The Complete Tawny Man Trilogy Omnibus (58 page)

Finally, I sat down behind him. I pulled him back against me, his back to my chest and put my arms around him in a vain effort to warm him. ‘Dutiful,’ I said by his ear. ‘Come back, boy. Come back. You’ve a throne to inherit, and a kingdom to rule. You can’t go like this. Come back, lad. It can’t all have
been for nothing. Not the Fool and Nighteyes both spent for nothing. What will I say to Kettricken? What will Chade say to me? Gods, gods, what would Verity say to me now?’

It was not so much what Verity would have said to me as what Verity would have done for me. I held his son close to me, and then placed my face next to his beardless cheek. I took a deep breath and dropped all my walls. I closed my eyes, and slipped into the Skill in search of him.

I nearly lost myself.

There have been times when I could scarcely reach the flow of Skill, and in other times and places, I have experienced the Skill as a flowing river of power, incredibly swift and powerful. As a boy, I had nearly lost myself in that river, sustained and rescued only by Verity’s intervention. I had grown in strength and control since then. Or so I had thought. This sensation was like diving into a racing current of Skill. Never before had I felt it so strong and seductive. In my present frame of mind, it seemed to offer the complete and perfect answer to me. Just let go. Stop being this person Fitz trapped in a battle-scarred body. Stop bleeding sorrow for the death of my closest friends. Just let go. The Skill offered me existence without thought. It was not the suicide’s temptation to die and make the world stop for him. This was far more enticing.
Change the shape of your being and leave all those considerations behind. Merge
.

If I had had only myself to think of, I know I would have yielded to it. But the Fool had charged me with seeing that he did not die in vain, and my wolf had bid me live and tell Nettle of him. Kettricken had asked me to bring her son back to her. Chade was depending on me. And Hap. So I found myself in that seething current of streaming sensations, and I fought to remain who I was. I don’t know how long it took me to do that. Time has no meaning in that place. That alone is one of the Skill’s dangers. Some part of me knew I was burning my body’s strength, but when one is immersed in the Skill it is hard to care about physical things.

When I was sure of myself, I cautiously reached out in search of Dutiful.

I had thought it would be easy to find him. The night before, it had been effortless. I had but clasped his hand then, and found him within the Skill. Tonight, though I knew that somewhere I cradled his chilling body, I could not discover him. It is difficult to describe how I sought him. The Skill is not truly a place nor a time. Sometimes I think it can be described as being without the boundaries of self. At other times, that defining seems too narrow, for ‘self’ is not the only boundaries we set to how we experience being.

I opened myself to the Skill and let it stream through me like water through a sieve, and still I found no trace of the Prince. I stretched myself beneath the flow of the Skill like a hillside full of tiny grasses under sunlight and let it touch each blade of me, and still I could not sense him. I wove myself throughout the Skill, twining over it like ivy, and still I could not separate the lad from its flow.

He had left a sense of himself in the Skill, but like a bootmark in fine dust on a windy day that trace was crumbling to meaningless grains flowing with the Skill. I gathered what I could of him, but it was no more Prince Dutiful than the scent of a flower is the flower. Nevertheless, I took to myself the bits that I recognized and held them fiercely. It was becoming more difficult for me to recall what exactly was the essence of the Prince. I had never known him well, and the body that my body held was rapidly losing its connection to him.

In an effort to find the boy, I engaged completely with the Skill. I did not surrender myself, but I stepped free of all the safety holds that always before I had clung to. It was an eerie feeling. I was a kite cut free and flying, a tiny boat with no hand on the tiller. I had not lost my sense of self, but I had given up the absolute certainty that I could find my way back to my body. Yet it put me no closer to finding Dutiful. It only made me more aware of the vastness that surrounded me and
the hopelessness of my task. It would have been easier to net the smoke from an extinguished fire than to gather the boy together again.

