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There were all kinds and a variety of styles, but all were winged and sleeping. And they had been here a very long time. A closer examination showed me that these great trees had grown around the statues, the statues had not been placed around them. Some were almost captured by the encroaching moss and leaf mold.
“We may be far from the Skill road, but we are still in the heart of a land once occupied by Skill users. They have left their touch everywhere. You cannot say, while you walk these hills, that you are safe. You should not go alone.”
Everything was taken from me. All that was good and beautiful and truthful was laid waste by evil and lust and greed. No. By something even baser than lust and greed, some drive I could not even understand. Even while the Raiders were raping me, they seemed to take no pleasure in it. At least, not the kind of pleasure…They mocked my pain and struggling. Those who watched were laughing as they waited.”
Honor and courtesy and justice…they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.”
“I know you think it slatternly, the way I am with men. But once you have been forced, it is…different. Ever after. I say to myself, Well, I know that it can happen to me at any time. So this way, at least I decide with whom and when. There will never be children for me, and hence there will never be a permanent man. So why should not I take my pick of what I can have?
“I did not understand. When you said Burl’s soldiers had raped some of the women…I did not know you had suffered that.” “Oh.” Her voice was very small. “I had thought you deemed it unimportant. I have heard it said in Farrow that rape bothers only virgins and wives. I thought perhaps you felt that to one such as I, it was no more than my due.”
“When I look at you, I see Starling Birdsong the minstrel.” She nodded her face against me, and I knew it was as I surmised. She and I shared that fear. We would not live as victims.
“Don’t be afraid,” Kettle told me uselessly. And then added that which almost paralyzed me, “If they have him and hold him still, it is only a matter of time before they use the link between you to take you as well. Your only choice is to battle them from his mind. Go on, now.”
Then, with an insight worthy of the stone game, I knew what to do. Rather than attempt to seize him, I surrounded him. I made no effort to invade or capture, but simply to encompass all that I saw of him and hold it separate from harm. It reminded me of when I had first been learning to Skill. Often Verity had done this for me, helping me contain myself when the current of the Skill threatened to spill me wide to the world. I steadied the Fool as he gathered himself back into himself.
“It would have done no good to warn you, save to put your mind to dwelling on it. We can make this comparison. It has taken all our combined effort to keep Fitz both focused and sane on the Skill road. He would never have survived his journey into the city, had not his senses been numbed with elfbark first. Yet these others travel the road and use the Skill beacons freely. Obviously their strength overmatches his by much.
“This cannot be right. It simply cannot be right. The Prophet and the Catalyst, and you are scarcely more than boys. Green to manhood, untrained in Skill, full of pranks and lovesick woes. These are the ones sent to save the world?”
Starling snapped her fingers. “And that is what makes the song!” she exclaimed suddenly, her face transfigured with delight. “Not a song of heroic strength and mighty-thewed warriors. No. A song of two, graced only with friendship’s strength. Each possessed of a loyalty to a king that would not be denied. And that in the refrain…‘Green of manhood,’ something, ah…” The Fool caught my eye, glanced meaningfully down at himself. “Green manhood? I really should have showed her,” he said quietly. And despite everything, despite even the glowering of my queen, I burst out laughing.
“Elfbark doesn’t work like that!” I objected indignantly. “Doesn’t it?” Kettle turned on me fiercely. “Then why was it used traditionally for years for just that purpose? Given to a royal bastard young enough, it could destroy any potential for Skill use. Often enough was that done.”
“Elfbark is well known among Skilled ones as a thing to avoid,” she said quietly. I heard every word, for no one in the tent even seemed to be breathing. “It deadens a man to Skill, so that he can neither use the Skill himself, nor may others reach through its fog to Skill to him. It is said to stunt or destroy Skill talent in the young, and to impede its development in older Skill users.”
My erratic talent for Skilling…could that have been my elfbark use? Like a lightning bolt was the immense knowledge that Chade had made a mistake in giving it to Verity and me. Chade had made a mistake. It had never occurred to me, somehow, that Chade could be wrong or mistaken. Chade was my master, Chade read and studied and knew all the old lore. But he had never been taught to Skill. A bastard like myself, he had never been taught to Skill.
“Unused, the Skill does not develop,” she said, almost to herself. “Used, it grows, and begins to assert itself, and one learns, almost instinctively, the many uses to which it may be put.”
