He held up a helpless hand. “I don’t know. Perhaps they did not even intend to do it, but once it was done, they made full use of it. They … oh, Fitz. There was a beating. And another one. My eyes were swollen shut. And another beating. And—”
I stopped him. “And when the swelling went down, you could no longer see.”
He drew in a deep breath. I saw how he fought to tell me a tale of things he wanted only to forget. “At first, I kept thinking it was night. Or that I was in a dark cell. They did that sometimes. If you are in the dark always, you can’t tell how much time has passed. I think, I think that sometimes they brought me water and food at very long intervals, and sometimes they brought me food quickly. To confuse me about time passing. It was a long time before I realized I couldn’t see. And a longer time before I knew it wasn’t going away.”
“That’s enough. I just needed to know a bit, to help me.”
Another silence. Then he whispered, “Will you try now?”
I was silent. To do so would risk my own vision. Could I tell him that while such hope burned in his face? He looked more like my old Fool than he had since Aslevjal. His vision was so important to him. Restoring it was key to his quest, and his ridiculous quest to assassinate all the Servants was the only purpose that he had left to him. Last night I’d had the triumph of a dream I’d never allowed myself to dream. Could I destroy his hopes today?
I’d be careful. So careful. Surely I’d be able to tell if I were endangering myself?
Was I more like Chade than I wished to be? Did I always want to find out how far I could push the magic, what I could do if no one restrained me? I pushed aside the itching question.
“Now? Why not?” I said. I pushed my chair back and walked around the table to him. “Face me,” I told him quietly. Obediently, he turned away from the candles. I pulled one of them closer and studied his face in its flickering light. He had scarring on the tops of his cheeks, right below the deep hollows under his eyes. It was the sort of puckering seen on the faces of men who have been in many fistfights. The skin splits easily where flesh is a thin layer over bone. I moved my chair, placing it so that I faced him. I sat down. “I’m going to touch you,” I warned him and took his chin in my hand. I turned his face slowly from side to side, studying the scars that meticulous torture and crude battering had left there. I remembered suddenly how Burrich had studied my face after Galen had beaten me. I set two fingers to his face and pressed gently as I traced a circle around his left eye. He winced more than once. Then the right. It was the same. I guessed at bone that had fractured and healed unevenly. In one place, there was a definite dent in his facial bones near his temple. Touching that made me feel queasy. But could that have been what blinded him? I didn’t know. I took a deep breath. I would be careful this time. I vowed I would not risk either of us. I set my hands to both sides of his face. I closed my eyes. “Fool,” I said softly. And just that easily, I found him.
And the Fool was there. The last time, he had been deeply unconscious, unaware of how I moved through him with his blood. Now I felt his hands come to rest on mine. That would help. I knew how his face had looked but he would recall how his face had felt. I started with my fingertips under his eyes. I called to mind the drawings in Chade’s old scrolls from the Flayer, and the human skull that probably still reposed in the cabinet in the corner. I whispered as our hands moved together. “When adjacent bone breaks, sometimes it fuses incorrectly. Here. Feel that? We need to undo that.”
And so we worked, not quickly. We moved bone, bit by tiny bit. Where his face had broken, it had healed with ridges and seams. Some reminded me of the cracks one makes when one taps a hard-boiled egg before shelling it. It was not something to be hurried, the painstaking exploration of the bones of his face. As we worked, touch and Skill combined, and we followed one fine crack down from the lower rim of his left eye to his upper jaw. The tops of his cheekbones were a maze of tiny cracks. At the outer corner of his right eye, a hard blow had crushed bone, leaving an indentation that pressed on the tissue beneath it. We worked for some time, moving tiny bits of bone to both ease pressure and fill the hollow.
To describe it makes it seem a simple thing. It wasn’t. The tiny movements of minuscule motes of bone were still a breaking away and a re-forming. I clenched my jaws against the Fool’s pain until my own head pounded with it. We did no more than the lower expanses below both his eyes. My strength was flagging and my determination failing me when the Fool lifted his hands from the backs of mine.