Fool's Fate Part 32

"I made extensive tests of it. I dug holes on the beach, built fires in the bottom of them, and when it was burning well, put in the box of powder and retreated. When the powder burst, it created a pit on the beach, the size proportionate to the amount of powder in the sealed container. Why should ice and snow be any different? Oh, I'll grant you that they are heavier and thicker, but that is why we'll use a larger container of powder. Now as for the fire-"

"Easily done," I said. My mind was already racing. I had found Chade's cloak. I settled it around my shoulders. "A container of some kind, a large cooking pot. That kettle we use for stew and melting snow for water. That will do. Kindling to start a small fire in the bottom of it, and then the Fool's burning oil. He had it with his tent, so it will be there still. I will crawl down the excavated tunnel, get the fire going, and then put in the powder and crawl out. Hastily." Chade and I grinned at one another. I was already infected with his enthusiasm.

Chade nodded, then knit his brows. "But the kettle's not big enough to hold the whole cask. Ah, let me think, let me think. I have it. Several layers of cured leather under the kettle. When you have the fire going well in the kettle, tip it over onto the leather. It will contain it well enough for the short time it will take. Then thrust the cask into the fire. And come out of the tunnel. Quickly." He grinned at me as if it were all a fine jest. Peottre looked alarmed, the Narcheska confused. Burrich was scowling, his face gone black as a thundercloud. Prince Dutiful looked torn between a boy's desire to make things happen and a monarch's need to consider all decisions carefully. When he spoke, I knew which side had won.

"I should do it, not Fi- Tom Badgerlock. His arm is all but useless. And I said I would do it. It's my task."

"No. You're the heir to the Fa.r.s.eer throne. We can't risk you!" Chade forbade it.

"Ah! Then you admit there is a risk!" Burrich growled as I dragged Chade's boots on to my feet. They were too big for me. I had never realized the skinny old man had such long feet.

My mind churned with plans. "I need the kettle, the oil from the Fool's supplies, kindling and tinder, a tinderbox, two treated hides. And the keg of powder."

"And a lantern. You'll need light to see what you're doing down there in the dark. I'll bring the lantern." Dutiful had ignored Chade's warning.

"No. No lantern. Well. Perhaps a small one. We go now and we go silently. If the rest of your Witted coterie gets wind of what we're up to . . . well. We just don't need that to happen." As I had struggled with the boots, I had realized I'd need someone to help me. My shoulder was still twinging at the slightest demand on it. The Prince would be that person. I'd send Dutiful out of the tunnel as soon as I had the fire started. He could stand beside me on the edge of the pit while we waited for the powder to burst. Surely that would be enough to fulfill his word as a Fa.r.s.eer that he would take the dragon's head.

"Witted coterie!" Burrich exploded.

I felt impatient. I spoke as I sorted through Chade's and Dutiful's clothing. I took Chade's fur hat. "Yes. The circle of Witted ones who serve the Fa.r.s.eer King. Did you think the Skill was the only magic that could be employed that way? Ask Swift about it. He's close to being a member of it. And despite Web's betrayal of our plan, I do not think it a bad idea." Then, as Burrich stared at me, both dumbfounded and insulted, I reminded Chade, "Send Longwick to gather those supplies himself. He's tight-lipped and loyal; he won't let a rumor start."

"I'll go with him," Dutiful said. He did not wait for anyone to agree, but s.n.a.t.c.hed up his cloak. He paused briefly near Elliania. His eyes did not meet hers but he offered, "I give you my word. If I can find clean death for your mother and sister, it will be theirs." Then he was gone.

"The Fa.r.s.eer Prince uses magic?" Peottre demanded as he stared after him.

Chade hastily devised a lie. "That was not what Tom said. The Prince has a circle of friends here who can use the Wit, what is sometimes called Old Blood Magic in the Six Duchies. They came with him to help him."

"Magic is dirty stuff," Peottre opined. "At least a sword is honest and a man sees his death coming. Magic is the way the Pale Woman has enchained our folk and shamed us of them. Magic is how she binds us still, to do her low tasks."

Burrich nodded slowly to his words. "Would that the magic of the sword could be worked on her. It is never fitting that a strong man falls to guile, especially the guile of an evil and ambitious woman." I know he thought of my father then, and how Queen Desire had plotted his death. I do not know what Peottre made of his words.

