Our loss is great, and all for the foolishness of a wager between novices no wiser than children. By order of Skillmaster Treeknee all markings will be removed from the Witness Stones. By order of Master Treeknee, it is forbidden for any Skill candidates or novices to go to the Witness Stones unless the Skillmaster accompanies them. By order of Skillmaster Treeknee, all knowledge of the use of the Witness Stones is hereafter restricted to those who are candidates for Master status.
When I climbed the hidden stairs back up to Chade's tower room that dawn, I was beyond weariness. I could not seem to find a coherent thought of my own. Chade and Prince Dutiful would be on their way home by this afternoon. The invitation to the Harvest Fest would have been passed to every kaempra of every clan. Kettricken would have to set in motion the preparations for the grandest celebration that had ever been held in Buckkeep Castle. The invitations to the dukes and their nobles, the food, the guest housing, the minstrels and jugglers and puppeteers to be hired: it made my head spin and I longed to lie down and sleep. Instead, once in my room, I added a few sticks of dry wood to the failing embers in the hearth. I filled a ewer with water from the barrel, and then poured it into the old washbasin and plunged my face into it. I came up, rubbed at my eyes until they felt less sandy, and then wiped my face dry. I looked into the small glass Chade had always kept there and wondered who it was looking back at me.
I suddenly understood what the Fool had said to me earlier. I had journeyed to a place and time I had never foreseen, one past my death. Futures I had never imagined loomed before me, and I had no idea which one I should aspire to. I had taken a step toward claiming a throne, in essence if not in view. I wondered if that meant that I had pushed any life with Molly out of the possible futures I might claim.
Chivalry's sword rested where I had left it, above the hearth. I took it down. It fitted my hand as if made for it. I flourished it aloft, and then asked the empty chamber, "And what would you think of your bastard now, King Chivalry? But, I forget. You never wore the crown, either. No one ever called you King Chivalry." I lowered the point of the sword to the floor, conceding to fate. "Nor will anyone ever bow the knee to me. All the same, I think I will leave some sign of my passage."
A strange trembling passed through me, leaving calm in its wake. Hastily, I restored the sword to its place and then wiped my sweaty palms down my shirtfront. A fine king, I thought, wiping sweat down his guard's uniform. I needed some sleep, but not yet. King Fitz, the bastard monarch. I made a decision and refused to think any more on it. I added a bottle of good brandy to my basket, covered it with a napkin, took up a heavy cloak and fled.
I left the secret corridors behind me and departed by the guards' entrance. I had to pass the kitchens and almost I stopped to eat. Instead, I helped myself to a little loaf of sweet morning bread from the guards' mess and ate it as I walked. I passed out of the gate with no more than a sleepy nod from the lad on watch there. I thought how I might change that and then pushed the thought aside. I strode on. I diverted from the main road down to Buckkeep Town onto the trodden trail that went first through the woods and then across the gentle roll of a hill. In the early light of day, the Witness Stones stood stark against the blue sky, awaiting me. Sheep cropped the grass around them. As I approached, they regarded me with that lack of curiosity that is sometimes confused with stupidity. They moved away slowly.
I reached the Witness Stones and walked a slow circle around them. Four stones. Four sides to each stone. Sixteen possible destinations. How often had they been used over the years? I stood on the hilltop and looked out around me. Grass and trees and there, if one looked for it, the indentation of an ancient road. If there had ever been the rubble of houses here, it had long ago been swallowed by the earth, or more likely carted off to rise again as a hut elsewhere.
Hands behind my back, I studied the stone faces. I decided the runes had been deliberately effaced, long ago. I wondered why and suspected I would never know. And that was almost a comfort.
The basket on my arm was growing heavy and the sun was warming me too well. I slung the heavy cloak around my shoulders. It would be cold where I was going. I stepped up to the face of the pillar I had emerged from on my last journey, set my hand to it, and passed through it.
I stumbled a bit as I emerged into the pillar room. Then dizziness took me and I sat down flat on the dusty tiles until it passed. "Not enough sleep, and using the stones twice in too short a period of time. Not good," I told myself firmly. "Not wise." I tried to stand up, and then decided to sit down again until the tower stopped spinning. It took several moments of sitting there before I realized something obvious. The floor was no longer cold. I put both hands flat against it, as if to prove it to myself. It was not exactly warm; it was more neutral, neither warm nor cold. I stood, and noticed that the windows were losing their haze of thick frost. I thought I heard whispering behind me and turned quickly. No one was there. Perhaps it was an errant summer wind, a warm wind from the south sweeping the island. Very peculiar. I had no time to dwell on it. I left the pillar room and, basket on my arm, tried to hasten through the icy labyrinth. My head pounded. I had not imagined the change in temperature. In one corridor, water slipped over the stones of the floor in a shallow running flow. The gentle warming of the chambers and halls lessened and then ceased as I approached the juncture where stone walls met ice. Little black spots danced before my eyes. I stopped and leaned my brow against the icy wall and rested. The spots receded and slowly I felt more myself. The coolness seemed to help. By the time I emerged from the crack in the ice wall onto the narrow path down to the Black Man's cavern, I had my cloak wrapped well about my basket and me.
