by Robin Hobb
“I do not know if he realizes you are with me,” I hastily sidestepped the question.
“No words,” she said dully as if she had not heard me. Her eyes were opaque as she asked. “Does he know how I have failed him? Does he know about . . . our child?”
“I do not believe he does, my lady. I sense no such grief in him, and well I know how it would grieve him. ”
Kettricken swallowed. I cursed my clumsy words, and yet, was it my place to utter words of comfort and love to his wife? She straightened up abruptly, then rose. “I think I shall bring in a bit more firewood for tonight,” she announced. “And grain the jeppas. There is scarcely a twig for them to browse on here. ”
I watched her leave the tent for the dark and still cold outside. No one spoke a word. After a breath or two, I rose and followed her. “Don’t be long,” Kettle warned me enigmatically. The wolf shadowed after me.
Outside the night was clear and cold. The wind was no worse than usual. Familiar discomforts can almost be ignored. Kettricken was neither fetching wood nor graining the jeppas. I was sure both tasks had already been done earlier. Instead she was standing at the edge of the cloven road, staring out over the blackness of cliff at her feet. She stood tall and stiff as a soldier reporting to his sergeant and made not a sound. I knew she was crying.
There is a time for courtly manners, a time for formal protocol, and a time for humanity. I went to her, took her by the shoulders, and turned her to face me. She radiated misery, and the wolf beside me whined high. “Kettricken,” I said simply. “He loves you. He will not blame you. He will grieve, yes, but what kind of a man would not? As for Regal’s deeds, they are Regal’s deeds. Do not take the blame for those to yourself. You could not have stopped him. ”
She wiped a hand across her face and did not speak. She looked past me, her face a pale mask in the starlight. She sighed heavily, but I could sense her strangling on her sorrow. I set my arms about my queen and pulled her to me, pressing her face to my shoulder. I stroked her back, feeling the terrible tension there. “It’s all right,” I lied to her. “It’s going to be all right. In time, you’ll see. You’ll be together again, you’ll make another child, both of you will sit in the Great Hall at Buckkeep and listen to the minstrels sing. There will be peace again, somehow. You’ve never seen Buckkeep at peace. There will be time for Verity to hunt and fish, and you’ll ride at his side. Verity will laugh and shout and roar through the halls like the north wind again. Cook used to chase him out of the kitchen for slicing the meat from the roast before it was cooked through, he would come home from the chase that hungry. He’d come right in and cut the leg off a cooking fowl, that he would, and carry it about with him, telling stories in the guardroom, waving it about like a sword . . . ”
I patted her back as if she were a child and told her tales of the bluff, hearty man I remembered from my boyhood. For a time her forehead rested on my shoulder and she was completely still. Then she coughed once, as if starting to choke, but instead terrible sobs welled up from her. She cried suddenly and unabashedly as a child that has taken a bad fall and is hurt as well as frightened. I sensed these were tears that had long gone unshed, and I did not try to help her stop. Instead I went on talking and patting her, scarcely hearing what I was saying myself, until her sobs began to quiet and her shaking to still. At last she drew away from me a little, to grope in her pocket for a kerchief. She wiped her face and eyes and blew her nose before she tried to speak.
“I’m going to be all right,” she said. To hear the strength of her belief in those words made my heart ache. “It’s just . . . It’s hard just now. Waiting to tell him all these terrible things. Knowing how they will hurt him. They taught me so many things about being Sacrifice, Fitz. From the beginning, I knew I might have terrible sorrows to bear. I am strong enough . . . to bear these things. But no one warned me that I might come to love the man they’d choose for me. To bear my sorrow is one thing. To bring sorrow to him is another. ” Her throat closed on the words and she bowed her head. I feared she might begin to weep again. Instead when she lifted her head she smiled at me. Moonlight touched the silver wetness on her cheeks and lashes. “Sometimes I think only you and I see the man beneath the crown. I want him to laugh, and roar about, and leave his bottles of ink open and his maps scattered about. I want him to put his arms about me and hold me. Sometimes I want those things so much, I forget about the Red Ships and Regal and . . . everything else. Sometimes I think that if we could only be together again, all the rest would come right as well. It is not a very worthy thought to have. A Sacrifice is supposed to be more . . . ”
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A glint of silver behind her caught my eyes. I saw the black column over her shoulder. It leaned at a cant over the broken edge of the road, half its stone support gone. I did not hear the rest of what she said. I wondered how I had not seen it before. It gleamed brighter than the moon on the sparkling snow. It was hewn of black stone webbed with glittering crystal. Like moonlight on a rippling river of Skill. I could decipher no writing on its surface. The wind was screaming behind me as I reached out and ran a hand down that smooth stone. It welcomed me.
