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And there it was, that stone-dropping-into-a-well plunge of my heart.
We were moving swiftly together, trotting side by side like wolves on a trail. I loved this.
We always loved the hunt. An ancient echo of the wolf I had been and the wolf who was still with me.
I didn’t step into the stone; it engulfed me. A moment of black and sparkling nothing. An indefinable sense of well-being caressed and tempted me. I was on the cusp of understanding something wonderful; in a moment I would grasp it fully. I would not just comprehend it. I would be it. Complete. Unheeding of anything, or anyone, ever again. Fulfilled.
The last light of sunset fell across the bed and the features of my old mentor, my old friend, my great-uncle Chade Fallstar. Despair rose in me.
But I didn’t. I didn’t know any more about it than the last time we had attempted to use Skill to heal a sealed man.
Oh, the things we discover and the things we learn, much too late. Worse are the secrets that are not secrets, the sorrows we live with but do not admit to one another.
When one has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.
This is the dream I love the best. I had it once. I’ve tried to make it come back, but it does not. Two wolves are running. That is all. They run by moonlight across an open hillside and then into an oak forest. There is little underbrush and they do not slow. They are not even hunting. They are just running, taking joy in the stretch of their muscles and the cool air flowing into their open jaws. They owe nothing to no one. They have no decisions, no duties, and no king. They have the night and the running, and it is enough for them. I long to be that complete. DREAM JOURNAL OF BEE FARSEER
“When the bee to the earth does fall, the butterfly comes back to change all.”
There are endings. There are beginnings. Sometimes they coincide, with the ending of one thing marking the beginning of another. But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything has ended and nothing else can ever begin.
“You … boil. Like the big kettle in the kitchen. When you come near, ideas and images and what you think come out of you like the steam from the pot. I feel your heat and smell what seethes inside you. I try to hold back but it drenches me and scalds me.
But Bee would outshine her as the sun outshines a candle.
My child. My little girl, sleepy and innocent-eyed. My heart swelled with love for her.
She had never seen the ocean or a ship, but had drawn a little boat towed through the waves by water snakes.
It was as if I had discovered the difference between river pebbles and gemstones, and realized that I had left jewels scattered haphazardly about for the past nine years.
It took six pages for me to write my Dream about the fish-white boy in the boat with no oars and how he sold himself as a slave.
I wrote a Dream I’d had of my father cutting open his chest and taking out his heart and pressing it into a stone until there was no blood left in it.
They were heartfelt missives from a young man of great passion and greater restraint, promising her that he would make something of himself and acquire a fortune and a reputation that might make up for his lack of noble birth.
“Your dream made me think of someone I knew a long time ago. He was a very pale man, and he often had peculiar dreams. And when he was a child, he wrote his dreams down, just as you said you would do.”
You might be surprised to find that facing life can be much harder than facing death.”
My child guided me home.
Do not agonize about yesterday. Do not borrow tomorrow’s trouble. Let your heart hunt. Rest in the now.
They might call me Bee Badgerlock, but I knew that in truth I was Bee Farseer. That knowledge was like a brick being set in place to fill up a chink in a wall. I was a Farseer.
Did others look at Bee’s pale hair and blue eyes and think me a fool?
I felt my gaze drawn to a pathetic lone beggar camped on the doorstep of a tea-and-spice shop. I hugged myself and shivered at his blind gaze.
Remind my sister that our father is a very brave man, when you see her. Tell her I am learning to be brave, too.”
The beauty and the possibility of glory that blossomed all around me flowed from him through me. This, this was how it was supposed to be done. Not in tiny glimpses, not as unconnected dreams. Everywhere I looked, possibilities multiplied.
And the paths change, they change constantly. Some vanish, impossible now, and others grow more likely. That is why the training takes so many years. So many years. One studies, and one pays attention to the dreams. Because the dreams are like guideposts for the most significant moments. The most significant moments …
“The wolf comes,” he recited. “His teeth are a knife, and the flying drops of blood are his tears.”
I plunged into the Fool’s body. We no longer had a Skill-link; for an instant his boundaries opposed me. I summoned Skill-strength I scarcely knew I possessed and breached his defenses.
“Well. A bit longer we shall have together. But at the last, we fail, my Catalyst. None have tried harder than we did.”
“When I learned for myself what I’d asked of you. How a minute of designed pain becomes an eternity.”
It was as Chade had described it, a sort of harness to which I could cling. Rather like holding to a powerful horse while crossing a deep, cold river. I clutched the Fool to my chest and we stepped forward into stony darkness.
“Would that Nighteyes … were here to … vouch for me. My queen.”
“Brandy with Fitz. By a fire. In clean clothes. With food. One last time, and almost I could die happy.”
They plot in convolutions far beyond what you or I could imagine, for they have a map of the maze of time, drawn from a hundred thousand prophecies.
Yet you are still the Catalyst, and you turn my dying into an infusion of strength.”
When the time for a new White Prophet to be born had passed with no such child being reported, the Servants of the Archives undertook to read for themselves all prophecies that might relate to such a lack. Their research led them to send messengers to that remote region, looking for the child. They came back with a tale of a pale child deemed a freak and an idiot, left to starve in his cradle.
