I knew what I had done. I had done it before, coldly and deliberately. I had used the Skill to forcefully imprint on my uncle, Prince Regal, that he would suddenly become adamantly loyal to Queen Kettricken, and the child she carried. I had intended that Skill imprint to be permanent, and it had been, though Prince Regal’s untimely death but a few months later had prevented me from ever knowing how long such an imposed command would remain in force.
This time I had acted in anger, with no thought beyond the moment. The furious command I had given him had printed itself onto his mind with the full strength of my Skill behind it. He had not decided to stop fighting me. Part of him doubtless wished to kill me still. His baffled look told me that he had no comprehension of what I had done to him. Neither did I, really.
‘Can you get up?’ I asked him guardedly.
‘Can I get up?’ He echoed my words eerily. His diction was blurred. His eyes rolled about as he seemed to seek an answer in himself, then his gaze came back to me.
‘You can get up,’ I ventured fearfully.
And at my words, he could.
He came to his feet unsteadily, reeling as if I had knocked him cold. The force of my command seemed to have driven the woman’s control away. Yet to have supplanted that with my own will over him was no victory for me. He stood, shoulders slightly hunched, as if investigating a pain in himself. After a time, he lifted his eyes to look at me. ‘I hate you,’ he told me, in a voice divested of rancour.
‘That’s understandable,’ I heard myself reply. Sometimes I shared that sentiment.
I couldn’t look at him. I found my knife on the sand and returned it to its sheath. The Prince lurched around the fire, then sat down on the opposite side. I watched him surreptitiously. He wiped his hand across his mouth and then looked at his bloody palm. Mouth slightly ajar, he ran his tongue past his teeth. I feared he would spit some out, but he did not. He made no complaint at all. Instead, he looked like a man trying desperately to recall something. Humiliated and confused, he stared at the fire. I wondered what he pondered.
For a time I sat, feeling all the new little pains he had given me. Many of them were not physical. I doubted they equalled what I had done to him. I could think of nothing to say to him, so I poked at the food in the fire. The seaweed I’d wrapped it in had shrunken and dried in the heat and was beginning to char. I poked the packet out from the coals. Inside, the mussels had opened, and the crab’s flesh had gone from opaque to white. Close enough to cooked to satisfy me, I decided.
‘There’s food here,’ I announced.
‘I’m not hungry,’ the Prince replied. Voice and eyes were distant.
‘Eat it anyway, while there’s food to eat.’ My words came out as a callous command.
Whether it was my Skill hold upon him, or his own common sense, I couldn’t tell. But after I had taken my share of the food from the seaweed packet, he came cautiously around the fire to claim his share. In some ways, he reminded me of Nighteyes when he had first come to me. The cub had been wary and defiant, yet pragmatic enough to realize he had to depend on me to provide for him. Perhaps the Prince knew that without me, he had no hopes of returning easily to Buck.
Or perhaps my Skill-command had burned so deep that even a suggestion from me must be obeyed.
The silence lasted as long as the food did, and a bit longer. I broke it. ‘I looked at the stars last night.’
The Prince nodded. After a time, ‘We’re a long way from home,’ he admitted grudgingly.
‘We may face a long journey home with few resources. Do you know how to live off the land at all?’
Again, a silence followed my words. He did not want to speak to me, but I had knowledge he desperately needed. His question came grudgingly.
‘What about the way we came here? Can’t we go back that way?’ A frown divided his brows as he asked, ‘How did you learn to do that magic? Is it the Skill?’
I broke a little piece of the truth off and gave it to him. ‘King Verity taught me to Skill. A long time ago.’ Before he could ask another question, I announced, ‘I’m going to walk down the beach and climb up those cliffs. It could be there’s a town nearby.’ If I had to leave the boy here alone, I’d do my best to leave him in a safe place. And if the Skill-pillar did not emerge from the water, then I’d best prepare for a long walk home. My will was iron in that regard. I’d return to Buck if I had to crawl there. And once there, I’d hunt down every one of those Piebalds and kill them slowly. The promise gave purpose to my motions. I began to pull on my socks and boots. The feathers still lay on the sand. A flick of my fingers slid them up my sleeve. I’d secure them better later. I did not wish to discuss them with the Prince. Dutiful made no reply to my words, but when I stood up and walked away from the fire, he followed me. I stopped at the freshwater stream, to wash my hands and face and to drink as well. The Prince watched me, and when I was finished, he walked upstream to drink himself. While he was occupied, a strip from my shirt secured the feathers to my forearm. By the time he looked up from washing the blood from his face, my sleeve once more concealed them. Together we walked on. The silence felt like a heavy thing we carried between us. I could feel him mulling over what I had told him about the woman. I wanted to lecture him, to batter him with words until he understood exactly what the woman was trying to do. I wanted to ask if she was still in his mind with him. Instead I bit my tongue and held back my words. He wasn’t stupid, I told myself. I’d told him the truth. Now I had to let him work out what it meant to him. We kept walking.
To my relief, we found no more feathers on the sand. We found little of anything useful, though the beach seemed to have more than its share of flotsam. There were bits of rotting rope, and worm-bored lengths of ship timbers. The remains of a dead-eye lay not far from a thole. As we walked, the black cliff gradually loomed larger, until it towered above us and promised a good vantage of the land around it. As we drew closer, I saw that its face was pocked with holes. In a sand cliff, I would have thought them swallow’s nests, but not in black stone. The holes seemed too regular and too evenly spaced to be the work of natural forces. The sun striking them seemed to wake glints in some of them. Curiosity beckoned me.