The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (257 page)

And I should not put myself in a position in which my weakness could damage both of us.’

He suddenly took my hand. It startled me, and when I looked at him, our eyes locked. ‘Fitz. Please. Do not tempt me to follow you and interfere in the future I saw for you. Do not tempt me to step out of my time and try to take something that was never meant for me.’ He shivered suddenly, as if a chill had taken him. He let go of my hand and leaned closer to the fire, holding his hands out to them. The nails had just started to regrow. His rubbed his hands together, loosening a layer of skin like white ash. The new skin exposed beneath reminded me of polished wood. Very softly, he asked me, ‘Could you have been content to live with Nighteyes among the wolves?’

‘I would have been willing to try,’ I said stubbornly.

‘Even if his mate could never completely accept you?’

‘Could you, for once, just say simply whatever it is you are trying to say?’

He looked at me and rubbed his chin as if he were truly considering it. Then he smiled sadly. ‘No. I can’t. Not without damaging something precious to me.’ As if he were not changing the subject at all, he asked, ‘Will you ever tell Dutiful that your body fathered his?’

I did not like him to speak that aloud even when it was just we two. My strong Skill-bond with Dutiful made him seem ever close. ‘No,’ I said shortly. ‘He would see too many things differently. It would hurt him, to no good end. It would damage his image of his father, his feelings toward his mother, even his feelings toward me. What purpose could it serve?’

‘Exactly. So you will always love him as a son, but treat him as your prince. One step away from where you long to be. Because even if you told him, you could never be his father.’

I was starting to get angry again. ‘You are not my father.’

‘No.’ He stared at the fire. ‘And I’m not your lover, either.’

I felt suddenly weary and sour. ‘Is that what this is about? Bedding with me? You won’t return to Buckkeep because I won’t bed with you?’

‘No!’ He did not shout the word, but something in the way he
said it stunned me to silence. His voice was low, almost harsh as he spoke. ‘Always, you bring it back to that, as if that is the only possible culmination of love.’

He sighed and abruptly settled back in his chair. He looked at me speculatively, and then asked, ‘Tell me, did you love Nighteyes?’

‘Of course.’

‘Without reserve.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then by your logic, you wished to couple with him?’

‘I wished … No!’

‘Ah. But that was only because he, too, was male? It had nothing to do with your other differences?’

I gaped at him. A moment longer he managed to keep his face straight in honest inquiry. Then he laughed at me, more freely than I had heard him laugh in a long time. I wanted to be offended, but it was such a relief to hear him laugh, even at my expense, that I could not.

He caught his breath, and said, ‘There it is. Plainly, Fitz. I told you I set no limits on my love for you. I don’t. Yet I never expected you to offer me your body. It was the whole of your heart, all for myself, that I sought. Even though I’ve never had a right to it. For you gave it away ere ever you saw me.’ He shook his head. ‘Long ago, you told me that Molly would never be able to tolerate your bond with the wolf. That she would force you to decide between them. Do you still believe that?’

‘I think it likely,’ I had to reply softly.

‘And how do you think she would react to me?’ He paused for a heartbeat. ‘Who would you choose? And what would you lose, either way, by being forced to make such a choice? Those are the questions I’ve had to ponder. And if I come back with you, and make that choice a part of your future, what else will my Catalyst change in the process of choosing? If you left the Six Duchies with me, what future would we have set in motion, all unknowing?’

I shook my head and looked away from him. But the flow of his words was relentless and my ears heard them.

‘Nighteyes chose. He chose between the pack of wolves that would have accepted him and his bond with you. I do not know
if you ever discussed with him what that decision cost him. I doubt it. The little I knew of him makes me think he chose and went forward from there. I do not mean to shame you. But is it not true that Nighteyes paid a higher toll for your bond, for the love that you shared, than you did? What did it cost Nighteyes to be bonded to you? Answer honestly.’

I had to look aside, for I
was
ashamed. ‘It cost him living with a pack, and being a wolf in full. It cost him having a mate and cubs. Just as Rolf later warned us. Because we set no limits on our bond.’

‘You knew the exhilaration of sharing his wolfness with him. Of being as close to becoming a wolf as a man can. Yet … forgive me … I do not think he ever sought the human within himself as ardently as you pursued being a wolf.’

