by neetha Napew
Riddle’s telling had been true. I stared at the blackened and shriveled forearms that she struggled to use. She could neither rise nor cover them again beneath the robe. I met her colorless eyes and spoke my words coldly. “You are the coward. At the last minute, you could not give up yourself, not even to complete your vision of what the world should be. You lacked his courage. He accepted the price fate decreed for him. He took his pain and his death and he won. He triumphed. You failed.”
She made a sound, between a shriek and a yelp, full of hatred and fury. It battered at my Skill-wall, but she could not get through. Had her strength for that magic been drawn from Kebal Rawbread? I watched her try to get to her feet. The long mantle hindered her, for she knelt on the hem of it. The black sticks that had been her arms and hands were of no use to her. From the elbow down, her arms were shrunken to bones that ended in charred and tapering ends. I could see the remains of the dual bones in her forearms. There was no sign of her hands and fingers. Those, at least, the dragon had claimed before she had managed to drag herself free of him. I recalled how Verity had gone, and Kettle, melting into the dragon they had fashioned so lovingly for the good of their people. Then I turned and walked away from her.
“Stop!” she commanded me. There was outrage in her voice. “You kill me here! I have seen this, a hundred times in my nightmares. You kill me now! It was my certain fate if I failed. I dreaded it but I now command it! My visions have always been true. You are fated to kill me.”
I spoke over my shoulder, scarcely considering my words at all. “I am the Catalyst. I change things. Besides. The time we are in now is the time the Fool chose. It is his future I live in. In his vision of the future, I walk away from you. You die slowly. Alone.”
Another dozen steps, and then she screamed. She screamed until her breath was gone, and then I heard her ragged panting. I walked on.
“Youare the Catalyst still!” she shrieked after me. There was nothing but desperation and amazement in her voice now. “If you will not kill me, then come back and use your Skill to heal me. I will be subject to you in all ways! You could use me as you wished, and I could teach you all I have learned from the Skill scrolls! You have the strength to wield that magic! Heal me, and I will show you the path to power. You will be the rightful King of the Six Duchies, of the Out Islands, of all the Cursed Shores! All. I will give you all your dreams, if only you come back!”
My dream was dead in my arms. I continued to walk.
I heard her scratching the blackened stubs of her melted arms against the ice. It reminded me of an overturned beetle frantically scrabbling in a washbasin. I did not look back. I wondered, briefly, if she had ever foreseen this moment, if she had ever imagined the look of my back as I walked away. No, I suddenly knew. The Black Man had told me. I walked in the Fool’s world now, the future he had shaped. She could see nothing, prophesy nothing here. This time was not hers. It was the time he had chosen.
I do not think I am by nature a cruel man, and yet I have never been able to feel any sort of compunction over what I did. I heard her scream once, like an animal screams from a trap, but I did not look back. I turned a corner and walked on, back the way I had come.
I was unutterably weary and cold and hungry. Yet none of those things consumed me as much as my grief. At some point, tears came to me. They fell on the Fool’s golden hair and misted my vision of the tunnels to a pale maze. Perhaps in my daze, I missed one of my marks on the wall. I realized it, and turned back, but found myself in an unfamiliar corridor. I came to an eroded ice staircase and attempted to go up it, but found that, burdened as I was, I could not. I turned back again and trudged on, hopelessly lost.
At one point, I spread my cloak out on the floor and slept for a time, my arm flung protectively across his frozen body. When I awoke, I searched through my pack and found a bit of travelers’ bread and ate it. I drank from my flask, and then wet the edge of my cloak and wiped some of the blood and filth from his contorted face. I could not wipe the pain from his brow. Then I rose and took him up and walked on, completely disoriented in the unchanging pale light. I was, perhaps, a trifle mad.
I reached a place where one wall was of ice and one of stone. I should have turned back, but like a moth drawn toward light, I followed the passageway that was leading me upward. I came to stairs cut in the stone and followed them up. The bluish light of the gleaming orbs did not waver, never brightening or dimming, so that I bore his body through a timeless maze of gentle stairs that wound ever upward. I halted for breath on a landing. There was a wooden door there, the wood gone splintery and dry. I pushed it open, thinking of finding fuel for his burning.