“You are most likely stunted, both of you. By the elfbark. Verity, as a man grown, may have recovered. He may have seen his Skill grow in the time he has spent away from the herb. As you seem to have. Certainly he seems to have mastered the road alone.” She sighed. “But I suspect those others have not used it, and their talents and usage of Skill had grown and outstripped what yours is.
I can give you this, and it will deaden you to the Skill. It will be harder for them to reach you, and much harder for you to reach out. You might be safer that way. But you will be once more thwarting your talent. Enough elfbark may kill it off completely. And only you can choose.”
There is no more slippery task than to refrain from thinking of something.
Kettle spoke clearly, as if I were slow. “He has been carving a dragon, and storing all his memories in it. That is part of why he seems so vague. But there is more. I believe he used the Skill to kill Carrod, and has taken grievous hurt in so doing.” She shook her head sadly. “To have come so close to finishing, and then to be defeated. I wonder how sly Regal’s coterie is. Did they send one against him, knowing that if Verity killed with the Skill, he might defeat himself?”
Like Skill. Only more so, and on my hands and arms.” I saw he thought he had answered my question. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “Well, to work the stone, you know. When this power is on my hands, the stone must obey the Skill. Extraordinary stone. Like the Witness Stones in Buck,
Of course, hands are poor tools for working stone. But once you have cut away all the excess, down to where the dragon waits, then he can be awakened with your touch. I draw my hands over the stone, and I recall to it the dragon. And all that is not dragon shivers away in shards and chips. Very slowly, of course. It took a whole day just to reveal his eyes.”
“He has begun a dragon. He cannot leave it.” She looked around at us levelly. “The only thing we can do for him now is stay here and help him finish it.”
“The dragons are the Elderlings,” the Fool said softly. “But Verity could not wake them. So he carves his own dragon, and when it is finished, he will waken it, and then he will go forth to fight the Red Ships. Alone.”
The Elderlings are dragons. Those carved creatures back in the stone garden. Those are the Elderlings. King Wisdom was able to wake them in his time, to rouse them and recruit them to his cause. They came to life for him. But now they either sleep too deeply or they are dead. Verity spent much of his strength trying to rouse them in every way he could think of. And when he could not, he decided that he would have to make his own Elderling, and quicken it, and use it to fight the Red Ships.”
“Kettle said you should touch no live things,” I reminded him like a tattling child. “Kettle has not to live with this. I do. I must discover the limits it places on me. The sooner I find what I can and cannot do with my right hand, the better.” He grinned wickedly, and made a suggestive gesture toward himself. I shook my head at him, but could not keep from laughing.
A lock does no more than keep an honest man honest, you know.
Immediately he decided Verity had conspired with you to seek that very power for himself. How dare he seek to steal the very treasure that Regal had worked so long to gain! How dare he try to make a fool of Regal in such a way!” The Fool smiled weakly. “In his mind, his domination over the Elderlings is his birthright. You seek to steal it from him. He believes he upholds what is right and just by trying to kill you.”
I am so tired, and there is so little left of me. When I killed Carrod, my Skill fled me. My work has been greatly slowed since then. Even the raw power on my hands weakens, and the pillar is closed to me; I cannot pass through it to renew the magic. I fear I may have defeated myself. I fear I will not be able to complete my task. In the end, I may fail you all. All of you, and the entire Six Duchies.”
“My king, you are mistaken. Few dragons were created by a single person. At least, not the Six Duchies dragons. Whatever the others, the true Elderlings could do on their own, I do not know. But I know that those dragons that were made by Six Duchies hands were most often made by an entire coterie working together, not a single person.”
“My lord king. I name myself Kestrel of Buck, once of Stanchion’s Coterie. But by my Skill I did slay a member of my own coterie, for jealousy over a man. To do so was high treason, for we were the Queen’s own strength. And I destroyed that. For this I was punished as the Queen’s Justice saw fit. My Skill was burned out of me, leaving me as you see me; sealed into myself, unable to reach beyond the walls of my own body, unable to receive the touch of those I had held dear. That was done by my own coterie. For the murder itself, the Queen banished me from the Six Duchies, for all time.
You do love me! I was incredulous. He had never truly believed it before. Before, it was words. I always feared it was born of pity. But you are truly my friend. This is knowing. This is feeling what you feel for me. So this is the Skill. For a moment he reveled in simple recognition. Abruptly, another joined us. Ah, little brother, you find your ears at last! My kill is ever your kill, and we shall be pack forever! The Fool recoiled at the wolf’s friendly onslaught. I thought he would break the circle. Then suddenly he leaned into it. This? This is Nighteyes? This mighty warrior, this great
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The Fool and Nighteyes were still near me, but no longer a part of a circle. I could scarcely feel them for all else I felt. Skill. Racing through me like a riptide. Skill. Emanating from Kettle like heat from a smith’s furnace. She glowed with it. She wrung her hands, smiled at the straightened fingers. “You should go and rest now, Fitz,” she told me gently. “Go on. Go to sleep.” A gentle suggestion. She did not know her own Skill-strength. I lay back and knew no more.
