The Elderlings were a far-flung race. Although few writings have survived from their time, and we cannot read their runes in full, several of our own seem descended from the glyphs they chose to mark on their maps and monoliths. The little we know of them seem to indicate that they mingled with ordinary humans, sometimes residing in the same cities, and much of our knowledge may have come from that association. The Mountain folk have ancient maps that are almost certainly copies of even more ancient scrolls and seem to reflect a familiarity with a much greater territory than those people now claim. Roads and cities marked on those maps either no longer exist or are so distant as to be mythical. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that at least one of those maps shows cities that would today be as far north as Bearns and as far south as the Cursed Shores.
I didn't say a word as I rejoined Dutiful and he didn't ask. He led the way, small lantern swinging, down the ramp into a pit that had grown substantially deeper and narrower since I had last dug in it. I could see how they had concentrated their efforts once they had glimpsed the shadow of the beast trapped in the ice below them. Again, like being drenched by an unexpected wave, my Wit-sense of Icefyre swelled, and then collapsed and vanished. It unnerved me to be so aware of the one I was coming to kill.
I followed Dutiful as he led me toward the corner of the pit that became a tunnel scratched and scraped into the ice. It started out as taller than a man and two men wide. But it did not go far before it narrowed, and soon I was hunched over, which made my shoulder ache more.
As I followed him, something Burrich had said suddenly rearranged itself in my mind. Burrich had come here to slay a dragon, if he had to, anything to bring Swift home. Nettle had told Thick that her father had gone off to kill a dragon. The two together meant that Nettle didn't know about me. She knew nothing of me. I was torn between relief that I had not said anything to enlighten her and a sick foreboding that I would never really exist in her life. Suddenly the blackness and the ice and cold seemed to close in on me, and for one dizzying instant, I felt squeezed inside the glacier, trapped and wishing I could die, but unable to do even that much for myself. Shame choked me as I tried to will my own death.
Then the suffocating darkness passed and I staggered on. I set Nettle and Burrich and Molly aside, pushed away my past and looked only at the immediate thing that I needed to do: kill this dragon. I followed Dutiful deeper into the ice, telling myself that perhaps I could still save the Fool. Lying to myself.
Dutiful's little lantern showed me nothing except the slickly gleaming walls of ice and Dutiful's silhouette in front of me. The tunnel came to an abrupt end. Dutiful turned to face me and squatted down. "That's his head, down there. We think." Dutiful pointed down at the scuffed ice below us. I stared at ice he crouched on. "I don't see anything."
"With the bigger lantern and daylight behind you, you could. Just take my word for it. His head is below us." Awkwardly, he unshouldered his sack onto the floor in front of him. I hunkered down facing him. There would just be room for him to step over the kettle and squeeze past me once we got the fire going. The cold had crept into my shoulder, stiffening it, and my battered face was a cold, sore mask. It didn't matter. I had my right hand still. How hard could it be to build a fire and put a crock into it? That was something even I could do.
The hides went down first. Dutiful arranged them between us, as if we were soldiers preparing for a dice game. The hides were thick ones, one of ice bear, and one of sea cow. They both stank. I settled the kettle in the middle of them and set the flask of oil carefully aside from it. I put the crock of powder next to it. We had shaved bits of wood for tinder and some scorched linen. I made a tiny nest in the bottom of the kettle. I had struck three futile showers of sparks from the firestone into the kettle before Dutiful asked me curiously, "Couldn't we just light it from the lantern?"
I lifted my eyes and gave him a baleful stare. In response, he grinned at me. The light emphasized his reddened cheeks and cracked lips. I didn't have a smile left in me, but somehow I shaped one for him. I remembered, briefly, that his young shoulders bore burdens too, not the least of which was that killing this dragon was a betrayal, of sorts, of his Old Blood and his Old Blood coterie. Nor would it buy him his own dream. The girl he had come to love was his only as a lure to get him to do the Pale Woman's bidding. She had offered herself to him, not for love, not to secure an alliance, but only to buy her mother's and sister's death. It did not seem a promising foundation for a marriage, and yet, here we were. I rocked back onto my heels. "You do it," I told him. "And then get out of here. Oh. And guide Burrich away from the edge of the excavation for me. He doesn't see well."
"No, really? I thought he was blind." It was a young man's humor, the dark sarcasm that has no fear of ever meeting the fate he mocks. I could no longer smile about it, but perhaps Dutiful didn't notice. He claimed a bit of the scorched linen from the kettle and offered it to the lantern's flame. It licked it hungrily and immediately the fire took. Dutiful hastily dropped it into the kettle on top of the other tinder. It went out. "Nothing is ever easy for us," I observed after our third try had failed.