I made my way down the steep path and knocked again at the Black Man's door. No one answered. I knocked again, hesitated for a time, and then tried the string latch. The door swung open and I entered. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim room. The fire had burned low. The Fool was sleeping heavily on a pallet made up near the hearth. There was no sign of Prilkop. I shut the door quietly, put my basket on Prilkop's low table, and took off my cloak. Silently I moved to the Fool's side and, crouching down, peered into his sleeping face. The darkening of his skin was already apparent. I wanted to wake him and ask him how he was. Sternly I resisted that impulse. Instead, I unloaded the basket, finding a wooden platter for the bread and cheese and a basket for the fruit. Prilkop's water barrel was nearly empty. I put water on to heat for tea, and then took his buckets out and down to the place where the trickle down the rock face came to a slight overhang and fell free. I waited while they filled, and then hauled them up again. By that time, the water was hot, and I made fragrant spice tea.
I think the aroma of the tea was what woke the Fool. He opened his eyes and lay still, staring at the awakened fire for a time. He did not move until I said, "Fool? Are you any better?"
Then he gave a small start and turned his head sharply toward me as he jerked his body into a protective ball. I was sorry to have frightened him, and well understood that reflex. I made no comment on it, saying only, "I've come back, and brought food with me. Are you hungry?"
He pushed his blankets back a little and half sat up, and then sagged back down into his bedding. "I'm getting better. The tea smells good."
"No apricots, but I brought you plums."
"Apricots?"
"I thought your mind was wandering a bit when you asked me to fetch you apricots. The fever, you know. Still, if there had been any to hand, I'd have filched some for you."
"Thank you," he said. Then, staring at me, "You look different. More than just being clean."
"I feel different. But the clean helps, too. I wish I could have brought the Buckkeep steams with me for you. I think they'd do you good. But as soon as you can walk at all, I'll get you home. I've told Kettricken that we'll be putting you up in Chade's old tower room for a time, until you've completely recovered and decided who you'd like to become next."
"Who I'd like to become…" He made a small sound of amusement. I could not find the right sort of knife for cutting the bread, so contented myself with tearing off the end of the loaf for him. I took him bread and cheese and a plum, and when the tea had finished steeping, poured him a cup. "Where's Prilkop?" I asked as he sipped at his tea. I was a bit annoyed that he had left the Fool here alone.
"Oh, out and about. He has been investigating the Elderling stronghold, to see what damage has been done to it. We've had more time for talk while you were gone, in the moments when I was awake. There were not many, I think. He told me tales of the old city; they seem interwoven with my dreams. I suspect that is where he is now. He spoke of seeing what damage she had done, and what he could put right. I suspect he did things to make the city less hospitable, in hopes of driving her out. Now he plans to undo them. I asked him, 'For whom?' and he said, 'Perhaps just for the sake of putting it right.' He lived there alone for many years after all the others died. For generations, perhaps. He did not tally the passing years, but I am convinced he has been here a very long time. He welcomed the Pale Woman when she first arrived for he thought she had come with her Catalyst to fulfill Prilkop's goals."
He drew breath and sipped at the tea. "Eat first and then tell stories," I suggested to him.
"Tell me yours while I eat. Something momentous has happened to you. It's in your bearing and eyes."
And so I spoke to him, as I could have to no other, divulging all that had befallen me. He smiled but it seemed weighted with sadness, and nodded to himself as if I were but confirming things that he already knew. When I had finished, he tossed his plum pit into the fire and said quietly, "Well. It is nice to know that my last vision and prophecy was a true one."
"So. I'll live happily ever after, as the minstrels sing?"
He twisted his mouth at me and shook his head. "You'll live among people who love you and have expectations of you. That will make your life horribly complicated and they will worry you sick half the time. And the other half, annoy you. And delight you." He turned away from me and took up his cup and looked into it, like a hedge-witch reading tea leaves. "Fate has given up on you, FitzChivalry Farseer. You've won. In the future that you now have found, it's almost likely that you'll live to a ripe old age, rather than that fate will try to sweep you from the playing board at every opportunity."
I tried to lighten his words. "I was getting a bit tired of being hauled back from death's door and beyond every time I turned around."
