beside me.
To my surprise the dragon yielded. My companion nipped at my shoulder. Let go. Get away from that!
I let go of the dragon's foreleg. I opened my eyes, surprised to find it was still night all around me.
The Fool had his arm around Nighteyes. 'Fitz,' he said quietly. He spoke into the wolf's ruff, but I heard him clearly. 'Fitz, I am sorry. But you cannot throw away all your pain. If you stop feeling pain …'
I did not listen to the rest of what he said. I stared at the dragon's foreleg. Where my two hands had rested against the lumpy stone there were two handprints now. Within those shapes, each scale stood fine and perfect. All of that, I thought. All of that, and this is how much dragon it brought me. Then I thought of Verity's dragon. It was immense. How had he done it? What had he held inside him, all those years, to have enough for the shaping of such a dragon?
'He feels much, your uncle. Great loves. Vast loyalty. Sometimes I think that my two hundred-odd years pale beside what he has felt in his forty-some.'
All three of us turned to Kettle. I felt no surprise. I had known she was coming and I had not cared. She leaned heavily on a stick and her face seemed to hang from the bones of her skull. She met my eyes and I knew that she knew everything. Skill linked as she was to Verity, she knew it all. 'Get down from there. All of you, before you hurt yourselves.'
We obeyed slowly and I slowest of all. Verity's joints ached and his body was weary. Kettle looked at me balefully when I finally stood beside her. 'If you were going to do that, you might have put it in Verity's dragon instead,' she pointed out.
'He wouldn't let me. You wouldn't let me.'
'No. We wouldn't have. Let me tell you something, Fitz. You are going to miss what you gave away. You will recover some of the feelings in time, of course. All memories are connected, and like a man's skin, they can heal. In time, left to themselves, those memories would have stopped hurting you. You may someday wish you could call up that pain.'
'I do not think so,' I said calmly, to cover my own doubt. 'I still have plenty of pain left.'
Kettle lifted her old face to the night. She drew a long breath in through her nose. 'Dawn comes,' she said, as if she had scented it. 'You must return to the dragon. To Verity's dragon. And you two,' her head swiveled to regard the Fool and Nighteyes. 'You two should go up to that lookout point and see if Regal's troops are in sight yet. Nighteyes, you let Fitz know what you see. Go on, both of you. And Fool. You leave Girl-on-a-Dragon alone after this. You would have to give her your entire life. And even then, it might not be enough. That being so, stop torturing yourself. And her. Go on, now!'
They went, but not without some backward looks. 'Come on,' Kettle ordered me tersely. She began to hobble back the way she had come. I followed, walking as stiffly as she, through the black and silver shadows of the blocks that littered the quarry. She looked every bit of her two hundred-odd years. I felt even older. Aching body, joints that caught and creaked. I lifted my hand and scratched my ear. Then I snatched it down, chagrined. Verity would have a silver ear now. Already the skin of it burned, and it seemed the distant night insects chirred more loudly now.
'I am sorry, by the way. About your Molly girl and all. I did try to tell you.'
Kettle did not sound sorry. But I understood that now. Almost all of her feelings were in the dragon. She spoke of what she knew she would have felt, once. She still had pain for me, but she no longer recalled any pain of her own to compare it with. I only, asked, quietly, 'Is there nothing private anymore?'
'Only the things we keep from ourselves,' she replied sadly. She looked over at me. 'It is a good thing you do this night. A kind thing.' Her lips started to smile but her eyes teared. 'To give him one last night of youth and passion.' She studied me, the set look on my face. 'I shall say no more of it, then.'
I walked the rest of the way beside her in silence.
I sat by the warm embers of last night's fire and watched the dawn come. The shrilling of night insects changed gradually to the morning challenges of distant birds. I could hear them very well now. It was strange, I thought, to sit and wait for myself. Kettle said nothing. She breathed deep of the changing scent of the air as night turned to dawn and watched the lightening of the sky with avid eyes. Storing it all up to put into the dragon.
I heard the grate of boot against stone and looked up. I watched myself coming. My stride was confident and brisk, my head up. My face was freshly washed, my wet hair slicked back from my brow into a warrior's tail. Verity wore my body well.
Our eyes met in the early light. I saw my eyes narrow as Verity appraised his own body. I stood up and without thinking, began to brush my clothes off. Then I realized what I was doing. This was not a shirt I had borrowed. My laugh boomed out, louder than I used it. Verity shook my head at me.
'Leave it, boy. There's no making it better. And I'm almost finished with it anyway.' He slapped my chest with the palm of my hand. 'Once I had a body like this,' he told me, as if I hadn't known. 'I had forgotten so much of how that felt. So much.' The smile faded from his face as he regarded me peering at him from his own eyes. 'Take care of it, Fitz. You only get one. To keep, anyway.'
A wave of giddiness. Black closed from the edges of my vision, and I folded up my knees and sank down to keep from falling.
'Sorry,' Verity said quietly, and it was in his own voice.
I looked up to find him looking down on me. I stared up at him mutely. I could smell Kettricken's scent on my skin. My body was very tired. I knew a moment of total outrage. Then it crested and fell away as if the emotion were too much effort. Verity's eyes met mine and accepted all I felt.
'I will neither apologize to you nor thank you. Neither would be adequate.' He shook his head to himself. 'And in truth, how could I say I am sorry? I am not.' He looked away from me, out over my head. 'My dragon will rise. My queen will bear a child. I will drive the Red-Ships from our shore.' He took a deep breath. 'No. I am not sorry for our bargain.' His eyes came back to me. 'FitzChivalry. Are you sorry?'
Slowly I stood up. 'I don't know.' I tried to decide. 'The roots of it go too deep,' I said at last. 'Where would I start to undo my past? How far back would I have to reach, how much would I have to change in order to change this, or to say I was not sorry now?'
The road is empty below us. Nighteyes spoke in my mind.
I know. Kettle knows, too. She but looked for something to busy the Fool and sent you along to keep him safe. You can come back now.
Oh. Are you all right?
'FitzChivalry. Are you all right?' There was concern in Verity's voice. But it could not completely mask the triumph there as well.
'Of course not,' I told them both. 'Of course not.' I walked away from the dragon.
Behind me, I heard Kettle ask eagerly, 'Are we ready to quicken him?'
Verity's soft voice carried to my ears. 'No. Not just yet. For a little while longer, I would have these memories to myself. For a short time more, I would remain a man.'
As I passed through the camp, Kettricken emerged from her tent. She wore the same travel-wearied tunic and leggings she had the day before. Her hair was caught back from her face in a short, thick braid. There were still lines in her brow and at the corners of her mouth. But her face had the warm luminescence of the finest pearls. Renewed faith shone in her. She took a deep breath of the morning air and smiled at me radiantly.
I hurried past her.
The stream water was very cold. Coarse horsetail grasses grew along one bank. I used handfuls of them to scrub myself. My wet clothes were draped on the bushes on the other side of the stream. The heat of the day promised they would soon be dry. Nighteyes sat on the bank and watched me with a pucker between his eyes.
I do not understand. You do not smell bad.
Nighteyes. Go hunting. Please.
You wish to be alone?
As much as that is possible anymore.
He stood up and stretched, curtseying low to me as he did so.
Someday, it will be only you and I We shall hunt and eat and sleep. And you will heal.
May we both live to see that, I agreed wholeheartedly.
The wolf slipped off through the trees. Experimentally, I scrubbed at the Fool's fingerprints on my wrist. They
