by Robin Hobb
Oh.
I went to the pond, sucked in water, sloshed it through my mouth and spat on the ground. Another one.
Small bits of information tumbled and joined in my mind. An idea threatened me. The pale messenger that Bee and I had burned. I mulled over that memory and then denied it. Nighteyes had insisted that I had worms. I did. That was all. I crouched down to study the creature that had lived inside me. It was a kind I had not seen before, in man or beast. But that was all it was. Just a worm. I wondered if I could be lucky enough to find wild garlic or orangeroot growing nearby. Both were good for clearing parasites from the body. But a more practical plan would be to begin my journey to the ancient market and go from there to Buck. There would be healers there.
I scooped up more water in my hands and rubbed my face. When I dropped my hands, they were tinged pink. I touched my nostrils and looked at my fingers. No.
I touched my fingertips to my eyes. They came away red. And with the blood on my fingertips came a sickening certainty. The messenger had wept blood. She had said the worms the Servants had infected her with were eating her eyes. That she could scarcely see any more. I lifted my eyes and looked about me. I could still see.
But for how long?
I had two tasks every day that I performed faithfully. I gathered more firewood, and I went to the water to drink. I longed to go to the creek to fish, but my strength was failing me. Nosebleeds were a daily occurrence now, and my back and thighs were covered with small, itching sores. The only parts of my legs that were free of the sores were where the Silver had splashed me.
Too late I had come to agree with the wolf. I wished he would return to me so that I could tell him so. By the third day of his absence, the reduction in my stamina was something I could no longer argue with. My wolf was gone, and I knew I was never going home again. I’d made several attempts to Skill and failed at all of them. Perhaps it was the Silver on my body, or my general weakness, or the presence of so much Skill-stone around me. The reason didn’t matter. I was alone. And I had one last task to do. I had to prepare a stone for us. And hope that the wolf would return to share it with me.
Once Nighteyes had begun the carving with my handprint it did not occur to me that it would be anything other than a wolf. Daily I toiled on our ‘dragon’, my silver hand stroking the stone, as I gave it the memories Nighteyes and I shared. I was surprised to see that the wolf emerging from the stone stood with teeth bared and hackles raised. Were the two of us, together, truly so fierce of visage? Yet even as I poured in memories of hunts and shared kills, of wild romps in the snow and mice caught in an old hut, of porcupine quills pulled and his teeth pressing hard against my back as he sheared off an arrow-shaft, I knew that I did not have enough to fill this stone flesh. I knew that when it came time to draw my last breath, I would lean on this cold creature and pass into him. And remain here, mired in stone, just as Girl-on-a-Dragon had stood for so many decades of years.
I should have listened to him. I should have. If Nighteyes had been with me still, there might have been more of us to put into the wolf-dragon.
He had only the colours of the stone, and that bothered me. Before I died, I wanted to once more look into those wise eyes. I wanted, a last time, to see his glance catch the firelight and gleam green and startling. I began to sleep with my back against him, as we used to do. Not that the stone gave me any warmth, but in the hopes that my dreams might permeate it and help the wolf emerge more swiftly.
I woke in the night. There are two kinds of sleep when one is weak and cold. One is the kind where one pretends to sleep as one shivers and shifts and tries to clutch body warmth. I had wrapped my stolen cloak around me, covering my head to keep the gnats from my ears and eyes. Insects do love a dying animal. Then I had fallen into the second kind of sleep, the heavy sleep of exhaustion that cold and pain cannot break. That sleep, I think, is the precursor to death.
Thus I came out of it slowly and reluctantly, unsure of where dream gave way to reality. Voices. Scuffing footsteps. I struggled to untangle my head from its wrapping. I didn’t stand up. But I opened my eyes and blinked dully at the startling yellow glare of a swinging lantern coming toward me.
‘This way, I think,’ someone said.
‘We should make a camp and continue in the morning. I can see nothing here.’
‘We are close. I know we are so close. Bee, cannot you Skill to him? He said he felt you Skill, once.’
‘This stone … no. I have no training. You know I have no training!’
