Fool's Fate (68 page)

    She laughed lightly, but her smile was gentle. “Oh, you quibble, and you know it. Your father would have died, childless, in a hunting accident while he was still a young man. Over and over, I have seen it happen in my visions. Verity would never have wed, and would have perished from a fever the next winter. If you had died, at the right moment, then in time the throne would have passed smoothly to Regal. He would have had his father's favor and guidance, and he would have become a great ruler. Yes, the line would have ended with him, but it would have ended splendidly, in peace and plenty, for the Six Duchies as well as the Out Islands. I have no reason to lie to you about any of this. It is far too late for that future to be, so what could motivate me to lie to you?”

    I did not know, and yet I did. My Skill again fluttered at the edges of my awareness. It was a flighty, untrustworthy magic. I knew that; I had always known that. I felt her assure me of it. Pay no mind to it. “You're deliberately confusing me. You contradict yourself, and twist my knowledge of truth. You're mocking me.”

    She laughed, throaty and delighted. “Of course I am. Just as your beloved Fool does. And you love it when he dances his words all around you, offering you a hundred ways to see the world. And so shall I delight you, now that you are mine. For I am taking you. I must. We must work together to put the world back on its true course. Not by your death this time, but by the life I shall give you. You will be my Catalyst now, a Catalyst a thousand times more powerful than Kebal Rawbread. And I shall delight you a thousand times more than your pitiful Fool did. For we are, at last, the perfect fit for one another. We shall be not just Prophet and Catalyst, but male and female, making the whole that turns the world. I will be to you everything that he secretly longed to be to you and could not. Except that I will be perfect, as he was flawed. You will come to see that you are not betraying him, but being true to the world and all that was meant to be. Taste the sweetness of the world as it was meant to be. Taste.” Her face had come ever closer to mine as she spoke, and then her mouth touched mine. Her lips were all softness, her tongue a teasing coolness that bade my lips part. And she spoke true. A giddy sweetness, wilder than anything I had ever known, spread through me at her cool touch. I shivered as I put my hands on her shoulders, holding her mouth against mine.

    Lust flooded me and the rightness, the inevitability, of the moment pushed aside all other thoughts. I cared not that her guards and maids watched us from outside the circle of candlelight; I cared for nothing except the gleaming white perfection of her body. Only one thing was still lacking in the future she offered me. I let my thoughts stray to it.

    “Our child will be beautiful,” she assured me as she released me and stood up. “You will delight in our son. I promise you this.”

    I could feel the truth of her words and they went thrilling through me, like ice and silver in my blood. A child, she would give me a child whom I could hold and cherish. A child who would never be taken from me. She knew all that I most desired and offered it all to me. She created in my thoughts the future that I had always most longed for, tailored to my every need. How, why, could I resist that?

    She stood and lifted her robe over her head and let it drop to the floor beside the couch. The silken shift followed it. She stood before me, letting the yellow light of the brazier play over her body. Golden light touched her whiteness, gilding the curves of her body and face. Her white breasts were round and heavy. She lifted them to show me, weighing them in her hands, inviting me to taste them. Slowly she sank down beside me, and then leaned back, opening her arms and her thighs to me. “Come to me. I know everything that you have ever wanted, and I will give it all to you.” She lolled her head back against the arm of the couch. Her colorless eyes looked through me and beyond me.

    The truth of her words thundered through me with my pounding blood. I stood and fumbled my garments out of the way. She dropped her eyes to see what I would offer her.

    And in that instant, I slammed up my Skill-walls tighter than ever I had before, blocking her insidious tendrils of influence. I flung myself on her, as she had expected, but my hands closed on that milky throat as I brought my knee down sharply onto her gently rounded belly. I felt her Skill batter at me along with her fists. I knew well I had one chance to make good my grip on her, and I knew the icy instant when I had missed it. I should have known that just as she mirrored the Fool in appearance, so also she possessed his uncanny strength. She had no need of her guard as she tucked her chin down tight to thwart my strangle. Her clasped hands came up between my elbows, and then she flung her arms wide, breaking my grip on her throat. She flung me backward off her, and as I fell against the brazier, sending it and hot coals flying in every direction, she lifted her hands. The white globes of light blazed suddenly, flooding the room with illumination. Guards surged at me from all directions, a flood of armed men. It was inevitable that they would take me down, and I would have been wise to let them, to offer them my sudden surrender. Yet my glimpse of the Fool, gagged and spread like a trophy hide on one icy wall, roused in me an anger I had not felt since the days when I had battled Red Ship raiders with an axe.

