The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (132 page)

Fragments of speech whirled like falling leaves in my memory. They flowed into my head and filled it up like other people’s furniture moved into a once-familiar room. I could not disengage from them. Something held me there as firmly as the hand that gripped mine.

‘… Can’t move him again, even if you could get a litter up those stairs. You’ll have to do it here.’

‘I don’t know how. I don’t know how. I don’t know how!’
This from Dutiful. ‘Eda and El, Chade, I’m not being stubborn. Don’t you think I’d save him if I could? But I don’t know how; I’m not even sure what you’re asking me to do.’

Stinks worse than dogshit now
. Thick was bored and wished he were anywhere else.

Chade, patiently explaining it yet again. ‘It doesn’t matter that you don’t know how. He’s going to die if we don’t do anything. If you try and it kills him, well, at least it will be quicker than what he’s enduring now. Now, I want you to look at these drawings carefully. They are my own work, from years ago. This shows you what those organs should look like, intact …’

I fell away from them. Blessed blackness for a time. Just as I found the snow-rounded hills, they tugged me back. Their hands were on me. My clothing was cut away. Someone retched, and Chade, tight-breathed, told them to get out of the room until called for. Then, harsh rags, water both cold and hot on my wound and close at hand a woman said sadly, ‘It’s hopelessly foul. Can’t we just let him go peacefully?’

‘No!’ I thought the voice was King Shrewd’s. Then I knew it could not be. It must be Chade, sounding so like his brother. ‘Get the Prince back in here. It’s time.’

Then I felt Dutiful’s icy hands on my hot flesh, set to either side of the wound. ‘Just Skill into his body,’ Chade told him. ‘Skill into him, look at what is wrong, and fix it.’

‘I don’t know how,’ Dutiful repeated, but I felt him try. His mind battered against mine like a moth against a lamp’s chimney. He was trying to reach my thoughts, not my body. I pushed feebly at him. That was a mistake.

For a moment, our minds touched and linked.
No
, I told him.
No. Leave me alone
.

His hands went away. ‘He doesn’t want us to do this,’ Dutiful reported uncertainly.

‘I don’t care!’ Chade’s voice was furious. ‘He isn’t allowed to die. I won’t permit it.’ Suddenly, the words were louder,
shouted right by my ear. ‘Fitz, do you hear me? Do you hear me, boy? I’m not going to let you die, so you might as well co-operate. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and fight to live.’

‘Fitz?’ There was wonder and horror in Dutiful’s voice.

A crack of silence opened. Then, harshly, Chade explained. ‘He was born a bastard, just as I was. It’s long been a joke between us, that the word only stings when it comes from someone who doesn’t wear it also.’

Feeble, Chade. Feeble
, I wanted to tell him,
and Dutiful knows you too well to be taken in by it
.

Someone stroked the hair back from my brow and took my hand. I thought it was the Fool. I tried to tighten my hand on his slender one, to somehow let him know that I would beg his pardon if I could. I suddenly thought of all the persons that I hadn’t bid farewell. Hap. Kettricken. Burrich and Molly. I’d always meant to make everything right with everyone before I died. ‘Patience, mother,’ I said, but no one heard me. Perhaps I didn’t even speak the words aloud.

‘Show me the picture,’ Lord Golden said. He let go of my hand and I swung abruptly into the blackness. I fell until I died. From the pillowed brow of a snowy hill, I glimpsed the summerland. A flash of grey moved in the tall grasses. Nighteyes! I called to him. He turned and looked back at me. He showed his teeth in a snarl, warning me back. I tried to move forward but again I was drawn back up to the surface. I thrashed helplessly, a fish on a line, but my body moved not at all.

‘… done it before. At least, something like it. I was there when he used the Skill to heal his wolf. And years ago, I studied how a man’s body is put together. And I don’t have the Skill, myself, but I know Fi–– Tom. If you can use the Skill through me, I’m willing to allow that.’ The Fool was insistent.

‘I have to use the privy.’

‘Go, then, Thick, but come right back. Understand me? Come right back here when you have.’ I could hear annoyance
in Chade’s voice. And uncertainty. ‘Well, what can it hurt? Go ahead. Try.’

Then I felt the Fool’s touch on my back. If Dutiful’s hands had been cold to my fevered skin, then the Fool’s fingers were as icicles. Their jabbing ice probed me. All eternity paused in anticipation of that dreaded, desired touch.

