Fool's Quest - Страница 158

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“Fitz?” Someone spoke close by. Someone shook my arm. It was Amber. I turned to her, smiling and puzzled.

“I wish you could have seen that,” I said quietly.

“I felt it,” she said quietly. “I very much doubt if anyone here did not feel it. The building seemed to hum around us. Fitz, this was a bad idea. You have to stop. This is dangerous.”

“Yes. But more than that, it’s right. It’s very right.”

“Fitz, you must listen to me—”

“Please. It’s her feet. They started to go wrong about a year ago. She used to run and play. She can scarcely walk anymore.”

I gave my head a shake and turned away from Amber. An Elderling woman with hummocked shoulders stood before me. But they were not her shoulders at all. What I had taken for fabric-draped hummocks I now saw were the tops of her wings. They were blue and the tops of them were as high as her ears; the trailing plumes nearly swept the floor behind her. A girl of about seven leaned on her, partially supported by her Elderling father on the other side. His markings were green, the mother’s blue, and the child bore a twining of both colors. “She is ours,” the father said. “But from month to month neither of our dragons claims her. Or both do, and squabble over her growth as if she were a toy, one changing what the other wrought. Both our dragons have gone to a warmer place for the winter months. Since then, she has grown worse.”

“Tats, Thymara, do you think it wise to ask him to interfere? Will not both Fente and Sintara take this amiss when they return?” Queen Malta cautioned them.

“When they return, I will worry about it,” Thymara declared. “Until then, why should Fillia pay for their neglect? Six Duchies prince, can you help her?”

I studied the child. I could almost see the conflicting plans for her. One ear was tasseled, the other pointed. The discord rang against my senses like the chiming of a cracked bell. I tried to be cautious. “I don’t know. And if I try, I may have to draw on her strength, on the reserves of her own body. It will be her own flesh that makes the changes. I can guide her, but I cannot supply what her body needs.”

“I don’t understand,” Tats objected.

I pointed at her feet. “You can see that her feet strive to become the feet of a dragon. Some bone must go away, flesh must be added. I cannot cut nor can I add. Her body must do that.” I could hear the muttering of the gathered Elderlings as they discussed my words.

The green father dropped to one knee to look into his daughter’s face. “You must decide, Fillia. Do you want to do this?”

She looked up at me, in fear and hope. “I want to run again and not have it hurt. My face is tight when I try to smile so that I think my lips will crack.” She touched her scaled scalp. “I would have hair, to keep me warmer!” She lifted her hands to me. Her nails were blue and tipped like claws. “Please,” she said.

“Yes,” I responded. I held my hands out to her and she set her fate in them. Two slender hands in my sword-callused ones. I felt her pain as she struggled to balance on her twisted feet. I sank down to sit on the floor and she folded gratefully. The Skill in me sent a tendril to touch her brow. This one, ah, this one was a puzzle. Here was her father and there her mother, and here the dragons that had touched her and quarreled over her like two children ripping at a single doll. There were so many possible ways. “What would you like?” I asked her, and her face lit. Her vision of herself surprised me. She did not mind her strong clawed feet, if only they would grow straight. She wished for a blue horse on one cheek, and for the darker green in her scaling to run up her back and down her arms like vines. She wanted black hair, thick and strong like her mother’s, and ears that she could move to catch sound. She showed me and with the Skill, I persuaded her body to follow her will. I heard as at a distance her parents speaking in worried tones, but it was not their choice to make but hers. And when at last she stepped back from me, walking on the front pads of her high arched feet, shaking back a glossy mane, she cried out to them, “See me! This is me!”

Another child they brought to me, born with nostrils so flat to his face that he could scarcely breathe. We found the nose he should have had, and lengthened his fingers and set his hips so that he might walk upright. This child moaned and I was sorry for how he ached with the turning of his bones, but, “It must be done!” the Skill and I whispered to him. He was thin when I gifted him back to his fathers, and panting with pain. One stared at me, teeth bared, and the other wept, but the boy breathed and the hands that he reached to them had thumbs he could move.

“Fitz. You are finished. Stop.” Amber’s voice trembled.

