The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (223 page)

The coals in the kettle oven waited and the powder was in my hands. Somewhere in the Pale Woman’s hall below me, the Fool strained to hold himself away from the memory stone that continued to Forge him at each touch. I should hurry.

I could not.

I groaned and yet again, weighed my choices in the balance. Free the dragon, and what did we win? Nothing. Perhaps Icefyre would rise to mate with Tintaglia; perhaps there would once again be dragons in the world. The Fool had never promised us any great good from that, except for his conviction that dragons and Elderlings were somehow connected. Freeing the dragon guaranteed me nothing except the Fool’s slow Forging and the continued degradation of the Narcheska’s mother and sister. But if I killed the
dragon, Dutiful would win Elliania’s love and gratitude. They would consummate their marriage, and reign long with many children and we’d be at peace with the Out Islands …

‘
Think it through for yourself
,’ Burrich had said to me. ‘
With no assumptions.
’ Blind as he was, he had still seen more clearly than Chade and I had. We had been so fixed on securing the betrothal, so fixed on killing the dragon. But now, almost too late, I applied what Chade had taught me years ago. ‘
Ask yourself, what happens next? Who benefits?
’ I pushed my thoughts out of their rut as if I were levering out a stuck wagon. Kill the dragon. The Pale Woman grants death to the Narcheska’s mother and sister, and releases the Fool to me. And then what? Who benefits?

A Farseer kills the Outislander dragon. What happens next? I saw it as clearly as if I had been granted the Fool’s prescience. That insult to the Outislanders would not only eliminate all chance of dragons returning to the world, it would become the incident that united the Outislanders against the Six Duchies. Far from guaranteeing a marriage that would secure a lasting peace, it would be the spark that set off the conflagration of war again. Chade, Dutiful and I were the last male members of the Farseer line; I doubted that any of us would leave the island alive. And Nettle? If Kettricken revealed my daughter’s bloodlines and proclaimed her the Farseer heir, would the Outislanders let her reign in peace? I doubted it. The uncertain peace we had achieved in the last fifteen years would be swept aside. The slaughter would begin here on Aslevjal and spread. There would be no one to rouse the stone dragons this time, no Elderling allies to come to our aid. Destruction and Forging would return to our shores. The Pale Woman would reign, unchallenged, for the future she had made.

My heart was pounding in my chest with what I had nearly done. As the Fool had predicted, the choice had passed to me. I had come so close to fulfilling the Pale Woman’s dreams. I set my own fingertips to the marks the Fool had left on my wrist. ‘Forgive me,’ I begged him. ‘Forgive me for doing what you hoped I would do.’ Then I threw myself flat on the ice and with every bit of strength I had, I flung my awareness, Wit and Skill, at the dragon.

My Skill was a flapping, fluttering moth, but my Wit was strong.
I felt Icefyre become aware of me. I felt the danger of his regard, just as prey lifts its head abruptly, knowing that a predator has focused on it. But I did not quail before him, but roared with my body’s strength, like one predator challenging another for territory. With my Wit, I could not convey my thoughts to him, but perhaps he would reach for me. Perhaps if he touched his mind to mine, he could know what I knew. That there was another dragon, a female, and she was even now winging her way toward us guided by a gull.

I know he sensed me, but to him I was a crow, neither prey nor pack, unworthy of his attention. His thoughts rolled over and away from me, and he made another dive into death and oblivion.

I flailed in panic. Just when I needed the Skill most, it had faded to a flickering ember in me. I was not strong enough to reach the dragon’s mind on my own. He was too determined to seek his own oblivion. I tried again, honing my Skill to an arrow’s point, and jabbing it toward the dragon.

There you are. I thought you were dead! I’ve been seeking you every night for days now. What is wrong, why did you vanish?
Nettle’s powerful sending caught my weak Skill like strong hands clutching at a drowning man. She held my thoughts to hers. I pushed her away.

Nettle, not now. Go away. I have no time for you now.

And then, just as she fled in affront and hurt, my stupidity broke over me, and I cried out,
No, come back, wait, I need you!

