Fool's Quest - Страница 66

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But Revel was dead.

I thought about my father. Did he care that I’d been stolen? Would he come after me?

I’m right here, Wolf-Father said. I’ve never left you.

My other father.

We are one.

“Shaysim?”

I felt queasy. I lifted my head slowly. Dwalia crouched before me. I said nothing.

“Look what I have for you, Shaysim.” She held out to me something rectangular and covered in bright fabric. I looked at it without comprehension. She opened it, and inside were pages of thick, creamy paper. It was a book, not a simple ledger such as my father had given me, but a book bound in rich cloth. I itched to touch it.

Danger! Wolf-Father’s warning brushed against my mind. I kept perfectly still.

“And this.” It was like a quill, but made of silver. “The ink I have for this is as blue as a summer sky.” She waited. “Don’t you want to try them?” she asked me.

I tried to restore childishness to my voice. “Try them how? What do they do?”

Dismay crept over her face. “You write with the pen on the paper. You write down your dreams. Your important dreams.”

“I don’t know how to write.” I held my breath, hoping my lie would protect me.

“You don’t …” She let her words trail away. Then she smiled her warmest smile. “That doesn’t matter, Shaysim. When we get to Clerres, you will be taught. Until then, you can tell me about your dreams, and I will write—”

Temptation surged in me. Tell her I had dreamed of a wolf tearing white rabbits into bloody shreds. Tell her of a man with a battle-axe chopping the heads of squirming white snakes.

NO. Wolf-Father was adamant. In a breath of awareness, he added, Do not provoke another predator until your pack is ready to tear it apart. Be small and still, cub.

“I don’t remember any dreams now.” I scratched my face, looked at the bits of dangling skin, wiped them on my shirt, and then pretended to pick my nose until she made a small sound of dismay. She moved away from me, taking book and quill with her. I looked carefully at my finger and then put it in my mouth. Odessa moved away from me. I did not let myself smile.

Chapter Seventeen
Blood

...

There are seventy-seven known medicinal uses for dragon parts, and fifty-two unsubstantiated ones. The seventy-seven are listed in the scrolls called Trifton Dragon-killer’s Remedies. Of great antiquity, this scroll has been translated many times, to the extent that seventeen of the remedies make no sense. For instance, we are told that “ground dragon scales applied to the apple with brighten coal a maiden’s eyes.” Yet, mistranslated as these remedies may be, for each one the original scribe provided the name and apparently the attestation from someone who had used the remedy to good effect.

The fifty-two unsubstantiated remedies are those with no attestations, and ones that seem unlikely to be real. As they are at the end of the translation I have, I suspect they are a later addition by someone seeking to present the medical properties of dragon parts as having more wondrous uses. There are potions made from various bits of dragons that are said to render a man invisible, to give a woman the gift of flight, ones guaranteed to bring twins to term, healthy and strong, in three months, and one startling remedy that assures the user of being able to see anyone whose name he speaks aloud, regardless of the distance or if that person is still alive.

With the reappearance of dragons in our corner of the world, perhaps these remedies may again become available, but I hypothesize that they will remain exceedingly rare and expensive. Thus the opportunity to test the beneficial effects of Trifton’s remedies may evade us still.

When one misses a stair in the dark and begins to fall, one feels that terrible lurch of wrongness combined with fear of the impact that will surely follow. I fell with the same horrid sensation of moving in the wrong direction, but my fear was that there would never be any impact. Only endless falling. The points of light were like dust. Bodiless, I flailed at them. Never before had I retained such a sense of self, such a sense of mortality inside a Skill-pillar.

And when I recognized that I had a self, I suddenly sensed I was not alone. He was beside me, streaking endlessly down like a comet as his being unraveled in brightness behind him. That was wrong. That was very wrong.

Between knowing it was wrong and wanting to do something about it, an indeterminate amount of time passed. Then I struggled to know what to do. Limit him. Define him. How? Name him. One of the oldest magics known to men. Chade. Chade. But I was tongueless, voiceless. I wrapped him in my self, containing him with all I knew of him. Chade. Chade Fallstar.