If I had doubted at all that once this icy realm had belonged to the Elderlings, that chamber dispelled it. I had seen furniture like this before, tottering in the deserted ruins of the city by the river. I had seen a map such as this room held, though this seemed to be of a world rather than of a city and the surrounding countryside. It was on a table in the center of the room. It was round, but it was not flat, nor drawn upon paper. Each island, each coast, each wave tip had been sculpted. Tiny mountains jutted in ranges, and the sea crinkled. Gleaming rivers meandered through grasslands to the sea.
An island, most likely Aslevjal, was in the exact center of it. Other islands dotted the sea around it. To the south and west, I saw the coast of the Six Duchies, though it was subtly wrong in many places. To the north was a land I had no name for, and across a wide sea, on the eastern edge of the map, I saw a coastline where tradition told me there was only endless ocean. Tiny gems had been set randomly into the map, each marked with a rune. Some seemed to glow with an inner light. One glittered white on Aslevjal. Four, set in a minute square, sparkled in Buck, near the mouth of the Buck River. There were a handful of others throughout the Six Duchies, some bright and some dull. There were more in the Mountain Kingdom, and a line of them, carefully spaced, along the Rain Wild River, though many of those were quenched. I nodded slowly to myself. Of course.
Dimly, I was aware that my arms and back ached. Yet it never occurred to me that I might wish to set down my burden and rest for a time. Inevitable as sunset, there was the door to another stairwell in the corner. I entered it. It was narrower than the first and the stairs were steeper. I marched slowly up it, my feet scuffing as I found each step unseeing. The light changed slowly as I went. The bluish glow faded, slowly replaced with the murky light of true day. Then I emerged into a tower room walled with glass. One panel of it had cracked, and all of the windows were coated with frost. The ceiling spoke of a steep spire overhead, with sheltering eaves. I put my eye to the crack in the window and peered out. Snow. Blowing snow. I could see no more than that.
In the center of the room was a Skill-pillar. The runes carved into the sides of it were as cleanly chiseled as the day they had been cut. I walked a slow circuit around them until I came to the one that I had known would be there. I nodded to myself. I held him close to me and said softly into his blood-matted hair, “Let’s go back, then.”
I opened one hand and we walked into the Skill-pillar.
Perhaps my recent practice of the Skill had strengthened me, or perhaps this pillar worked better than others I had known. The Fool in my arms, I stepped from winter to summer, from a stone tower to what remained of a market plaza. All around me, a summer day hummed in the forest that had encroached to the edges of it. I took two more steps and then went to my knees, both in weakness and gratitude. Here, suddenly, it did not feel like blasphemy to deposit him on the clean stone and earth. I sat down flat beside him and rested. For a time, all was still, save for the calls of birds and the buzzing of busy insects. I looked down the overgrown road, like a tunnel through the greenery of the forest, that would, if I followed it, lead me to the Stone Garden where all the Elderling dragons slept. I looked up at the worn pillar, where once a young Fool had perched and I had seen him transformed into a white girl wearing a rooster crown. “This is a good place,” I said softly. “
I’m glad we came back here.” I leaned back and closed my eyes. I slept.
It took time for the warmth of the afternoon to seep into me. When I awoke, I was too warm. The Fool’s frozen body was thawing and loosening in the sunlight. I peeled my winter garments from my body as if I were shedding an outworn skin until I wore only my tunic and leggings. Now that we were here, alone and together, I felt my urgency leave me. There was time here, time that belonged only to him and me, time in which I could do things properly.
I fetched water from the stream where once we had drunk. I gently washed his face, wiping the blood from his lips and smoothing the hair over his torn ear. When I could do so, I peeled the sacking away from his raw flesh. What I saw dizzied me at first. Yes. She was right. I did regret that I had turned away from her instead of dealing her the agonizing death she deserved. But as I straightened, as much as I could, his tormented and stiffened limbs and wiped away with green leaves and clean grass the filth and clotted blood, all hatred seeped away from me. Here was my Fool, and if I could not save him from death, I could send him from this life with dignity.
