IF THE TRUTH be known, Forging was not an invention of the Red-Ships. We had taught it well to them, back in the days of King Wisdom. The Elderlings that took our revenge on the OutIslands soared many times over that country of islands. Many Outlslanders were devoured outright, but many others were overflown by dragons so often that they were stripped of their memories and feelings. They became callous strangers to their own kin. That was the grievance that had rankled so amongst that long memoried folk. When the Red-Ships sailed, it was not to claim Six Duchies territory or wealth. It was for revenge. To do to us as so long ago we had done to them, in the days of their great-great-grandmothers.
What one folk know, another may discover. They had scholars and wise folk of their own, despite Six Duchies disdain of them as barbarians. So it was that mention of dragons were studied by them, in every ancient scroll they could find. While it would be difficult to find absolute proof, it seems to me that some copies of scrolls collected by the Skillmasters of Buck might actually have been sold, in the days before the Red-Ships menaced our coasts, to OutIslander traders who paid well for such things. And when the slow movement of glaciers bared, on their own shores, a dragon carved of black stone and outcroppings of more of that black stone, their wise men combined their knowledge with the insatiable lust for vengeance of one Kebal Rawbread. They resolved to create dragons of their own, and visit upon the Six Duchies the same savage destruction we had once served upon them.
Only one White Ship was driven ashore by the Elderlings when they cleansed Buck. The dragons devoured all her crew, down to the last man. In her hold were found only great blocks of shining black stone. Locked within them, I believe, were the stolen lives and feelings of the folk of the Six Duchies who had been Forged. Their studies had led the OutIslander scholars to believe that stone sufficiently imbued with life-force could be fashioned into dragons to serve the Outlslanders. It is chilling to think how close they came to discovering the complete truth of creating a dragon.
Circles and circles, as the Fool once told me. The OutIslanders raided our shore, so King Wisdom brought the Elderlings to drive them back. And the Elderlings Forged the Outlslanders with Skill when they flew over their huts so frequently. Generations later, they came to raid our shores and Forge our folk. So King Verity went to wake the Elderlings, and the Elderlings drove them back. And Forged them in the process. I wonder if once more the hate will fester until …
I sigh and set my quill aside. I have written too much. Not all things need to be told. Not all things should be told. I take up the scroll and make my slow way to the hearth. My legs are cramped from sitting on them. It is a cold damp day, and the fog off the ocean has found every old injury on my body and awakened it. The arrow wound is still worst. When cold tightens that scar, I feel its pull on every part of my body. I throw the vellum onto the coals. I have to step over Nighteyes to do it. His muzzle is graying now and his bones do not like this weather any more than mine do.
You are getting fat. All you do anymore is lie by the hearth and bake your brains. Why don't you go hunting?
He stretches and sighs. Go bother the boy instead of me. The fire needs more wood.
But before I can call him, my boy comes into the room. He wrinkles his nose at the smell of burning vellum and gives me a scathing look. "You should have just asked me to bring more wood. Do you know how much good vellum costs?"
I make no reply, and he just sighs and shakes his head over me. He goes out to replenish the wood supply.
He is a gift from Starling. I have had him for two years now, and I am still not used to him. I do not believe I was ever a boy such as he is. I recall the day she brought him to me, and I have to smile. She had come, as she does, some twice or thrice a year, to visit me and chide me for my hermit ways. But that time she had brought the boy to me. He had sat outside on a skinny pony while she pounded on my door. When I opened to her, she had immediately turned and called to him, "Get down and come inside. It's warm here."
He had slid from the pony's bare back and then stood by him, shivering, as he stared at me. His black hair blew across his face. He clutched an old cloak of Starling's about his narrow shoulders.
"I've brought you a boy," Starling announced, and grinned at me.
I met her gaze incredulously. "Do you mean … he is mine?"
She shrugged at me. "If you'll have him. I thought he might do you good." She paused. "Actually, I thought you might do him good. With clothing and regular meals and such. I've cared for him as long as I can, but a minstrel's life …" She let her words trail off.
"Then he is … Did you, did we …" I floundered my way through the words, denying my hope. "He is your son? Mine?"
Her grin had widened at that, even as her eyes had softened in sympathy. She shook her head. "Mine? No. Yours? I suppose it's possible. Did you pass through Flounder Cove about eight years ago? That's where I found him six months ago. He was eating rotten vegetables from a village midden heap. His mother is dead, and his eyes don't match, so her sister wouldn't have him. She says he's a demon gotten bastard." She cocked her head-at me and smiled as she added, "So I suppose he might be yours." She turned back to him again and raised her voice. "Come inside, I tell you. It's warm. And a real wolf lives with him. You'll like Nighteyes."
Hap is a strange boy, one brown eye and one blue. His mother had not been merciful, and his early memories are not gentle ones. She had named him Mishap. Perhaps, to her, he was. I find I call him "boy" as often as not. He does not seem to mind. I have taught him his letters and his numbers and the growing and harvesting of herbs. He was seven when she brought him to me. Now he is nearly ten. He is good with a bow. Nighteyes approves of him. He hunts well for the old wolf.
When Starling comes, she brings me news. I do not know that I always welcome it. Too many things have changed, too much is strange. Lady Patience rules at Tradeford. Their hemp fields yield fully as much paper now as they do fine rope. The size of the gardens there have doubled. The structure that would have been the King's Circle is now a botanical garden of plants gathered from every corner of the Six Duchies and beyond.
