The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (246 page)

He was right. I was whole again.

We did not leave the forest plaza that evening. Instead, I built a new fire, and stared into it for most of the night. As if I were sorting scrolls or storing herbs for Chade, I went through all the years since I had given half my life away, and reordered my experience of them. Half-passions. Relationships in which I had invested nothing and received it in return. Retreats and evasions. Withdrawal. The Fool lay between the fire and me, pretending to sleep. I knew he kept vigil with me. Towards dawn, he asked me, ‘Did I do you a wrong?’

‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘I did myself a wrong, long ago. You’ve put me on the path to righting it.’ I did not know how I would do it, but I knew I would.

In the morning, I scattered the ashes of our fire on the plaza. We left the Elderling tent billowing in the wind and fled a promised summer squall. We shared out my winter clothing between us, and then, his fingers pressed to my wrist and, Skill-linked, we entered the pillar.

We stepped out into the pillar room of the Pale Woman’s ice castle. The Fool gasped and went to his knees after two staggering steps into the room. The trip through the pillar did not affect me
as badly, though I knew a moment’s vertigo. Almost immediately, the chill of the place seized me. I helped the Fool to his feet. He stared around himself in wonder, hugging himself against the cold. I gave him some time to recover, and time to explore the frost-rimed windowpanes, the snowy view and the Skill-pillar that dominated the room and then told him quietly, ‘Come on.’

We went down the stairs, and halted again in the map room. He looked down at the world portrayed there. His long fingers wandered over the rippling sea and then returned, to hover over Buck. Without touching them, he indicated the four jewels set near Buckkeep. ‘These gems … they indicate Skill-pillars?’

‘I think so,’ I replied. ‘And those would be the Witness Stones.’

He touched, a wistful caress, the coast of a land far to the south and east of Buckkeep. No gem winked there. He shook his head. ‘No one who knew me lives there any more. Silly even to think of it.’

‘It’s never silly to think of going home,’ I assured him. ‘If I asked Kettricken, she –’

‘No, no, no,’ he said quietly. ‘It was but a passing fancy, Fitz. I cannot go back there.’

When he had finished gazing at the map, we went down the stairs, deeper into the pale blue light of the labyrinth. I felt as if we descended back into old nightmare. As we went, I saw his trepidation grow. He grew paler, not just from the cold. The half-healed bruises on his face stood out like shadows of the Pale Woman’s power over us. I tried to stay to the stone passages and find some egress from there, without success. As we wandered from room to room, the beauty of the place touched me even as I worried about the Fool’s growing silence and weariness. Perhaps we had misjudged, and he was not yet ready to confront the place where he had been so tormented.

Many of the chambers on this stone level seemed untouched by the vandalism and degradation I had seen elsewhere in the ice fortress. Themes of forest and flowers or fish and birds were lovingly chiselled into the stone lintels, and were echoed in the friezes within the chambers. The friezes seemed exotic and foreign, the colours either too pastel or too smoky for my Six Duchies taste. The figures of the humans were elongated, with fancifully coloured eyes and
strange markings on their faces. They called to mind Selden, the Bingtown Trader, with his unnatural growth and scaled face. I said as much to the Fool, and he nodded. Sometime later, as we walked down yet another stone passageway, he asked me, ‘Have you ever seen a white rose that has grown for years in proximity to a red?’

‘Probably,’ I said, thinking of the gardens at Buckkeep. ‘Why?’

His mouth quirked to one side. ‘I think you have looked at them without truly seeing them. After years of such closeness, there is an exchange. It shows most plainly in the white roses, for they may take on a rosy blush, or exhibit faint tendrils of red in what used to be snowy white blossoms. It happens because there has been an exchange of the very stuff of their beings.’

I gave him a curious look, wondering if his mind was wandering and I should be concerned. He shook his head at me. ‘Be patient. Let me explain. Dragons and humans can live side by side. But when they do so for a long period, they influence one another. Elderlings show the effect of having been exposed to dragons for generations.’ He shook his head, a bit sadly and added, ‘It is not always a graceful transformation. Sometimes, there is too much exposure, and the children do not survive much past birth, or suffer a shortened lifespan. For a few, life may be extended, at the expense of fertility. The Elderlings were a long-lived race, but they were not fecund. Children were rare and treasured.’

