Some decisions are easier if you don’t allow yourself time to think. ‘Yes,’ I lied to my daughter. ‘Exactly.’
I watched her mull this for a moment. Slowly her tower of glass began to melt into water. It flowed, warm and harmless, past my feet until her balcony had descended to the ground. She offered me her hand to help her climb over the railing. I took it, touching and yet not touching my daughter for the first time in her life. Her tanned fingers rested briefly on my black-clawed paw. Then she stood clear of me and looked down at the fog and creeping briars that were ascending the hillside toward us.
‘You know I’ve never done anything like this before?’
‘Neither have I,’ I admitted.
‘Before we go into his dream, tell me something about him,’ she suggested.
The fog and bramble crept ever closer. Whatever I told her about Thick would be too much, and yet for her to enter his dream ignorant might be dangerous to all. I could not control what Thick revealed to her in the context of the dream. For one fleeting second, I wondered if I should have consulted Chade or Dutiful before seeking Nettle’s aid. Then I smiled grimly to myself. I was Skillmaster, was I not? In that capacity, this decision was mine alone.
And so I told my daughter that Thick was simple, a man with the mind and heart of a child, and the strength of an army when it came to Skill-magic. I even told her that he served the Farseer Prince, and that he journeyed with him on a ship. I told her how his powerful Skill-music and now his dreams were undermining morale on the ship. I told her of his conviction that he would always be seasick and that he would likely die from it. And as I told her these things, the thorns grew and twined toward us, and I watched her quickly drawing her own conclusions from what I said; that I was on board the ship also, and therefore that her brother was with me, on a sea-voyage with the Farseer Prince. Rural as her home was, I wondered how much she had heard of the Narcheska and the Prince’s quest. I didn’t have to wonder long. She put the tale together for herself.
‘So that is the black dragon that the silver dragon keeps asking you about. The one the Prince goes to slay.’
‘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?’