27
The City
THERE RUNS THROUGH the Mountain Kingdom an old trade trail that serves none of the present-day towns of the Mountain Kingdom. Portions of this old highway appear as far south and east as the shore of Blue Lake. The trail is not named, no one recalls who constructed it, and few use it even for the stretches that remain intact. In places the road has been gradually destroyed by the freezing swells that are common to the Mountains. In other places flooding and landslides have reduced it to rubble. Occasionally an adventurous Mountain youth will undertake to trace the road to its source. Those who return have tall tales of ruined cities and steaming valleys where sulfurous ponds smoke, and they speak too, of the forbidding nature of the territory the road spans. No game and poor hunting, they say, and it is not recorded anywhere that anyone has ever been impressed enough to make a return trip to the road’s end.
I stumbled to my knees in the snowy street. I got to my feet slowly, groping for a memory. Had I got drunk? The queasiness, the dizziness were right for that. But not this darkly gleaming and silent city. I looked all around me. I was in a town square of some sort, standing in the shadow of a looming stone memorial of some kind. I blinked my eyes, squeezed them shut, then opened them again. The nebulous light still fogged me. I could scarcely see more than an arm’s length in any direction. I waited in vain for my eyes to adjust to the vague starlight. But soon I began to shiver, so I began to walk silently through the empty streets. My natural wariness came back first, followed by a dim recollection of my companions, the tent, the sundered road. But between that hazy memory and my standing up in this street, there was nothing.
I looked back the way I had come. Darkness had swallowed the road behind me. Even my footprints were being filled in by the slowly falling damp snowflakes. I blinked snowflakes from my eyelashes and peered about me. I saw the damply glistening sides of stone buildings to either side of the street. My eyes could make no sense of the light. It was sourceless and evenly insufficient. There were no looming shadows or especially dark alleys. But neither could I make out where I was going. The heights and styles of the buildings, the destinations of the streets remained a mystery.
I felt panic rise in me and fought it down. The sensations I had reminded me too vividly of how I had been Skill-deceived in Regal’s manor. I was terrified to grope out with the Skill lest I encounter Will’s taint in this city. But if I moved blindly on, trusting that I was not being deceived, I might blunder into a trap. In the shelter of a wall, I paused and forced myself to composure. I tried once more to recall how I had come here, how long ago I had left my companions and why. Nothing came to me. I quested out with my Wit-sense, trying to find Nighteyes, but I sensed nothing else alive. I wondered if there were truly no living creatures nearby, or if
my Wit-sense had once more failed. I had no answers to that either. When I listened, I heard only wind. I smelled only damp stone, fresh snow and somewhere, perhaps, river water. Panic rose in me once more and I leaned back against the wall.
The city suddenly sprang to life around me. I perceived I was leaning up against the wall of an inn. From within I heard the sounds of a shrill piping instrument and voices lifted in an unfamiliar song. A wagon rumbled past in the street, and then a young couple darted past the mouth of the alley, hand in hand, laughing as they ran. It was night in this strange city, but it was not sleeping. I lifted my eyes to the impossible heights of their strangely spired buildings, and saw lights burning in the upper stories. In the distance, a man called loudly to someone.
My heart was hammering. What was wrong with me? I steeled myself and found the resolve to go forth and find out what I could about this strange city. I waited until another keg-laden ale wagon had rumbled past the mouth of my alley. Then I stepped away from the wall.