‘And we are responsible for bringing dragons back into the world, so they may wreak this change upon us again?’ I asked him.

‘Yes. We are.’ He seemed quite calm about it. ‘Humanity will learn the cost of living in proximity to dragons. Some will pay it gladly. Elderlings will return.’

We walked for a time in silence and another question came to me. ‘But what of dragons? Do they take no effect from their exposure to us?’

He was silent for a longer time. Then he said, ‘I suspect they do. But they find it shameful and banish such beings. You have been to Others’ Island.’

That boggled my thoughts. I could think of nothing to say. Again we came to a junction of corridors, one of ice and two of stone. I chose one of the stone ones at random. As we paced along it, I
tried to reconcile the Fool’s notion of Elderlings with what I had experienced of them.

‘I thought Elderlings were close to gods,’ I said at last. ‘Far loftier than humans in both spirit and mind. So they have seemed when I’ve encountered them, Fool.’

He gave me a quizzical look.

‘In the Skill-current. Bodiless beings, of great power of mind.’

He threw up his head suddenly and I halted beside him, listening. He turned to look at me, his eyes huge. My hand went to my sword. For a time, we stood frozen. I heard nothing. ‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘Air moves in these old passages. It sounds like someone whispering in the distance.’

He nodded, but it took several minutes for his breath to slow. Then he said, ‘I suspect that the Skill is what remains to you from an older time. That it is the trailing end of a talent that developed between dragons and humans, as a way to communicate. I do not understand what you speak of when you talk of the Skill-current, but perhaps the ability can allow one to transcend the need for a physical body. You have already shown me that it is a far more powerful magic than I ever suspected. Perhaps it was a result of living alongside the dragons, and perhaps it lingered. So that even after dragons were gone, the descendants of the Elderlings kept that ability, and passed it down to their children. Some inherited little of it. In others,’ he gave me a sideways glance, ‘the Elderling blood ran stronger.’

When I was silent for a time, he asked, almost mockingly, ‘You can’t quite admit it aloud, can you? Not even to me.’

‘I think you are wrong. Would not I know such things if they were true, would not I feel them? You seem to be saying that I am descended, somehow, from the Elderlings. And that would mean that, in a sense, I am part dragon myself.’

He gave a snort of laughter. It was so welcome a sound from him that I treasured it, even at my expense. ‘Only you would put it that way, Fitz. No. Not that you are part dragon, but rather that, somewhere, the stuff of dragons entered your family line. Some ancestor of yours may have “breathed the dragon’s breath” as the old tales say. And it has come down to you.’

We walked on, our feet scuffing on stone. The passages echoed oddly, and several times the Fool glanced back over his shoulder. ‘Like a long-tailed kitten born from a long line of stump tails?’ I asked him.

‘I suppose you could think of it that way.’

I nodded slowly to myself. ‘That would account for the Skill cropping up in odd places. Even in the Outislanders, it would seem.’

‘What’s this?’

His eyes had always been sharper than mine. His long fingers touched a mark scratched on the wall. Incredulous, I stepped closer to peer at it. It was one of mine. ‘It’s the way home,’ I told him.

    
And dark Oerttre, mother to them all, lifted her eyes and shook her head.

    
‘
It cannot be,’ she said with grave resolve. ‘We are not bound by what mere men have said.

    
My eldest must remain here, to reign after me. Woman to woman is our power passed.

    
You would take our Narcheska to be your Queen? Of all our treasure, she would be the last

    
That we would forfeit, no matter what your deed. Show me in fact how you have fulfilled

    
The letter of your promise. In blood you wrote your vow that you’d do as she had willed.

    
O Farseer Prince, recall now the boast that you did say:

    
On these hearthstones of our mothershouse, Icefyre’s head you’d lay.
’

The Dragon’s Head
, Cockle Longspur

We followed my marks backward through the Elderling maze, and emerged eventually from the crack in the icy wall into a bright day. The wind was brisk and blowing ice crystals filled the air, peppering our skins and making the steep path treacherous underfoot. The clear light of true day made my eyes tear. The Fool went before me down the steep path. Here, exposed to the wind and cold, his weakness showed plain, and I muttered at my own stupidity. This had overtaxed him. The second time he slipped, I took a firm grip on the back of his collar and kept him upright on his feet until we
reached the Black Man’s door. ‘Knock!’ I told him, but when he only stared back at me, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, I reached past him to thud my fist against the wood.

