had seen deliberation and even art in how dragons had marked them. But in this woman, the changes were as random as a tree planted in rocky soil and shaded by a boulder. As close as she was to me, I could not exclude her from my Skill, and as it closed around her I felt her innate ability in the magic. It was untrained and yet in that instant I shared how deep her longing for a child was, and how it distressed her to watch the slow years pass and her cradle remain empty.

Such a familiar pang. How could I refuse such a request when I knew so well what it was like to have it denied? Why had I never sought to use the Skill to find why Molly could not bear a child for us? Years wasted, never to be recovered. I set my hands to her shoulders to lift her to her feet and in doing so closed a circle. We were bound for that moment, the pain of loss tying us together, and what had been crooked in her the Skill straightened and what had been closed opened. She cried out suddenly and stepped back from me, her hands clasped over her belly. “I felt the change!” she cried out. “I felt it!”

“Enough!” Amber cried in a low voice. “This must be enough.”

But there was suddenly before me a man saying, “Please, please, the scales have grown down my brow and onto my eyelids. I can barely see. Push them back, I beg of you, prince from the Six Duchies.” He seized my hand and set it to his face. Did he have the Skill as the woman had, or was it that it was running so strongly in me that I could not deny it? I felt the scales retreat from his eyelids, from his brow-line, and he fell back from me laughing aloud.

Someone took my hand and held it tightly. I felt the fabric of a glove against my skin.

“King Reyn! Queen Malta, please, tell them they must step back! He heals them at great danger to himself. He must stop, he must take rest now. See how he shakes! Please, tell them they must not ask more of him.” I heard the words. They meant little to me.

“Good keepers and friends, you hear Lady Amber! Step back, give him room!” Malta's voice came from across the room. Closer to me were other voices.

“Please, kind prince!”

“My hands, if only you would mend my hands!”

“I wish to look like a woman again, not a lizard! My prince, please, please!”

In a lower voice, I heard the Fool give his orders. “Spark, Per, stand before him and hold them back. Push them back! Lant, where are you? Lant?”

“People of Kelsingra! Keep order. Step back from the prince, give him room!” There was anxiety in Reyn's voice, bordering on fear.

It was hard to use my eyesight when the Skill flowed so strongly all around me, far more potent than any of my senses, far stronger even than my Wit. My eyes were poor things, relying on light to show me the outer shapes of things. Still, I looked for Lant and found him at my side, struggling to take something from his pocket. In front of me, Spark and Per had linked arms and stood between me and a wall of pushing people. They could not hold them back, not when such need consumed them. I closed my eyes and stopped my ears. Such senses only confused me when I could blanket the room with Skill and know so much more.

Amber's gloved hand still gripped mine and her free hand was on my chest now, trying to push me back and away from the reaching hands. It was a hopeless gesture. The room was large and the people had flowed to surround us. There was no “back” now, only a noose of desperate people struggling toward us.

As mobs go, it was a small one, and no one meant me harm. Some pushed toward me out of hunger and need. Some strove to be first, others only to see what wonder I would next work, and some pushed to try and break through the wall of people in front of them so that they might have a chance to beg a boon of their own. One woman pushed because she did not want another woman to reach me and have her face changed, lest she win the man they both desired. Rapskal was in the thick of it, with Kase and Boxter, not to find order but to see if somehow Amber would betray that she was sighted, for he was certain she had been to the Silver well, and he was consumed with hatred that anyone would attempt to steal Silver from the dragons.

“Fitz. Fitz!
Fitz!
You have to stop. Set your walls, come back to yourself. Fitz!”

I had forgotten my body. It was shaking all around me and Lant's arms were around my chest, trying to hold me up. “Get away from us!” Lant roared, and for a moment the press of the crowd lessened. But those who could see me collapsing were pushed forward by those who wished to know what was happening. This I knew in a dispassionate way. I would fall, Lant would go down holding on to me, the grim youngsters trying to hold back the crowd would stumble backward, and we would be trampled.

The Skill told me that Amber had been pushed up under my arm. “Fitz,” the Fool said by my ear. “Fitz, where are you? I can't feel you. Fitz, put up your walls! Please, Fitz. Beloved.”

“Give him this!” Lant cried out to her.

