Fool's Fate Part 41

"l.u.s.t is but a wet moment, a surge and a splat!" she said disdainfully. She was a young woman, and she remembered freckles across the bridge of her nose. Strange to hear her words pipe from my throat. "You want a love song, don't you? Something timeless, something older than the fallen mountains, and newer than a seed unfurling in rich soil. Such is love."

"Good luck!" someone exclaimed in dismay. He tinged his words with a fop's disdain. "Listen. Fa, la, la, la, la, la-oh, hopeless! This one has the pipes of a sailor, and a body of wood. The finest song ever sung will be a crow's croaking when it comes from this throat, and I'll wager he never turned a handspring in his life. Who is this, and how came he by our treasure?"

"Minstrels," I said dully. "Minstrels, tumblers, and bards. Oh, Fool, this would would be your treasure. A circle of jesters. There is no help for us here." I put my head down into my hands. I felt the rough wood of the crown beneath my fingers. I pushed at it, but it clung stubbornly in place. It had tightened to my brow. be your treasure. A circle of jesters. There is no help for us here." I put my head down into my hands. I felt the rough wood of the crown beneath my fingers. I pushed at it, but it clung stubbornly in place. It had tightened to my brow.

"We've only just arrived," the toothless crone complained. "We've no intention of leaving already. We are a great gift, a magnificent gift, only awarded to the one most pleasing to the King. We are a chorus of voices, from all ages, we are a rainbow of history. Why would you refuse us? What sort of a performer are you?"

"I'm not a performer at all." I sighed heavily. For a moment, I regained full awareness of my body. I stood by the funeral pyre. I didn't recall getting up from it. Night was dark around us and chirring insects were tuning their voices. In the cooling air, I smelled the rich leaf mold of the forest. The Fool's degenerating body added its own note of sweet rot. All his life, he had been the Scentless One to Nighteyes. Now, in death, I smelled him. It did not sicken me. There was still wolf enough in me that how he smelled was simply how he smelled. It was the change that gave me a pang, for it was irrefutable evidence that his body was going back to the earth and the natural web of rot and rebirth all around me. I tried to pause for long enough to take some comfort in that, but the five within me were too impatient for stillness. They turned me in a slow circle, lifting my arms, testing the spring of my feet, filling my lungs with air. I sensed how those within me lapped eagerly at the night, the taste, the smell, the sound, and the feel of the forest air on my face. They were avid for life.

"What help do you need?" the freckled girl asked me, and in her voice I heard sympathy and a readiness to listen. And under it, scarcely cloaked, lurked the hunger that all minstrels have for the tale of another's woe. She wanted that part of life back as well. I did not wish to share mine.

"No. Go away. You can't help me." And then, against my will, I told them anyway. "My friend is dead. I want to bring him back to life. Can a minstrel help with that?"

For one respectful instant, they were silent as I gazed down on the Fool's corpse. Then, the freckle-nosed girl said tremulously, "He's very dead, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is," the bull-throated one declared, but added, "I can make you such a song as will have him remembered a thousand years hence. It is the only way ordinary mortals can transcend the flesh. Give me your memories of him, and I'll get started."

The crone spoke sense to me. "Did we know how to undo death, would we be what we are, feathers in a fool's cap? We are lucky to have this much of life left to us. A pity that your friend did not have the favor of a dragon, or perhaps he too could share this boon."

"What are you?" I demanded.

"We are sweet preserves of song, stored away so that in the winter of our deaths you can taste again the tang of our summers." It was the young man, so conscious of his imagery that he ruined it for me.

"Someone else!" I begged when the young man fell silent.

"We were favored of dragons," a calm voice said. She was one who had not spoken before. Her voice was a deep calm pond, huskier than the voice of most women. I heard it in my mind even as my own throat rusted her words. "I lived by the river of black sand, in a little town called Junket. I went one day to fetch water from the river, and there I met my dragon. She was a young thing, just at the end of her first summer, and I was in the spring of my years. Oh, she was green, a thousand greens, with eyes like deep pots of melted gold. She stood in the river and the waters rushed by her. Then she looked at me, and my heart fell into her whirlpool eyes, never to surface again. I had to sing to her; speaking would not have been enough. So she charmed me and I sang to her, and charmed her in return. I was her minstrel and her bard for all the days of my life. And when my time to end was approaching, she came to me, with the gift that only a dragon may give. It was a sliver of wood from a dragon's womb . . . do you know whereof I speak? The cradles they spin for the serpents to sleep in until they emerge as dragons? Sometimes, there is one who does not survive that stage, who dies in the sleep between serpent and dragon. Slow is the womb wood to erode, and the dragons forbid that humans touch any of it, save by their leave. But to me, fair Smokewing brought a sliver of it. She bid me wet it well with my own blood, and work the blood into it with my fingers, all the while thinking of a feather.