The Narwhal Clan kaempra stood slowly, as if some thought were uncurling uncomfortably in his mind. He nodded, as if to himself. Beside him, the Narcheska stood. "Please tell Prince Dutiful that I said farewell," she said quietly, to no one in particular.

"And I," Peottre said in his deep voice. "I am grieved that it came down to this. Would that there had been a better path for all of us." They left slowly, Peottre moving as if heavily burdened. Dutiful returned quickly, carrying some of the supplies for our mission. A few moments later, Longwick brought the rest. He stood after he had been relieved of the objects. Plainly, he wished to ask questions, but no explanations were offered to him before Chade dismissed him with thanks. The man looked worried. Obviously Dutiful and I were preparing some sort of foray. Little or no explanation of my return had been offered to anyone. Yet, like any good soldier, Longwick accepted the lack of explanation as reasonable and returned to his post outside the tent.

There was some little delay, for Chade had decided that a fire on hides over ice might not burn hot enough to set off his powder. Chade experimented with the kettle to see how large a container of powder would fit into it. This demanded a hasty comparison of packed items to find a container that would both fit within the kettle and sufficiently seal in the powder. At last he settled on a small crock with a pottery stopper that had been full of tea herbs. I suspected the tea was one of his special blends from the way he grumbled over dumping it out. That done, he opened the cask I had carried from the beach and carefully transferred a coa.r.s.e powder from it into the crock. He did this well away from the tiny candle fire, tamping the powder down with his fingers and muttering to himself as he worked. "It's a little damp," he grumbled as he turned back to me with the sealed crock. "But, well, the flask that we put in your hearth was a bit damp inside too, and it still worked. Not that I had expected it to blow up like it did, but, well, that is how we learn these things, I suppose. Now, keep this well away from kettle fire until it is going very well, as hot as you judge you can get it. Then put this into the kettle, centered, so it doesn't extinguish the fire. Then get out as quickly as you can."

These directions were for me. To the Prince he said, "You are to get out as soon as the fire is started in the kettle. Don't wait for Fitz to put the powder in, get out and away and wait for him well back from the excavation edge. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, yes," Dutiful replied impatiently. He was packing our fire-making supplies into a sack.

"Promise me, then. Promise me that you'll leave as soon as he starts the fire in the kettle."

"I said I would kill the dragon. I should stay at least to see the powder go into the kettle."

"He'll leave before the powder goes into the kettle," I told Chade as I took the sealed crock. "I promise you that. Let's go, Dutiful. We don't have much of the night left."

As we moved toward the door flap, Burrich stood. "Want me to carry some of that?" he asked me.

I looked at him blankly for a moment. Then I understood him and said, "You aren't going, Burrich. Wait here for us. I won't be long."

He didn't sit down. "We need to talk. You and I. About many things."

"And we will. For a long time. There is much I wish to say to you, also. But as it has kept this many years, so it will keep until this task is done. And then we will have time to sit down together. Privately." I emphasized the last word.

"Young men are so confident that there will always be more time, later." He made this observation to Chade. Burrich reached over casually to take part of Dutiful's armload. "Old men know better. We remember all the times when we thought there would be more time, and there wasn't. All the things I thought I would say to your father, someday, remain in my heart, unsaid. Let's go."

I sighed. Dutiful was still standing there with his jaw slightly ajar. I shrugged at him. "There's no use arguing with Burrich. It's like arguing with your mother. Let's go."

We left the tent and moved quietly into the darkness. We moved as silently as Witted ones can, even when one of them won't admit he's Witted. Burrich set a hand lightly on my good shoulder. It was his only concession to his failing vision and I made no comment on it. I glanced back once to see Chade standing in the tent flap in his night robe, peering after us. He seemed embarra.s.sed to have been caught at it; he let the flap drop down into place. But now I knew that he was worried, and I tried not to wonder how well he had tested his exploding powder. Longwick too stared after us.

The path to the excavation was uphill. It had not impressed me as a difficult climb, but the events of the last few days were making themselves felt to me. Now it seemed difficult, and I was blowing by the time we reached the ramp that led down into the pit. We stopped there, and I took the oil from Burrich, wincing a little at the weight of it.