"It's nasty. I know how nasty now. You've shown me that." He almost had his old smile as he asked me, "Let's leave it at this and call it even, shall we? One time pays for all?"
I nodded to that. Then, as if he had to say it swiftly before I interrupted, "Prilkop and I have been talking about what should happen next."
I smiled. "A new plan to save the world? One that doesn't involve me dying quite so often?"
"One that doesn't involve you at all," he said quietly. "You could say that we are going home, after a fashion. Back to the place that shaped us."
"You said no one there would remember you; that there was little point to going back there." I was starting to feel alarm.
"Not to the home that birthed me; I am sure I am no longer recalled there. But to the place that prepared both of us to face our destinies. It was a sort of school, you might say. I know I've spoken of it to you, and told you too that I ran away from it when they refused to recognize the truth of what I told them. There, I will be well remembered, and Prilkop also. Every White Prophet who has ever passed through there is well remembered."
"So let them remember you there. It seems to me they did not treat you well. Why go back?"
"To see that it never happens to any child again. To do what has never been done before, to return, and interpret for them the old prophecies in light of what we now know. To expunge from their libraries all that the Pale Woman planted there, or at least to cast it in a different light. To bring back our experiences of the world to them."
I was silent for a long time. "How will you get there?"
"Prilkop says he can use the pillars. Together, we could travel quite a way south before we needed to find another way to travel. We'll get there. Eventually."
"He can use the pillars?" I was stunned. "Why did he remain here, in cold and privation, all those years?" The Fool looked at me as if it were obvious. "I think he can use them, but he dreads them. Even in our language, there are Elderling concepts he has difficulty in explaining to me. The magic that makes the pillars work takes something from you, each time you use it. Not even the Elderlings used them casually. A courier of an important item might use one or even two pillars to travel, but then the task was passed on to another. But that is not the whole of why he stayed. He stayed to protect the dragon. And to await the coming of the White Prophet and the Catalyst, the ones he had seen who could, perhaps, finish his task. That was, after all, the focus of his life."
"I cannot imagine such devotion."
"Cannot you? I think I can."
I heard the scrape of the door and Prilkop entered. He looked startled to see me there, as well he might, but then exclaimed something to the Fool. The Fool translated. "He is amazed to see you return here so soon, and asks what pressing business had led you to brave the pillars again."
I made a dismissive gesture and spoke to Prilkop. "I wished to bring food for you; see, here is bread and cheese, as you wished, and wine and plums. I had hoped to find you both ready to travel to my home with me. But the Fool still seems weak."
"Travel to your home with you?" he asked me, and I nodded, smiling.
He turned to the Fool and spoke softly to him at length in their tongue. The Fool replied more briefly. Then he turned and spoke reluctantly to me. "Fitz. My friend. Please. Come and sit with me by the fire. I need to talk to you."
He got up stiffly, draped a blanket loosely around his shoulders, and moved slowly to a grass cushion by the hearth. He eased himself down onto it and I took one beside him. Prilkop was investigating the food. He broke off a piece of cheese, put it into his mouth and then closed his eyes in sheer pleasure. When he opened them again, he bowed his head in thanks to me. I nodded back, pleased to have pleased him. When I turned back to the Fool, he took a deep breath and spoke.
"Prilkop does not intend to go back to Buckkeep with you. And neither do I."
I stared at him, running his words through my mind over and over. They made no sense. "But why? His task here is finished, as is yours. Why remain in such a harsh place? It's cold, and this is summer! Life is hard here, and barren. When winter comes… I cannot even imagine wintering here. There is no reason for you to stay here, none at all, and every reason in the world for you to come back to Buckkeep. Why would you want to stay here? I know you wish to return to your 'school' but surely you could come to Buckkeep first. Rest and recover for a time, and then take ship from there."
He looked down at his long hands held loosely in his lap. "I have discussed this at length with Prilkop. There is so much that neither of us knows about this situation, this living beyond our time as White Prophets. He has experienced it longer than I have. He stayed here because it was the last place he had a vision of himself. He stayed in the hopes that his final view of another Prophet and Catalyst coming to finish his task was true. And it was. His last vision was true." He looked into the fire and then leaned over to push the end of a piece of driftwood deeper into it. "I had a final vision, too. Of what would be after my death." I waited.
"I saw you, Fitz. I saw you in the midst of what you are currently becoming. It did not seem to me that you were always happy, but I thought you were more complete than before."
"What has that got to do with it?"
"It has to do with what I did not see. I was, of course, to be dead. I had seen clearly that my death was a part of your future. No, that sounds cruel, as if my death were a thing you had planned. Rather, say, that my death was a landmark on the journey to where you had gone. You had passed my death and gone on to that life."
"I did pass your death. But, as you have told me so often, I am a Catalyst. I brought you back."