"I knew what such a favor meant. It was rarely granted, even to minstrels who had served their dragons well. It meant I would take a place in the crown of minstrels, so that my songs and words and my way of thinking would go on, long after I died. The crown is the property of the Ruler of all the River Lands. The Ruler alone declares who may wear the crown and sing with the voices of minstrels long dead. It is a great honor, for only a dragon can select you to become a feather, and only the Ruler can bestow the gift of wearing the crown. Such an honor. I remember how I clasped my feather as I died . . . for die I did. Just like your friend. A pity that your friend was not favored of dragons, to have been granted such a boon."

I was hammered by the irony of it. "He should have been. He died to waken a dragon, the last male dragon in the world, so that Icefyre might rise to partner Tintaglia, the last female. So that there might be dragons again in this world."

The moment of silence told me that I had impressed them. "Now, here is a tale worth the telling! Give us the memories of that, and each of us will make you a song, for surely there are at least a score of songs in such an event!" It was the crone who spoke, my mouth going soft with her words.

"But I don't want a song about him. I want the Fool as he was, alive and whole."

"Dead is dead," the bull-voiced man said. But he said it gently. "If you wish to open your memories to us, we will weave you songs. Even with your voice, they will be songs that will live, for true minstrels will hear you sing them, and wish to sing them as they should be sung. Do you want to do that?"

"No. Please, Fitz, no. Leave it be. Let it be over."

It was a whisper against my senses, scarce a breathing of the words. I shivered to it, wild with hope and fear.

"Fool," I breathed, praying there would be some response.

Instead, there was a cacophony, the thoughts indistinguishable from one another, as the five feather minstrels all shouted a dozen unanswerable questions at me. At last, Bull-throat roared through them with a reply.

"He's here! With us. In the crown, of all places. He put his blood in the crown!"

But from the Fool, there was no reply. I spoke for him. "The crown was broken. He used his blood to mend it."

"The crown was broken?" The crone was aghast. "It would have ended all of us! Forever!"

"He cannot stay in the crown! He was not chosen. Besides, the crown belongs to all of us. If he takes it, we shall not be able to speak, save through him." The young man was outraged at the Fool's rash a.s.sumption of his territory.

"He must go," the bull-voiced man concluded. "We are very sorry, but he must go. It is not right or fitting that he be here."

"He was not chosen."

"He was not invited."

"He is not welcome."

They gave me no time to express an opinion. The crown was tight to my brow and suddenly it became tighter. I lifted my hands to it, for they seemed to have retreated from my body into the crown, to do whatever they were doing now. For the nonce, my body was my own again. I tried to tear the crown from my head, but I could not get so much as a nail between it and my skin. In a wave of horror, I realized it was melding to my flesh, melting into me like a coterie seeping into a stone dragon. "No!" I roared. I shook my head and clawed at it. It would not budge. Worse, it no longer felt like wood beneath my fingers. It felt like a band of flesh. When I queasily lifted my fingers to investigate the feathers, they flexed softly as c.o.c.kerel plumes against my fingers. I felt sick.

Trembling, I went back to the funeral pyre and sank down onto it beside the Fool. I sensed no battle in the crown, only a concerted effort by the five minstrels. The Fool did not resist them; he simply did not know how to do what they demanded of him. I no longer had any voice in what they did. Theirs was a quarrel heard across the market, a conflict I was aware of but had no part in. They would force him out of the crown, and then he would be truly gone, forever. I could not stop it.

I took his body in my lap and held it. It had pa.s.sed through stiffness now to laxness. His hand flopped to one side, and I lifted it by the wrist to fold it back in to his chest. Something in the way it moved so lifelessly woke an ancient memory. I scowled after it. It was not my recall. It was Nighteyes, and he saw it through a wolf's eyes. We were in hunting light and the colors were muted. Yet I had been there. Somehow. And then it came back to me.