I had to turn the kettle on its side, and then Dutiful burnt his fingers poking the last bit of flaming linen under the shaved bits of wood. We held our breaths, waiting, and the tiny flame gripped and clambered over the tinder. I nursed it stronger with curls of wood, deciding that I would not turn the kettle upright and risk dislodging the heart of the fire, but would instead slide the powder into the kettle as if I were putting a loaf of bread into an oven's mouth. I coughed in the gathering smoke from our tiny fire. "Time for you to go," I told the Prince. "Just do it and then we'll both go."
"No." I would not say I wanted to be sure he was safely away before I loaded the powder. Instead, I said, "Burrich is very important to me. And very proud. He'll want to wait until I'm with him before he flees. Take his arm and tell him that I'm coming, that you can see me. And get him well away from the pit. We both know that Chade's concoctions sometimes work far better than he expects them to."
"You want me to lie to him?" Dutiful was scandalized.
"I want you to get him to safety. He has a bad knee, and he can't move as swiftly as you or I can. So get him started. I'll give you a moment or two to do that, then I'll load in the powder and get out of here." It worked. The Prince would not have left me if only his own safety had been at risk. He would for Burrich's. I thanked Kettricken for the heart she had instilled in her son as he stepped gingerly over the hot kettle and clambered past me. I listened to his footsteps in the icy tunnel, trying to gauge when he would leave the pit, reach Burrich, and escort him away. No hurry, I told myself. No need to risk anyone just yet. In a few more minutes, the dragon would be dead. And perhaps the Fool would be safe.
I lay flat on the floor of the tunnel, to avoid the smoke hanging above me and to feed my fledgling fire. I wanted a good bed of coals. Then I'd put in the powder. Reluctantly, I decided I should add the oil at that time too, enough to coax the flames up around the side of the powder container. I opened the flask of oil and set it to hand. It would be safe. It had taken quite a long time before the powder in the flask had exploded in my hearth fire. Of course, that had been before Chade had perfected the powder.
Don't think about that. Don't think about dying here, burnt and crushed, I said to myself. No. I could be trapped and still in the ice, with cold taking me deeper and deeper into blackness, until I was finally gone. I thought of that easing into death. It almost seemed cowardly. And yet what other way was there to go? Alone, mateless, was a death by ice so cruel a fate?
A cold drop from the ceiling fell on the back of my neck, pulling my thoughts back to what I was supposed to be doing. I wondered how my mind had wandered so far. The hides around the blazing kettle were scorching and stinking as it got hotter. I burned my fingers, tipping the lip of the kettle a bit higher so it would hold the oil when the moment came. I cursed and set my burnt fingers against the ice to ease them. And then, like a flood tide, the dragon rushed into me.
I do not believe he intended to. I think he was like a man who holds his breath, thinking he will be able to extinguish his own life. But at the last moment, the body overpowers the will of the mind, and takes that great gasp of air that forces the mind to go on. In that instant when he lost control, we touched. It was not the Wit or the Skill, but something else, and in recognizing it, I knew it was intrinsic to dragonkind. I had felt it before, when Tintaglia invaded my dreams through Nettle. I had thought it was her own peculiar sending, but no. Icefyre echoed it. Tintaglia was better at it, or perhaps having dealt mostly with humans, she had learned to tailor her thoughts to our minds. The dragon swept through my mind and drowned me in his being. It was not phrased in human words or concepts; it was not an attempt at communication with me. In his eruption of thought and emotion and knowledge, I learned far more of him than I wanted to. When the dragon receded from my mind, leaving me beached in my individuality, my elbow gave out, and I found myself belly down on the ice, my face uncomfortably close to the hot kettle.
That brief time of sharing Icefyre's memories seemed more real than my entire life had been. Icefyre was definitely alive. And aware, but his awareness was focused deep within himself. He desired death. He had come here to seek it, deliberately. Death does not come easily to dragons. They may die of disease or injury or in battle with their own kind, but other than those fates, no one knows how many years one may number. Icefyre had been a strong and hearty creature with many years before him. But the skies had become empty, bereft of his kind, and the serpents that should have returned to renew the ranks of the dragons were gone too. The dragons and most of their Elderling servants had perished when the earth shook and split and the mountains belched forth smoke and flame and poisonous winds. The blast had spewed the trees flat and scorched all green from the earth.
Many of the dragons and their attendants had died in the first few days of that cataclysm, burned or choked or smothered in the raining ash. Others had perished in the harsh days that followed, for spring did not come that year, and the previously wide and swift river was a trickling thread groping its way to the sea through a choke of fine ash. The game died off, for the meadows were buried in ash and clinkers and what foliage survived was thin and dusty.