And in that instant, all was once more quiet, gleaming darkness. Gone were the song and laughter from the tavern; no one passed in the streets. I ventured to the mouth of the alley and peered cautiously in both directions. Nothing. Only softly falling wet snow. At least, I told myself, the weather was milder here than it had been on the road above. Even if I had to spend the entire night out-of-doors, I would not suffer too much.
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I wandered a time through the city. At every intersection, I chose the widest road to follow, and soon realized a pattern of always going gently downhill. The river smell grew stronger. I paused once to rest on the edge of a great circular basin that might have enclosed a fountain or been a washing court. Immediately the city once more sprang to life around me. A traveler came and watered his horse at the dry basin so close that I could have reached out to touch him. He noticed me not at all, but I marked well the strangeness of his garb and the odd shape of the saddle the horse wore. A group of women walked past me, talking and laughing quietly together. They wore long, straight garments that hung softly from their shoulders and fluttered about their calves as they walked. All wore their long fair hair loose to their hips, and their boots rang on the cobbled street. When I rose to speak to them, they vanished and the light with them.
Twice more I woke the city before I realized all it took was the touch of my hand on a crystal-veined wall. It took an unreasonable amount of courage but I began to walk with just my fingers trailing along the buildings’ sides. When I did so, the city bloomed into life about me as I walked. It was night and the quiet snow still fell. The passing wagons left no tracks in it. I heard the slamming of doors that had long since rotted away and saw folk walk lightly over a deep gully some wild rainstorm had created down one street. It was hard to dismiss them as ghosts when they called greetings aloud to one another. I was the one who was ignored and invisible as I drifted along.
At length I came to a wide black river flowing smoothly under the starlight. Several ghost quays ran out into it and two immense ships were anchored out in the river. Lights shone from their decks. Hogsheads and bales waited dockside to be loaded. A huddle of folk were engaged in some game of chance and someone’s honesty was being loudly disputed. They dressed differently from the river rats who came into Buck and the language was different, but in all else that I could tell, they were the same breed. As I watched, a fight broke out and spread to become a general brawl. It dispersed quickly when the whistle of the night watch sounded, combatants fleeing in all directions before the City Guard arrived.
I lifted my hand from the wall. I stood a moment in the snow-spangled darkness, letting my eyes adjust. Ships, quays, riverfolk were all gone. But the quiet black water still flowed, steaming in the colder air. I walked toward it, feeling the road go rough and broken under my feet as I advanced. The waters of this river had risen and fallen over this street, working their damage with no one to oppose them. When I turned my back to the river and studied the skyline of the city, I could see the faint silhouettes of fallen spires and crumpled walls. Once again I quested out about me; once again I found no life.
I turned back to the river. Something in the general configuration of the land tugged at my memory. It was not precisely here, I knew that, but I felt sure that this was the river where I had seen Verity lave his hands and arms and bring them out gleaming with magic. Cautiously I walked over broken paving stones right down to the edge of the river. It looked like water, it smelled like water. I crouched down beside it and thought. I had heard tales of pools of tarry mud covered over with water; I knew well how oil floated upon water. Perhaps beneath the black water there flowed another river, one of silver power. Perhaps, farther upstream or down, was the tributary of pure Skill I had seen in my vision.
I drew off my mitten and bared my arm. I set my hand upon the flow of the water, feeling its icy kiss against my bare palm. Senses straining, I tried to detect whether there was Skill beneath that surface; I felt nothing. But perhaps if I plunged in my arm and hand, they would come up gleaming with strength. I dared myself to reach in to discover for myself.
That was as far as my courage went. I was no Verity. I knew the strength of his Skilling, and I had seen how his immersion in the magic had tried his will. I was no match for it. He had marched alone up the Skill road while I . . . My mind darted back to that puzzle. When had I left the Skill road and my companions? Perhaps I never had. Perhaps all this was a dream. I reached up and patted cold water on my face. I felt no different. I set my nails to my face and scratched the skin until it hurt. It proved nothing to me but only made me wonder if I could dream pain. I had found no answers in this strange dead city, only more questions.