"Yes. You did. I had never foreseen such a thing. Neither had Prilkop. And in all the records we studied and memorized when we were in training, there is nothing that either of us can recall that foreshadows such a thing." He almost smiled. "I should have known that only you could work such a change, a change that may have carried us outside of any future that any White Prophet has ever foreseen."
"But—" I began, and he lifted that long cautioning forefinger to halt me.
"Prilkop and I have discussed this. Neither of us thinks I should risk being around you too much. I could make a serious mistake. There is far less chance of my making a mistake if I do not go back with you."
"I don't understand. A mistake? What mistake? You're feverish still, and not making sense." I was worried and irritated at the same time. I shifted angrily and he reached out a hand and set it on my arm. His touch was almost cool. He was still weak from his changing time but he did not speak from fever. His voice was almost stern, as if he were an old man and I were a willful youngster.
"Yes you do. You understand. You don't want to look at it, but you know it. You are still the Changer, still the Catalyst. Even in the short time you were at Buckkeep, you've proved that. Change is swirling around you like a whirlpool. Restored, you no longer flee it, but seem to attract it. And I, I am blind now, when it comes to seeing what vast changes my influence upon you can cause. So." He was silent for a time. I waited him out. "I will not be coming with you. No, wait, don't speak. Let me talk for a time."
But instead of speaking, he immediately fell silent. I sat and looked at him and thought how he had changed. The pale moon-faced boy, the lithe and narrow youth, was now visibly a young man. Recent privation had sharpened the angles of his face and the bruises around his eyes from his torment were still fading. But that was only his body. His glance had darkened and his solemnity did not seem a temporary mood but a new gravity of spirit. I let him take his time as he mentally sorted his words. I suspected he was working on a decision, and that however resolute he might claim to be, his heart still teetered on a choice.
"Fitz, I faced my death, not bravely perhaps, but determinedly. Because I had seen what might come after it, and judged it worth the cost. I decided to come to this island, and set in motion the events that would end with the dragon rising. I knew I would die, horribly, in pain and cold. But I also saw the chance for the world to know dragons again, a chance for there to be creatures as arrogant and lovely as humans, so that they might balance one another. I dreamed of a world in which men could not dominate all nature and impose their order upon it. It will not be a peaceful world, and it may be that men will curse me for my role in what happened here. But it will be a world in which both men and dragons are so busy with one another that they cannot subvert all nature to themselves. That was what I saw, in the greater scheme of things."
"Fine!" I was weary of his talk of dragons, and uneasy still about what we had loosed on the world. "So now there will be dragons. Lots of them, from what I saw happening over the battlefield. But why can't you come back to—"
"Hush!" he rebuked me sternly. "Do you think this is easy for me? Do you think that lofty reason is my only one? Do you think it is easy for me to part my ways from yours? No. There is a more personal element that divides my path from yours. It is because of what I glimpsed on a far smaller scale. I saw you, after my death, taking satisfaction in the things and people you had so long denied yourself. Living the life you were meant to have, after my death. You gave me another piece of life. Shall I use it to rob you of yours?" More slowly he added, "I can love you, Fitz, but I cannot allow that love to destroy you and what you are." He rubbed at his face wearily, and then exclaimed in annoyance at the skin that peeled away beneath his fingers. He shook the bits from his fingertips, rubbed his face all over vigorously, and then folded his hands into his lap and looked into the fire. I glowered at him, baffled and waiting.
Behind us, Prilkop moved quietly around the room. I heard a clicking sound and glanced behind me. He had opened the neck of a little sack and was taking small blocks of stone out of it. I recognized it at once. Memory stone, cut into uniform cubes like the ones I had glimpsed in the Elderling chamber. I watched as he held one briefly against his temple, then smiled, and set it aside. He repeated the process, and again. It was soon apparent to me he was sorting the blocks into different stacks. He looked up, realizing the Fool and I were watching him. He smiled and held up a cube of stone. "Music." Another cube. "Some poetry." Another cube. "History. Music, again." He proffered one to me, but I waved it aside, uneasy. The Fool, however, reached out to touch it lightly with one Skilled fingertip. He recoiled from it as quickly as if he had been burned, but then smiled at me. "Music, indeed. Like a rushing flood of it. You should try it, Fitz."
"We were talking," I reminded him quietly. "About your coming back to Buckkeep with me."
"No. We were talking about my not coming back." He tried a smile that failed.
I just looked at him. A short time later he said something, a request, to Prilkop. At almost the same moment, I felt Chade tug at my thoughts. I would speak to the Queen. I can't right now. Try Thick.
You know all the reasons why that will not work. Please, Fitz. It will not take long.