Long ago, the Fool had accompanied me into the Mountains on the quest to find Verity. In helping me tend our exhausted king, he had carelessly let his fingers come into contact with Verity’s Skill-silvered hands. That physical manifestation of the Skill-magic had gleamed like quicksilver. The contact with the pure magic had jolted the Fool and forever marked him. The silvering magic had faded with time, yet enough of it remained on his fingertips that I had seen the Fool use it in his woodcarving. It allowed him to know, intimately, whatever those fingers touched, be it wood or plant or beast. Or me. Long ago, he had left his fingerprints on my wrist. Lord Golden’s gloves always kept his Skill-fingers covered, protected from casual contact. Yet now the hands that touched the skin of my back were bared.

I knew the instant that his Skill-coated fingers made contact with my skin. Like little cold knives his touch plunged into me, cutting more sharply than the sword which had stirred my guts. It was neither pain nor pleasure; it was connection, pure and simple, as if we shared a skin. I lay still under that scrutiny, lacking even the strength to tremble, as I prayed he would go no further. I need not have feared. I felt the Fool’s honour in that touch, an honour that was like armour between us. It was only my body he probed, not my heart or mind. I knew then with terrible guilt how my earlier accusations had wronged my friend. He would never seek anything from me that I did not first offer him. I heard him speak, and the words echoed through me even as they washed against my ears.

‘I can see the damage, Chade. The muscles are like snapped cords that have pulled back on themselves. And where the
blade cut him, there is rot and poison leaking from his own guts. His blood carries it through his body. It is not just this wound that is toxic. The wrongness gleams throughout his whole body, like dye spreading through water or decay that has reached up through a tree. It has overwhelmed him, Chade. The trouble is not just here, where the blade went in, but in other places where his own body tries to make it right and instead succumbs to the poison.’

‘Can you repair it? Can you heal his body?’ Chade’s voice seemed choked and weak, but it could have been because the Fool’s thoughts seemed so thunderously loud.

‘No. I can see what is wrong but perceiving damage does not mend it. He is not a chunk of wood, so I cannot simply carve the rot away from what is sound.’ The Fool fell silent, but I felt how he struggled within that silence. Then he spoke in a voice full of despair. ‘We have failed him. He’s dying.’

‘No, oh no. Not my boy, not my Fitz. Please, no.’ Light as leaves, the old man’s hands settled on me. I knew how terribly he desired to make me right. Then his hands seemed to sink inside me and the heat of his touch burned like liquor running through my veins. Someone gasped, and then I felt, I felt the Fool join his mind to Chade’s. They linked in me. It was a feeble thing, this Skilling effort. The old man’s voice cracked as he cried out, ‘Dutiful. Take my hand. Lend me strength.’

Dutiful joined them. It disrupted everything. Light exploded into blackness. ‘Get Thick!’ someone shouted. It didn’t matter. I fell for a long time, getting smaller and smaller as I fell. I heard the howling of wolves. It grew louder.

Then I became aware of a light. The light was not hot, but it was terribly penetrating. I fell into it and became it. It seemed to come from inside my eyes themselves. There was no avoiding it. It was light that seared but did not illuminate. I could see nothing. It was unbearably bright, and then suddenly, the brilliance increased. I screamed, my whole body screamed with the force of the light surging through me. I was a broken
limb jerked straight, a dammed river released, snarled hair roughly combed. Rightness tore through me. The cure was worse than the malady. My heart stopped. Voices cried out in dismay. Then my heart slammed into motion again. Air scorched into my lungs.

I passed through an instant of wild wakefulness in which I saw all, knew all, felt all. They surrounded me in a circle. The Fool’s Skilled fingers were pressed to my back. Chade gripped his free hand, and in turn his hand held Dutiful’s. Dutiful clenched Thick’s chubby wrist in his hand and Thick stood, stock-still and stolid, immobile and yet roaring like a bonfire. Chade’s eyes were wide, showing the whites all round and his clenched teeth were bared in a snarl of joy. Dutiful’s face was white with fear, his eyes squeezed shut. And the Fool, the Fool was gold gleaming and joy and a flight of jewelled dragons across a pure blue sky. And the Fool screamed suddenly, shrill as a woman, ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! It’s too much, we’ve gone too far!’