With great resolve I turned my steps back the way I had come. Visibility was poor and the clinging snow was rapidly filling my footprints. With reluctance I set my fingers to the stone of a wall. It was easier to trace my way back that way, for the living city had had more landmarks than the cold cinders of it did. Yet as I hurried through the snowy streets, I wondered when all these folk had been here. Did I view the events of a night a hundred years ago? Had I come here another night would I view the same events played out or see a different night from the city’s history? Or did these shades of folk perceive themselves as living now, was I an odd cold shadow that crept through their lives? I forced myself to stop wondering about things I had no answer to. I had to trace my way back the way I had come.
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Either I came to the end of places I could remember or I took a wrong turning. The result was the same. I found myself wandering up a road I was sure was unfamiliar. I trailed my fingers down the fronts of a row of shops, all locked up tight for the night. I passed two lovers locked in an embrace in a doorway. A ghost dog padded past me without giving me so much as a curious sniff.
Despite the milder weather, I was getting cold. And tired. I glanced up at the sky. It would soon be morning. By daylight, I could perhaps climb up one of the buildings and get the lay of the land. Perhaps when I awoke, I would recall how I came here. Foolishly, I cast about for some overhanging eve or shed where I might shelter before it occurred to me that there was no reason not to go inside one of the buildings. Even so, I felt queer as I chose a door and walked through it. While I touched a wall, I saw a dim interior. Tables and shelves were laden with fine pottery and glassware. A cat slept by a banked hearth. When I lifted my hand from the wall, all was cold and pitch-black. So I trailed my fingers along the wall, nearly stumbling over the crumbling remains of one of the tables. I stooped, and gathered together the bits by touch and took them to the hearth. By great perseverance, I made a true fire of them where the ghost fire burned.
When it was going well and I stood over it to warm myself, its flickering light showed me a different view of the room. Bare walls and debris-strewn floor. There was no trace of the fine crockery and glassware, though there were a few more bits of wood
from long-fallen shelves. I thanked my luck that they had been made of good oak, for surely they would have rotted to splinters long ago if they had not. I decided to lay my cloak on the floor to save me from the stone’s chill and trust my fire to keep me warm enough. I lay down and closed my eyes and tried not to think of ghost cats or what phantom folk slept in their beds on the floor above me.
I tried to set my Skill walls before I slept, but it was rather like drying one’s feet while standing in a river. The closer I came to sleep, the harder it was to recall where those boundaries lay. How much of my world was me and how much was the folk I cared about? I dreamed first of Kettricken, Starling, Kettle, and the Fool wandering about with torches while Nighteyes ran back and forth, back and forth whining. It was not a comfortable dream and I turned away from it and drifted deeper into myself. Or so I supposed.
I found the familiar hut. I knew the simple room, the rough table, the tidy hearth, the narrow bed so neatly made. Molly sat in her nightrobe by the hearth, rocking Nettle and singing softly a song about stars and starfish. I could recall no lullabies and was as charmed by it as Nettle. The baby’s wide eyes were on Molly’s face as her mother sang. She gripped one of Molly’s forefingers in her small fist. Molly sang the song over and over and over, but I found no boredom there. It was a scene I could watch for a month, for a year, and never know tedium. But the babe’s eyelids slid shut, once, to open quickly. They closed more slowly a second time, and stayed closed. Her tiny pursed mouth moved as if she suckled in her sleep. Her black hair had begun to curl. Molly lowered her face to brush her lips across Nettle’s forehead.
Molly rose wearily and carried the baby to her bed. She pulled open the blanket, nestled the child in, and then went back to the table to blow out the single candle there. By the light from the hearth, I watched her ease into bed beside the child and draw the blankets up over them both. She closed her eyes and sighed and did not stir again. I watched over her leaden sleep, recognizing it as the sleep of exhaustion. I knew sudden shame. This hard, bare life was not anything I ever envisioned for her, let alone our child. Were it not for Burrich, life would be even harder for them. I fled from seeing them this way, promising myself, Things will get better, somehow I will make things better for them. When I return.