He had curled protectively around his last treasure. He gripped the Rooster Crown in his lifeless hands. I pried its dull gray wood carefully from his nailless fingers. His tormentors had broken the crown, probably in the course of beating him, but he had repaired it before he died. When I saw how he had done it, how he had used his own congealing blood as a binder to hold the pieces together, I choked for a time. Its circle had a gap in it. I wondered if that had grieved him as he died.
Slowly I took from my pouch the shard they had left on the floor of the throne room. It only lacked that one piece to make it complete. I dipped the edges of it into his thawing blood, and joined it to its fellows to complete the crown. Dampened with blood, the wood swelled and seized and held, almost as if it had never been broken. I did not know what this treasure was, exactly. Whatever it had meant to him, I would send him from this world wearing it.
I set it to one side as I gathered evergreen boughs and dry fallen limbs, dead twigs and dry grasses, for his funeral pyre. Evening was hovering before it was built. When it was ready, I spread my cloak over it. Overhead, a deep blue sky shimmered, and summer seemed to hold its breath around us, awaiting the first stars of evening. The sparks of his burning would join them. I lifted him and placed him on the cloak. Experience told me the evergreen boughs would burn well and consume him. With a heavy heart, I sat down on the stone beside his pyre, the Rooster Crown in my lap. It lacked but one thing to be complete.
From my pack I took a bundled packet. Gently I unrolled the fabric. One at a time, I set out the feathers from the Others beach. As I handled each one, I marveled anew at the intricate workmanship that had gone into their carving. Despite all the long way they had traveled with me, they were unharmed. Why someone had chosen such a lusterless wood for such fine work escaped me. It was as plain and dull as the arrow the Fool had given Swift.
It took some moments for me to fit each feather into its proper place. I noticed now what I never had before, that the end of each feather’s shaft was notched. Each would slide only into its proper aperture in the crown. As I pushed the last one into place, it seemed to my weary eyes that a wave of colors washed over both crown and feathers. Perhaps it was only a rainbow caught for an instant in the sudden tears that brimmed my eyes. I dashed them away impatiently. Time to be done with all this.
The crown whispered uncomfortably against my fingers, like a trapped fly buzzing in a fist. I wondered what I held. What potent Elderling magic was trapped here, denied for all time by the Fool’s death? For a moment, my eyes lingered on the softened carvings of roosters’ heads that ringed the crown. Either the Fool had never got round to painting it as we recalled it, or it had refused to hold the paint. Chips of color still clung in the deeper corners of the carving. Tiny gems still winked in two of the carved eyes; the others were blank and empty. There were dark seams in the ring of the crown where it had been broken and then glued back into a whole with the Fool’s blood. I tapped one of the seams cautiously, testing the strength of the bond. It held and suddenly he leaped into my mind, my memory of him so poignant and whole that I felt disemboweled with sorrow.
I sat down heavily on the pyre beside him. Rigor had kept his body in its defensive curl. I could do nothing about that. I wished that I could have smoothed the lines of terror and pain from his face before I sent him on his way. I pushed his golden hair back from his tawny forehead. “Oh, Beloved,” I said. I bent and kissed his brow in farewell. And then, grasping the rightness of that foreign tradition, I named him as myself. For when I burned him, I knew I would be ending myself, as well. The man I had been would not survive this loss. “Good-bye, FitzChivalry Farseer.” I took the crown in both hands to ease it onto his brow. I felt suddenly as if all my life had been funneling me toward this moment. It seemed cruel that the strongest current of my life would propel me toward this moment of absolute end and loss. But there were no other choices left for me. Some things could not be changed. It was time to crown the king’s jester and send him on his way.
I stopped.
I halted my hands, and it felt as if by doing so, I stood alone against fate and defied the flow of all time. I knew what I was meant to do. I should crown my Fool and then drench the pyre with the remaining oil. A spark, at most two, would be enough for the summer-dry tinder. He would burn away to nothing, his smoke rising on the summer wind of the land beyond the Mountain Kingdom. I would go back, through the pillar, to Aslevjal. I would collect Thick and go back to the little bay and wait for a ship to come and fetch us. It was right, it was inevitable, it was the channel in which the entire world wished to flow. Life would go on without the Fool, because he had died. I could see it all so clearly, as if I had always known it would come to this.