That is what you said last time. Besides, I am nowhere near the Queen. I went through the pillar. I'm with the Fool.
What? Without warning any of us or consulting with us at all? I believe my life is still my own.
No. It was a flat denial from Chade. No, it is not, sir. Last night, you drew a line with me, and I sensed you did it with the Queen's approval. You cannot claim that authority one moment, and then shoulder aside from it the next. Crowns cannot be doffed so lightly. I am not truly the King and you know it.
Too late to take that stance, Fitz! Chade sounded angry. Too late. The Queen offered you the authority and you accepted it.
I did not capitulate. I could not decide if I agreed with him or not. Give me some time. By now, you must be at sea. What can be of such immediate importance now that you have sailed?
It will keep for a time, that is true. But after this, Fitz, you must not absent yourself without warning all of us. Am I a servant, that my time is never my own? Worse. You are a king. And Sacrifice to all.
He broke his mind free of mine before I could reply to that. I blinked and realized that I had just heard the door close. Prilkop had left. The Fool was looking at me, somehow aware I had been Skilling and waiting for my attention to come back to him. "I am sorry. Chade, in a rush as always, demanding that he needed contact with the Queen. He claims that if she has recognized me once, even for a moment, as Sacrifice, I now have all the duties and responsibilities of a crowned king. It's ridiculous."
"Is it?"
"You know it is!"
My defense seemed to release a torrent of words from him, as if while he waited the words had mounted up inside him like water behind a dam.
"Fitz. Go back to the life you were meant to have, and love it, without reserve. That was what I saw you doing." He gave a laugh that had hysteria at the edge of it. "It even sustained me while I was dying. To know that you would go on to that life, after I was dead. When the pain was worst, I fixed my thoughts on what I had seen for you, and I let it move through me."
"But… she said you called out for me. When she tormented you." I said the words, and then wished I could call them back. He suddenly looked sick and old.
"Probably, I did," he admitted. "I have never claimed to be brave. But the fact that she could wring that from me changes nothing, my friend. Nothing." He looked into the fire as if he had lost something there, and I was ashamed that I had taken him back to his torture. No man should be reminded that he has screamed in front of people who delighted in it. "It should probably serve to teach me that, in many ways, I am not as strong as I wish I were. And I should not put myself in a position in which my weakness could damage both of us." He suddenly took my hand. It startled me, and when I looked at him, our eyes locked. "Fitz. Please. Do not tempt me to follow you and interfere in the future I saw for you. Do not tempt me to step out of my time and try to take something that was never meant for me." He shivered suddenly, as if a chill had taken him. He let go of my hand and leaned closer to the fire, holding his hands out to it. The nails had just started to regrow. He rubbed his hands together, loosening a layer of skin like white ash. The new skin exposed beneath reminded me of polished wood. Very softly, he asked me, "Could you have been content to live with Nighteyes among the wolves?"
"I would have been willing to try," I said stubbornly.
"Even if his mate could never completely accept you?"
"Could you, for once, simply say whatever it is you are trying to say?"
He looked at me and rubbed his chin as if he were truly considering it. Then he smiled sadly. "No. I can't. Not without damaging something precious to me." As if he were not changing the subject at all, he asked, "Will you ever tell Dutiful that your body fathered his?"
I did not like him to speak that aloud even when it was just we two. My strong Skill-bond with Dutiful made him seem ever close. "No," I said shortly. "He would see too many things differently. It would hurt him, to no good end. It would damage his image of his father, his feelings toward his mother, even his feelings toward me. What purpose could it serve?"
"Exactly. So you will always love him as a son, but treat him as your prince. One step away from where you long to be. Because even if you told him, you could never be his father." I was starting to get angry again. "You are not my father."
"No." He stared at the fire. "And I'm not your lover, either."
I felt suddenly weary and sour. "Is that what this is about? Bedding with me? You won't return to Buckkeep because I won't bed with you?"
"No!" He did not shout the word, but something in the way he said it stunned me to silence. His voice was low, almost harsh as he spoke. "Always, you bring it back to that, as if that is the only possible culmination of love."
He sighed and abruptly settled back in his chair. He looked at me speculatively, and then asked, "Tell me, did you love Nighteyes?"
"Of course."
"Without reserve."
"Yes."
"Then by your logic, you wished to couple with him?"
"I wished… No!"
"Ah. But that was only because he too was male? It had nothing to do with your other differences?" I gaped at him. A moment longer he managed to keep his face straight in honest inquiry. Then he laughed at me, more freely than I had heard him laugh in a long time. I wanted to be offended, but it was such a relief to hear him laugh, even at my expense, that I could not.
He caught his breath, and said, "There it is. Plainly, Fitz. I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don't. Yet I never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I've never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me." He shook his head. "Long ago, you told me that Molly would never be able to tolerate your bond with the wolf. That she would force you to decide between them. Do you still believe that?"