Burrich and Molly and their children are well. They have Nettle and little Chivalry and another on the way. Molly tends her hives and candle shop, while Burrich has used stud fees from Ruddy and Ruddy's colt to begin to breed horses again. Starling knows these things, for it was she who tracked them down and saw to it that Ruddy and Sooty's colt were given over to him. Poor old Sooty was too old to survive the journey home from the Mountains. Molly and Burrich both believe I am many years dead. Sometimes I believe that, too. I have never asked her where they live. I have never seen any of the children. In that, I am truly my father's son.
Kettricken bore a son, Prince Dutiful. Starling told me he has his father's coloring, but looks as if he will be a tall slender man, like Kettricken's brother Rurisk, perhaps. She thinks he is more serious than a boy should be, but all of his tutors are fond of him. His grandfather journeyed all the way from the Mountain Kingdom to see the lad who will someday rule both lands. He was well pleased with the child. I wondered what his other grandfather would have thought of all that had come to pass from his treaty making.
Chade no longer lives in the shadows, but is the honored adviser to the Queen: According to Starling, he is a foppish old man who is entirely too fond of the company of young women. But she smiles as she says it, and "Chade Fallstar's Reckoning" will be the song she is remembered for when she is gone. I am sure he knows where I am, but he has never sought me out. It is as well. Sometimes, when Starling comes, she brings me curious old scrolls, and seeds and roots for strange herbs. At other times she brings me fine paper and clear vellum. I do not need to ask the source. Occasionally, I give her in return scrolls of my own writing: drawings of herbs, with their virtues and dangers; an account of my time in that ancient city; records of my journeys through Chalced and the lands beyond. She bears them dutifully away.
Once it was a map of the Six Duchies that she brought to me from him. It was carefully begun in Verity's hand and inks, but never completed. Sometimes I look at it and think of the places I could fill in upon it. But I have hung it as it is upon my wall. I do not think I will ever change it.
As for the Fool, he returned to Buckkeep Castle. Briefly. Girl-on-a-Dragon left him there, and he wept as she rose without him. He was immediately acclaimed as a hero and a great warrior.
I am sure that is why he fled. He accepted neither title nor land from Regal. No one is quite sure where the Fool went or what became of him after that. Starling believes he returned to his homeland. Perhaps. Perhaps, somewhere there is a toymaker who makes puppets that are a delight and a marvel. I hope he wears an earring of silver and blue. The fingerprints he left on my wrist have faded to a dusky gray.
I think I will always miss him.
I was six years in finding my way back to Buck. One we spent in the Mountains. One was spent with Black Rolf. Nighteyes and I learned much of our own kind in our seasons there, but discovered we like our own company best. Despite Holly's best effort, Ollie's girl looked at me and decided I would most definitely not do. My feelings were not injured in the least and it provided an excuse to move on again.
We have been north to the Near Islands, where the wolves are as white as the bears. We have been south to Chalced, and even beyond Bingtown. We have walked up the banks of the Rain River and ridden a raft back down. We have discovered that Nighteyes does not like traveling by ship, and I do not like lands that have no winters. We have walked beyond the edges of Verity's maps.
I had thought I would never return to Buck again. But we did. The autumn winds brought us here one year, and we have not left since. The cottage we claimed as ours once belonged to a charcoal burner. It is not far from Forge, or rather where Forge used to be. The sea and the winters have devoured that town and drowned the evil memories of it. Someday, perhaps, men will come again to seek the rich iron ore. But not soon.
When Starling comes, she chides me, and tells me I am a young man yet. What, she demands of me, became of all my insistence that one day I would have a life of my own? I tell her I have found it. Here, in my cottage, with my writing and my wolf and my boy. Sometimes, when she beds with me and I lie awake afterward listening to her slow breathing, I think I will rise on the morrow and find some new meaning to my life. But most mornings, when I awake aching and stiff, I think I am not a young man at all. I am an old man, trapped in a young man's scarred body.
The Skill does not sleep easily in me. In summers especially, when I walk along the sea cliffs and look out over the water, I am tempted to reach forth as Verity once did. And sometimes I do, and I know for a time, of the fisherwoman's catch, or the domestic worries of the mate of the passing merchant ship. The torment of it, as Verity once told me, is that no one ever reaches back. Once, when the Skill-hunger was on me to the point of madness, I even reached for Verity-as-Dragon, imploring him to hear me and answer.
He did not.
Regal's coteries long ago disbanded for lack of a Skillmaster to teach them. Even on the nights when I Skill out in despair as lonely as a wolf's howling, begging anyone, anyone to respond, I feel nothing. Not even an echo. Then I sit by my window and look out through the mists past the tip of Antler Island. I grip my hands to keep them from trembling and I refuse to plunge myself whole into the Skill river that is waiting, always waiting to sweep me away. It would be so easy. Sometimes all that holds me back is the touch of a wolf's mind against mine.
My boy has learned what that look means, and he measures the elfbark carefully to deaden me. Carryme he adds that I may sleep, and ginger to mask the elfbark's bitterness. Then he brings me paper and quill and ink and leaves me to my writing. He knows that when morning comes, he will find me, head on my desk, sleeping amidst my scattered papers, Nighteyes sprawled at my feet.
We dream of carving our dragon.