Did you see how she stood and faced them down? I demanded with pride. A most excellent bitch, Nighteyes agreed.
There is nothing like being treated like a child to provoke one to act that way.
The way the sleeping creature was sprawled upon the earth followed the contour of the ground beneath him. It did not look like a statue carved and then set in place here. It looked like a living creature that had flung itself down to rest and never moved again.
Verity in their firelight looked like a demon out of a tale. His face was splashed with silver from the careless touching of his hands, while his hands and arms gleamed as if made of polished silver. His gaunt face and ragged clothes, the utter blackness of his eyes would have terrified any man.
Verity glanced down at his sword. He frowned. Suddenly he grasped the blade in his left hand just below the hilt and drew it through his shining grip. I gasped at what I saw. The sword he brandished now gleamed and came to a perfect point. Even by torchlight, I could see the wavering ripples of the many-folded metal of the blade. The King glanced at me. “I should have known I could do that.” He almost smiled.
“Go then, Tag. Go as swift as you may and as silent as you may, for those who have used you will kill you if they know you are true to me. Return to Buck. And on the way there, and when you get there, tell everyone that I shall be returning. That I shall bring my good and true Queen with me, to sit the throne, and that my heir will claim it after me. And when you get to Buckkeep Castle, present yourself to my brother’s wife. Tell the Lady Patience that I commend you to her service.”
Forge, the first village to fall victim to the scourge that took its name, had long since become a watering stop for Red Ships. There had been for some time rumors of OutIsland sailing ships anchoring off Scrim Island, including several sightings of the elusive “White Ship.”
Catapults and other engines of war had been in place for decades to defend the mouth of the Buck River, but Lord Bright diverted them to the defense of Buckkeep Castle itself. Unchallenged, the Red Ships beat their way up the Buck River, carrying their war and Forging deep into the Six Duchies like a spreading poison following a vein to the heart.
Kettle, her hands and arms silver to the elbow, knelt carefully beside me to ask, “Are you all right, FitzChivalry?” I looked at her magic-coated arms and hands. “What have you done?” I asked her. “Only what was necessary. Verity took me to the river in the city. Now our work will proceed more swiftly.
I cannot explain the hurt I felt. He had taken what should have been mine and given it to Kettle. He owed that Skill-closeness to me, no other. Who else had come so far, given up so much for him? How could he deny me the carving of his dragon? It was Skill-hunger, pure and simple, but I did not know it then.
“Not the death, but the spilled life,” Kettle said to Verity. “That might be it. Like the scent of fresh meat rousing a dog starved near to death. They are hungry, my king, but not past rousing. Not if you find a way to feed them.”
Kettle pointed a scolding finger at the Fool. “Pay heed to that, Fool, and understand now why you are so weary. When you touched her with Skill, you linked with her. She draws you to her now, and you think you go out of pity. But she will take from you whatever she needs to rise. Even if it is your whole life.”
Kettle and Verity had indeed gone to the river, almost as soon as I left. They had used the pillar to get down to the city, and there they had laved Kettle’s arms in the stuff and renewed the power in Verity’s. Every glimpse of that silvering of her arms woke in me a Skill-hunger that was almost a lust. It was something I masked from myself and attempted to hide from Verity. I do not believe he was deceived, but he did not force me to confront it. I masked my jealousy with other excuses.
“As close as you are to Verity, the dragon would reach for you. And you are not strong enough to say no. He would pull you in completely. That’s how strong he is, how magnificently strong.”
“FitzChivalry. My dear friend. When the dragon is finished? Rather say that when Verity and I are finished, the dragon will be begun.”
“I will not die when the dragon is finished, Fitz. I will be consumed, that is true. Quite literally. But I will go on. As the dragon.” I found my voice. “And Kettle?” “Kestrel will be a part of me. And her sister Gull. But I shall be the dragon.”
“I should have you stand here and talk to me while I work, Fitz. Just when I think I am past any great feelings at all, you stir them in me.” He lifted his face to regard me. His tears had cut two paths through the gray rock dust. “What choice do I have?”