The Skill coursed through me and I recalled that this rush of pleasure was as dangerous as it was sweet. To some. To some it was dangerous. But I was learning, I’d learned so much this very day. I could control it in ways I’d never learned before, in ways I’d never thought were possible. To touch with a tendril, to read the makeup of a child, to allow someone to guide the Skill I wielded as if sharing a grip on a brush, all this I could do.

And I could cool the Skill, reduce it from a boil to a simmer. I could control it.

“Please!” a woman shouted suddenly. “Kind prince, if you would, cannot you open my womb! Let me conceive and bear a child! Please. I beg you, I beg you!”

She flung herself down at my feet and embraced my knees. Her head was bowed, her hair hanging past her heavily scaled face as she sobbed. She was no Elderling but one whose body had been distorted by contact with dragons. With every child I had touched, the influences of a dragon on a growing human body had become plainer to me. In some of the children, I had seen deliberation and even art in how dragons had marked them. But in this woman, the changes were as random as a tree planted in rocky soil and shaded by a boulder. As close as she was to me, I could not exclude her from my Skill, and as it closed around her I felt her innate ability in the magic. It was untrained and yet in that instant I shared how deep her longing for a child was, and how it distressed her to watch the slow years pass and her cradle remain empty.

Such a familiar pang. How could I refuse such a request when I knew so well what it was like to have it denied? Why had I never sought to use the Skill to find why Molly could not bear a child for us? Years wasted, never to be recovered. I set my hands to her shoulders to lift her to her feet and in doing so closed a circle. We were bound for that moment, the pain of loss tying us together, and what had been crooked in her the Skill straightened and what had been closed opened. She cried out suddenly and stepped back from me, her hands clasped over her belly. “I felt the change!” she cried out. “I felt it!”

“Enough!” Amber cried in a low voice. “This must be enough.”

But there was suddenly before me a man saying, “Please, please, the scales have grown down my brow and onto my eyelids. I can barely see. Push them back, I beg of you, prince from the Six Duchies.” He seized my hand and set it to his face. Did he have the Skill as the woman had, or was it that it was running so strongly in me that I could not deny it? I felt the scales retreat from his eyelids, from his brow-line, and he fell back from me laughing aloud.

Someone took my hand and held it tightly. I felt the fabric of a glove against my skin.

“King Reyn! Queen Malta, please, tell them they must step back! He heals them at great danger to himself. He must stop, he must take rest now. See how he shakes! Please, tell them they must not ask more of him.” I heard the words. They meant little to me.

“Good keepers and friends, you hear Lady Amber! Step back, give him room!” Malta’s voice came from across the room. Closer to me were other voices.

“Please, kind prince!”

“My hands, if only you would mend my hands!”

“I wish to look like a woman again, not a lizard! My prince, please, please!”

In a lower voice, I heard the Fool give his orders. “Spark, Per, stand before him and hold them back. Push them back! Lant, where are you? Lant?”

“People of Kelsingra! Keep order. Step back from the prince, give him room!” There was anxiety in Reyn’s voice, bordering on fear.

It was hard to use my eyesight when the Skill flowed so strongly all around me, far more potent than any of my senses, far stronger even than my Wit. My eyes were poor things, relying on light to show me the outer shapes of things. Still, I looked for Lant and found him at my side, struggling to take something from his pocket. In front of me, Spark and Per had linked arms and stood between me and a wall of pushing people. They could not hold them back, not when such need consumed them. I closed my eyes and stopped my ears. Such senses only confused me when I could blanket the room with Skill and know so much more.

Amber’s gloved hand still gripped mine and her free hand was on my chest now, trying to push me back and away from the reaching hands. It was a hopeless gesture. The room was large and the people had flowed to surround us. There was no “back” now, only a noose of desperate people struggling toward us.

As mobs go, it was a small one, and no one meant me harm. Some pushed toward me out of hunger and need. Some strove to be first, others only to see what wonder I would next work, and some pushed to try and break through the wall of people in front of them so that they might have a chance to beg a boon of their own. One woman pushed because she did not want another woman to reach me and have her face changed, lest she win the man they both desired. Rapskal was in the thick of it, with Kase and Boxter, not to find order but to see if somehow Amber would betray that she was sighted, for he was certain she had been to the Silver well, and he was consumed with hatred that anyone would attempt to steal Silver from the dragons.

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