I groped for my anger and felt only sickness. No wonder they had been so glad to see the Fool awaiting us on Aslevjal. We had been sold like cattle.
‘May I speak?’ Elliania lifted her head. Perhaps she had always carried that grave sorrow in her, but I had never seen the shame she bore plainly now. She looked younger than I recalled, and yet she had the eyes of a dying woman. She looked at Dutiful and then lowered her eyes before the hurt he did not hide. ‘I think there is much I could make clear for you. It is long since I had any heart for this vicious sham. But my duty to my family means that first I must speak of this to you. My mother and my sister … it is imperative that … that we –’ She choked for a time. Then she flung up her head and spoke stiffly. ‘I do not think I can make you understand how important it is. That they must die, and that their bodies must be returned to my mothershouse. For an Outislander, for a daughter of Narwhal Clan, no other choice was ever possible.’ She clasped her shaking hands in front of her. ‘There was never an honourable choice,’ she managed to say before her voice died.
Dutiful spoke quietly. ‘Sit down, if you can find the space. I think we have all come to the same place now.’ He did not mean the tent.
We all shifted, trying to make room in the small shelter. Burrich grunted as he tried to move his stiff leg out of the way. As Peottre and Elliania found places to sit, Burrich shook out my shirt and then draped it around me. It almost made me smile. No matter what else might be going on, he still would not let me offend a lady by sitting bare-chested in her presence. The grandson of a slave, he had always been far more aware of the social niceties than I had.
Elliania’s voice was shamed and weary. She held her shoulders tightly hunched. ‘You ask what else she could do to us? Much. We do not know, with certainty, who belongs to her. She has preyed on our men and boys for years. Our warriors go forth and do not return. Young boys vanished while shepherding our flocks, on our own clan lands! Child by child, she has reduced our family. Some she killed. Others went out to play and returned home as soulless monsters.’ She glanced sideways at Peottre, who stared at nothing. ‘With our own hands, we have killed the children of our clan,’ she whispered. The Prince made a small sound at her words. She stopped speaking, then took a ragged breath and went on. ‘Henja had been in our household for years before she betrayed us. We still do not know how my mother and little sister were snatched so effortlessly from our midst. Just as those two were taken, so others are vulnerable. Our Great Mother is elderly, and her mind flickers like a dying candle, as you have seen. All her knowledge should have been passed on to my mother by now. Yet my mother is not there to receive it. So, she lingers, trying her best to mother our house despite the burden of her years. Perhaps you think her pathetic. Nonetheless, if she were taken from us, the centre of our mothershouse would be completely destroyed. My family would cease to be. As it is, we have suffered greatly from my mother’s absence and the discord it has created. What is a mothershouse, with no mother in it?’
She asked the question as if it were rhetorical, but the Prince suddenly sat very straight. Stiffly, he asked, ‘But then, if you came to Buckkeep to be my wife, would not you be leaving your mothershouse – that is, who would be the Great Mother when it was your turn to take that role?’
A tiny spark of anger kindled in Elliania’s eyes. She spoke disdainfully. ‘My cousin already fancies herself in that role, as you have seen. She seeks to make others think it is hers by right rather than by default.’ For a second, I saw the spitfire I had glimpsed on her home island. Then she gave a small sigh and waved her hands helplessly. ‘But you are right. I gave up all hope of becoming what I was born to be when I agreed to marry you. That loss is the price I pay to buy the deaths of my sister and mother, and end their torment and degradation.’ She dwindled back into herself, her shoulders rounding. She clenched her hands, and I saw the sweat start on her brow.
‘Why didn’t she ask you to kill the dragon? Or why doesn’t she do it herself?’ Chade asked them.
Peottre spoke up. ‘She believes she is a great prophetess, one who can not only see the future, but one who determines what the future will be. During the war, she said that the Farseer line must perish entirely, or that they would bring the dragons to descend on us, just as they did of old. Some believed her, and tried to do her will. But they failed, and her words came true. You Farseers brought the wrath of the dragons upon us, smashing and destroying our ships and villages.’
‘But, if you had not attacked us with your Red Ships …’ Dutiful began, outraged.
Peottre spoke over him. ‘Now, she says there is still a chance to redeem ourselves. She says our dragon deserves to die, for he failed to rise and protect us. Moreover, she says he deserves to die at a Farseer’s hands, since you are the foe that he failed to protect us from. But most of all, she says a Farseer must kill Icefyre because that is what she has seen in her visions of the future. For it to go as she wills it, a Farseer must do this deed.’
‘Which seems to me to be a very good reason to consider not doing it,’ Burrich remarked under his breath to me.
The Prince’s ears were keen. He spoke bitterly. ‘But the best reason to consider not killing the dragon is that it may be impossible. You’ve been aware that some in my group had begun to doubt my mission. The closer we came to Icefyre, the clearer we could sense him, not just his life that lingers in him still, but his power. His intellect. Now, I discover that my friends have acted against me. Lord Blackwater, Narcheska Elliania, I have failed you. My own trusted friends have sent a message to the Bingtown Traders. They will send their dragon to oppose us. She may already be hastening here.’
‘I do not understand,’ Peottre broke in. ‘I knew there had been resistance in your group to killing the dragon. But what is this talk of “sensing” him?’
‘You are not the only one with secrets, and this I will reserve to myself for now. Just as you reserve the secret of how the Pale Woman has been in contact with you. She prompted you to poison Fit— Tom with the cake you brought to us, did she not?’
Peottre sat up very straight, lips folded. Dutiful gave a sharp nod to himself. ‘Yes. Secrets. If you had not seen fit to hold yours so tightly, we might have acted as one from the beginning, not against the dragon, but against the Pale Woman. If only you had spoken to me …’
The Narcheska suddenly collapsed. She fell onto her side, moaning and then shuddered into stillness.