They let me go. I raced on without them. I couldn’t stop now. As a flash flood cuts down a ravine, clearing all debris along with the live trees that it tears up from the banks, so I raced. Healing? It was not a healing. Healing is gentleness and recovery and time. Healing, I suddenly knew, was not a thing that one man did to another. Healing was what a body did for itself, given the rest and time and sustenance to do it. If a man set fire to his feet to warm his hands, that would be like this healing was. My body sloughed rotted flesh and purged poisonous fluids from itself. Yet one cannot tear away from a structure without replacing it, and building bricks must come from somewhere. My body stole from itself and I felt it do it, but could not stop the process. And so I was made whole, but at a cost to the strength of that whole. Like a wall built without sufficient mortar, strength was sacrificed to the paucity of materials. When all was done and the world thundered to stillness around me, I lay looking up at them from the wash
of filth and poison that my body had ejected, and I had not even the strength to blink.

They looked down at me, the four who had reconstructed my body. The old man, the golden lord, the prince and the idiot stared down at me, and in their gazes awe mingled with fear and satisfaction vied with regret. Thus was Dutiful’s Coterie formed, and it was as poor a way for any five folk to be joined as I could imagine. Not since Crossfire’s Coterie of cripples had there been such a sadly mismatched assortment of Skill-users. The Fool had no true Skill of his own, only the silver shadows on his fingertips and the thread of Skill-awareness we had shared for so long. Thick possessed it in ample quantity but had neither knowledge nor any ambition to gain knowledge to use it well. I had Skill, but as always it faded and then fountained unpredictably, untrained and unreliable. And Chade, gods help us all, had discovered his own talent in the waning of his years. He flourished it like a boy waving a wooden sword, with no concept of what a true edge could do. He had knowledge, and ambition like a floodtide, and yet he did not have the intrinsic understanding that Thick did. Only in our prince did Skill balance both intellect and ambition, and there it was Wit-tainted. I stared up at what I had wrought merely by virtue of nearly dying, and my courage left me. Catalyst indeed. A coterie should be able to lend its strength to the Farseer monarch in time of need. This one could not function without him. And it should have been built on the camaraderie of mutually-chosen companions. This was more like an accidental meeting of travellers in a tavern.

Some of the woe I felt must have shown in my eyes, for Chade knelt down by my bedside and took my hand. ‘It’s all right, boy,’ he said reassuringly. ‘You’re going to live.’

I knew he meant it well. I closed my eyes to shut out the unholy glee shining in his face.

I slept for four days and four nights. I slept through them bathing my wasted body and clothing me anew. They told
me later that I drank broth and wine and gruel in those days. Someone kept me clean. I don’t recall it, and for that, I’m glad. I was later told that Starling checked on me several times, and that Wim came by and delivered a restorative potion from his grandmother’s recipe. None of them were allowed to see me. I remember none of that, I am ashamed to say. Instead, I recalled memories I had not known I held. I ran with a pack of wolves, shadowing them over the hills. I watched their lives and longed to join them. But always, somewhere, a thread tugged at me, reminding me that eventually I would have to come back.

I do recall one interlude. Someone put her arm around my shoulders and hauled me up and held a mug of warm milk to my mouth. I have never cared for warmed milk, and I tried to turn aside from it when I smelled it, but she was determined. It was drink or drown, and most of it went down my throat. It was only when she lowered me back to my pillows that I recognized that strength of will as my queen’s. I opened my eyes to slits. ‘Sorry,’ I croaked as Kettricken wiped the spilled milk from my scruff of beard and nightshirt.

She smiled at me and I saw relief in her eyes. ‘That’s the first time you’ve had the strength to be difficult. Should I take it that you are recovering and will soon be your old self?’ She asked the question teasingly, but for all that relief quivered in her words. She set the cloth aside and gathered my hands in hers. I felt my bones rub together in her gentle grip; all flesh had fallen from my hands, leaving them like talons. I could not bear to look at them, or at the tenderness in her blue gaze. I glanced past her and frowned, not recognizing my surroundings. Her eyes followed my gaze. ‘I changed it,’ she said. ‘I could not abide for you to lie in this cell as it was.’

There was a thick rug of Mountain weave on the floor. I lay on a low couch, while my exalted queen sat cross-legged on a plump cushion on the floor beside me. In the corner, a spiralling rack held tiers of scented candles that warmed and lit the room. A chest of drawers, the front ornamented with
carving, supported a graceful ewer and wash bowl. I saw the lacy edge of some piece of weaving beneath the pitcher. A low table beside the bed held the empty mug and a bowl of torn bread softened in broth. The smell made me hungry. Kettricken must have seen my eyes go towards it, for she immediately took it up and lifted a spoonful.