The light was so bright I could see nothing else. Then I made out shadows and silhouettes. People. Carrying a lantern. And packs. I feebly pushed my Wit toward them.
‘FITZ!’ someone shouted, and I realized I’d heard that querying call before, in my sleep, and it had wakened me. And more, that I knew the voice.
‘Over here,’ I called. But my voice was thin in a dry throat.
The wolf hit me with an almost physical impact. He was a jolt to my dwindling body, almost like an infusion of Skill-strength. Oh, my brother, I could not find you to return to you. I feared we were too late. I feared you had entered the stone without me.
I am here.
‘Look. Embers of a fire. He’s there! Fitz! Fitz!’
‘Don’t touch me!’ I cried out and clutched my Silver hand to my chest. They came to me at a run, shapes emerging out of the twilight. The Fool reached me first, but as the firelight illuminated him, he halted an arm’s length away and stared at me, his mouth hanging ajar. I looked back at him and waited.
‘Oh, Fitz!’ the Fool cried. ‘What did you do to yourself?’
‘No worse than what you have done, twice,’ I managed a twisted smile. ‘I did not choose this,’ I added feebly.
‘Far worse than anything I’ve ever done!’ he declared. His gaze wandered over me, lingering on the silvered side of my face. His expression was more telling than any mirror. ‘How could you do this? Why?’
‘I didn’t. It happened. The container of Silver. The fire-brick in my bag.’ I held up a helpless silvered hand. ‘Da!’ Bee shrieked furiously, and my watering eyes showed me Per with his arms wrapped about my younger daughter, holding her back.
She kicked and struggled, baring her teeth. Abruptly Per said to her, ‘Bee, you are not that foolish!’ and let her go. She did not rush to me. She came in small steps, studying me carefully. Then she set her small hands onto my arm, touching flesh to flesh with no Silver between us. I could suddenly draw a deeper breath. Hope flowed in me. I could live. I could go home.
Then I realized what she was doing. ‘Bee, no!’ I rebuked her and pulled my arm free of her grip. ‘You do not Skill strength to me.’
But she had. ‘I have strength to spare,’ she pleaded, but I shook my head. ‘Bee. All of you. You cannot touch me now. I am carving my dragon. Our dragon, for Nighteyes and me. Everything I have, I must put into it. And I must not pull you and your strength into it.’
The Fool set his hands, one gloved, on Bee’s shoulders. He drew her back gently, but I saw her stiffen with resentment and, for a moment, flash her teeth at his touch. Lant and Per were staring at my silvered face in something between horror and pity.
The Fool spoke. ‘Explanations can wait. After we have built up the fire, and made hot tea and soup for Fitz. There are blankets in the big pack.’ He lifted his voice to a shout. ‘Spark! Over here!’ he cried, and I glimpsed another bobbing lantern. Then they were all unshouldering their packs. And he spoke on, of wondrous things, of hot tea with honey and smoked meat and blankets while the wolf capered joyously inside me.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, other people had approached and were busying themselves with camp tasks. I sat quietly while Bee told me of their journey home, and described the shape of her life at Buckkeep Castle. The Fool orbited us at a distance, sometimes pausing to listen to some detail of Bee’s recitation, but mostly engaged in directing Lant and Per in setting up a shelter and sorting supplies from the pac
ks. I leaned with my back on my partially-carved wolf and tried to take pleasure in what I knew was actually farewell.
But Motley with her silver beak came and perched on my stone wolf. She cocked her head and said nothing but I thought she looked at me sadly. She whetted her silver beak on the stone, once, twice, and I felt something go into the wolf. The memory of a kind shepherd. A man who had taken in a freak nestling. Then she hopped into the air to land on the firewood pile.
I was given a thick wool blanket and Per built up my fire recklessly large, and Lant fetched water for a cooking pot and a kettle. ‘Eat this,’ Spark said, and set wrapped food before me. I was surprised that she was there, but the smell of the food drove even a greeting out of my thoughts. I opened the sticky cloth. It was cold bacon, thick with grease, wrapped in a thick cut of dark bread. Lant uncorked a bottle of wine and set it within my reach. They moved about me as if I were a rabid dog that might lunge and bite, avoiding my touch as they offered me every physical comfort. I filled my belly with bread and meat, and washed down the immense half-chewed bites I took with the heady red wine.
