I offered a distraction of my own. ‘Then you’ve begun teaching him the Skill.’ I put no judgement in my voice.
‘I’ve begun trying,’ Chade growled, and there was concession in his. ‘I feel like a mole telling an owl about the sun. I’ve read the scrolls, Fitz, and I’ve attempted the meditations and the exercises they suggest. And sometimes I almost feel … something. But I don’t know if it’s what I’m meant to feel or only an old man’s wistful imagining.’
‘I told you,’ I said, and I kept my voice gentle. ‘It can’t be learned, nor taught, from a scroll. The meditation can ready you for it, but then someone has to show it to you.’
‘That’s why I sent for you,’ he replied, too quickly. ‘Because you are not only the only one who can properly teach the Skill to the Prince. You are also the only one who can use it to find him.’
I sighed. ‘Chade, the Skill doesn’t work that way. It –’
‘Say rather that you were never taught to use the Skill that way. It’s in the scrolls, Fitz. It says that two who have been joined by the Skill can find one another with it, if they need to. All my other efforts to find the Prince have failed. Dogs put on his scent ran well for half the morning, and then raced in circles, whimpering in confusion. My best spies have nothing to tell me, bribes have bought me nothing. The Skill is all that is left, I tell you.’
I thrust aside my piqued curiosity. I did not want to see the scrolls. ‘Even if the scrolls claim it can be done, you say it happens between two who have been joined by the Skill. The Prince and I have no such –’
‘I think you do.’
There is a certain tone of voice Chade has that stops one from speaking. It warns that he knows far more than you think he does, and cautions you against telling him lies. It was extremely effective when I was a small boy. It was a bit of a shock to find it was no less effective now that I was a man. I slowly drew breath into my lungs but before I could ask, he answered me.
‘Certain dreams the Prince has recounted to me first woke my suspicions. They started with occasional dreams when he was very small. He dreamed of a wolf bringing down a doe, and a man rushing up to cut her throat. In the dream, he was the man, and yet he could also see the man. That first dream excited him. For a day and a half, he spoke of little else. He told it as if it were something he had done himself.’ He paused. ‘Dutiful was only five at the time. The detail of his dream far exceeded his own experience.’
I still said nothing.
‘It was years before he had another such dream. Or, perhaps I should say it was years before he spoke to me of one. He dreamed of a man fording a river. The water threatened to sweep him away, but at the last he managed to cross it. He was too wet and too cold to build a fire to warm himself, but he lay down in the shelter of a fallen tree. A wolf came to lie beside him and warm him. And again, the Prince told me this dream as something that he himself had done. “I love it,” he told me. “It is almost as if there is another life that belongs to me, one that is far away and free of being a prince. A life that belongs to me alone, where I have a friend who is as close as my own skin.” It was then that I suspected he had had other such Skill-dreams, but had not shared them with me.’
He waited, and this time I had to break my silence.
I took a breath. ‘If I shared those moments of my life with the Prince, I was unaware of it. But, yes, those are true events.’ I halted, suddenly wondering what else he had shared. I recalled Verity’s complaint that I did not guard my thoughts well, and that my dreams and experiences sometimes intruded on his. I thought of my trysts with Starling and prayed I would not blush. It had been a very long time since I had bothered to set Skill-walls round myself. Obviously, I must do so again. Another thought came in the wake of that. Obviously, my Skill-talent had not degraded as much as I believed. A surge of exhilaration came with that thought. It was probably, I told myself viciously, much the same as what a drunk felt on discovering a forgotten bottle beneath the bed.
‘And you have shared moments of the Prince’s life?’ Chade pressed me.
‘Perhaps. I suspect so. I often have vivid dreams, and to dream of being a boy in Buckkeep is not so foreign from my own experience. But –’ I took a breath and forced myself on. ‘The important thing here is the cat, Chade. How long has he had it? Do you think he is Witted? Is he bonded to the cat?’
I felt like a liar, asking questions when I already knew the answers. My mind was rapidly shuffling through my dreams of the last fifteen years, sorting out those that came with the peculiar clarity that lingered after waking. Some could have been episodes from the Prince’s life. Others – I halted at the recollection of my fever dream of Burrich – Nettle, too? Dream sharing with Nettle? This new insight reordered my memory of the dream. I had not just witnessed those events from Nettle’s perspective. I had been Skill-sharing her life. It was possible that, as with Dutiful, the flow of Skill-sharing had gone both ways. What had seemed a cherished glimpse into her life, a tiny window on Molly and Burrich, was now revealed as her vulnerability before my carelessness. I winced away from the thought and resolved a stronger wall about my thoughts. How could I have been so incautious? How many of my secrets had I spilled before those most vulnerable to them?
‘How would I know if the boy was Witted?’ Chade replied testily. ‘I never knew you were, until you told me. Even then, I didn’t know what you were telling me at first.’
I was suddenly weary, too tired to lie. Who was I trying to protect with deceit? I knew too well that lies did not shield for long, that in the end they became the largest chinks in any man’s armour. ‘I suspect he is. And bonded to the cat. From dreams I’ve had.’
Before my eyes, the man aged. He shook his head wordlessly, and poured more brandy for both of us. I drank mine off while he drank his in long, considering sips. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘I hate irony. It is a manacle that ties our dreams to our fears. I had hoped you had a dream-bond with the boy, a tie that would let you use the Skill to find him. And indeed you do, but with it you reveal my greatest fear for Dutiful is real. The Wit. Oh, Fitz. I wish I could go back and make my fears foolish instead of real.’
‘Who gave him the cat?’
‘One of the nobles. It was a gift. He receives far too many gifts. All try to curry favour with him. Kettricken tries to turn aside those of the more valuable sort. She worries it will spoil the boy. But it was only a little hunting cat … yet it may be the gift that spoils him for his life.’
‘Who gave it to him?’ I pressed.