The Gray One, Chade, leaning on a shovel, his breath white in the cold air. He stands some distance away, so as not to frighten us. Heart of the Pack is the one who sits on the edge of my grave. His feet dangle in the hole before him, my splintered coffin at his feet. He holds my corpse in his lap. He waves the hand of it at me, beckoning the wolf in closer. His Wit is strong, and Nighteyes cannot bring himself to disobey Heart of the Pack. Heart of the Pack is speaking to us, a steady stream of calm words. "Come back to this. This is yours, Changer. Come back to it."

Nighteyes lifts a lip and snarls. We know death when we smell it. That body is dead. It is carrion, not fit for an honest meal. Nighteyes conveys the message to Heart of the Pack. "It smells bad. It is spoiled meat, we do not want it. There is better meat by the pond than that."

"Come closer," Burrich bids us. For that moment, I perceive him as both Burrich and Heart of the Pack. I slide sideways from the wolf's perception of him into my human memory of that moment. I had long suspected that I had truly died, despite Chade's a.s.surances that his poisons had only feigned my death. My body had been too battered to withstand any amount of poison. In the memory, my wolf's nose is mercilessly truthful. That body was dead. But the wolf's keener Wit-awareness tells me what I had never guessed before. Heart of the Pack does more than hold my flesh. He has prepared it for me; it is ready to begin again, if only he can coax me into it. Nighteyes is a rea.s.suring whisper against my senses.

The Wit. Not the Skill. Burrich did it with the Wit. But he was much stronger in that magic than I was, and far more wise. I stroked the Fool's slackening face, willing his body to align with mine, but I could not find a way into him. He did not have the Wit. Was that the difference? I did not know. But I knew that there was a way, once, a place where we had linked, he and I. Once, he had dragged me from the wolf's body back into my own. I turned my own wrist up to the faltering moonlight and found there the duskiness of his fingerprints. I took his mangled hand in mine. The fingernails had been peeled from three of his slender, delicate fingers. I pushed away my awareness of that agony he had endured. My hand overshadowed his as I carefully set each fingertip of his to each print on my wrist. I groped for the slender Skill-link, spun between us so many years before.

And it was there, faint as gossamer, but there. I gathered my courage, knowing well that I was going into death itself. But go I would. Had not I just said that I would, that I would take his death for him? I could feel that the crown minstrels were forcing him out, expelling him into my own flesh, but I had no time to wait and make explanations for him. I took a deep breath and trickled down the Skill-link, leaving my body to his awakening awareness and entering the ruin of his.

For the briefest moment, my perception was doubled. The Fool was in my flesh, looking out of my eyes. He stared down aghast at his own lax corpse in my arms. He lifted a hand to touch my whiskered chin. "Beloved!" he groaned. "Oh, Beloved, what have you done? What have you done?"

"It's all right," I a.s.sured him quietly. "If I fail, take my life and live it. I willingly take your death." Then, like a stone falling into muck, I sank into the Fool's lifeless flesh.

I was in a body that was dead, that had been dead for days.

This body had no life left in it, and hence it was no longer a body. Lifeless as a rock, it was separating into its components and going back to the earth. My Skill did not know what to make of such a situation. I pushed aside my impulse to use it, to cry out to Thick and Chade and Dutiful. They would only have forced me back into my own body to save me.

The Wit is the awareness of life all around us. It is a web, a net that connects us to every living creature. Some were vital and complex, large healthy beasts that demanded my recognition. Trees and plants were subtler, but even more essential to the continuation of life than creatures that moved. They were the warp the world is woven upon, and without them we would all snarl and fall. Even so, I had successfully ignored them for most of my life, other than a pa.s.sing interest in the green shadow life of the oldest trees. But beyond and beneath it all, there flowed an even more nebulous life.

It was death.

Death, the knots in the net that connected us all, was not death at all. In that twisting and tightening noose, life was re-formed, not destroyed. The Fool's body rioted with life. It was a simmering cauldron of life, bubbling its way to rebirth. Every element that had united to make his body a living creature was still there. The question was, could I persuade it to a.s.sume its old alignment rather than the simpler forms it was now reducing itself to?

Breathless, voiceless, senseless, I gave myself over to it. It was like a Skill-stream in its own way, for it plucked and tugged at the strings of the Fool's body, carrying away bits of him that it would use elsewhere. It fascinated me, this orderly dispersal, this re-sorting and reordering. It was rather like watching a well-played game of Stones. The bits moved in a pattern. I tried to coax one back to its old position, but it flowed away from me to join its fellows.

It is the old game again. Still, you will not see it. They are not individual hunters, but a pack. You do not set your will against the individuals. There are too many of them. You cannot stop them. So drive them. Use them. What they have made new, put back in place of the old.

