Fool's Fate (77 page)

    I feared that Tintaglia's command had sunk deep into his mind. I wanted to believe Chade was thinking clearly, but I was not confident of it.

    Longwick came first with the kettles, and then Dutiful with the containers of varying sizes. As soon as he had what he wanted, Chade sent them back to the excavation site, with orders to be sure the six holes he had ordered dug alongside the dragon were progressing. I wondered if he merely intended to keep the Prince busy. Chade seemed very picky to me as he sorted through the containers, first selecting the vessels to hold the powder, making sure of the tightness of the stoppers or lids, and then matching them to their firepots. I offered to help him but he refused. “Eventually, I will devise the perfect container for my powder. It must be one that will yield to fire, but not too swiftly, for whoever sets fire to it must have time to move away. It should be tight enough to keep out moisture, if the powder is to be safely stored in it. And it must be one that can be filled cleanly, with no residual powder clinging to the outside. Eventually, I will fashion a better way to ignite it...”

    He was now completely focused on what he was doing, a master still puzzling out his new invention, unwilling to trust it to his journeyman's hands. I withdrew from him a small way, sitting on Dutiful's pallet next to a silent Burrich. He seemed deep in his own thoughts. I still felt a terrible sense of urgency, a desire for it all to be over. I could not decide if Tintaglia had imprinted me with a command, or if it was my agony over the Fool. I could not keep my thoughts from turning to him. I tried not to wonder what he might be enduring, or if he was past enduring anything. The dragon's touch seemed to have restored my Skill, yet when I groped for my silk-thin Skill-bond with the Fool, I could not feel him. It frightened me. “I'm doing what you wanted me to do,” I promised the Fool quietly. “I'll try to get the dragon free.”

    Chade, absorbed in his sorting and loading of the powder vessels, did not appear to hear me, but Burrich did. Perhaps it is as they say, that his fading sight had sharpened his other senses. He set his hand to my shoulder. Perhaps if Web had never spoken of it, I would never have noticed it. But he was right. I felt Burrich's calm flow into me. It was not his thoughts that reached me, but a sense of connection with his being. It did not match the strength of a Wit-bond between man and animal, and yet it was there. He spoke quietly. “You've been doing that for a long time, boy. Doing what others wanted you to do. Taking on tasks no one else wanted.” It was a statement, not a judgment.

    “So did you.”

    He was quiet a moment. Then, “Yes. That's true. Like a dog that needs a master, I believe someone once told me.”

    The cutting words I had once flung at him now brought bitter smiles to both of us. “Perhaps that has been true for me as well,” I admitted.

    We both sat still and silent for a time, finding a moment of respite in the eye of the storm all around us. Outside, I could hear the muffled noises of the working men. Their voices came distantly through the cold. I heard the dull ring of metal tools against ice, and the deeper thuds of chunks of ice flung into the wooden-bottomed sleds. Closer to hand, Chade muttered to himself and scraped his powder into precise loads. I felt for the dragon, and he was there, but my Wit-sense of him was dimmed as if he conserved his strength and now would do no more for himself than remain alive and await rescue. Burrich's hand was still on my shoulder. I suddenly suspected that, just as I did, he quested out toward the dragon.

    “What will you do about Swift?” I asked Burrich, before I was even aware I was going to speak.

    Burrich spoke almost casually. “I'll take my son home. Try to raise him to be an upright man.”

    “You mean, not to use his Wit.”

    Burrich made a noise that might have been an assent or a request to drop the topic. I couldn't.

    “Burrich, all those years in the stables, all your gift for healing and calming and training animals. Was that the Wit? Did you have a bond with Vixen?”

    He took his time answering me. Then, he gave me a question instead. “What you are really asking me is, did I do one thing and demand another of you?”

    “Yes.”

    He sighed. “Fitz. I've been a drunk. It was nothing I ever wished to see you or my sons become. I've given in to other appetites, knowing well that no good could come of it. I am a man, and human. But that doesn't mean that I would condone or encourage those things in my boys. Would you? Kettricken told me that you had a foster son. I was glad to hear that you had not been entirely alone. But did raising him not teach you something about yourself? That the faults you find abhorrent in yourself are even more horrifying when you see your son manifest them?”