Spark was brewing tea in a fat kettle. Lant stirred a pot of simmering water enriched with chunks of dried beef, and carrots and potatoes. I could smell it and a deep wave of hunger left me shaking. I hugged myself against it.
‘Fitz. Are you in pain?’ It was the Fool asking that, in a voice fraught with guilt.
‘Of course I am,’ I said. ‘They are eating me, the little bastards. They eat me, and my body rebuilds itself, and they eat me afresh. I almost think it is worse after I have eaten.’
‘I will see to that,’ a woman said. ‘I have learned a great deal about herbs for pain. And I brought what I thought best would serve.’ I looked again, and it was Kettricken. I felt a boyish lurch of joy inside me. My queen. Oh, Nighteyes.
‘Kettricken. I did not see you there.’
‘You never did,’ she said and smiled sadly. Then she called to Spark, asking for a little kettle from her pack and the blue roll of herb-bundles.
‘Da, tomorrow, you will feel better,’ Bee told me. ‘We will begin the journey back to the market-circle, and from there, we can take you home. Nettle says that there are new healers at Buckkeep, from far-off places with new ideas.’
‘So Nettle sent you to bring me home?’ I suddenly realized how wrong this all was. Was this a dying man’s illusion? I looked into the darkness. ‘She sent no coterie here?’
An uncomfortable expression passed over Bee’s face. ‘I left her a note,’ she said quietly. Then, at my shock, she added, ‘She wasn’t going to let me come. She was going to send a coterie after you, to bring you home.’
‘Bee, I am not going to go home. I am going to finish here.’ She reached out to take my hand and I tucked it under my other arm. ‘No, Bee.’ She lifted her hands and covered her face. I looked over her head at the Fool hovering at the edge of our circle. I tried to find some comforting words. ‘You will have to trust me that this is a better end than I would face if I came home. And this is the ending I choose for myself. My decision, for me.’
The Fool stared at me, and then stepped back out of the firelight. Kettricken came, bearing a small steaming kettle and a thick pottery mug. She offered me the mug and I held it as she poured her brew into it. Her hands shook slightly.
I sipped at the tea and tasted carryme and valerian for pain, and enlivening herbs and ginger all sweetened with honey. It worked swiftly; the pains eased. It was as if I poured life back into my body.
‘Tomorrow you will be strong enough, and we will take you back to Buckkeep and the healers there,’ Kettricken offered hopefully.
I smiled at her as she sat down beside my fire. Yes. It would be a long farewell. ‘Kettricken, you have been here before. We both know how this ends. You see my wolf at my back. I will finish him, and now that Nighteyes is with me again, it will go more swiftly.’ I reached behind me to set my hand on his paw. I felt each toe, the space between them, and recalled how his claws had been set. I stroked the polished smoothness of one, and almost expected him to twitch his foot away in annoyance, as he always had.
You always teased me when I was trying to sleep, barely touching the hairs between my toes. It tickled unbearably.
I let that shared memory soak into the stone. For a time, I was alone with him. I heard Kettricken retrieve the mug and her quiet steps as she walked away.
‘Fitz, can you leave off that for a time? Stop carving until you have regained some of your strength?’ There was a plea in Lant’s voice. I opened my eyes. Time had passed. They had rigged a shelter over my wolf and me. The fire was in front of it, and the tent contained the warmth. I was grateful. The Mountain nights were cold. They sat in a semicircle on the other side of the fire. I looked around at them. Little Bee, my stableboy, an apprentice assassin, Chade’s bastard, and my queen. And the Fool. He was there, sitting at the very edge of the firelight. Our eyes met and then looked away from me. He had seen this before, as had Kettricken. I tried to help the others understand.