It was a harsh time. Of the dragons that lived, some said they must leave their ancestral lands. A few did, but what became of them, no one knew, for they never returned again. Competition for food weakened many, and resulted in death for others as dragons battled over the scrawny game that remained. Ash lay thick and acid over the once verdant land: no seed unfurled there and few plants pushed up through it. The human folk died off, and even their Elderling kin surrendered to slow death. The herds and flocks of the humans perished beside their two-legged tenders. The few cities that had not been buried stood empty and cracked, broken and licked dry like a nest of raided eggs.
Yet even then, none of them had feared it was the end of the dragons. Humans and Elderling might perish, trees die and game fail, but not dragons. Five generations of serpents remained in the sea. There would be five seasons of migration, and five successions of cocooning. Serpents would emerge as dragons and, eventually, the land must heal. So Icefyre had believed. Even when season after season passed, and he alone spread his wings in the sky, he waited and watched for the serpents to return. But none appeared at the cocooning grounds. He had awaited them, often going without food for fear they would arrive and find no dragons to help them spin their cocoons from the black sand of the cocooning beach and their own saliva. His saliva and venom should have mixed with it, to give to them his memories, the memories that reached back beyond his own life span.
The new dragons would be lost without them. Only if he helped them would they gain their full memories of all dragonkind when they emerged from their cocoons in the strong heat of summer. But the serpents never came.
And when he knew that they would not come, would never return, when he knew he was the last of his kind, he gave thought to how he would end. Not in ignominy, starving to death from a hunting injury, his body becoming carrion for low animals. No. He would choose the hour and place of his death, and would die in such a way that his body would be preserved intact.
Such were his plans when he came to icy Aslevjal. I saw it as he had, as an island almost completely locked under the ice. I recalled his disappointment that it was so, but did not grasp the cause. Perhaps the seas had been lower then, or perhaps the winters colder, for the waters around the island were frozen so that he more felt than saw the sea beneath the ice. He flew over it, as gleaming black as it was white, but could not find the entry he sought. He contented himself at last with a crack in the ice, crawled into it and gave himself over to sleep, knowing that from cold sleep to death was scarce a step for his kind.
But the body always chooses life. It is not swayed by logic or emotion. He passed out of life into a suspension of being, but he could not part from his body. Try as he might, there were moments when awareness seized him again, and clamored that he was cold and stiff and famished with hunger. The closing ice squeezed him and bent his body, but could not break him. He could not break himself.
He longed to die. He dreamed of dying. Again and again, he dived into death, only to have his traitorous body gasp in yet another slow breath, only to have his foolish hearts squeeze out a pulse. Humans came and flitted about him, flies drawn to a dying stag. Some tried to seek his mind, others strove to pierce his flesh. Useless, all of them. They could not even help him die.
I felt myself draw a breath and wondered when I had last taken one. It was as if someone had opened the shutters on a tavern window, to show me all that went on inside, and then as abruptly closed them. I was dazed with all that I suddenly knew about dragons. So completely had the dragon engulfed me that it was as if I had been him. I sprawled on the ice, drenched in my unwelcome awareness of the intellect of the frozen creature trapped below me.
I seized his death wish with relief. I was granting him mercy. I heaved myself up onto my knees, groaning as my injured shoulder took more weight than it wanted. I peered into my kettle oven, then crouched low to blow into it. Red coals glowed. I added a few more small sticks of wood, and carefully arranged the fuel I would tuck in around the powder container.
I knew what it was to long for death. I had tried to die when Regal had me in his power. Tormented, cold, alone, hungry, I would have welcomed a swift death then, by any means. I had come here determined to kill the dragon and now I knew he would welcome that kindness. No reason to hesitate. I picked up the crock of powder and used a stick to make a nest for it in the coals. What difference could one dragon make in the world? He was likely too feeble to survive now, even if we did release him.
Of course, if I had died in Regal's dungeon, as I had hoped, then likely Kettricken would never have found Verity or roused the stone dragons to defend the Six Duchies. No. I took too much significance to myself. She would have gone alone to find her king. But could she have wakened the dragons, if Nighteyes and I had not been there? If we had not gone with her, if Nighteyes had not killed game for her, would she have succeeded? Would Kettle have survived, to aid Verity in carving his dragon? Did, as the Fool had so long insisted, the fate of the whole world hinge on the actions of each man, every day?