"Wait for us here."

"You needn't worry I'll follow you. I know my vision is gone, and I won't put you in danger by going with you. But I'd have at least a word or two with you before you go. Alone, if you don't mind."

"Burrich. Every moment that I dally, the Fool may lose more of himelf to the dragon."

"Son, you know in your heart that we're too late to save him. But I know also that you must go on and do this." He turned his head, not looking at the Prince, but "seeing" him. At a pleading look from me, Dutiful retreated several steps to give us the privacy Burrich sought. He still lowered his voice. "I'm here to bring you and Swift home. I promised Nettle I'd bring her brother home, safe and sound, that I'd kill a dragon to do it if I had to, and that everything would be as it used to be. In some ways, she's still a child, believing that Papa will always be able to keep her safe. I'd like her to go on believing that, at least for a time."

I wasn't sure what he was asking me, but I was in too much of a hurry to quibble. "I'll do my best to let her keep that," I a.s.sured him. "Burrich, I have to go."

"I know you do. But . . . you know that we both believed you were dead. Molly and I. And that we only acted as we did in that belief. You know that?"

"Of course I do. Perhaps we'll talk about it later." I suddenly knew, by both the anger and pain that his words woke in me, that I wanted to talk about it never. That I did not want even to think of talking about it with him. Yet I drew a breath and said the words I'd told myself so often. "You were the better man for her. I slept well at night, knowing that you were there for her and Nettle. And afterward . . . I didn't come back. Because I never wanted you to feel that, that-"

"That I'd betrayed you," he finished quietly for me.

"Burrich, the sun will be coming up soon. I have to go."

"Listen to me!" he said, suddenly fierce. "Listen to me, and let me say this. These words have been choking me since I was first told what I'd done. I'm sorry, Fitz. I'm sorry for all I took from you, without knowing I had taken it. I'm sorry for the years I can't give back to you. But-but I can't be sorry I made Molly my wife, or for the children and life we had together. Have. I can't be. Because I was was the better man for her. Just as Chivalry was better for Patience, when all unknowing he took her from me." He sighed suddenly, heavily. "Eda and El. What a strange, cruel spiral we've danced." the better man for her. Just as Chivalry was better for Patience, when all unknowing he took her from me." He sighed suddenly, heavily. "Eda and El. What a strange, cruel spiral we've danced."

My mouth was full of ashes. There was nothing to say.

Very, very softly, he asked me, "Are you going to come back and take her from me? Will you take her from our home, from our children? Because I know that you can. She always kept a place in her heart for the wild boy she loved. I . . . I never tried to change that. How could I? I loved him, too."

A lifetime spun by on the whirling wind. It whispered to me of might have been, could have been, should have been. Might yet could be. But would not. I finally spoke. "I won't come back and take her from you. I won't come back at all. I can't."

"But-"

"Burrich, I can't. You can't ask that of me. What, do you imagine that I could ride out to visit you, could sit at your table and drink a cup of tea, wrestle your youngest boy about, look at your horses, and not think, not think-"

"It would be hard," he cut in fiercely. "But you could learn to do it. As I learned to endure it. All the times I rode out behind Patience and Chivalry, when they went out on their horses together, seeing them and-"

I couldn't bear to hear it. I knew I'd never have that sort of courage. "Burrich. I have to go. The Fool is counting on me to do this."

"Then go!" There was no anger in his voice, only desperation. "Go, Fitz. But we are going to talk of this, you and I. We are going to untangle it somehow. I promise. I will not lose you again."

"I have to go," I said a final time, and turned and fled from him. I left him standing there, blind in the cold wind, and he stood there alone, trusting that I would return.

chapter 23.

MIND OF A DRAGON.