None of it mattered. Skill was a spreading pool and I was spreading with it. There were others here, diluted and mingled. They'd enjoyed what I had done. I sensed that there were some here who were larger and more intact, larger souls that were more defined. Older and wiser. I couldn't be one of them. There wasn't enough of me. I'd spread and disperse. Mingle. I could just let go. It would be like the sweetsleep. Stop the worries, give up the guilt. The worst were the sharp-edged hopes that I still clung to. The hope that somewhere, somehow, Bee still existed and would tumble intact from a Skill-pillar. But it was far more likely that she was here in this amorphous mingling. Perhaps letting go was the closest I'd ever get to reuniting with her.

Being Fitz had never been that enticing an existence.

Fingers prying at my lips, pressing on my teeth. Bitterness in my mouth. The Skill-tide that had surged so strongly against me became a lapping of calmer water. I tried to recede with it.

The touch of fingers on my wrist burned. Burned exquisitely, pain and ecstasy inseparable.

BELOVED!

The word echoed through me, rebounded from my fraying edges, found and bound me. I was there, trapped in an exhausted and shaking body, trembling as Lant hugged me from behind and held me upright. His hand was over my mouth and I tasted elfbark. Dry powder coated my lips. Per and Spark, arms locked, faced out into the press. They were crowded up against Amber, pushing her against me.

The Fool embraced me, his head bowed on my chest. One of his arms was around my neck, holding on to me. I clutched an empty glove in one hand. Slowly and dully, I lifted that hand to look at the glove. The Fool's hand, his fingers gleaming silver, clutched my wrist, burning my identity into me. The bond was shockingly and completely renewed.

“I told you!” Rapskal's shout was guttural with excitement and validation. “I told you they were thieves! See there, see on her hand, my proof! Silver! She has stolen Silver from the dragons and she must be punished! Seize her! Seize all of them!”

A moment of horror and shock. I heard Spark give a shriek as someone grabbed her. In the next instant the Fool was torn away from me. I struggled to remain standing.

I heard the Fool scream as the surging crowd engulfed us.

After not being for so long, I was not sure how to exist.

Uncurl,
Wolf-Father commanded me.
You have to be ready before they are.
Uncurl. Stand up.

I couldn't. I tried. Somewhere, I knew I had legs and arms. A face. Sunlight. Warm. Slowly those words began to have meaning again. Sunlight was touching me and it was almost warm. I was sprawled on my back. I blinked my eyes. I was looking up at blue sky. The sun was too bright. I tried to move but my body was weighted down with something.

I heard a terrible sound. I rolled my head toward it. The Chalcedean who had liked Shun. He was making the sounds. I could not remember his name. He was on all fours and he was stretching his mouth wide open and making peculiar retching sounds. I thought he would be sick on the ground. Instead he collapsed back onto his belly. His face was turned toward mine, and he looked at me. Nothing human was in his eyes. They grew wider until I could see the whites all around them. He pursed his lips as if he would blow a horn and hooted at me. They were silly sounds that were somehow frightening.

Fear can help you do things. I rolled over onto my belly and suddenly knew what was holding me down. The heavy, floppy fur coat I wore was like being rolled up in a rug. I tried to get my knees under me but instead I knelt inside the coat and could not move. The sounds the Chalcedean was making were getting stranger, as if he were trying to make squirrel noises.

I rolled onto my back. My floppy hands found the peg-and-loop fastenings that held the coat shut. I fumbled at them, trying to make the part of me that knew how to undo them connect with my fingers. His sounds were now like a dog trying to howl. I gave up on the pegs and sat up. I was suddenly far too warm and getting out of the coat seemed more important than getting away from the madman. I managed to stand up, staggered a few steps, and almost fell over someone. One of Dwalia's luriks. I could not think of her name. She was dead, I suddenly knew. I tottered away from her, still fighting with the pegs on my coat. I saw Dwalia. She was underneath someone and fighting to get out from under him.

Don't look. Run. Just run. You are safer in the forest than among these evil creatures. There is one here who will help us if I can wake him. Run. Run where I show you.

I ran. I had landed on a surface of black stone like paving stones in the middle of a forest. I reached a place where melting snow vied with sprouting grass. Spring? How could it be spring? I had been dragged into the stone-pillar in winter. Where had I been? What was I not remembering?

A wave of vertigo swept over me. I fell, going to my knees and my hands met the melting edge of a snowbank. I got up and staggered away. Into the forest. Get into the forest as fast and as far as I could.

Behind me I heard Dwalia shout, “Catch her! Don't let her get away! We can never go home unless we bring her with us.”

I ran.