    He had summed it up too neatly. But I still took him round to the jump again, asking him, “Did you use the Wit when you were Stablemaster?”

    He took a breath and said shortly, “I chose not to.” I thought that was all he would say, but a short time later, he cleared his throat and said, "But it is as Nighteyes said long ago. I could choose not to reply, but I could not choose to be deaf to them. I know what the hounds called me. I've even heard it from your own lips. Heart of the Pack. I knew what they called me and I was aware of their...regard for me. I could not conceal from them that I was aware of them, when they cried back to me of the joy of the hunt as they gave tongue to the chase. I shared that joy, and they knew it.

    “Long ago, you told me you did not choose Nighteyes. That he chose you and bonded to you and gave you little choice in the matter. So it was with Vixen and me. She was a sickly pup, the runt of an otherwise hearty litter. But she had...something about her. Tenacity. And a mind to find a way around every obstacle. It was not to her mother that she whimpered when her brothers pushed her aside from the nipple, but to me. What was I to do? Pretend I could not hear her plea for a fair share, for a chance at life? So, I saw that she had a chance at the milk. But by the time she was large enough to fend for herself, she had attached herself to me. And in time, I admit, I came to rely on her.”

    On some level, I had known it. I don't know why I wanted him to admit it. “Then you did forbid me what you yourself did.”

    “I suppose I did.”

    “Have you any idea how unhappy you made me?”

    He didn't flinch. “About as unhappy as you made me when you didn't obey me. But, then, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Doubtless you never forbade anything to your Hap that you yourself were guilty of. And I'm sure he always listens to your wisdom.” He was very good. The sarcasm was there only if I looked for it.

    That silenced me, for a time. But there was still one more question. “But why, Burrich? Why did you, why do you still so despise the Wit? Web, a man I much admire, sees no harm or danger in his magic. How could your own magic disgust you?”

    He smoothed his hair back from his face and then rubbed his eyes. He spoke reluctantly. “Ah, Fitz, it's a long, old tale. My grandmother, when she discovered I had the taint, was horrified. Her father had it. And when he was faced with the choice of saving his wife and small children from slavers or getting his Wit-partner out of a burning stable, he chose his Wit-partner. And because of that, slavers took them. My great-grandmother lived a short, miserable time after that. My grandmother said she was a very beautiful woman. There are few worse traits for a slave to have. Her masters used her and her mistresses abused her out of jealousy. My grandmother and her two sisters witnessed it all. And grew up as slaves, used and abused. Because the man who should have made his primary bond to his wife instead chose a horse over her and his children.”

    “One man, Burrich. One man making a bad decision. Or who knows what went through his head. Did he think that if he got to the horse, it could carry his wife and children to safety? Or help him battle the slavers? We can't know. But he was only one man. That seems a small foundation upon which to condemn all the Wit.”

    He exhaled a short breath through his nose. “Fitz. His decision condemned three generations of his family. It did not seem small to anyone who bore that burden. And my grandmother feared that if I were allowed to go on as I had begun, I would do the same. Find an animal, bond to it, and put it above all other considerations. And after she died, for a time, she was right. I did exactly that. As did you. Have you never looked at your own life and said, 'Take the Wit away, and what changes?' Think on it. If Nosey had not come between you and me, would not we have been closer when you were a boy? If you had not bonded to Smithy, would you have done better with your Skill-lessons? If Nighteyes had not been in your life, could Regal have found excuse to condemn you?”

    For a moment, I was stymied. Then I replied, “But if the Wit had not been held a shameful thing, none of that would have been true. If you had spoken of it as Old Blood and taught me why I must not bond, if the Wit had been held in esteem as the Skill is, then all would have been well.”

