Fool's Fate (Tawny Man #3)

The Fool had gone, of course, to Girl-on-a-Dragon. As I approached them, I saw that he stood quietly before her, the crown in one hand. The other hand rested lightly on the dragon's shoulder, and I noted that his Skilled fingers touched the creature. His face was very still as he looked up at the figure of the girl astride the dragon. She was breathtakingly lovely. Her hair was more golden than the Fool's; it fell to her shoulders and caressed them with its loose curls. Her skin was like cream. She wore a jerkin of hunter green, but her legs and feet were bare. Her dragon was even more glorious, his scales the shining green of dark emeralds. He possessed the lax grace of a sleeping hunting cat. When last I had seen her, she had been posed in sleep upon the dragon, her rounded arms wrapped around his lithe neck. Now she sat upright on her mount. Her eyes were closed, but she lifted her face as if she could feel the errant sunbeams that touched her cheek. A very faint smile curved her lips. Crushed green plants beneath her sleeping steed indicated how recently she had flown. She had carried the Fool to Aslevjal Island, and then returned here, to rejoin her fellows in sleep.

I thought I had walked quietly, but as I approached, the Fool turned his head and looked at me. “Do you recall how we attempted to free her, that night?”

I bowed my head. I felt a bit ashamed, still, that I had ever been so young and rash.

“I've repented it ever since.” I had touched her with the Skill, thinking it might be enough to free her. Instead, it had only roused her to her torment.

He nodded slowly. “But what about the second time you touched her? Do you remember that?”

I sighed heavily. It had been the night I had Skill-walked, and seen Molly take Burrich as her man. Later that evening, I had worn Verity's body, for he had borrowed mine, to get himself a son. To get Dutiful upon Queen Kettricken. I had not known that had been his intent. In an old man's aching body, I had wandered the memory stone quarry. Wandered it until Nighteyes and I had come upon the Fool at his forbidden task. He had been chipping at the stone around the dragon's feet, trying to finish the dragon so it might be set free. I had felt sorry for him, so great was his empathy with the creature. I had known too what it truly took to quicken a dragon: not just the work of a man's hands, but the surrender of his life and his memory, his loves and his pains and his joys. And so I had set Verity's Skill-silvered hands to the rocky flesh of Girl-on-a-Dragon, and I had poured forth into her all the misery and pain of my short life, that she might take it and take life with it. Into the dragon I had poured my parents' abandonment of me to the care of strangers, and all I had suffered at Galen's hands and in Regal's dungeon. I had given those memories to the dragon to keep and to hold and to shape herself with. I had given her my loneliness as a child and every sharp-edged misery of that night. Given it willingly, and felt my pain ease even as the world dulled around me and my love of it dimmed slightly. I would have given far more if the wolf had not stopped me. Nighteyes had rebuked me, saying that he had no wish to be bonded to a Forged One. I had not, at that time, grasped what he meant. Having seen the warriors who served the Pale Woman, I thought I understood better now.

I thought I understood too what the Fool had in mind and why he had come here. “Don't do it!” I pleaded with him, and when he looked at me in sharp surprise, I said, “I know you are thinking of putting your memories of her torture of you into the dragon. Girl-on-a-Dragon could drain them out of you and keep them forever locked away where they cannot stab you. It would work. I know that. But there was a cost to that surcease from pain, Fool. When you dull pain and hide it from yourself . . .” My words trickled away. I did not want to sound self-pitying.

“You dull your joys as well.” He said it simply. He looked away from me for a time, his lips folded. I wondered if he weighed the one against the other. Would he decide to be rid of night terrors at the expense of taking fresh joy in every morning? “I saw that in you, afterward,” he said. “I felt guilty. If I had not been chipping away at Girl-on-a-Dragon, you never would have done it. I wished to undo it. Years later, when I came to see you at your cottage, I thought, ‘Surely he will be healed by now. Surely he will have recovered.' ” He swung his gaze to meet me. “But you had not. You had just . . . stopped. In some ways. Oh, you were older and wiser, I suppose. But you had not made any move on your own to reach out to life again. But for your wolf, I think it would have been even worse. As it was, you were living like a mouse in a wall, off the crumbs of affection that Starling tossed to you. As thick-skinned as she is, even she could see it. She gave you Hap and you took him in. But if she had not brought him to your doorstep and dumped him there, would you have sought out anyone to share your life?” He leaned closer to me and said, “Even after you came back to Buckkeep and your old world, you held yourself apart from it. No matter what I did or offered. Myblack. You couldn't even connect to a horse.”