    The tumbled brazier burned my hands as I seized it and flung it at my attackers. I fought them, expecting them to kill me, and thus holding back nothing. I think that is why it took them so long to subdue me. They were more restrained than I was and rendered less damage to me than I did to several of them. I know I broke one man's collarbone, for I heard it crack, and I recall that I spat out a piece of ear, but as with all battles when such a mood is on me, my recollection is disjointed and vague.

    I recall clearly that I lost the struggle. I knew it was over when I was down on my belly with three men kneeling on me. There was blood in my mouth, some of it my own. I have never scrupled against using my teeth in a brawl, not since I first bonded with the wolf. My left arm no longer obeyed me. As they hauled me to my feet, that arm flopped and flailed against my side. Wrenched out of its socket, I thought sickly, and waited for that pain to find me.

    I had almost made it to the Fool's feet. I lifted my eyes to look at him. He was pinned to the icy wall like a butterfly, his arms spread wide, and even his head held against it with a metal band around his throat. The gag was tight enough to cut his mouth. Blood had leaked in a line from the corner of his mouth to drip down his shirt. They must have ransacked his pack, for he wore the Rooster Crown, the wooden circlet jammed down on his head to the top of his ears. His eyes were open, and I knew he had witnessed all that the Pale Woman had staged for his torment, that that had been the whole point of her attempted seduction of me. I knew too as our eyes met, that he understood that I had never betrayed him. I saw the feeble twitch of the Skilled tips of his fingers on one pinioned hand. He too had sensed her subtle attack on me through my reviving Skill-sense.

    “I tried!” I cried out to him as his head bowed as much as his binding would allow it and his eyes began to sag shut. The guards had had their sport with him. Patches of blood seeped through his clothing and streaked his sweaty hair. Now he was held immobile and silenced against the ice, tormented with the cold he had always so hated. Had he foreseen this slow and icy end for himself? Was that why he had always so dreaded the cold?

    “Bring them both to my throne room!” The Pale Woman's voice was like ice cracking. I swung my head to look at her. She had retrieved her garments and donned them. Her lower lip was beginning to swell and several loosened plaits dangled by her face. Such were the fruits of my deadly attack upon her. Yet I felt small amusement as my guards seized me roughly, careless that one of my arms hung limp and useless. The piteous cries of the Fool followed me as they tore him from his bindings.

    The halls seemed longer and whiter than they had been, as if the lights burned brighter with the anger of the woman who strode ahead of us. We encountered few people, but all we passed cowered or shrank to the side of the corridor as she swept by them. I tried to make note of how we went and what turns we made, telling myself that if the Fool and I escaped, we must know in which direction to run. It was useless, both the effort to memorize the way and the effort to fan hope in myself. It was finished, we were finished and that was the end of it. The Fool was going to die, and I would die alongside him, and all he had worked for would come to a bloody and useless end. “Just as if I had died the very first time that Regal looked at me and proposed to Verity that I meet a discreet end.”

    I did not know I had spoken aloud until one of the guards gave me a rough shake at the same time he bade me, “Shut your hole.”

    On we went. It was hard to focus, and harder still to overcome my fear, but I lowered the walls I had raised against the Skill. I gathered my small strength and tried to Skill out to Dutiful, to warn them and to beg for help. I was like a man patting his clothes, trying to find a misplaced pouch. My magic was gone and I could not muster it. Even that last weapon was lost to me.

    The Pale Woman had already resumed her throne by the time we entered the hall. A few of her retainers lined the walls. They watched dispassionately as the Fool and I were dragged before them. There we were halted and pushed to our knees as before. For a long time, she looked down on us in silence. Then she gestured at the Fool with her narrow chin. “Give that one to the dragon. He can have Theldo's place. Let the other one watch.”