And all the while the Skill plucked at me, whispering promises. It was only cold and rushing so long as I resisted it. If I gave in, I knew it would become all warmth and comfort and belonging. If I surrendered to it, I would subside into peaceful existence without individual awareness. What would be so terrible about that? Nighteyes and the Fool were gone. I’d failed in my mission to bring Dutiful back to Kettricken. Molly did not wait for me; she had a life and a love.
Hap
, I told myself, trying to stir some sense of responsibility.
What about Hap?
But I knew that Chade would see to Hap’s needs, at first out of a sense of duty to me, but before long for the sake of the boy himself.

But Nettle. What of Nettle?

The answer was terrible. I had already failed her. I knew I could not recover Dutiful, and without him, she was doomed. Did I wish to return to witness that? Could I be aware of it and stay sane? Then a worse thought came to me. In this timeless place, it had all already happened. Even now, she had perished.

That decided me. I let go of the bits of Dutiful and they streamed away from me. How to describe that? As if I stood on a sunny hillside and released a rainbow I had imprisoned in my hand. As he flowed away, I realized that those traces of him had become tangled with my own essence. My being flowed with his. It didn’t matter. FitzChivalry Farseer ribboned away from me, the thread of myself snagged and now unravelling in the streaming Skill.

Once, I had put memories into a stone dragon. I had gratefully thrust away pain and hopeless love and a dozen other experiences. I had given away that part of my life so that the dragon would have enough essence to come to life. This felt different. Imagine bleeding that feels pleasurable and yet is still just as deadly. I passively witnessed the draining.

Now stop that
. Warm feminine amusement in the voice that filled my mind. I was helpless to prevent it as she wound the thread of my being around me as if she were gathering yarn back into a skein.
I had forgotten how passionately dramatic humans can be at their silliest. No wonder we enjoyed you so. Such ardent little pets as you were
.

Who?
I could refine the thought no more than that. Her presence left me limp with happiness.

And this is yours too, I suppose. No wait, this is a different one. Two of you here, at once, and coming all apart! Are you lost, then?

Lost
. I repeated the thought to her, unable to frame any concept of my own. I was a dandled infant, adored for my mere presence, and it left me helpless with delight. Her love transfused me with warmth. It was something I had never even been able to imagine before: I was loved enough, and valued enough, and I needed nothing more than what I presently had. This enough was more bountiful than plenty, more rich than a king’s gleaming hoard. Never in my life had I experienced this sensation.

Back you go. Be more careful next time. Most of the others would not even notice that they had attracted you.

Like plucking a burr off herself
, I thought with dim dismay. While she held me, I was too giddy with pleasure to oppose her, even though I knew she was about to do the unthinkable.
Wait wait wait
I managed, but the thought was weightless and she gave me no heed. For less than a blink I was aware of Dutiful close beside me.

Then I was back in the horrid confines of my miserable little body. It ached, it was cold and damaged, old damage, new damage, it had never worked that well in the first place, and worst of all, it did not have enough of anything. It was riddled with wants and great gaping needs. In here, I had never had, I would never have enough love or regard or –

I flung myself out of it again.

All that happened was that my body gave a great twitch and fell over on the sand. I could not get out of it. I was cramped and stifling in the ill-fitting flesh that coated and confined me, and I could not find a way out. The discomfort was acute and alarming, akin to having a limb twisted or being choked. The more I struggled, the more I sank into the thrashing limbs of my flesh, until I was hopelessly embedded in my sweating, shaking self. I subsided, feeling the misery of having a physical self. Cold. Sand in the wet waistband of my leggings, sand at the corner of one eye and up my nose. Thirsty. Hungry. Bruised and cut.

Unloved.

I sat up slowly. The fire was nearly out; I’d been gone for quite a time. I got up stiffly and tossed the last piece of wood onto it. The world fell into place around me. My losses engulfed me as completely as the night that surrounded me. I stood perfectly still, mourning the Fool and Nighteyes, but devastated even beyond those losses by my abandonment by … by whatever she had been. It was not like waking from a dream. Rather, it was the opposite. In her, there had been truth and immediacy and the simplicity of being. Plunged back into this world, I sensed it as a tangling web of distractions and annoyances, illusions and tricks. I was cold and my shoulder hurt and the fire was going out, and all those discomforts plucked at me. Larger loomed the problem of Prince Dutiful and how we would get back to Buck and what had become of Nighteyes and the Fool. Yet even those things now seemed but diversions dancing before my eyes to keep my attention from the immense reality beyond them. All of this existence was composed of trivial pains and searing agonies, and each of them was yet another mask between me and the face of the eternal.