The door was opened so swiftly that I had to believe that he had been waiting for us. Even then, the Fool stood frozen, staring at the smiling Black Man who confronted us. ‘He’s cold, and very weary,’ I excused him, and then thrust him into the room in front of me. Once inside I pushed the door firmly shut behind us and then turned back gratefully to the cosy room. I blinked, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness after the brightness of full daylight. I saw the small hearth fire first, and then I found the Black Man staring at the Fool in mutual incredulity.

‘He was dead,’ the Black Man told me firmly. ‘He died.’ His eyes were very wide.

‘Yes. He was.’ I confirmed it for him. ‘But I am the Catalyst. I change things.’

And then Thick sprang up from the hearth and grasped me in a short-limbed hug. He danced like a little bear as he shouted, ‘You’re back! You’re back! I thought you would never come back. Chade said, “The ship is coming,” and I said, “But he’s not here and I won’t get on a ship.” Then he said, “It’s coming anyway.” And it did, but no one was there and it went back, because I said, “No, I am not walking back all alone, all alone, and I don’t want to get on a ship anyway!”’ He halted his dance and then told me with a satisfied grin, ‘Either you are dead or Chade is so angry at you that you’ll wish you were. That was what he said. Dutiful. Oh, and the dragon head, I forgot to tell the dragon head part. Nettle did it! She sent the dragon head to the mothershouse and it was a big surprise for everyone. Except me. She told me she could do it, could talk to Tintaglia and make her sorry if she didn’t. So she did. And everything is good again now.’

The last he said so confidently that it was difficult to look down into the cheerful round-eyed face and say, ‘I don’t think I understood half of what you just told me. And I think I have been away longer than I thought. But I’m glad to be back.’ I extricated myself from his hug. A strange silence had fallen in the other half of the room. The Black Man and the Fool regarded one another, not
with animosity, but disbelief. Looking at the two of them together, I could see a kinship, but it was one of ancient lineage rather than a close family resemblance. The Black Man was the first to speak.

‘Welcome,’ he said faintly.

‘I never saw you,’ the Fool said wonderingly. ‘In all the futures I glimpsed, in all that might be, I never saw
you.
’ He abruptly began to tremble and I knew he was at the end of his strength. The Black Man seemed to sense this also, for he pushed a cushion closer to the fire and motioned hastily that the Fool should be seated. The Fool more collapsed than sat down. I took my cloak from around him, telling him, ‘The warmth will reach you faster if you let it in.’

‘I don’t think I’m that cold,’ he said faintly. ‘I’m just … I’m outside my time, Fitz. I’m a fish in the air or a bird beneath the sea. I’m past my life and I grope forward through each day, wondering what I am meant to do with myself. It’s hard. It’s very hard for me.’ His voice dwindled as he said the words. He looked up at the Black Man as if begging for help. His head wavered on his neck.

I did not know what to say to him. Did he resent that I had sought more life for him? It hurt to think so, but I held my tongue. I watched the Black Man grope for words. ‘This, I can teach …’ The Black Man’s voice slowly faded away. A smile slow as sunrise came to his face. He cocked his head at the Fool and said something in another tongue.

The Fool opened to him as a flower turns to light. A tremulous smile lit his face and he replied hesitantly in the same language. The Black Man whooped aloud in delight to hear him. He gestured at himself and said something rapidly, and then, as if remembering his manners, took up the kettle and a cup and with a graceful flourish, poured tea for the Fool and set it before him. The Fool thanked him extravagantly. Their language seemed to take many words to say simple things. Not one syllable of it resembled any tongue I’d ever heard before. The Fool’s voice grew fainter. He took a breath and then finished what he was saying.

I felt an adolescent pang of exclusion. Almost as if the Fool sensed it, he turned slowly to me. He pushed his hair back from his face with fingers that shook. ‘I have not heard the language of my childhood since, well, since I left home. It is like balm to hear it again.’