"I think it likely," I had to reply softly.
"And how do you think she would react to me?" He paused for a heartbeat. "Whom would you choose? And what would you lose, either way, by being forced to make such a choice? Those are the questions I've had to ponder. And if I come back with you, and make that choice a part of your future, what else will my Catalyst change in the process of choosing? If you left the Six Duchies with me, what future would we have set in motion, all unknowing?"
I shook my head and looked away from him. But the flow of his words was relentless and my ears heard them. "Nighteyes chose. He chose between the pack of wolves that would have accepted him and his bond with you. I do not know if you ever discussed with him what that decision cost him. I doubt it. The little I knew of him makes me think he chose and went forward from there. I do not mean to shame you. But is it not true that Nighteyes paid a higher toll for your bond, for the love that you shared, than you did? What did it cost Nighteyes to be bonded to you? Answer honestly."
I had to look aside, for I was ashamed. "It cost him living with a pack, and being a wolf in full. It cost him having a mate and cubs. Just as Rolf later warned us. Because we set no limits on our bond."
"You knew the exhilaration of sharing his wolfness with him. Of being as close to becoming a wolf as a man can. Yet… forgive me… I do not think he ever sought the human within himself as ardently as you pursued being a wolf."
"No."
He took my hand again and held it in both of his. He turned it over and looked down at the shadows of his fingerprints that I had worn on my wrist for so many years. "Fitz. I have thought long on this. I will not take your mate and cubs from you. My years will be long; by comparison, you have not that many left. I will not take from you and Molly whatever years may remain to you. For I am sure that you will be together, again. You know what I am. You have been within this body, and I in yours. And I have felt, oh, gods help me against that memory, I have felt what it is to be human, fully human, in the moments that I held your love and pain and loss within me. You have allowed me to be as human as it is possible for me to be. What my teachers took away from me, you restored tenfold. With you, I was a child. With you, I grew to manhood. With you… Just as Nighteyes allowed you to be the wolf." His voice ran down and we were left sitting in silence, as if he had run out of words. He did not release my hand. The touch sharpened my awareness of the Skill-bond between us. Dutiful nudged at my Skill, seeking my attention. I ignored him. This was more important. I tried to grasp exactly what the Fool feared.
"You think that it would hurt me if you came back to Buckkeep. That it would keep me from a life you had seen."
"Yes."
"You dread that I would grow old and die. And you would not."
"Yes."
"What if I didn't care about those things? About the cost."
"I still would."
I asked my last question, my heart squeezed with hurt, dreading however he might answer it. "And if I said I would follow you, then? Leave my other life behind and go with you."
I think that question stunned him. He drew breath twice before he answered it in a hoarse whisper. "I would not allow it. I could not allow it."
We sat a long time in silence after that. The fire consumed itself. And then I asked the final, awful question. "After I leave you here, will I ever see you again?"
"Probably not. It would not be wise." He lifted my hand and tenderly kissed the sword-callused palm of it, and then held it in both of his. It was farewell, and I knew it, and knew I could do nothing to stop it. I sat still, feeling as if I grew hollow and cold, as if Nighteyes were dying all over again. I was losing him. He was withdrawing from my life and I felt as though I were bleeding to death, my life trickling out of me. I suddenly realized how close to true that was.
"Stop!" I cried, but it was too late. He released my hand before I could snatch it back. My wrist was clean and bare. His fingerprints were gone. Somehow, he had taken them back, and our Skill-thread dangled, broken. "I have to let you go," he said in a cracked whisper. "While I can. Leave me that, Fitz. That I broke the bond. That I did not take what was not mine."
I groped for him. I could see him, but I could not feel him. No Wit, no Skill, no scent. No Fool. The companion of my childhood, the friend of my youth, was gone. He had turned that facet of himself away from me. A brown-skinned man with hazel eyes looked at me sympathetically. "You cannot do this to me," I said.
"It is done," he pointed out. "Done." His strength seemed to go out of him with the word. He turned his head away from me, as if by doing that, he could keep me from knowing that he wept. I sat, feeling numbed in the way that one does after a terrible injury.
"I am just tired," he said in a small, quavering voice. "Just tired, still. That is all. I think I will lie down again."
Fitz. The Queen wants you. Thick pushed effortlessly into my mind.
Shortly. I am with the Fool right now.
It's about Old Blood. Soon, please, she says.
Soon, I replied dully.
And no sooner was Thick cleared from my mind than Chade was tapping at my shoulder. I gave him my heed and, As long as you are there, think to bring back at least some of the Skill scrolls you found there. We'll be in need of them, I think.