It was a wolf's wisdom. As Black Rolf had told me it could be, so it was. Nighteyes was with me, not as he had been, but as we had been. It was his vision I used that night, his simple wolf's awareness that when one ate meat, one ate life as much as flesh. The elegant balance of the predator and the prey applied here as much as it did when we had hunted together. Death feeds life. What the body takes apart, it a.s.sembles again.

This was not a Skill-healing. It was a guiding of the changes, a herding of the bits into the alignment I recalled. I doubt that I was as adept as Burrich had been in my restoration. Time and again, the flows I had corrected reversed themselves and had to be persuaded again to build up, not tear down. Nor was the Fool completely human. That night, I confronted completely his strangeness. I thought I had known him. In those hours of rebuilding, I realized and accepted him as he was. That, in itself, was a revelation. I had always believed we were more alike than different. It simply was not true. He was human only in the same way that I was a wolf.

I stayed with my work, past the moment when I felt the blood begin to once more flow within his veins, beyond the slow perception that I could once more draw breath into his lungs. Some of his body had been repaired in the act of restoring it. Two of his ribs had been broken. Those bone ends had found their mates and begun knitting themselves together. Gossamer st.i.tches of flesh closed the worst rents in his skin. But there was little I could do about the places where flesh or bone or nail was simply missing. Delicately, I set in motion his own healing. I dared not urge it much past its own careful reconstruction. He had already burned the reserves of his body. I closed the raw flesh of his back against the agonizing kiss of the air. I coaxed his split tongue into a whole again. Two of his teeth were missing, and there was nothing I could do about that. When I knew I had done all I could for his body, I drew a deeper breath into his lungs. I opened his eyes.

Night was fading into dawn. The weaker stars had already given way to the creeping light of day. A bird sang a dawn call. Another one challenged it. An insect hummed past my ear. I became aware of my body more slowly. Blood moved through me and I tasted air sliding from my lungs. It was good. There was pain, a great deal of pain. But pain is the body's messenger, the warning that something is wrong and must be repaired. Pain says that you are still alive. I heeded that message and reveled in it. For a long time, it seemed enough.

I blinked my eyes and shifted my gaze. Someone cradled me in his arms. His arm beneath my raw back was a scarlet welt of agony, but I lacked the strength to move away from it. I looked up into my own face. It was different from seeing myself in a mirror. I was older than I thought. He had taken off the crown, but there was a standing welt on my brow where it had scored my flesh with its grip. My eyes were closed and tears from beneath the closed lids slid down my cheeks. I wondered why I wept. How could anyone weep on such a dawn? With great effort, I lifted one hand slowly and touched my own face. My eyes snapped open and I stared at them in wonder. I had not known they were so dark or that they could be so wide. I looked down at myself incredulously. "Fitz?" The inflection was the Fool's but the hoa.r.s.e voice was mine.

I smiled. "Beloved."

His arms closed around me almost convulsively. I arched away from that pain but he seemed unaware of it. Sobs shook him. "I don't understand!" he wailed to the sky. "I don't understand." He looked around, my face wild with his uncertainty and fear. "I have never seen this moment. I am out of my time, beyond where I ended. What has happened? What has become of us?"

I tried to move, but I had so little strength. For a time, I had to ignore his weeping while I a.s.sessed myself. There was a lot of damage, but the body was striving to repair. I felt terribly, terribly frail. I drew a breath, and told him quietly, "The skin on my back is new and tender yet."

He gulped for air. Breath ragged, he protested, "But I died. I was in that body, and she sliced the skin free from my back. I died." His voice cracked on the words. "I remember it. I died."

"It was your turn to die," I agreed. "And my turn to bring you back."

"But how? Where are we? No, I know where, but when? How can we be here, alive? How can we be like this?"

"Be calm." I had the Fool's voice. I tried for his lilt of amus.e.m.e.nt, and almost found it. "All will be well."

I found my wrist with his hand. The fingertips knew where to fall. For a moment, our gazes held as we mingled in unity. One person. We had always been one person. Nighteyes had voiced it long ago. It was good to be whole again. I used our strength to pull myself up, to press his brow to mine. I did not close his eyes. Our gazes locked. I felt my frightened breath against his mouth. "Take your body back from me," I bade him quietly. And so we pa.s.sed, one into the other, but for a s.p.a.ce we had been one. The boundaries between us had melted in the mingling. "No limits," I recalled him saying, and suddenly understood. No boundaries between us. Slowly I drew back from him. I straightened my back and looked down at the Fool in my arms. For an instant, he gazed clear-eyed at me with only wonder in his face. Then the pain of his wracked body demanded his attention. I saw him clench his eyes to it and wince away from my touch. "I'm sorry," I said softly. I eased him down onto the cloak. The evergreen boughs that had been his funeral pyre were his mattress now. "You did not have the reserves for me to perform a complete healing. Perhaps, in a day or two . . ."