The Elderlings were a far-flung race. Although few writings have survived from their time, and we cannot read their runes in full, several of our own seem descended from the glyphs they chose to mark on their maps and monoliths. The little we know of them seem to indicate that they mingled with ordinary humans, sometimes residing in the same cities, and much of our knowledge may have come from that a.s.sociation. The Mountain folk have ancient maps that are almost certainly copies of even more ancient scrolls and seem to reflect a familiarity with a much greater territory than those people now claim. Roads and cities marked on those maps either no longer exist or are so distant as to be mythical. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that at least one of those maps shows cities that would today be as far north as Bearns and as far south as the Cursed Sh.o.r.es.- FEDWREN FEDWREN'S " "TREATISE ON A LOST FOLK"

I didn't say a word as I rejoined Dutiful and he didn't ask. He led the way, small lantern swinging, down the ramp into a pit that had grown substantially deeper and narrower since I had last dug in it. I could see how they had concentrated their efforts once they had glimpsed the shadow of the beast trapped in the ice below them. Again, like being drenched by an unexpected wave, my Wit-sense of Icefyre swelled, and then collapsed and vanished. It unnerved me to be so aware of the one I was coming to kill.

I followed Dutiful as he led me toward the corner of the pit that became a tunnel scratched and sc.r.a.ped into the ice. It started out as taller than a man and two men wide. But it did not go far before it narrowed, and soon I was hunched over, which made my shoulder ache more.

As I followed him, something Burrich had said suddenly rearranged itself in my mind. Burrich had come here to slay a dragon, if he had to, anything to bring Swift home. Nettle had told Thick that her father had gone off to kill a dragon. The two together meant that Nettle didn't know about me. She knew nothing of me. I was torn between relief that I had not said anything to enlighten her and a sick foreboding that I would never really exist in her life. Suddenly the blackness and the ice and cold seemed to close in on me, and for one dizzying instant, I felt squeezed inside the glacier, trapped and wishing I could die, but unable to do even that much for myself. Shame choked me as I tried to will my own death.

Then the suffocating darkness pa.s.sed and I staggered on. I set Nettle and Burrich and Molly aside, pushed away my past and looked only at the immediate thing that I needed to do: kill this dragon. I followed Dutiful deeper into the ice, telling myself that perhaps I could still save the Fool. Lying to myself.

Dutiful's little lantern showed me nothing except the slickly gleaming walls of ice and Dutiful's silhouette in front of me. The tunnel came to an abrupt end. Dutiful turned to face me and squatted down. "That's his head, down there. We think." Dutiful pointed down at the scuffed ice below us.

I stared at ice he crouched on. "I don't see anything."

"With the bigger lantern and daylight behind you, you could. Just take my word for it. His head is below us." Awkwardly, he unshouldered his sack onto the floor in front of him. I hunkered down facing him. There would just be room for him to step over the kettle and squeeze past me once we got the fire going.

The cold had crept into my shoulder, stiffening it, and my battered face was a cold, sore mask. It didn't matter. I had my right hand still. How hard could it be to build a fire and put a crock into it? That was something even I could do.

The hides went down first. Dutiful arranged them between us, as if we were soldiers preparing for a dice game. The hides were thick ones, one of ice bear, and one of sea cow. They both stank. I settled the kettle in the middle of them and set the flask of oil carefully aside from it. I put the crock of powder next to it. We had shaved bits of wood for tinder and some scorched linen. I made a tiny nest in the bottom of the kettle. I had struck three futile showers of sparks from the firestone into the kettle before Dutiful asked me curiously, "Couldn't we just light it from the lantern?"

I lifted my eyes and gave him a baleful stare. In response, he grinned at me. The light emphasized his reddened cheeks and cracked lips. I didn't have a smile left in me, but somehow I shaped one for him. I remembered, briefly, that his young shoulders bore burdens too, not the least of which was that killing this dragon was a betrayal, of sorts, of his Old Blood and his Old Blood coterie. Nor would it buy him his own dream. The girl he had come to love was his only as a lure to get him to do the Pale Woman's bidding. She had offered herself to him, not for love, not to secure an alliance, but only to buy her mother's and sister's death. It did not seem a promising foundation for a marriage, and yet, here we were. I rocked back onto my heels. "You do it," I told him. "And then get out of here. Oh. And guide Burrich away from the edge of the excavation for me. He doesn't see well."

"No, really? I thought he was blind." It was a young man's humor, the dark sarcasm that has no fear of ever meeting the fate he mocks. I could no longer smile about it, but perhaps Dutiful didn't notice. He claimed a bit of the scorched linen from the kettle and offered it to the lantern's flame. It licked it hungrily and immediately the fire took. Dutiful hastily dropped it into the kettle on top of the other tinder. It went out.