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 not only eliminates all chance of dragons returning to the world, it becomes the incident that unites the Out Islands against the Six Duchies. Far from guaranteeing a marriage that secured 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 of her 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 seabird 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 bade 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.
Verity was here, somewhere. I could sense him like a fragrance that had almost been forgotten until a sly waft of wind brings a hint of it to the nose. Verity, yes, and others, older and wiser and calm. So calm, the Elders of the Skill-stream. All was peaceful. Then there was a frantic stirring and someone nattering to someone else, speaking so swiftly that I could scarcely follow the thoughts. They were seeking someone who was lost, a girl, no, a man, no, a girl and a man, carried off by the tide. Such a shame, but nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me. I wished they would stop their worrying of it and let themselves go and join us. Why did they struggle against such peace and oneness as they could know here?
Shame on you. He set his teeth in me and worried me wildly. Shame on you, letting the cub drown. You would have come after me, and I would have come after you. Shame upon you, letting her go. Are we not pack? If you do this, you leave me behind. Do you know that? Do you care? Were you ever a wolf at all? And that question stabbed me sharper than fangs and woke me to the struggle. Chade and Dutiful and Thick were there, linked as a coterie, searching for us. They were doing it all wrong, like a man bailing the sea with a sieve in hopes of catching a fish. Chade made a random search for Nettle, for none of them save Thick knew well the shape of her in the Skill-current, and neither Chade nor Dutiful had thought to ask the little man to locate her. I struggled to find enough of myself to reach them. It was like working in a dream, where the sequences of events make no sense and every moment the reality changes. I touched Thick at last, a touch like a thread settling on his sleeve, and whispered, Find the woman who helped the kitten. That is what she looks like here. Find her!
And he did. We had known he was strong, but we had never measured him here, where his navigation of the Skill was all that mattered. He sang the song that was Nettle, and she coalesced around the notes. He did not seek her so much as summon her to fill the shape that he had made for her. And then, as if he were restoring a glass figurine to a shelf, so he carefully restored her to his dream of her. Had ever a woman been regarded as so precious? For a moment I glimpsed the inside of the traveling wagon and then the kitten on the bed told the limp woman sprawled beside him, It's all right. Rest for now. You know the way home from here. Rest for a time, and then go home. You are safe, now. You know I love you.
I had only an instant to wonder at what he had done, and so effortlessly. Then he seemed to sense me there and flung me out of his dream. I did not belong there. But even that act of his was a recognition of my shape. He had fixed me into myself again to expel me from their world, and suddenly Dutiful was clutching at me. Fitz! There you are! We thought you were lost.
Why did you betray us? What have you done? Where is the girl? Chade demanded.
Nettle is fine. I mended her. Now I'll mend him back together too, Thick suggested pragmatically.
And he slammed me back into my body with no more ceremony than that.
I lay panting on the floor of the ice tunnel. When I found my eyes and opened them, the world was red and black. Then I realized I was looking into the glowing contents of the kettle. I felt the container of powder under my fingers. It rolled under my hand as I scrabbled away from the heat. Thinking about anything seemed like too much trouble. Somewhere, around me and inside me and below me, the dragons spoke to one another. Their communication felt like thunder rolling in my lungs. I did not wish to be a party to that communion. Already I had nearly died of it. I gathered all my strength and managed to pull my knees up under me. Crawling would work, I told myself. I could crawl out.
Three things happened simultaneously. I heard Dutiful shout to me from the entrance of the tunnel. I felt a sudden crack start in the ice beneath my hand. It raced off in a jagged line toward the dawn light that was now seeping into me. And the Pale Woman invaded my mind.
She had the Skill. I should have known and been more careful. Now she looked through my soul with her colorless eyes and pierced me with her hate. Her words slapped me. You chose, bastard king. You chose a dragon over your Beloved. And you will live with that choice. As will he. At least, for a short time. Until I let you see what you have chosen!
And then she was gone, leaving me wretched and soiled from that contact with her mind. Such hate and virulence knows no bounds, and I knew that I had won for the Fool every coin of pain she could wring from him before his mind was gone. My spine turned to jelly, and I sprawled on the ground with neither the will nor the strength to move any farther. Again, I felt that vague stirring beneath me, and heard the oddly shrill sounds of complaining ice. Then all was stillness again. I longed to plunge into it as Icefyre had, seeking my death in it, but Dutiful was kneeling by me, shaking me frantically.
"Get up, Fitz. Get up! We have to get out of here. The dragon is stirring and the ice is cracking. He could bring it all down on us. Get up."
And when I could not, he grasped me by the collar and dragged me, out of the tunnel and into the excavation and up the ramp into the world of light and men.