    “No!” I cried before a fist to my ear sent me sprawling on the ice. The Fool made not a sound as they dragged him forward. When they were close to one of the chained captives, the guard matter-of-factly drew his blade and plunged it into the wretch. The man did not die swiftly, but neither did he make much noise or fuss about it. I think most of him had already gone into the dragon, and there was little left of his spirit to mourn his body's passing. He fell against the dragon as he died, and slid down the creature's stony flank. For a few moments, his blood was a vivid red smear down the stone. Then, as sand takes in water, the blood was sucked away from the surface, leaving the scales in that area more clearly defined than they had been.

    Two guards moved efficiently, careful not to touch the dragon-stone as they unshackled the hapless wretch. One glanced at their queen, and at a nod from her, he cut and disjointed one of the man's arms from his shoulder as neatly as if he were preparing a fowl for the pot. He did not look as he tossed it in Kebal Rawbread's direction. I wished I had not. The mad king lunged the length of his chain, seized the flopping, bloody arm and fell upon it as hungrily as a dog on a joint of fresh meat. He was a noisy eater. I turned aside, sickened.

    But a worse sight awaited me. My guards tightened their grips on me, and a third man stepped up to seize my head by my warrior's tail and grip me tight. The Fool's guards moved forward with him. He did not resist. His face looked like that of a man near bled to death, as if he could no longer feel horror or pain, only the encroachment of death. They shackled him, ankle and wrist, to the dragon. By standing in a half-crouch, knees and elbows held out, the Fool could avoid contact with the thirsty stone. It was a posture that was a torment in itself, and one that no man could hold for long. Sooner or later, he must tire, and when he did, he must fall against the dragon and yield something of himself to it.

    The Fool faced a slow death by Forging.

    “No,” I breathed as the reality seeped into me, and then, “NO!” I roared at the Pale Woman. I twisted my head to look up at her, heedless of the hair torn from my head. “Anything!” I promised her. “Anything you want from me, if you let him go!”

    She leaned back on her furs. “How tedious. You capitulate much too easily, FitzChivalry Farseer. You didn't even wait to witness the demonstration. Well. I shall not deny myself that pleasure. Dret! Introduce him to my dragon.”

    The named guard stepped forward, drawing his sword. “No!” I roared, twisting helplessly against my guards as Dret set the point of his blade to the small of the Fool's back and urged him against the stone dragon.

    He held him there for only an instant. The Fool did not scream. Perhaps it did not cause pain to his body. But as the man took back his sword, the Fool recoiled from the stone as a hand does from a hot ember. He leaned against the brief length of his chains, trembling but soundless. On the dragon's skin, I saw for an instant the outline of my friend's body as the dragon drank in his memories and emotions. Then his silhouette faded into the stone.

    I wondered what the Fool had lost in that brief kiss of stone. A summer's day from his childhood, a moment of watching King Shrewd and Chade talking by the firelight of the hearth in the old King's room? Had it been some moment he and I had shared, now snatched from him and gone forever? He would know such things had happened, but Forging would erase their significance to him. Our friendship and all we had meant to one another slowly would be erased from his mind before he died. When he died, he would not even have memories of having been loved to ease his passage. I lifted my eyes to the Pale Woman. I think she drank in my misery as the dragon had sucked down the Fool's stolen moments.

    “What do you want of me?” I asked her. “What?”

    She spoke calmly. “Only that you take the easiest path and play the most likely role in the days to come. It will not be difficult for you, FitzChivalry. In almost every future I have foreseen, you accede to my request. Do your prince's bidding, do Chade's bidding, do the Narcheska's bidding. And mine. Take Icefyre's head. That is all. Think of the good you will do. Chade will be pleased, and your queen will win her alliance with the Out Islands. You'll be a hero in their eyes. Dutiful and the Narcheska can consummate their love for one another. I ask nothing difficult of you, only that you do what so many of your friends hope you will do.”