She halted at the edge of my awareness. I saw fluttering rags of her dream. She was a hunter, her hair tied back and a game net held at the ready. I lunged at her, pleading,
No, come back! Please! I need your help!

For what?
she demanded coldly.

I’d hurt her by my brusque dismissal after so long an absence. I doubt that she recollected that she was the one who had first barricaded her thoughts against mine. I wished I had time for explanations, but I did not. Already my Wit-sense of the dragon was starting to subside. In moments, he’d be beyond my reach.
Help me wake a dragon!
I pleaded with her.
He dives down deep into his dreams, seeking death. But if you can reach down into sleep, perhaps you can reach down into his death dream and pull him back from there.

But … Shadow Wolf? Changer? Is it truly you, bidding me do this? Always before, you cautioned me of the dragon, warning me not to even say her name. Now you would have me wake her for you?

It’s a different dragon.
And then, knowing how little time there was, I trod heavily where I had never ventured to go before.
Please. If you would only do this thing for me, trusting me, without asking why. There is so little time. I would tell you all if we had time
, I will tell you all when it is over. Only, for now, I ask you to trust me. Wake this dragon for me. Help me speak to him.

What dragon?

This one!
I pointed frantically, Wit and Skill, but Icefyre was gone again.
Wait, wait!
I begged her.
He dives deep right now, but he is here, I promise you. Wait and watch with me. In a moment, he’ll be back.

Are you all right? Why haven’t you come out yet? Have you placed the powder?
It was a panicky Skilling from Dutiful, breaking into my desperate thoughts to Nettle.

A moment or two longer, my prince. There is something I must do here.
Then, as the dragon suddenly surged back into existence below me, I frantically summoned Nettle with,
There! There he is. Wake him, reach him! Tell him he is not the last of his kind, tell him of Tintaglia. Tell him that she comes for him, to wake him and restore dragons to the air and earth.

Then, like a roll of doom, Chade burst in with,
Fitz, what do you do? Would you betray us? Would you betray me, after all these years? Would you betray the Farseer throne and your own blood?

I do what I must!
I Skilled it out wildly, feeling the strength of my magic wobble and fail. I could not tell if anyone heard me. I found I was lying flat on the ice in the tunnel. The dragon had receded again. By my head, the kettle glowed red. The container of powder was by my hand. I summoned my magic, hammered it like red iron and thrust it out into the world. I begged, hoping Nettle heard my thought.
Tell him to turn away from death and choose life. Choose struggle and toil and pain and lovely, lovely life. Speak to him and tell him that Tintaglia still lives. Speak to him for me.

I will try
, she agreed dubiously. She had held our link. I felt her thought but could no longer see her.
I do not perceive this dragon
that you speak of. But if you can show him to me, show me his dream, perhaps I can enter it and find him there.

I held a feeble Skill-wall against Chade’s threats, imprecations and pleas and Dutiful’s confusion while I pressed myself against the floor of ice and sought for the dragon that had no awareness of me. I could not reach him. Time both raced and dragged for me. I needed to reach him soon, before Chade could act against me, physically or with the Skill. I did not doubt that he would stop me if he could.

I recalled there had been a place where our spirits had touched, the dragon’s and mine, and I had entered his dream. I did not want to return to that time and that memory. It had been a turning point in time, not unlike this one, I suddenly realized. It had been one of the Fool’s crossroads; a place where a decision made by one had altered all that had followed. Burrich had chosen, for love of me, to use a magic he found hateful. I had chosen to trust the wolf and embrace a death that was not a death. In doing so, I had unwittingly chosen to go on living.

I found the place where my experience matched Icefyre’s. I found the cold and the dark and the despair, I found the longing for a death that I could not reach on my own. I returned my soul to Regal’s dungeon of beatings and isolation.

It was one thing to know I had been in a place like that. It was another to reach for it, to taste again old blood around my loosened teeth, to smell the stink of my own festering wounds, and feel the numbing cold of the stone walls that was still not enough to dull the aching of my battered flesh. I put my soul back into that trapped body and knew again the despair of reaching for a death that would not come to me. I pushed the life from my body and held it at bay, only to have it flow relentlessly back into my flesh the moment I relaxed my guard against it.

