I sighed. Dutiful was still standing there with his jaw slightly ajar. I shrugged at him. ‘There’s no use arguing with Burrich. It’s like arguing with your mother. Let’s go.’
We left the tent and moved quietly into the darkness. We moved as silently as Witted ones can, even when one of them won’t admit he’s Witted. Burrich set a hand lightly on my good shoulder. It was his only concession to his failing vision and I made no comment on it. I glanced back once to see Chade standing in the tent flap in his night robe, peering after us. He seemed embarrassed to have been caught at it; he let the flap drop down into place. But now I knew that he was worried, and I tried not to wonder how well he had tested his exploding powder. Longwick, too, stared after us.
The path to the excavation was uphill. It had not impressed me as a difficult climb, but the events of the last few days were making themselves felt to me. Now it seemed difficult, and I was panting by the time we reached the ramp that led down into the pit. We stopped there, and I took the oil from Burrich, wincing a little at the weight of it.
‘Wait for us here.’
‘You needn’t worry I’ll follow you. I know my vision is gone, and I won’t put you in danger by going with you. But I’d have at least a word or two with you before you go. Alone, if you don’t mind.’
‘Burrich, every moment that I dally, the Fool may lose more of himself to the dragon.’
‘Son, you know in your heart that we’re too late to save him. But I know also that you must go on and do this.’ He turned his head, not looking at the Prince, but ‘seeing’ him. At a pleading look from me, Dutiful retreated several steps to give us the privacy Burrich sought. He still lowered his voice. ‘I’m here to bring you and Swift home. I promised Nettle I’d bring her brother home, safe and sound, that I’d kill a dragon to do it if I had to, and that everything would be as it used to be. In some ways, she’s still a child, believing that Papa will always be able to keep her safe. I’d like her to go on believing that, at least for a time.’
I wasn’t sure what he was asking me, but I was in too much of a hurry to quibble. ‘I’ll do my best to let her keep that,’ I assured him. ‘Burrich, I have to go.’
‘I know you do. But … you know that we both believed you were dead. Molly and I. And that we only acted as we did in that belief. You know that?’
‘Of course I do. Perhaps we’ll talk about it later.’ I suddenly knew, by both the anger and pain that his words woke in me, that I wanted to talk about it never. That I did not want even to think of talking about it with him. Yet I drew a breath and said the words I’d told myself so often. ‘You were the better man for her. I slept well at night, knowing that you were there for her and Nettle. And afterwards … I didn’t come back. Because I never wanted you to feel that, that …’
‘That I’d betrayed you,’ he finished quietly for me.
‘Burrich, the sun will be coming up soon. I have to go.’
‘Listen to me!’ he said, suddenly fierce. ‘Listen to me, and let me say this. These words have been choking me since I was first told what I’d done. I’m sorry, Fitz. I’m sorry for all I took from you, without knowing I had taken it. I’m sorry for the years I can’t give back to you. But – But I can’t be sorry I made Molly my wife, or for the children and life we had together. Have. I can’t be. Because I was the better man for her. Just as Chivalry was better for Patience, when all unknowing he took her from me.’ He sighed suddenly, heavily. ‘Eda and El. What a strange, cruel spiral we’ve danced.’
My mouth was full of ashes. There was nothing to say.
Very, very softly, he asked me, ‘Are you going to come back and take her from me? Will you take her from our home, from our children? Because I know that you can. She always kept a place in her heart for the wild boy she loved. I … I never tried to change that. How could I? I loved him, too.’
A lifetime spun by on the whirling wind. It whispered to me of might have been, could have been, should have been. Might yet could be. But would not. I finally spoke. ‘I won’t come back and take her from you. I won’t come back at all. I can’t.’
‘But –’
‘Burrich, I can’t. You can’t ask that of me. What, do you imagine that I could ride out to visit you, could sit at your table and drink a cup of tea, wrestle your youngest boy about, look at your horses and not think, not think –’
‘It would be hard,’ he cut in fiercely. ‘But you could learn to do it. As I learned to endure it. All the times I rode out behind Patience and Chivalry, when they went out on their horses together, seeing them and –’
I couldn’t bear to hear it. I knew I’d never have that sort of courage. ‘Burrich. I have to go. The Fool is counting on me to do this.’
‘Then go!’ There was no anger in his voice, only desperation. ‘Go, Fitz. But we are going to talk of this, you and I. We are going to untangle it somehow. I promise. I will not lose you again.’
‘I have to go,’ I said a final time, and turned and fled from him. I left him standing there, blind in the cold wind and he stood there alone, trusting that I would return.
TWENTY-THREE
Mind of a Dragon
The Elderlings were a far-flung race. Although few writings have survived from their time, and we cannot read their runes in full, several of our own seem descended from the glyphs they chose to mark on their maps and monoliths. The little we know of them seems to indicate that they mingled with ordinary humans, sometimes residing in the same cities, and much of our knowledge may have come from that association. The Mountain folk have ancient maps that are almost certainly copies of even more ancient scrolls and seem to reflect a familiarity with a much greater territory than those people now claim. Roads and cities marked on those maps either no longer exist or are so distant as to be mythical. Strangest of all, perhaps, is that at least one of those maps shows cities that would today be as far north as Bearns and as far south as the Cursed Shores.
Fedwren’s Treatise on a Lost Folk
I didn’t say a word as I rejoined Dutiful and he didn’t ask. He led the way, small lantern swinging, down the ramp into a pit that had grown substantially deeper and narrower since I had last dug in it. I could see how they had concentrated their efforts once they had glimpsed the shadow of the beast trapped in the ice below them. Again, like being drenched by an unexpected wave, my Wit-sense of Icefyre swelled, and then collapsed and vanished. It unnerved me to be so aware of the one I was coming to kill.