He was dead. Nothing could change that.
But I was the Changer.
I stood suddenly. I lifted the humming crown high overhead in my hands and shook it at the sky. “NO!” I roared. I still do not know to whom I spoke. “No! Let it be different! Not this way! Whatever you want from me, take it! But don’t let it all end like this! Let him take my life and give me his death. Let him be me and I be him. I take his death! Do you hear me? I take his death for my own!”
I lifted the crown to the sun. Through my flowing tears, it shone iridescent, and the feathers seemed to waver gently in the summer breeze. Then, with an almost physical wrench, I tore it out of time’s destined path. I clapped it firmly upon my own brow. As the world spun around me, I lay my body down on my funeral pyre, wrapped my arms around my friend, and gave myself over to whatever awaited me beyond it.
chapter29
FEATHERS IN A FOOL’S CAP
She was the richest girl in the world, for not only had she a noble father, and many silk gowns and so many necklaces and rings that not even a dozen little girls could have worn them all at once, but she had also a little gray box, carved from a dragon’s womb. And inside it, ground to fine powder, were all the happy memories of the wisest princesses who had ever lived. So, whenever she got the least bit sad, all she had to do was open her little box and take a tiny bit of the memory snuff, and, kerchoo! She was as happy as a girl could be again.
—OLD JAMAILLIAN TALE
I missed a step in the dark. It was like that, that unexpected lurch.
“Blood is memory.” I swear someone whispered that by my ear.
“Blood is who we are,” a young woman agreed with him. “Blood recalls who we were. Blood is how we will be remembered. Work it well into the womb wood.”
Someone laughed, an old woman with few teeth. “Say that six times swiftly!” she cackled. And she did. “Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood.”
The others laughed, amused at her tripping tongue. “Well, you try it!” she challenged u
s.
“Work it well into the womb wood,” I said obediently.
But it wasn’t me.
There were five other people there inside me, looking out of my eyes, running my tongue over my teeth, scratching at my beard with my unkempt nails. Breathing my breath, and rejoicing in the taste of the forest on the night air. Shaking out my hair, alive again.
Five poets, five jesters. Five tellers of tales. Five jumbling, tumbling minstrels, leaping and whirling in gratitude for their release, shaking out my fingers, limbering my voice, and already squabbling and vying for my attention.
“What is your need? A birthday anthem? I’ve a host of them at my beck and call, and it’s no trouble, no trouble at all, to adapt one to your recipient’s name!”
“Hackery! Shameless hackery, this chopping and splicing of old relics, this dressing of bones anew! Let me have your voice and I’ll sing you a song to rouse your warriors and make your maidens tremble with newborn lust!” This was a man, and he filled my lungs to bursting to roar out his words. Each set of words, each voice came from my own throat. I was a puppet for them, a pipe to be played.
“Lust is but a wet moment, a surge and a splat!” she said disdainfully. She was a young woman, and she remembered freckles across the bridge of her nose. Strange to hear her words pipe from my throat. “You want a love song, don’t you? Something timeless, something older than the fallen mountains, and newer than a seed unfurling in rich soil. Such is love.”
“Good luck!” someone exclaimed in dismay. He tinged his words with a fop’s disdain. “Listen. Fa, la, la, la, la, la—oh, hopeless! This one has the pipes of a sailor, and a body of wood. The finest song ever sung will be a crow’s croaking when it comes from this throat, and I’ll wager he never turned a handspring in his life. Who is this, and how came he by our treasure?”
“Minstrels,” I said dully. “Minstrels, tumblers, and bards. Oh, Fool, thiswould be your treasure. A circle of jesters. There is no help for us here.” I put my head down into my hands. I felt the rough wood of the crown beneath my fingers. I pushed at it, but it clung stubbornly in place. It had tightened to my brow.