‘Once begun, there is no stopping this task. I have already put a great deal of myself into the wolf, and as I add more, I will become vaguer—just as Verity did. This task will consume me, as it consumed him.’ I struggled to focus on their anxious faces. ‘Bee, know this now, while I can still marshal my thoughts. I will become distant to you. It almost broke Kettricken’s heart, how Verity ignored her. But he never stopped loving her. He had put his love for her into his dragon, for he never expected to see her again. It is still there, in the stone. To last forever. And so it will be with my love for you. And the wolf’s love for you.’ I looked at Lant, at Spark, at Per. ‘Everything I feel for each one of you will go into the stone.’ My gaze sought out the Fool’s, but he was looking past me, into the darkness.
Bee was sitting between Spark and Per. Her hair had grown but it was still short. Golden and curly. I had never seen such hair. My curls and my mother’s coloration. My mother. Would I put her into the wolf? Yes. For she had loved me in the time she had me.
‘Fitz?’
‘Yes?’
‘You keep drifting away.’ Kettricken looked at me with concern. Bee had wilted over and was asleep by the fire. Someone had put a blanket over her. ‘Are you hungry still? Do you want more food?’
I looked down at a bowl with a spoon in it. The taste of beef soup was in my mouth. ‘Yes. Yes, please.’
‘And then you should sleep. We should all sleep.’
‘I’ll keep the first watch,’ Lant offered.
‘I will keep you company,’ Spark added.
I finished the soup and someone took the bowl. Soon, I would sleep. But while the taste of the good food was fresh in my mind, I would put it into my wolf.
In the time before dawn, I felt a tug at my sleeve. I’d been putting the roughness on the bottoms of the pads of his feet. Strange to shape something I could neither see nor touch. I looked down at Bee sitting cross-legged beside me. She had an open book before her, and a pot of ink and a brush and a pen, all set out neatly. ‘Da, I dreamed of a time when I would sit beside you and you would tell me the tale of your days. I want that now, for I do not think we will have years for you to pass that on to me.’
‘I recall that you told me that dream.’ I looked around the quarry. ‘This is not how I imagined it. I thought I would be an old man, too feeble to write, and that we would sit by a hearth fire in a pleasant chamber, after a long and lovely life together. Is that the book I gave you to write in?’
‘No. That one went to the bottom of the bay at Clerres, when Paragon became dragons and we all fell in the water. This is a new one. The one you call Fool gave it to me, along with a book for writing down my dreams. He reads that one, and tries to help me understand them. But this one … He has explained how you must put all your memories into your wolf so that he can become a stone wolf, just as Verity is a stone dragon. But as you put them in, if you spoke them aloud, I could write them down. So I would have at lea
st that much of you to keep.’
‘What would you have me tell you?’ It was hard to stay focused on her. My stone wolf waited for me.
‘Everything. Everything you might have told me as I was growing up. What is the first thing you remember?’
Everything I might have told her, had I longer to live. That was a fresh cut of pain. Was it a memory to consider the future we would never have? I considered her question. ‘The first thing I remember clearly? I know I have older memories, but I hid them from myself, long ago.’ I drew a deep breath. Hiding memories again. Setting the pains and the joys deep into stone. ‘The rain had soaked through me. The day was chill and cold. The hand that held mine was hard and callused. His grip was remorseless but not unkind. The cobblestones were icy, and that grip kept me from falling when I slipped. But it also would not let me turn around and run back to my mother.’
She dipped her pen and began to write rapidly. I could not tell if she took down my exact words, and as I began to pour those first memories into the wolf, what she wrote mattered less and less.
Dawn came. Lant and Per followed my directions to the stream and came back with fish. There was bread to go with it, and bacon to cook it in. I felt my strength returning to me as my body finally began to get the sustenance it needed to both rebuild what the parasites were destroying and power me through my carving. They were catching the fish and bringing the firewood. I no longer had to leave my carving at all. It was kind of them and I managed to tell them so, but the more I carved my wolf, the more focus it demanded and the less I cared for any of them.
I knew what was happening to me. It was not the first time that I had poured memories into a stone dragon. Decades ago, I had taken the pain of losing Molly and poured it into Girl-on-a-Dragon. Surrendering that pain to stone had deadened me in a way that was a relief, but there was a darker side to that forgetting. I’ve seen folk who numbed their pain with strong drink or Smoke or other herbs and always the loss of their pain made them less connected. Less human. And so it was with me.