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with the thought that they were safe and happy.’
‘Could not you reach out with the Skill, to assure yourself of that?’
The shadows of the room had deepened and the Fool’s eyes were fixed on the fire. It was as if I recounted my history to myself.
‘I could claim I learned the discipline to leave them to their privacy. In truth, I think I feared it would drive me mad, to witness love shared between them.’
I watched the fire as I spoke of those days, yet I felt the Fool’s eyes turn to me. I did not turn towards him. I did not want to see pity there. I had grown past the need for anyone’s pity.
‘I found peace,’ I told him. ‘A bit at a time, but it came to me. There was a morning when Nighteyes and I were returning from a dawn hunt. We’d had a good hunt, and taken a mountain goat that the heavy snows of winter had pushed down from the heights. The hill was steep as we worked our way down, the gutted carcass was heavy, and the skin of my face was stiff as a mask from the cold burning down from the clear blue sky. I could see a thin tendril of smoke rising from my chimney, and just beyond my hut, the foggy steam rose off the nearby hot springs. At the top of the last hill, I paused to catch my breath and stretch my back.’
It all came back so clearly to me. Nighteyes had halted beside me, panting clouds. I’d swathed my lower face in the edge of my cloak; now it was half-frozen to my beard. I looked down, and knew that we had meat for days, our small cabin was tight against winter’s cold clench, and we were nearly home. Cold and weary as I was, satisfaction was still uppermost in my mind. I hefted my kill to my shoulders. Almost home, I told Nighteyes.
Almost home, he had echoed. And in the sharing of that thought, I sensed a meaning that no man’s voice could have put into it. Home. A finality. A place to belong. The humble cottage was home now, a comforting destination where I expected to find all I needed. As I stood staring down at it, I felt a twinge of conscience as for some forgotten obligation. It took me a moment to grasp what was missing. The whole of a night had passed and I had not once thought of Molly. Where had my yearning and sense of loss gone? What sort of shallow fellow was I, to let go of that mourning and think only of the dawn’s hunting? Deliberately I turned my thoughts to the place and the people who were once encompassed in the word home.
When I wallow in something dead to reawaken the savour of it, you rebuke me.
I turned to look at Nighteyes but he refused the eye contact. He sat in the snow, ears pricked forwards towards our hut. The unpleasant little winter wind stirred his thick ruff, but could not penetrate to his skin.
Meaning? I pressed him, though his meaning was perfectly clear.
You should leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life, my brother. You may enjoy unending pain. I do not. There is no shame in walking away from bones, Changer. He finally swivelled his head to stare at me from his deep-set eyes. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.
Then he had stood, shaken his coat free of snow, and trotted resolutely down the snowy hillside. I had followed him more slowly.
Finally I glanced over at the Fool. He looked at me but his eyes were unreadable in the darkness. ‘I think that was the first bit of peace I found. Not that I take any credit for discovering it. Nighteyes had to point it out to me. Perhaps to another man it would have been obvious. Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.’
His voice was very soft in the dim room. ‘There is nothing dishonourable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.’ He shifted slightly in the dark. ‘And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them.’
I snorted softly. ‘I wish. But the most I can say is that I stopped deliberately provoking that melancholy. When summer finally came and we moved on, it was like leaving a cast-off skin.’ I let a silence follow my words.
‘So you left the Mountains and came back to Buck.’
He knew I had not; it was just his little prod to get me talking again.
‘Not right away. Nighteyes didn’t approve, but I felt I could not leave the Mountains until I had retraced some of our journey there. I went back to the quarry, back to where Verity had carved his dragon. I stood on the spot. It was just a flat, bare place hemmed by the towering quarry walls under a slate-grey sky. There was no sign of all that had happened there, just the piles of chips and a few worn tools. I walked through our campsite. I knew the flattened tents and the possessions scattered about had once been ours, but most of them had lost their significance. They were greying rags, sodden and slumped. I found a few things I took with me … the pieces for Kettle’s stone game, I took those.’ I took a breath. ‘And I walked down to where Carrod had died. His body was as we had left it, gone to bones and bits of mouldering cloth. No animals had disturbed it. They don’t like the Skill-road, you know.’
‘I know,’ he admitted quietly. I felt he had walked with me through that abandoned quarry.
‘I stood a long time looking at those bones. I tried to remember Carrod as he had been when I first met him, but I couldn’t. But looking at his bones was like a confirmation. It all had truly happened, and it all was truly finished. The events and the place, I could walk away from. I could leave it behind now and it could not get up and follow me.’
Nighteyes groaned in his sleep. I set a hand on his side, glad to feel him so near in both touch and mind. He had not approved of me visiting the quarry. He had disliked journeying along the Skill-road, even though my ability to retain my sense of self against its siren call had increased. He was even more disgruntled when I insisted I must return to the Stone Gardens as well.
There was a small sound, the chink of the bottle against the cup’s lip as the Fool replenished our brandy. His silence was an invitation for me to speak on.
‘The dragons had gone back to where we first found them. I visited them there. The forest was gradually taking them back again, grass sprouting tall around them and vines creeping over them. They were just as beautiful and just as haunting as when we first discovered them there. And just as still.’
They had broken holes in the forest canopy when they had left their slumbers and arisen to fight for Buck. Their return had been no gentler, and thus sunlight fell in shafts, penetrating the lush growth to gild each gleaming dragon. I walked amongst them, and as before, I felt the ghostly stir of Wit-life within the deeply slumbering statues. I found King Wisdom’s antlered dragon; I dared to set my bare hand to his shoulder. I felt only the finely-carved scales, cold and hard as the stone they had been carved from. They were all there: the boar dragon, the winged cat, all the widely divergent forms carved by both Elderlings and Skill coteries.
‘I saw Girl on a Dragon there.’ I smiled at the flames. ‘She sleeps well. The human figure is sprawled forwards now, her arms twined lovingly around the neck of the dragon she bestrides still.’ Her I had feared to touch; I recalled too clearly her hunger for memories, and how I had fed her with mine. Perhaps I feared as much to regain what I once had willingly given her. I slipped past her silently, but Nighteyes stalked past her, hackles abristle, showing every white tooth he possessed in a snarl. The wolf had known what I truly sought.
‘Verity,’ the Fool said softly, as if confirming my unspoken thought.
‘Verity,’ I agreed. ‘My king.’ I sighed and took up my tale.
I had found him there. When I saw Verity’s turquoise hide gleaming in the dappling summer shade, Nighteyes sat down and curled his tail tidily around his forefeet. He would come no closer. I felt the silence of his thoughts as he carefully granted me the privacy of my mind. I approached Verity-as-Dragon slowly, my heart thundering in my throat. There, in a body carved of Skill and stone, slept the man who had been my king. For his sake, I had taken hurts so grievous that both my mind and my body would bear the scars until the day I died. Yet as I drew near to the still form, I felt tears prick my eyes, and knew only longing