and down the river road, for I had been sure you would not flee to Bingtown, but would immediately set out for the Mountains. I had been so sure that despite all you had endured, your heart was true. It was what I told to Burrich that night: that we must leave you alone, to discover for yourself where your loyalty was. I had wagered Burrich that left to your own devices you would be like an arrow released from a bow, flying straight to Verity. That, I think, was what shocked us both the most. That you had died there, and not on the road to your king.'
'Well,' I declared with a drunkard's elaborate satisfaction, 'you were both wrong. You both thought you knew me so well, you both thought you had crafted such a tool as could not defy your purposes. But I did NOT die there! Nor did I go to seek my king. I went to kill Regal. For myself.' I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms on my chest. Then sat up abruptly at the uncomfortable pressure on my healing injury. 'For myself!' I repeated. 'Not for my king or Buck or any of the Six Duchies. For me, I went to kill him. For me.'
Chade merely looked at me. But from the hearth corner where Kettle rocked, her old voice rose in complacent satisfaction. 'The White Scriptures say, `He shall thirst for the blood of his own kin, and his thirst shall go unslaked. The Catalyst shall hunger for a hearth and children in vain, for his children shall be another's, and another's child his own …. '
'No one can force me to fulfill any such prophecies!' I vowed in a roar. 'Who made them, anyway?'
Kettle went on rocking. It was the Fool who answered me. He spoke mildly, without looking up from his work. 'I did. In my childhood, in the days of my dreaming. Before I knew you anywhere, save in my dreams.'
'You are doomed to fulfill them,' Kettle told me gently.
I slammed my cup back onto the table. 'Damned if I will!' I shouted. No one jumped or replied. In a terrible instant of crystalline recall, I heard Molly's father's voice from his chimney, corner. 'Damn you, girl!' Molly had flinched but ignored him. She had known there was no reasoning with a drunk. 'Molly,' I moaned soddenly and put my head down on my arms to weep.
After a time, I felt Chade's hands on my shoulders. 'Come, boy, this avails you nothing. To bed with you. Tomorrow you must face your queen.' There was far more patience in his voice than I deserved, and I suddenly knew the depths of my churlishness.
I rubbed my face on my sleeve and managed to lift my head. I did not resist as he helped me to my feet and steered me toward the cot in the corner. As I sat down on the edge of it, I said quietly, 'You knew. You knew all along.'
'Knew what?' he asked me tiredly.
'Knew all this about the Catalyst and the White Prophet.'
He blew air out through his nose. 'I `know nothing of that. I knew something of the writings about them. Recall that things were comparatively settled before your father abdicated. I had many long years after I had taken to my tower, when my king did not require my services for months at a time. I had much time for reading, and many sources for scrolls. So I had encountered some of the foreign tales and writings that deal with a Catalyst and a White Prophet.' His voice became milder, as if he'd forgotten the anger in my question.
'It was only after the Fool had come to Buckkeep, and I had quietly discovered that he had a strong interest in such writings, that my own interest was piqued. You yourself once told me that he had referred to you as the Catalyst. So I began to wonder … but in truth, I give all prophecies small credence.'
I lay back gingerly. I could almost sleep on my back again. I rolled to my side, kicked off my boots, and dragged a blanket up over me.
'Fitz?'
'What?' I asked Chade grudgingly.
'Kettricken is angry with you. Do not expect her patience tomorrow. But keep in mind that she is not only our queen. She is a woman who has lost a child and been kept in suspense over her husband's fate for over a year, hounded away from her adopted country, only to have trouble dog her steps to her native land. Her father is understandably bitter. He turns a warrior's eyes toward the Six Duchies and Regal, and has no time for quests to search for the brother of his enemy, even if he believed he lived. Kettricken is alone, more grievously alone than you or I can imagine. Find tolerance for the woman. And respect for your queen.' He paused uncomfortably. 'You will need both tomorrow. I can be of little help to you with her.'
I think he went on after that, but I had ceased to listen. Sleep soon dragged me under its waves.