"Nothing is ever easy for us," I observed after our third try had failed.

I had to turn the kettle on its side, and then Dutiful burnt his fingers poking the last bit of flaming linen under the shaved bits of wood. We held our breaths, waiting, and the tiny flame gripped and clambered over the tinder. I nursed it stronger with curls of wood, deciding that I would not turn the kettle upright and risk dislodging the heart of the fire, but would instead slide the powder into the kettle as if I were putting a loaf of bread into an oven's mouth. I coughed in the gathering smoke from our tiny fire.

"Time for you to go," I told the Prince.

"Just do it and then we'll both go."

"No." I would not say I wanted to be sure he was safely away before I loaded the powder. Instead, I said, "Burrich is very important to me. And very proud. He'll want to wait until I'm with him before he flees. Take his arm and tell him that I'm coming, that you can see me. And get him well away from the pit. We both know that Chade's concoctions sometimes work far better than he expects them to."

"You want me to lie to him?" Dutiful was scandalized.

"I want you to get him to safety. He has a bad knee, and he can't move as swiftly as you or I can. So get him started. I'll give you a moment or two to do that, then I'll load in the powder and get out of here."

It worked. The Prince would not have left me if only his own safety had been at risk. He would for Burrich's. I thanked Kettricken for the heart she had instilled in her son as he stepped gingerly over the hot kettle and clambered past me. I listened to his footsteps in the icy tunnel, trying to gauge when he would leave the pit, reach Burrich, and escort him away. No hurry, I told myself. No need to risk anyone just yet. In a few more minutes, the dragon would be dead. And perhaps the Fool would be safe.

I lay flat on the floor of the tunnel, to avoid the smoke hanging above me and to feed my fledgling fire. I wanted a good bed of coals. Then I'd put in the powder. Reluctantly, I decided I should add the oil at that time too, enough to coax the flames up around the side of the powder container. I opened the flask of oil and set it to hand. It would be safe. It had taken quite a long time before the powder in the flask had exploded in my hearth fire. Of course, that had been before Chade had perfected the powder.

Don't think about that. Don't think about dying here, burnt and crushed, I said to myself. No. I could be trapped and still in the ice, with cold taking me deeper and deeper into blackness, until I was finally gone. I thought of that easing into death. It almost seemed cowardly. And yet what other way was there to go? Alone, mateless, was a death by ice so cruel a fate?

A cold drop from the ceiling fell on the back of my neck, pulling my thoughts back to what I was supposed to be doing. I wondered how my mind had wandered so far. The hides around the blazing kettle were scorching and stinking as it got hotter. I burned my fingers, tipping the lip of the kettle a bit higher so it would hold the oil when the moment came. I cursed and set my burnt fingers against the ice to ease them. And then, like a flood tide, the dragon rushed into me.

I do not believe he intended to. I think he was like a man who holds his breath, thinking he will be able to extinguish his own life. But at the last moment, the body overpowers the will of the mind, and takes that great gasp of air that forces the mind to go on. In that instant when he lost control, we touched. It was not the Wit or the Skill, but something else, and in recognizing it, I knew it was intrinsic to dragonkind. I had felt it before, when Tintaglia invaded my dreams through Nettle. I had thought it was her own peculiar sending, but no. Icefyre echoed it. Tintaglia was better at it, or perhaps having dealt mostly with humans, she had learned to tailor her thoughts to our minds. The dragon swept through my mind and drowned me in his being. It was not phrased in human words or concepts; it was not an attempt at communication with me. In his eruption of thought and emotion and knowledge, I learned far more of him than I wanted to. When the dragon receded from my mind, leaving me beached in my individuality, my elbow gave out, and I found myself belly down on the ice, my face uncomfortably close to the hot kettle.

