But instead of speaking, he immediately fell silent. I sat and looked at him and thought how he had changed. The pale moonfaced boy, the lithe and narrow youth, was now visibly a young man. Recent privation had sharpened the angles of his face and the bruises around his eyes from his torment were still fading. But that was only his body. His glance had darkened and his solemnity did not seem a temporary mood but a new gravity of spirit. I let him take his time as he mentally sorted his words. I suspected he was working on a decision, and that however resolute he might claim to be, his heart still teetered on a choice.
‘Fitz, I faced my death, not bravely perhaps, but determinedly. Because I had seen what might come after it, and judged it worth the cost. I decided to come to this island, and set in motion the events that would end with the dragon rising. I knew I would die, horribly, in pain and cold. But I also saw the chance for the world to know dragons again, a chance for there to be creatures as arrogant and lovely as humans, so that they might balance one another. I dreamed of a world in which men could not dominate all nature and impose their order upon it. It will not be a peaceful world, and it may be that men will curse me for my role in what happened here. But it will be a world in which both men and dragons are so busy with one another that they cannot subvert all nature to themselves. That was what I saw, in the greater scheme of things.’
‘Fine!’ I was weary of his talk of dragons, and uneasy still about what we had loosed on the world. ‘So now there will be dragons. Lots of them, from what I saw happening over the battlefield. But why can’t you come back to –’
‘Hush!’ he rebuked me sternly. ‘Do you think this is easy for me? Do you think that lofty reason is my only one? Do you think it is easy for me to part my ways from yours? No. There is a more personal element that divides my path from yours. It is because of what I glimpsed on a far smaller scale. I saw you, after my death, taking satisfaction in the things and people you had so long denied yourself. Living the life you were meant to have, after my death. You gave me another piece of life. Shall I use it to rob you of yours?’ More slowly he added, ‘I can love you, Fitz, but I cannot allow that love to destroy you and what you are.’ He rubbed at his face wearily, and then exclaimed in annoyance at the skin that peeled away beneath his fingers. He shook the bits from his fingertips, rubbed his face all over vigorously, and then folded his hands into his lap and looked into the fire. I glowered at him, baffled and waiting.
Behind us, Prilkop moved quietly around the room. I heard a clicking sound and glanced behind me. He had opened the neck of a little sack and was taking small blocks of stone out of it. I recognized it at once. Memory stone, cut into uniform cubes like the ones I had glimpsed in the Elderling chamber. I watched as he held one briefly against his temple, then smiled, and set it aside. He repeated the process, and again. It was soon apparent to me he was sorting the blocks into different stacks. He looked up, realizing the Fool and I were watching him. He smiled and held up a cube of stone. ‘Music.’ Another cube. ‘Some poetry.’ Another cube. ‘History. Music, again.’ He proffered one to me, but I waved it aside, uneasy. The Fool, however, reached out to touch it lightly with one Skilled fingertip. He recoiled from it as quickly as if he had been burned, but then smiled at me. ‘Music, indeed. Like a rushing flood of it. You should try it, Fitz.’
‘We were talking,’ I reminded him quietly. ‘About you coming back to Buckkeep with me.’
‘No. We were talking about me not coming back.’ He tried a smile that failed.
I just looked at him. A short time later he said something, a request, to Prilkop. At almost the same moment, I felt Chade tug at my thoughts. I would speak to the Queen.
I can’t right now. Try Thick.
You know all the reasons why that will not work. Please, Fitz. It will not take long.
That is what you said last time. Besides, I am nowhere near the Queen. I went through the pillar. I’m with the Fool.
What? Without warning any of us or consulting with us at all?
I believe my life is still my own.
No. It was a flat denial from Chade. No, it is not, sir. Last night, you drew a line with me, and I sensed you did it with the Queen’s approval. You cannot claim that authority one moment, and then shoulder aside from it the next. Crowns cannot be doffed so lightly.
I am not truly the King and you know it.
Too late to take that stance, Fitz! Chade sounded angry. Too late. The Queen offered you the authority and you accepted it.
I did not capitulate. I could not decide if I agreed with him or not. Give me some time. By now, you must be at sea. What can be of such immediate importance now that you have sailed?
It will keep for a time, that is true. But after this, Fitz, you must not absent yourself without warning all of us.
Am I a servant, that my time is never my own?
Worse. You are a king. And ‘Sacrifice’ to all.
He broke his mind free of mine before I could reply to that at all. I blinked and realized that I had just heard the door close. Prilkop had left. The Fool was looking at me, somehow aware I had been Skilling and waiting for my attention to come back to him. ‘I am sorry. Chade, in a rush as always, demanding that he needed contact with the Queen. He claims that if she has recognized me once, even for a moment as “Sacrifice” that I now have all the duties and responsibilities of a crowned king. It’s ridiculous.’
‘Is it?’
‘You know it is!’
My defence seemed to release a torrent of words from him, as if while he waited the words had mounted up inside him like water behind a dam.
‘Fitz. Go back to the life you were meant to have, and love it, without reserve. That was what I saw you doing.’ He gave a laugh that had hysteria at the edge of it. ‘It even sustained me while I was dying. To know that you would go on to that life, after I was dead. When the pain was worst, I fixed my thoughts on what I had seen for you, and I let it move through me.’
‘But … she said you called out for me. When she tormented you.’ I said the words, and then wished I could call them back. He suddenly looked sick and old.
‘Probably, I did,’ he admitted. ‘I have never claimed to be brave. But the fact that she could wring that from me changes nothing, my friend. Nothing.’ He looked into the fire as if he had lost something there, and I was ashamed that I had taken him back to his torture. No man should be reminded that he has screamed in front of people who delighted in it. ‘It should probably serve to teach me that, in many ways, I am not as strong as I wish I were. And I should not put myself in a position in which my weakness could damage both of us.’
He suddenly took my hand. It startled me, and when I looked at him, our eyes locked. ‘Fitz. Please. Do not tempt me to follow you and interfere in the future I saw for you. Do not tempt me to step out of my time and try to take something that was never meant for me.’ He shivered suddenly, as if a chill had taken him. He let go of my hand and leaned closer to the fire, holding his hands out to them. The nails had just started to regrow. His rubbed his hands together, loosening a layer of skin like white ash. The new skin exposed beneath reminded me of polished wood. Very softly, he asked me, ‘Could you have been content to live with Nighteyes among the wolves?’
‘I would have been willing to try,’ I said stubbornly.