‘No.’

He took my hand again and held it in both of his. He turned it over and looked down at the shadows of his fingerprints that I had worn on my wrist for so many years. ‘Fitz. I have thought long on this. I will not take your mate and cubs from you. My years will be long; by comparison, you have not that many left. I will not take from you and Molly whatever years may remain to you. For I am sure that you will be together, again. You know what I am. You have been within this body, and I in yours. And I have felt, oh, gods help me against that memory, I have felt what it is to be human, fully human, in the moments that I held your love and pain and loss within me. You have allowed me to be as human as it is possible for me to be. What my teachers took away from me, you restored tenfold. With you, I was a child. With you, I grew to manhood. With you … Just as Nighteyes allowed you to be the wolf.’ His voice ran down and we were left sitting in silence, as if he had run out of words. He did not release my hand. The touch sharpened my awareness of the Skill-bond between us. Dutiful nudged at my Skill, seeking my attention. I ignored him. This was more important. I tried to grasp exactly what the Fool feared.

‘You think that it would hurt me if you came back to Buckkeep. That it would keep me from a life you had seen.’

‘Yes.’

‘You dread that I would grow old and die. And you would not.’

‘Yes.’

‘What if I didn’t care about those things? About the cost.’

‘I still would.’

I asked my last question, my heart squeezed with hurt, dreading however he might answer it. ‘And if I said I would follow you then? Leave my other life behind and go with you.’

I think that question stunned him. He drew breath twice before he answered it in a hoarse whisper. ‘I would not allow it. I could not allow it.’

We sat a long time in silence after that. The fire consumed itself. And then I asked the final, awful question. After I leave you here, will I ever see you again?’

‘Probably not. It would not be wise.’ He lifted my hand and tenderly kissed the sword-calloused palm of it, and then held it in both of his. It was farewell, and I knew it, and knew I could do nothing to stop it. I sat still, feeling as if I grew hollow and cold, as if Nighteyes were dying all over again. I was losing him. He was withdrawing from my life and I felt as though I were bleeding to death, my life trickling out of me. I suddenly realized how close to true that was.

‘Stop!’ I cried, but it was too late. He released my hand before I could snatch it back. My wrist was clean and bare. His fingerprints were gone. Somehow, he had taken them back, and our Skill-thread dangled, broken.

‘I have to let you go,’ he said in a cracked whisper. ‘While I can. Leave me that, Fitz. That I broke the bond. That I did not take what was not mine.’

I groped for him. I could see him, but I could not feel him. No Wit, no Skill, no scent. No Fool. The companion of my childhood, the friend of my youth was gone. He had turned that facet of himself away from me. A brown-skinned man with hazel eyes looked at me sympathetically.

‘You cannot do this to me,’ I said.

‘It is done,’ he pointed out. ‘Done.’ His strength seemed to go out of him with the word. He turned his head away from me, as if by doing that, he could keep me from knowing that he
wept. I sat, feeling numbed in the way that one does after a terrible injury.

‘I am just tired,’ he said in a small, quavering voice. ‘Just tired, still. That is all. I think I will lie down again.’

Fitz. The Queen wants you.
Thick pushed effortlessly into my mind.

Shortly. I am with the Fool right now.

It’s about Old Blood. Soon, please, she says.

Soon
, I replied dully.

And no sooner was Thick cleared from my mind than Chade was tapping at my shoulder. I gave him my heed and
As long as you are there, think to bring back at least some of the Skill-scrolls you found there. We’ll be in need of them, I think.

Chade. I will. Please. A time to myself. Please.

Very well.
His reply was surly. Then he softened, asking more gently,
What is the problem? Is he that ill?

Actually, he seems improved. But I need a time for my own thoughts.

Very well.

I turned back to the Fool, but he had either sunk into a true sleep or was pretending one so convincingly that I could not find it in me to try to wake him. I needed a time to think. I thought there must be some way to get him to change his mind, if only I could think of it.