That brief time of sharing Icefyre's memories seemed more real than my entire life had been. Icefyre was definitely alive. And aware, but his awareness was focused deep within himself. He desired death. He had come here to seek it, deliberately. Death does not come easily to dragons. They may die of disease or injury or in battle with their own kind, but other than those fates, no one knows how many years one may number. Icefyre had been a strong and hearty creature with many years before him. But the skies had become empty, bereft of his kind, and the serpents that should have returned to renew the ranks of the dragons were gone too. The dragons and most of their Elderling servants had perished when the earth shook and split and the mountains belched forth smoke and flame and poisonous winds. The blast had spewed the trees flat and scorched all green from the earth.

Many of the dragons and their attendants had died in the first few days of that cataclysm, burned or choked or smothered in the raining ash. Others had perished in the harsh days that followed, for spring did not come that year, and the previously wide and swift river was a trickling thread groping its way to the sea through a choke of fine ash. The game died off, for the meadows were buried in ash and clinkers and what foliage survived was thin and dusty.

It was a harsh time. Of the dragons that lived, some said they must leave their ancestral lands. A few did, but what became of them, no one knew, for they never returned again. Compet.i.tion for food weakened many, and resulted in death for others as dragons battled over the scrawny game that remained. Ash lay thick and acid over the once verdant land: no seed unfurled there and few plants pushed up through it. The human folk died off, and even their Elderling kin surrendered to slow death. The herds and flocks of the humans perished beside their two-legged tenders. The few cities that had not been buried stood empty and cracked, broken and licked dry like a nest of raided eggs.

Yet even then, none of them had feared it was the end of the dragons. Humans and Elderling might perish, trees die and game fail, but not dragons. Five generations of serpents remained in the sea. There would be five seasons of migration, and five successions of coc.o.o.ning. Serpents would emerge as dragons and, eventually, the land must heal. So Icefyre had believed. Even when season after season pa.s.sed, and he alone spread his wings in the sky, he waited and watched for the serpents to return. But none appeared at the coc.o.o.ning grounds. He had awaited them, often going without food for fear they would arrive and find no dragons to help them spin their coc.o.o.ns from the black sand of the coc.o.o.ning beach and their own saliva. His saliva and venom should have mixed with it, to give to them his memories, the memories that reached back beyond his own life span. The new dragons would be lost without them. Only if he helped them would they gain their full memories of all dragonkind when they emerged from their coc.o.o.ns in the strong heat of summer.

But the serpents never came.

And when he knew that they would not come, would never return, when he knew he was the last of his kind, he gave thought to how he would end. Not in ignominy, starving to death from a hunting injury, his body becoming carrion for low animals. No. He would choose the hour and place of his death, and would die in such a way that his body would be preserved intact.

Such were his plans when he came to icy Aslevjal. I saw it as he had, as an island almost completely locked under the ice. I recalled his disappointment that it was so, but did not grasp the cause. Perhaps the seas had been lower then, or perhaps the winters colder, for the waters around the island were frozen so that he more felt than saw the sea beneath the ice. He flew over it, as gleaming black as it was white, but could not find the entry he sought. He contented himself at last with a crack in the ice, crawled into it and gave himself over to sleep, knowing that from cold sleep to death was scarce a step for his kind.

But the body always chooses life. It is not swayed by logic or emotion. He pa.s.sed out of life into a suspension of being, but he could not part from his body. Try as he might, there were moments when awareness seized him again, and clamored that he was cold and stiff and famished with hunger. The closing ice squeezed him and bent his body, but could not break him. He could not break himself.

He longed to die. He dreamed of dying. Again and again, he dived into death, only to have his traitorous body gasp in yet another slow breath, only to have his foolish hearts squeeze out a pulse. Humans came and flitted about him, flies drawn to a dying stag. Some tried to seek his mind, others strove to pierce his flesh. Useless, all of them. They could not even help him die.

I felt myself draw a breath and wondered when I had last taken one. It was as if someone had opened the shutters on a tavern window, to show me all that went on inside, and then as abruptly closed them. I was dazed with all that I suddenly knew about dragons. So completely had the dragon engulfed me that it was as if I had been him. I sprawled on the ice, drenched in my unwelcome awareness of the intellect of the frozen creature trapped below me.

I seized his death wish with relief. I was granting him mercy. I heaved myself up onto my knees, groaning as my injured shoulder took more weight than it wanted. I peered into my kettle oven, then crouched low to blow into it. Red coals glowed. I added a few more small sticks of wood, and carefully arranged the fuel I would tuck in around the powder container.