But he already slept. I lifted a corner of the cloak and draped it over his eyes to shield them from the rising sun. I sniffed the air and it came to me that it would be a good time to hunt.

I took the whole morning for the hunt, and came back with a brace of rabbits and some greens. The Fool still lay as I had left him. I cleaned the rabbits and hung the meat to bleed. I set up his tent in the shade. I found the Elderling robe he had once given to me and laid it out inside the tent. I checked on the Fool. He slept on. I studied him critically. Biting insects had found him. They, and the growing strength of the sun on his skin, convinced me that I should move him.

"Beloved," I said quietly. He made no response. I spoke to him anyway, knowing that sometimes we are aware of the things we hear when we are sleeping. "I'm going to move you. It may hurt."

He made no response. I worked my arms under the cloak and lifted him as gently as I could. Still, he cried out wordlessly, squirming in my arms as he tried to escape the pain. His eyes opened as I carried him across the ancient plaza to the tent in the shade of the trees. He looked at me and through me, not knowing me, not truly awake. "Please," he begged me brokenly. "Please stop. Don't hurt me any more. Please."

"You're safe now," I comforted him. "It's over. It's all done."

"Please!" he cried out again, loudly.

I had to drop to one knee to get him inside the tent. He shrieked as the fabric brushed over his raw back in pa.s.sing. I set him down as gently as I could. "You'll be out of the sun and away from the insects here," I told him. I don't think he heard me.

"Please. No more. Whatever you want, anything. Just stop. Stop."

"It has stopped," I told him. "You're safe now."

"Please." His eyes fluttered closed again. He was still. He had never truly wakened.

I went out of the tent. I had to be away from him. I was sick at heart for him, and wretched with my own sudden memories. I had known torture. Regal's methods had been crude but effective. But I had had a small shield that the Fool had lacked. I had known that as long as I held out against him, as long as I could refuse to give him proof that I was Witted, he could not simply kill me. So, I had held firm against the beatings and deprivations; I had not given Regal what he wanted. Giving him that would have allowed him to kill me, without compunction, with the sanction of the Dukes of the Six Duchies. And in the end, when I knew that I could not hold out any longer, I had s.n.a.t.c.hed my death from him, taking poison rather than allowing him to break me.

But for the Fool, there had been nothing he could hold back. He had nothing that the Pale Woman wanted, except his pain. What had she made him beg for, what had she made him promise, only to laugh at his capitulation and begin again on his tormented flesh? I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know, and it shamed me that I fled his pain. By refusing to acknowledge what he had suffered, could I pretend it had not happened?

Little tasks are how I have always hidden from my thoughts. I refilled my water skin with clean cold water from the creek. I stole fuel from the former funeral pyre and built a small cook fire from it. When it was burning well, I set one rabbit to roast on a skewer and the other to bubbling in a pot. I gathered up my strewn winter garments, beat some of the dirt from them, and hung them on bushes to air. In the course of my tasks I found the Rooster Crown where the Fool had apparently flung it in a pique. I brought it back and set it just inside the flap of the tent. I went to the stream and scrubbed myself clean with horsetails and then bound my dripping hair back in a warrior's tail. I did not feel like a warrior. I wondered if I would have felt better if I'd killed her. I thought of going back and killing the Pale Woman and bringing her head to the Fool.

I did not think it would help, or quite likely I would have done it.

I set the rabbit soup aside to cool, and ate the roasted one. Nothing quite compares to fresh meat when one has gone a long time without it. It was b.l.o.o.d.y near the bone and succulent. I ate like a wolf, immersing myself in the moment and in the sensation of feeding. But eventually I had to toss the last gnawed bone into the fire and contemplate the evening ahead of me.

I took the kettle of soup into the tent. The Fool was awake. He lay on his belly and stared at the corner of the tent. The long light of late afternoon shone through the tent's panels and dappled him with color. I had known he was awake. The renewal of our Skill-bond made it impossible for me not to know. I could block most of the physical pain he felt. It was harder to block his anguish.

"I brought you food," I said to him.