Chade. I will. Please. A time to myself. Please.
Very well. His reply was surly. Then he softened, asking more gently, What is the problem? Is he that ill? Actually, he seems improved. But I need a time for my own thoughts. Very well.
I turned back to the Fool, but he had either sunk into a true sleep or was pretending one so convincingly that I could not find it in me to try to wake him. I needed a time to think. I thought there must be some way to get him to change his mind, if only I could think of it.
"I'll be back," I told him, and then slung my cloak over my shoulders and went out. I thought I might as well make a trip through the Elderling maze to retrieve some of the Skill scrolls. It would keep me busy while I thought. I have never done my best pondering while sitting still. I climbed the steep path and found I did not have to squeeze quite as much to get into the crack. My comings and goings were wearing it open, I thought to myself. Yet I had not gone far under the false light of the Elderling globes before I saw someone coming toward me. It startled me for the instant before I recognized the Black Man. He had a haunch of smoked meat on one shoulder, and as we drew near to one another, he nodded to me and then slung it carefully to the ground. "Her supplies, I stole. Many times. Not like this. A little bit here, a little bit there. Now, what I want, I take." He cocked his head at me. "And you?"
"Somewhat the same. Years ago, scrolls, special writings, were taken from my king. She has them, here, in a room near her bedchamber. I am to bring them home again."
"Ah, those. I saw them long ago."
"Yes."
"I will help."
I was not sure I wanted help, but there seemed no courteous way to refuse him. I nodded my thanks, and we walked companionably through the halls. He shook his head at the desecration of the carvings and the missing art from the empty niches. He spoke to me of the folk who had lived here in the times he had known. Thick had been right. Once, the stone hallways had been warmed. Elderlings had come and gone from this place, enjoying the wonders of the ice and snow that never reached their warmer lands. I tried to imagine taking pleasure in coming to a cold place, but the idea was foreign to me.
Prilkop had somehow unharnessed the magic that gave warmth to the stone. He had sought too to deprive the Pale Woman of the Elderling light, but had failed at that. Yet even without warmth, she had stayed. She had driven Prilkop into hiding, and shown her disdain for him and the dragon-partnered Elderlings by her encouragement of the destruction of their art. "Yet she left the map room alone," I pointed out to him.
"She did not know of it, perhaps. Or, not knowing the use, did not care. Of the travel portals, she knew nothing. Once, only once, to flee her I used one." He shook his head at the memory. "So weak, so sick, so—" He put his fists to his temples and made pounding motions. "I could not come back, for many days. When I did" — he shrugged—"she had made my city hers. But now I take it back."
He knew his city well. He took me by a different path, through narrower ways that had, perhaps, been for servants or tradesmen. In less time than I had thought possible, we turned down a hallway that led us past her bedchamber. I glanced in. Someone had been there since I last glimpsed it. I halted and stared. Every item in the room that could have been pushed over or dragged about had been. A cask of jewelry had spilled a stream of pearls and silver chains and glittering white stones across the floor. Some had settled in slow melt into the floor of the chamber. Prilkop saw me staring and calmly entered the room. "This will work," he told me, and pulled a silk coverlet from her bed. As I watched, he knotted the corners to form a very large carry sack. Catching the sense of what he did, I found another and copied him. Then, our makeshift sacks slung across our backs, we went on to the scroll room.
I was not prepared for the sight that met me there. The racks had been deliberately pushed toward the center of the room, so that as they fell, their shelved contents spilled in a messy pile. A broken pitcher lay near them and oil drenched a number of the scrolls. The Pale Woman lay on the floor near them. She was very dead. Her blackened stick arms reminded me of insect legs. Freezing and death had darkened her countenance. She had thrown back her head and died, mouth open like a snarling cat. An Elderling light globe, pried loose from its setting, lay near the oil-soaked manuscripts. It looked battered, as if it had been kicked and beaten. For a time, Prilkop and I stared in silence.
"She tried to make a fire to warm herself," I hazarded my guess. "She thought something in the light globe might catch the scrolls on fire."
He shook his head in disgust. "No. To destroy. Her whole desire that was. Dragons to destroy. Other Prophets to destroy. Beauty. Knowledge." He nudged one of the oily scrolls that was close to her body. "What she could not control or possess, she destroys." He met my eyes and added, "She could not control your Fool." He set to work alongside me. The unruined scrolls, we loaded into one sack, taking as much care as we could, for some were very old and fragile. Those that had taken the oil I placed separately from the others. I noticed that we both avoided the Pale Woman. When I had to move her body to get at the scrolls beneath her, Prilkop backed away and looked aside. When every single scroll had been rescued, I looked at her lying there. "Do you want me to do something with her body?" I asked him quietly. He stared at me, as if uncomprehending. Then he slowly nodded.
