She was white, as the Fool was once white, and her hair floated unbound around her shoulders. Her eyes were colourless, just as the Fool’s had been when he was a boy. Her face was his, softened to a woman’s countenance. Her beauty was unearthly, cool as the ice that surrounded her. She sat on overlapping furs, white bear, white fox and ermine with dangling black tails, on a throne chiselled from ice. Her robe of purest white wool did not conceal the womanly curves of her body. About her throat she wore a necklace of flowers carved from ivory. Diamonds sparkled in their centres. Her long-fingered hands rested in idle relaxation on the fur-draped arms of her throne. Her fingers were ringed with silver, all set with glistening white stones. She looked down at us, held on our knees before her, and appeared neither pleased nor surprised. Perhaps, like the Fool, she had always known it would come to this.
Her throne nestled in the coil of a curved and sleeping carved dragon. The black-and-silver memory stone of his body gleamed in a mountainous arch behind her throne and his folded wings were thick and heavy against him. He was not one single piece of stone, but rather blocks of it, probably painstakingly hauled here from the quarry at the other end of the island, and then fitted tightly together to form a continuous sculpture. The fine seams in the carefully matched stone were barely visible. The dormant dragon was immense, larger than Verity as Dragon had been, and yet still not as big as Icefyre. And he was incomplete, soft and slumped and without details, an unformed suggestion of a dragon rather than a reality. His blocky head on his curved long neck rested before the Pale Woman’s elevated throne like a step. His eyes were lidded. Even so, I shuddered at his cruel countenance. My Wit clamoured with conflicting emotions, fear, hatred, pain, lust and vengeance. All were trapped within the crudely-worked stone.
The source of the dragon’s developing essence was plain. Several Outislanders, nearly spent, were chained against his flanks. The captives bore the marks of torture and privation; that would be how the Pale Woman wrung sufficient emotion from them to make them useful to her. Emotions and memories were what a Skill-coterie fed into a stone dragon as they created it to hold their joined awareness. I could not understand how she could imagine a creature fed by the discordant memories of tormented wretches could become a sentient creature. What would unite them and give purpose to the dragon’s flight? The stone dragons I had seen had been works of single-minded devotion, the crowning glory of the coteries that had created them. Beauty had infused them, no matter how odd the shapes each coterie had selected to represent it. Even the Winged Boar had gained grace in flight. This creature of hers was a mosaic of stolen pain. What temperament would such a creature have? It was obvious to my Wit that the prisoners’ humanity had already been Forged away from them, stripped from their souls and forced into the dragon. What she fed it now was the dumb torment of creatures less than beasts. What sort of a dragon would he be, founded on pain and hatred and cruelty?
Between the sleeping dragon’s forepaws was another throne, also of ice and also draped with furs. The ice and coverings of that throne were corroded with filth and human waste. A caricature of a human was chained to it, manacled at ankles, wrists and throat to rings sunk deep in the ice of the royal chair. The black crown he wore looked painfully tight, as if locked to his brow, and his royal robes were stained and tattered. He wore chains of silver about his neck, and the chains that restrained him had been set with jewels, mocking his captivity. His beard and hair were grown long and matted; his nails were yellow and crusted. The ends of his bare toes and fingers were black with frostbite. Discarded bones, picked clean of meat, littered the floor near his feet. Perhaps one was a human arm-bone. I looked away, unwilling to know what they fed him. He was Forged, but not completely. I could still feel his hate, and how it burned. Perhaps that was the only feeling left to him. And then, like a numbed limb returning to life, I felt an odd tingling of my Skill. I turned my head as if I could capture it, like a man straining after a sound. It came no more clearly to me, but I discerned the source of it. The mad king Skilled at me. His teeth were set in a yellow snarl and his sunken eyes were fixed on me. For an instant, I felt the full force of his Skilled hatred and it struck me like a blow. Then it was gone, not because I shielded myself, but because my ability to feel it faded again. I heaved in a panting breath, shocked at his Skill-strength. Perhaps Thick could have matched him in Skill-power; I knew I never could have.
I managed to lift my head and look back at the woman, and was startled to find her smiling at me. She had been waiting for me, letting me look my fill and reach my own conclusions. A long, graceful hand gestured at her captive king. ‘Kebal Rawbread. But I’m sure you guessed that only my failed Catalyst could be worthy of such a punishment, FitzChivalry Farseer. Oh, you need not look so aghast. I am only finishing what your Six Duchies dragons began. He foolishly ventured out, to draw his bow and fire at a flight of dragons overhead. But their mere passage above him sapped much of his intelligence. Not that he had much to begin with. He was a useful tool, for a time. He had cunning, ambition, and he knew the ways of war.’
She stood, and then descended the dais of her throne, treading on the dragon’s head in passing. She strolled over to the soiled throne and the squalid monarch upon it and considered her prisoner. ‘Nonetheless, he failed me.’ She stretched out a slender hand to him. His nostrils flared and he bared his teeth as if to snap at her. She shook her head, almost fondly, as a man might over a stallion too spirited to be trusted. Her voice was sweet as she asked him, ‘Shall I give a bit more of you to the dragon, my pet? Would you like that?’
The muscles around the mad king’s deep-set eyes twitched as if he desperately tried to recall something. Then he cringed away from her, raising one shoulder as if that could shelter him. A low moan of ‘Nooooooo!’ oozed from him.
‘Not now, perhaps. Eventually, of course, he will have all of you. When there is nothing else to wring from you, I shall fling you on top of him and watch you melt into him. That is how it happens, is it not?’ She turned suddenly to confront me. ‘At the final quickening, are not the sacrifices to the dragon completely absorbed? When your Skill-coteries are given to a dragon, do not they vanish completely into its body?’
I held my tongue, as much from shock as from a desire to withhold the information from her. She spoke as if coteries were forced into a dragon, rather than entering one willingly. I would not take her ignorance from her. One of my guards growled and lifted a fist to menace me, but she shook her head and flicked her fingers at him, dismissing my silence as inconsequential.
Instead, she transferred her gaze to the Fool, dangling insensible between his captors, and for the first time, a frown marred her sculpted face. ‘You have not damaged him, have you? I warned you that I wished him brought to me intact. He is the greatest curiosity in the world, that most rare creature, a false White Prophet. Though he scarcely deserves such a title now. Look at him, gone all brown as a withered flower. Is he dead?’