Sweet Eda, was that really you, trapped like that? I thought it but one of your nightmares!

Nettle’s horror nearly ripped me from my despair, but in that moment, I felt the dragon once more surge back to the edge of life’s shores. In that instant, we touched and duplicated one another. My nightmare and his were the same, and I felt Nettle’s awareness flow from my nightmare into the dragon’s dark dream.

An instant later, I grasped the fullness of my error. His dream closed around her and took her down as he submerged his life again. I heard Nettle’s fading wail at the complete foreignness of the consciousness that now enmeshed her.

I had time only to gasp. Then she was gone, fallen into a tarry darkness that engulfed her.

I Skilled uselessly after her. It was like groping in cold black water. And then even my awareness of the dragon was snatched from me, and my daughter was carried down with him, into the death he so avidly sought.

Once, I had seen a motley-fish leap from the water and seize a sea bird in its jaws and bear it down. So had it been. One moment Nettle had been with me, poised at my request to plunge in where I bid her go. And she had and now she was gone, carried down to a place I could not even imagine. I had risked her, weaponless, untrained in the Skill. She had gone at my request. The magnitude of my stupidity gutted me. I could neither blink nor breathe.

I had fed my daughter to a dragon.

I tried to unbelieve that it had happened, to force time back by sheer effort of will. It was impossible that such a terrible thing could have happened so instantaneously, impossible that so dreadful an error could be irreversible. The injustice of it alone would have seemed to make it impossible. She had done nothing to deserve such an end. It was my fault; it should have fallen upon me. Horror hollowed me as I scratched my claws against iron-hard reality. I could not unmake that moment of foolishness. What had possessed me, why hadn’t I paused to think before I flung her into the dragon’s dream?

Dimly, I was aware of the others.

Where did she go? What happened?
This from Dutiful.

She went in the dragon. I been there. The music is big, but he doesn’t let you go. He doesn’t find you and he doesn’t care. You have to be his music, down there. No room for your own music.
Thick’s Skilling was full of awe and fear.

But worst was Chade’s woeful,
Oh, Fitz, what have you done? What have you done?

I wanted to die, if dying could undo my shame and remorse.
I needed to die, because I could not live through feeling those things.

And in that horrid place, I again touched the dragon. Touched him, and knew that he had taken my message from Nettle. Taken it and demanded more of her, to know more of things that she did not know. He had torn her wide and emptied her out, a useless juvenile human female, full of their trivial fancies. And so he had discarded her, coughed her out into the Skill, a useless indigestible bit of waste. Like a thoughtless child would wipe the scales of a dead butterfly’s wings from his grubby hands, he disposed of her. Unprepared, she dispersed, a drop of pale ink in a rush of water.

And now the dragon found me, wordlessly, roaring into my being, tearing me open to the Skill as if he ripped the scar from an old wound. It was not the Skill that linked our minds, but it was kin to it in some strange way. And in that instant, it was all out of my hands. For I had the knowledge that he wanted, and he took it. He tore my mind open like an old purse, upended my memory as if it were a crock of oddments and sorted my life impatiently for whatever he wished to know. And even before he was finished, our fate, the fate of all humans, was sealed. For Tintaglia, roaring like a storm wind, suddenly rushed through me, using her awareness of me to find Icefyre. It was as if they converged inside my body; I was the conduit for them, briefly, until they recognized one another. After that, they locked their minds together and cast me aside, unneeded, unnoticed, and unimportant. But their use of me had torn me wide and turned me inside out, emptied me into the wild currents of the Skill. I could no longer find myself, and did not much care to try.

I lay like a flayed fish and the Skill swept past me, carrying off bits of me. It suddenly seemed as if all my walls had not been protection but barriers that had confined me and cut me off from all that was best. It was not even that the Skill-flow was heady and intoxicating; it just seemed inevitable now, the ending I had always been destined for. It would obliterate me and let me forget what I had been and what I had done. That seemed an impersonal kindness, but one I longed for.