I held him. Not his body, but his awareness. We fell together. I held my awareness of my separate self and hoped without reason that there was an end, somewhere, sometime, to this endless falling. Despite my efforts, Chade was leaking away from me. Like a basket of meal in a high wind, he seemed to waft away, carried off by the Skill. Worse, I had no sense of him resisting it. I held him, gathered back what I could of him, but I also felt myself shredding in the constant blast of that place that was neither a place nor a time. The very timelessness of it was terrifying. The journey through the star-studded vastness of the stone passage seemed to slow. “Please,” I breathed, terrified that we might never emerge, that no one would ever know what became of us, that Bee would live or die believing that her father had never attempted to rescue her. But that agony was fleeting.

Merge, whispered something that was Chade but both more and less than he was. Let go. It doesn’t matter. And he surrendered to that glittering attraction of the spaces between, to the darkness that was neither a distance nor a location. Like a seedhead that, at the whisper of the wind, launches itself into a thousand pieces, so was Chade. And I, I was not a sack to hold him, but a net. With the least part of the will that remained to me, I strove to hold him together within myself, even as the lure of the sparkling darkness sought to disperse us into bits of light.

Chade. Chade Fallstar.

His name was not enough to bind him. He had hidden himself from it for too long.

Chade Fallstar. Brother to Shrewd Farseer. Father to Lant Fallstar. Father to Shine Fallstar. Chade! Shaper of FitzChivalry Farseer. I settled loop after loop of identity around him as if I were wrapping line to tie up a storm-tugged ship. But I could not enclose him without opening myself to the pull of the current.

I have them!

I did not wish anyone to have me, but then I was clutching at Dutiful and felt myself drawn from the stone that sucked at me like thick mud. Chade came with me whether he would or not, and suddenly we were both shaking with cold on the snowy hillside above Buckkeep as dawn was breaking.

Dawn.

King Dutiful grasped me by the wrist, and Kettricken gazed at me, swathed from head to foot in a purple wool cloak edged in white fox fur. Six of her guards in purple and white stood by. Near them was a wagon, made comfortable with blankets and cushions. Steady was slouched on the seat, holding his face in his hands. Nettle sat in the wagon, swaddled in blankets like an old tinker. Riddle was beside her, haggard, his face red with cold. Lending her his strength with no thought of the cost. They both looked worn, as if aged by years.

Years?

I turned my head and looked at Dutiful. His beard was gray and his shoulders bowed.

How long? I asked, and then remembered that speech came from my mouth. “How long?” I asked again, croaking the words from my dry throat.

Every Skilled person there startled. Dutiful spoke. “Easy, Fitz. Gently. Half a day and all the night.” He lifted a hand and rubbed his cheek. Frost. His dark beard was hoared gray with frost. Days. Not years. But still, days.

He put his hand on my shoulder, waking me to him. “Fitz. What happened?” He added, “You need not Skill so powerfully. We are right here to hear your words.”

“But you are all still here?” I was astounded.

“Where else would we be?” Nettle demanded angrily. “You Skilled to us that you were attacked and then we heard nothing. You both blocked us. Then you suddenly Skilled that you’d be coming through the stone. But you didn’t! What happened?”

There was too much to explain. I moved my mouth but could not find words intricate enough to explain anything. I had told him we were attacked. How could that encompass the betrayal, the swords, the cuts, pain, gasping for breath, the many motions our bodies had made? My thoughts slid and slipped like cartwheels in mud. As Dutiful put an arm around Chade to lift him, two guardsmen joined him, carrying him drooping between them to the wagon. Kettricken took my arm. I felt her so strongly. Such a brave woman, so true and intelligent. Nighteyes had loved her so much.

“Oh, Fitz,” she said softly and her cold-reddened cheeks flushed hot. I leaned on her unabashedly. She would help me. She’d always helped me, never failed me. They all had. I simply opened my mind to Nettle and Dutiful and let my tale flow from my thoughts to theirs. I was too weary and it was all too complex to hold anything back. I gave it all to them, everything that had happened since I had left Buckkeep. Skilling was so much easier than talking. I finished with the most awful truth I knew. “You were right, you and Riddle. I’m a terrible father. I should have given her to you. This would never have happened if I’d listened to you and given you Bee.”

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