I knew what it was to long for death. I had tried to die when Regal had me in his power. Tormented, cold, alone, hungry, I would have welcomed a swift death then, by any means. I had come here determined to kill the dragon and now I knew he would welcome that kindness. No reason to hesitate. I picked up the crock of powder and used a stick to make a nest for it in the coals. What difference could one dragon make in the world? He was likely too feeble to survive now, even if we did release him.

Of course, if I had died in Regal's dungeon, as I had hoped, then likely Kettricken would never have found Verity or roused the stone dragons to defend the Six Duchies. No. I took too much significance to myself. She would have gone alone to find her king. But could she have wakened the dragons, if Nighteyes and I had not been there? If we had not gone with her, if Nighteyes had not killed game for her, would she have succeeded? Would Kettle have survived, to aid Verity in carving his dragon? Did, as the Fool had so long insisted, the fate of the whole world hinge on the actions of each man, every day?

The coals in the kettle oven waited and the powder was in my hands. Somewhere in the Pale Woman's hall below me, the Fool strained to hold himself away from the memory stone that continued to Forge him at each touch. I should hurry.

I could not.

I groaned and, yet again, weighed my choices in the balance. Free the dragon, and what did we win? Nothing. Perhaps Icefyre would rise to mate with Tintaglia; perhaps there would once again be dragons in the world. The Fool had never promised us any great good from that, except for his conviction that dragons and Elderlings were somehow connected. Freeing the dragon guaranteed me nothing except the Fool's slow Forging and the continued degradation of the Narcheska's mother and sister. But if I killed the dragon, Dutiful would win Elliania's love and grat.i.tude. They would consummate their marriage, and reign long with many children and we'd be at peace with the Out Islands . . .

"Think it through for yourself," Burrich had said to me. "With no a.s.sumptions." Blind as he was, he had still seen more clearly than Chade and I had. We had been so fixed on securing the betrothal, so fixed on killing the dragon. But now, almost too late, I applied what Chade had taught me years ago. "Ask yourself, What happens next? Who benefits?" I pushed my thoughts out of their rut as if I were levering out a stuck wagon. Kill the dragon. The Pale Woman grants death to the Narcheska's mother and sister, and releases the Fool to me. And then what? Who benefits?

A Fa.r.s.eer kills the Outislander dragon. What happens next? I saw it as clearly as if I had been granted the Fool's prescience. That insult to the Outislanders not only eliminates all chance of dragons returning to the world, it becomes the incident that unites the Out Islands against the Six Duchies. Far from guaranteeing a marriage that secured a lasting peace, it would be the spark that set off the conflagration of war again. Chade, Dutiful, and I were the last male members of the Fa.r.s.eer line; I doubted that any of us would leave the island alive. And Nettle? If Kettricken revealed my daughter's bloodlines and proclaimed her the Fa.r.s.eer heir, would the Outislanders let her reign in peace? I doubted it. The uncertain peace we had achieved in the last fifteen years would be swept aside. The slaughter would begin here on Aslevjal and spread. There would be no one to rouse the stone dragons this time, no Elderling allies to come to our aid. Destruction and Forging would return to our sh.o.r.es. The Pale Woman would reign, unchallenged, for the future she had made.

My heart was pounding in my chest with what I had nearly done. As the Fool had predicted, the choice had pa.s.sed to me. I had come so close to fulfilling the Pale Woman's dreams. I set my own fingertips to the marks the Fool had left on my wrist. "Forgive me," I begged him. "Forgive me for doing what you hoped I would do." Then I threw myself flat on the ice, and with every bit of strength I had, I flung my awareness, Wit and Skill, at the dragon.

My Skill was a flapping, fluttering moth, but my Wit was strong. I felt Icefyre become aware of me. I felt the danger of his regard, just as prey lifts its head abruptly, knowing that a predator has focused on it. But I did not quail before him, but roared with my body's strength, like one predator challenging another for territory. With my Wit, I could not convey my thoughts to him, but perhaps he would reach for me. Perhaps if he touched his mind to mine, he could know what I knew. That there was another dragon, a female, and she was even now winging her way toward us guided by a gull.