‘I’ll be back,’ I told him, and then slung my cloak over my shoulders and went out. I thought I might as well make a trip through the Elderling maze to retrieve some of the Skill-scrolls. It would keep me busy while I thought. I have never done my best pondering while sitting still. I climbed the steep path and found I did not have to squeeze quite as much to get into the crack. My comings and goings were wearing it open, I thought to myself. Yet I had not gone far under the false light of the Elderling globes before I saw someone coming toward me. It startled me for the instant before I recognized the Black Man. He had a haunch of smoked meat on one shoulder, and as we drew near to one another, he nodded to me and then slung it carefully to the ground.

‘Her supplies, I stole. Many times. Not like this. A little bit here,
a little bit there. Now, what I want, I take.’ He cocked his head at me. ‘And you?’

‘Somewhat the same. Years ago, scrolls, special writings, were taken from my king. She has them, here, in a room near her bedchamber. I am to bring them home again.’

‘Ah, those. I saw them long ago.’

‘Yes.’

‘I will help.’

I was not sure I wanted help, but there seemed no courteous way to refuse him. I nodded my thanks, and we walked companionably through the halls. He shook his head at the desecration of the carvings and the missing art from the empty niches. He spoke to me of the folk who had lived here in the times he had known. Thick had been right. Once, the stone hallways had been warmed. Elderlings had come and gone from this place, enjoying the wonders of the ice and snow that never reached their warmer lands. I tried to imagine taking pleasure in coming to a cold place, but the idea was foreign to me.

He had somehow unharnessed the magic that gave warmth to the stone. He had sought, too, to deprive the Pale Woman of the Elderling light, but had failed at that. Yet even without warmth, she had stayed. She had driven Prilkop into hiding, and shown her disdain for him and the dragon-partnered Elderlings by her encouragement of the destruction of their art.

‘Yet she left the map room alone,’ I pointed out to him.

‘She did not know of it, perhaps. Or, not knowing the use, did not care. Of the travel portals, she knew nothing. Once, only once, to flee her I used one.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘So weak, so sick, so –’ He put his fists to his temples and made pounding motions. ‘I could not come back, for many days. When I did,’ he shrugged, ‘she had made my city hers. But now I take it back.’

He knew his city well. He took me by a different path, through narrower ways that had, perhaps, been for servants or tradesmen. In less time than I had thought possible, we turned down a hallway that led us past her bedchamber. I glanced in. Someone had been there since I last glimpsed it. I halted and stared. Every item in the room that could have been pushed over or dragged about had been.
A cask of jewellery had spilled a stream of pearls and silver chains and glittering white stones across the floor. Some had settled in slow melt into the floor of the chamber. Prilkop saw me staring and calmly entered into the room. ‘This will work,’ he told me, and pulled a silk coverlet from her bed. As I watched, he knotted the corners to form a very large carry sack. Catching the sense of what he did, I found another and copied him. Then, our makeshift sacks slung across our backs, we went on to the scroll room.

I was not prepared for the sight that met me there. The racks had been deliberately pushed toward the centre of the room, so that as they fell, their shelved contents spilled in a messy pile. A broken pitcher lay near them and oil drenched a number of the scrolls. The Pale Woman lay on the floor near them. She was very dead. Her blackened stick arms reminded me of insect legs. Freezing and death had darkened her countenance. She had thrown back her head and died, mouth open like a snarling cat. An Elderling light globe, pried loose from its setting, lay near the oil-soaked manuscripts. It looked battered, as if it had been kicked and beaten. For a time, Prilkop and I stared in silence.

‘She tried to make a fire to warm herself,’ I hazarded my guess. ‘She thought something in the light globe might catch the scrolls on fire.’

He shook his head in disgust. ‘No. To destroy. Her whole desire that was. Dragons to destroy. Other prophets to destroy. Beauty. Knowledge.’ He nudged one of the oily scrolls that was close to her body. ‘What she could not control or possess, she destroys.’ He met my eyes and added, ‘She could not control your Fool.’

He set to work alongside me. The unruined scrolls, we loaded into one sack, taking as much care as we could, for some were very old and fragile. Those that had taken the oil I placed separately from the others. I noticed that we both avoided the Pale Woman. When I had to move her body to get at the scrolls beneath her, Prilkop backed away and looked aside. When every single scroll had been rescued, I looked at her lying there. ‘Do you want me to do something with her body?’ I asked him quietly.