    His face darkened with rising blood, and for a moment I glimpsed Burrich's old temper. Then, with a patience that only time could have taught him, he said quietly, “Fitz. It is a thing I was taught from the time my grandmother first discovered the taint in me. The Wit is shameful magic, and it shames a man to practice it. Now, you talk of people who practice it openly and find no disgrace in it. Well, I have heard of places where men marry their sisters and have children, where women go about with their breasts showing, where it is not accounted shameful to discard your mate simply because her youth has faded. Yet, would you teach your children that these behaviors are good? Or would you teach them to live as you yourself were taught?”

    Chade startled me when he spoke. “There are unspoken rules to every society. Most of us never question them. But surely, Burrich, you must have at some time wondered about what you were taught. Did you never decide that you would determine for yourself if the magic was worth having?”

    Burrich turned to regard Chade with his clouded eyes. What did he see? A shape, a shadow, or only his Wit-sense of the old man?

    “I always knew it was worth having, Lord Chade. But I was an adult, and I knew the cost of it. Your prince out there; what price would he have to pay for his useful, worthwhile magic if it became known that he was Witted? You deny he has it to shield him from hatred and prejudice. Do you fault me that I tried to shield Chivalry's son?”

    Chade looked down at the work of his hands and didn't answer. He had finished. Six containers, everything from flasks to saltboxes, were filled with his explosive powder and resting in kettles or pots. “I'm ready,” he said. He lifted his gaze to me and smiled a strange smile. “Let's go and free the dragon.”

    I could not read his green eyes. I could not decide if he truly intended to free the dragon from the ice or meant to blast it to pieces. Perhaps he himself didn't know. But as if his resolve were contagious, I suddenly felt tight with the need to end this.

    “How dangerous is this?” Burrich asked.

    “Just as dangerous as it was last night,” Chade replied testily.

    Burrich put out a hand and ran his fingertips lightly across the pots. “Not six times as dangerous?” he asked. “How will you do it? Will one man set them all, or six?”

    Chade thought a moment. “Six men, each to get a kettle fire going. And then Fitz, to go down the line putting the containers in each pot.”

    I nodded to the wisdom of that. Six men each judging their own time to put the powder in and flee might end up running into one another. “I'll do it.”

    I carried three of the pots and Chade carried the other three. Burrich brought the sack of fuel and a smaller kettle of coals from the guards' hoarded night fire. The day seemed very bright to me as we walked up the hill. It was warm, for that place, and the sun glinted off the glistening ice. As we walked up the hill together, Burrich asked me, “Are you sure Nettle is safe now? I do not understand the risk she took, but it seems to have frightened all of you.”

    I swallowed and admitted my guilt. “I asked her to go into the dragon's dream and wake him. Her strongest Skill-talent is the manipulation of dreams. I never paused to consider that it might be dangerous, that the dreams of a dragon might be a far different challenge than the dreams of a man.”

    “Yet still she went?” There was quiet pride in Burrich's voice.

    “Yes, she did. Because I asked her. I'm ashamed that I risked her.”

    He was silent for several strides then said, “So. She knows you, and knows you well enough to trust you. For how long?”

    “I'm not sure. It's a hard thing to explain, Burrich.” I felt a flush rise but forced myself to speak on. “I used to...look in on you. Not often. Only when it got so...It was wrong of me.”

    His silence was long. Then he said, “That must have been a special torment for you. For the most part, we have been happy.”

    I took a deep breath. “Yes. It was. Yet I never realized I was involving Nettle to do it. She was my...I don't know, my focus point, I suppose. After a time, she became aware of me. She knew me through her dreams of me, as a, as a wolf-man.” I halted, flustered.

    Burrich almost kept the amusement out of his voice as he said, “Well. That accounts for some very odd nightmares, when she was small.”

    “I didn't know I was doing it. Then, after a time, I became aware of her. In my dreams. We talked there, in the dream worlds she made. It took me a while to realize that she was manifesting the Skill, in a way I'd never seen it used before her. But I never...She doesn't, that is, she doesn't know--” And suddenly I couldn't go any further. My throat had crushed the words unsaid.

    “I know. If you had told her I wasn't her father, I'd have known.”

    I nodded wordlessly. It was strange to see how he would perceive such a telling. I thought only of telling her who her father was; Burrich saw it as telling her who was not her father.