After some silence had pa.s.sed, I told him, "Beloved, you need to eat. And drink. I've brought fresh water."

I waited. "I could make tea for you if you'd like."

Eventually, I fetched a mug and poured the cooling broth into it. "Just drink this, and I'll stop bothering you. But only if you drink this."

Crickets were chirping in the dusk. "Beloved, I mean it. I won't leave you in peace until you at least drink this."

He spoke. His voice was flat and he did not look at me. "Could you not call me that?"

"Beloved?" I asked, confused.

He winced to the word. "Yes. That."

I sat holding the mug of cold broth in both hands. After a time I said, stiffly, "If that is what you wish, Fool. But I'm still not leaving until you drink this."

He moved in the dimness of the tent, turning his head toward me and then reaching a hand for the mug. "She mocked me with that name," he said quietly.

"Oh."

He took the mug awkwardly from me, protecting his torn fingertips from contact. He levered himself up on an elbow, quivering with pain and effort. I wanted to help him. I knew better than to offer. He drank the broth in two long draughts, and then held the mug out to me shakily. I took it and he sank down on his belly again. When I continued to sit there, he pointed out wearily, "I drank it."

I took the kettle and the mug out into the night with me. I added more water to the kettle of soup and set it near the fire. Let it simmer until morning. I sat staring into the fire, recalling things I didn't want to think about and chewing on my thumbnail until I bit it too close to the quick and tore it. I grimaced, and then, staring out into the night, shook my head. I had been able to retreat into being a wolf. As a wolf, I had not been humiliated and degraded. As a wolf, I'd kept my dignity and power over my life. The Fool had nowhere to go.

I'd had Burrich, and his calm, familiar ways. I'd had isolation and peace and the wolf. I thought of Nighteyes, and rose, and went to the hunt.

My first night's luck did not hold. I came back to the camp after sunrise, with no meat, but a shirt full of ripe plums. The Fool was gone. A kettle of tea had been left to stay warm by the fire. I resisted the urge to call out his name and waited, almost patiently, by the fire until I saw him coming up the path from the stream. He wore the Elderling robe and his hair was slicked flat to his skull with water. He walked without grace in a lurching limp and his shoulders were bowed. With difficulty, I restrained myself from going to him. He reached the fire at last and, "I found plums," I told him.

He took one solemnly and bit into it. "They're sweet," he said, as if it surprised him. With an old man's caution, he lowered himself to the ground. I saw him run his tongue around the inside of his mouth and winced with him when he found the gap of missing teeth on one side. "Tell me what happened," he requested quietly.

So I did. I began with her guards throwing me out into the snow, and reported in as much detail as if it were Chade sitting there, nodding to my words. His face changed slowly as I began to speak about the dragons. Slowly he sat up straighter. I felt the Skill-link between us intensify as he reached for my heart to confirm what he was hearing, as if mere words could not be enough to convey it to him. Willingly, I opened myself to him and let him share my experience of that day. When I told him that Icefyre and Tintaglia had mated in flight and then disappeared, a sob shook him. But he was tearless as he asked me incredulously, "Then . . . we triumphed. She failed. There will be dragons in the skies of this world again."

"Of course," I said, and only then realized that he could not have known that. "We walk in your future now. On the path you set for us."

He choked again, audibly. He rose stiffly and paced a turn or two. He turned back to me, his heart in his eyes. "But . . . I am blind here. I never foresaw any of this. Always, in every vision, if there was triumph, I bought it with my death. I always died."

He c.o.c.ked his head slowly and asked me, as if for confirmation, "I did die?"

"You did," I admitted slowly. But I could not help the grin that crept over my face. "But, as I told you in Buckkeep, I am the Catalyst. I am the Changer."

He stood still as stone, and when comprehension seeped into him, it was like watching a stone dragon come to wakefulness. Life infused him. He began to tremble, and this time I did not fear to take his arm and help him sit down. "The rest," he demanded shakily. "Tell me the rest."

And so I told him, the rest of that day, as we ate plums and drank his tea and then finished the rabbit broth from the night before. I told him what I knew of the Black Man, and his eyes grew wide. I spoke of searching for his body, and reluctantly told how I had found him. He looked aside from me as I spoke and I felt our Skill-link fade as if he would vanish from my sight if he could. Nonetheless, I told him, and told him too of my encounter with the Pale Woman. He sat rubbing his arms while I spoke of her, and when he asked, "Then, she lives still? She did not die?" his voice shook.