Yet the layers of masks were back in place, and must be recognized. My body shivered. The tide was going out again. I could not see anything beyond the ring of our firelight, but
I could hear the waters retreat in the rhythm of the falling waves. The unmistakable smell of low tide, of bared kelp and shellfish was in the air.

The Prince lay on his back staring up at the sky. I looked down at him and thought at first that he was unconscious. In the fickle light of my dying fire, I saw only black cavities where his eyes should be. Then he spoke. ‘I had a dream.’ There was wonder and uncertainty in his voice.

‘How nice.’ It was a neutral sneer. I was incredibly relieved that he was back in his body and could speak. To an equal degree, I hated that I was trapped inside my own body again and had to listen to him.

He seemed immune to my nastiness. The edges of his voice were soft. ‘I’ve never had a dream like that. I could feel … everything. I dreamed my father held me together and told me that I was going to be fine. That was all. But the strangest part was, that was enough.’ Dutiful smiled up at me. It was a luminous smile, wise and young. It made him look like Kettricken.

‘I have to find more firewood,’ I said at last. I turned from the light and the fire and the smiling boy and walked away into the darkness.

I didn’t look for wood. The retreating waves had left the sand wet and packed under my bare feet. A fading slice of moon had risen. I looked at it, then up at the sky, and felt my stomach drop. According to the stars, we were substantially south of the Six Duchies. My previous experience with Skill-pillars was that they could save a few days of travel time. This evidence of their power was not reassuring. If tomorrow’s low tide did not bare the stone, we faced a long journey home, with no resources to aid us. The moon reminded me, too, that our time was dwindling. In eight nights, the new moon would herald Prince Dutiful’s betrothal ceremony. Would the Prince stand at the narcheska’s side? It was hard to make the question seem important.

There are times when not thinking requires all of one’s
concentration. I don’t know how far I walked before I stepped on it. It shifted in the wet sand beneath my foot, and for an instant I thought I had stepped on a knife blade lying flat on the sand. In the darkness, I stooped and located it by touch. I picked it up. It was about the length of the blade of a butcher’s knife, and somewhat shaped the same. It was hard and cold, stone or metal, I could not tell which. But it was not a knife. I ran my fingers over it cautiously. There was no sharpened edge. A rib ran up the centre of it, and then the object was finely striated in parallel rows at an angle to the rib on both sides. It culminated in a sort of tube at one end. It was heavy, yet not as heavy as it seemed it should have been. I stood holding it in the darkness, feeling sure I knew what it was, but unable to summon up that knowledge. It was familiar in an eerie way, as if I picked up something that had been mine a long time ago.

The puzzle of the object was a welcome distraction from my own thoughts. I held it in my hand as I continued down the beach. I hadn’t gone a dozen steps before I stepped on another one. I picked it up. By touch I compared the two. They were not quite identical, one being slightly longer. I held them, weighing them in my hands.

When I stepped on the third one, I was almost expecting it. I lifted it from the sand and wiped the wet grit from it. Then I stood still where I was. I had a strange sense of something waiting for me. It hovered, unable to take shape without my volition. I had the strangest sensation of standing on the edge of a cliff. One more step, and I would either plummet to my death, or discover I could fly.

I stepped back from it. I turned around and walked back towards the dying campfire on the beach. As I watched, I saw Dutiful’s silhouette pass before the flames, and the sparks leapt up into the night as he dropped more wood on the fire. Well, at least he could do that much for himself.

It was hard to go back to the circle of that light. I didn’t
want to face him, didn’t want his questions or his accusations. I did not want to pick up the reins of my life. But by the time I reached the fire, Dutiful was stretched out beside it, feigning sleep. He wore his own shirt, and mine had been draped on the stakes to warm and dry. I put it on silently. As I tugged up the collar, my fingers encountered Jinna’s charm. Ah. Well that explained his smile and kindly words. I lay down on my side of the fire.