Fool's Fate (Tawny Man #3)

“Don't speak her name,” I begged her.

She gave me a disdainful look that mocked my foolish fears. Then, “Here it comes,” she said quietly. And the brambles engulfed us.

They made a crackling sound as they rose around our ankles and then our knees, like fire racing up a tree. The thorns bit into our flesh and then a dense fog swirled up about us, choking and menacing.

“What is this?” Nettle exclaimed in annoyance. Then, as the fog stole her from my sight, she exclaimed, “Stop it. Shadow Wolf, stop it right now! This is all yours; you made this mess. Let go of it!”

And she wrested my dream from me. It was rather like having someone snatch away your blankets. But most jarring for me was that it evoked a memory I both did and did not recognize: another time and an older woman, prying something fascinating and shiny from my chubby-fisted grasp, while saying, “No, Keppet. Not for little boys.”

I was breathless in the sudden banishment of my dream, but in the next instant we literally plunged into Thick's. The fog and brambles vanished, and the cold salt water closed over my head. I was drowning. No matter how I struggled I could not get to the top of the water. Then a hand gripped mine, and as Nettle hauled me up to stand beside her, she exclaimed irritably, “You are so gullible! It's a dream, and that's all it is. Now it's my dream, and in my dream we can walk on the waves. Come on.”

She said it and it was so. Still, I held on to her hand and walked beside her. All around us, the water stretched out, glittering shoreless from horizon to horizon. Thick's music was the wind blowing all around us. I squinted out over the water, wondering how we would ever find Thick in the trackless waves, but Nettle squeezed my hand and announced clearly through Thick's wild song, “We're very close to him now.”

And that too was so. A few steps more and she dropped to her knees with an exclamation of pity. The blinding sunlight on the water hid whatever she stared at. I knelt beside her and felt my heart break.

He knew it too well. He must have seen it, sometime. The drowned kitten floated just beneath the water. Too young even for his eyes to be opened, he dangled weightlessly in the sea's grip. His fur floated around him, but as Nettle reached in to grip him by the scruff of the neck and pull him out, his coat sleeked suddenly flat with the water. He dangled from her hand, water streaming from his tail and paws and dribbling from his nose and open red mouth. She cupped the little creature fearlessly in her hand. She bent over him intently, experimentally flexing the small rib cage between her thumb and forefingers. Then she held the tiny face close to hers and blew a sudden puff of air into the open red mouth. In those moments, she was entirely Burrich's daughter. So I had seen him clear birth mucus from a newborn puppy's throat.

“You're all right now,” she told the kitten authoritatively. She stroked the tiny creature, and in the wake of her hand, his fur was dry and soft. He was striped orange and white, I suddenly saw. A moment before, I thought he had been black. “You're alive and safe, and I will not let any evil befall you. And you know that you can trust me. Because I love you.”

At her words, my throat closed up and choked me. I wondered how she knew them to say. All my life, without knowing it, I had wanted someone to say those words to me, and have them be true and believable. It was like watching someone give to another the gift you had always longed for. And yet, I did not feel bitterness or envy. All I felt was wonder that, at sixteen, she would have that in her to give to another. Even if I could have found Thick in his dream, even if someone had told me those were the words I must say, the words he most desperately needed to hear, I could not have said them and made them true as she did. She was my daughter, blood of my blood, and yet the wonder and amazement she made me feel at that moment made her a creation entirely apart from me.

The kitten stirred in her hand. It looked about blindly. When the little red mouth opened wide, I was prepared for a yowl. Instead, it questioned in a hoarse little voice, “Mam?”

“No,” Nettle replied. My daughter was braver than I. She did not even consider the easy lie. “But someone like her.” Nettle looked around the seascape as if noticing it for the first time. “And this is not a good place for someone like you. Let's change it, shall we? Where do you like to be?”

His answers surprised me. She coaxed the information from him, detail by detail. When they were finished, we sat, doll-sized, in the center of an immense bed. In the distance, I could make out the hazy walls of a traveling wagon such as many puppeteer families and street performers lived in when they traveled from town to town. It smelled of the dried peppers and braided onions that were roped across one corner of the ceiling. Now I recognized the music around us, not just as Thick's Mothersong, but also the elements that comprised it: the steady breathing of a sleeping woman, the creak of wheels, and the slow-paced thudding of a team's hoofbeats, woven as a backdrop for a woman's humming and a childish tune on a whistle. It was a song of safety and acceptance and content. “I like it here,” Nettle told him when they were finished. “Perhaps, if you don't mind, I'll come and visit you here again. Would that be all right?”