It had been some time since Skill dreams had troubled me. I do not know if my physical weakness had finally banished my dreams of battle, or if my constant guard against Regal's coterie had blocked them from my mind. That night my brief respite ended. The strength of the Skill dream that snatched me from my body was as if a great hand had reached inside me, seized me by the heart, and dragged me out of myself. I was suddenly in another place.
It was a city, in the sense that folk dwelt there in great number. But the folk were unlike any I had ever seen, nor had I ever seen such dwellings. The buildings soared and spiraled to airy heights. The stone of the walls seemed to have flowed into their forms. There were bridges of delicate tracery and gardens that both cascaded down and tendriled up the sides of the structures. There were fountains that danced and others that pooled silently. Everywhere brightly clad people moved through the city, as numerous as ants.
Yet all was silent and still. I sensed the flow of folk, the play of the fountains, the perfume of the unfolding blossoms in the gardens. All was there, but when I turned to behold it, it was gone. The mind could sense the delicate tracery of the bridge but the eye saw only the fallen rubble gone to rust and rot. Frescoed walls had been wind-polished away to roughly plastered bricks. A turn of the head changed a leaping fountain to weedy dust in a cracked basin. The hastening crowd in the market spoke only with the voice of a racing wind heavy with stinging sand. I moved through this ghost of a city, bodiless and seeking, unable to decipher why I was there or what was drawing me. It was neither light nor dark there, neither summer nor winter. I am outside time, I thought, and wondered if this was the ultimate hell of the Fool's philosophy or the final freedom.
I saw at last, far ahead of me, a small figure plodding along one of the vast streets. His head was bowed to the wind and he held his cloak's hem over his mouth and nose as he walked to shield him from the sand laden wind. He was not a part of the ghostly crowd but moved through the rubble, skirting the places where some unrest in the earth had sunken or ridged the paved street. I knew in that instant of sighting him that this was Verity. I knew by the jerk of life I felt in my chest, and knew then that what had pulled me here was the tiny pebble of Verity's Skill that hid still within my own consciousness. I sensed also that the danger to him was extreme. Yet I saw nothing to threaten him. He was at a great distance from me, seen through the hazy shadows of buildings that had been veiled in the ghosts of a market-day crowd. He trudged heavily along, alone and immune to the ghost city, and yet entwined in it. I saw nothing, but danger loomed over him like a giant's shadow.
I hastened after him and in the blinking of an eye was beside him. 'Ah,' he greeted me. 'So you have come at last, Fitz. Welcome.' He did not pause as he walked, nor turn his head. Yet I felt a warmth as if he had clasped my hand in greeting, and I felt no need to reply. Instead I saw with his eyes the lure and the danger.
A river flowed ahead. It was not water. It was not glistening stone. It partook of both those things, but was neither. It sliced through the city like a gleaming blade, sliding out of the riven mountain behind us and continuing until it disappeared into a more ancient river of water. Like a seam of coal bared by a cutting tide, or gold veining quartz, it lay exposed on the earth's body. It was magic. Purest ancient magic, inexorable and heedless of men, flowed there. The river of Skill I had so tediously learned to navigate was to this magic as the bouquet of wine is wine. That which I glimpsed with Verity's eyes had a physical existence as concrete as my own. I was immediately drawn to it as a moth is drawn to a candle flame.
It was not just the beauty of that shining flow. The magic filled every one of Verity's senses. The sound of its rushing was musical, a running of notes that kept one waiting and listening, in the certainty that the sound was building to something. The wind carried its scent, elusive and changeable, one moment the edge of lemon blossoms and the next a smoky coiling of spices. I tasted it on every breath, and longed to plunge myself into it. I was suddenly sure that it could quench every appetite I had ever suffered, not just those of my body but the vague yearnings of my soul as well. I longed for my body to be here as well, that I might experience it as completely as Verity did.
Verity paused, lifting his face. He drew in a deep breath, air laden with Skill as fog is laden with moisture. Suddenly I could taste in the back of Verity's throat a hot metallic tang. The longing he had felt for it suddenly became an all-consuming desire. He thirsted for it. When he got to it, he would throw himself on his knees and drink his fill. He would be filled with all the consciousness of the world, he would partake of the whole and become the whole. At last he would know completion.