So it was that I bundled her into one of the sumptuous fur spreads from her bed and dragged her down the hall behind me. He showed me a door, quite small, that I would not have noticed on my own. It opened onto a chute and the distant rush of waves. He had me push her into this. She vanished from sight, and that seemed to give Prilkop much satisfaction.
We returned to the scroll room for our trove. We walked through the halls, dragging the sacks more than carrying them. Scrolls are surprisingly heavy. I winced at every bump as we took them up the stairs, imagining how Chade would scold me for treating them like this. Well, he would not know what condition they were in when I first found them. With Prilkop's help, I got both sacks up to the pillar room. There we paused to catch our breath. For all his years, the old man seemed as spry as a youngster. For the first time, I pondered how old the Fool might live to be. Then, the even more strange thought came to me, to wonder where he was in his life. Was he still a youngster? Did that have any meaning to him? Once he had told me that he was older than Nighteyes and I put together… I pushed the thought aside uncomfortably. I did not want to consider how different we were, how different we had always been. Our friendship had crossed that line and made us one. Just as my bond with Nighteyes had made us one. And yet. I sighed as I followed the Black Man down the steps to the map room. And yet it had not made us the same. I was a man, with a man's concerns with this world, unable to live fully in the now as Nighteyes did, or to stretch his years beyond their span. Was that how the Fool saw me?
I made a small sound in my throat. Prilkop glanced back at me, but said nothing. When we reached the map room, he paused by the image. He rubbed his hands together as he considered it, then, with a raised eyebrow, he gestured at it.
I touched the grouped gems near Buckkeep. "Buckkeep," I told him. "My home."
He nodded sagely. Then, as the Fool had before, he touched a land far to the south. "Home," he said. Then he touched an inlet on the coast of that land and said, "Clerres."
"Your school," I guessed. "Where you wish to return."
He paused, head cocked, then nodded. "Yes. Our school." He gave me a sad look. "Where we must return. That what we have learned may be recorded. For others, yet to come. Very important this is."
"I understand."
The Black Man looked at me kindly. "No. You don't." He studied the map again, and then, as if speaking to himself, said, "The letting go is hard. Yet, this you must do. Both of you. Let go. If not, you will make more changes. Blindly. If, because of him, things you do make changes, what comes of them? No one can say. Even a little thing. You bring to him bread. He eats. If you do not bring this bread, someone else eats it. See, a change. A little change. To him, you give your time, your talk, your friendship. Who then does not receive your time? Hm? A big change, maybe, I think. Let go, Fool's Changer. Your time together is over. Done." It was none of his concern and I very nearly told him so. But he looked at me so kindly and sympathetically that my anger died almost as soon as I felt it.
"Let us go back," he suggested. I started to nod and then Thick broke into my thoughts. Fitz? Have you finished yet? The Queen is still waiting.
I sighed wearily. I'd best go take care of it, and then beg some time for myself. I've finished. I'll bring the Skill scrolls home with me this time. Meet me at the Witness Stones and help me carry them. No! I'm eating raspberry tart! With cream.
After the tart, then. I felt a sudden sympathy for Thick's unwillingness to interrupt his meal to rush and find me. Prilkop had reached the end of the steps. He glanced up at me quizzically. "I have to go back to my home for a time," I told him. "Please tell the Fool that I will come back as soon as I can. I'll bring more food then, fresh fruit and bread."
Prilkop looked alarmed. "Not through the portal stones? So soon? Not wise is that. Foolish, even." He made a beckoning gesture at me. "Come to Prilkop's home. A night, a day, a night, a day, and then go back through the stones. If you must."
"I fear I must go now." I did not want to see the Fool or talk to him again until I had found a way around all his arguments.
"Changer? You can do this? You have done this before?"
"Several times."
He came back up the steps toward me, his brow lined with anxiety. "Never have I seen this done so often, so close together. Be careful, then. Do not come back too soon. Rest."
"I've done this before," I insisted. I recalled how I had been in and out of the Skill-stones with Dutiful on that long-ago day we fled the Others beach. "Do not fear for me."
Despite my brave words, I wondered if I were being foolish in going through the Skill-stones once again. Whenever I look back on that moment, I wonder whatever possessed me. Was it the press of hurt that the Fool had taken our link away? I truly think not. I think it was more likely too little sleep for too many days.
I climbed back up the steps to the Skill-pillar. The Black Man followed me anxiously. "Sure you are? Sure of this?"
I stooped and took up the necks of both bags. "I'll be fine," I assured him. "Tell the Fool I will be back." I gripped the necks of both bags in one hand. I opened my other palm wide and pushed into the pillar. I stepped into a starry night.