“No!” Kettle cried, aghast, but the Fool was already reaching for me like a man in a dream. He took my hand in his right hand. Then he laid three silver fingertips against my upturned wrist. As I felt the cold burn of his fingers on my wrist, I reached over and grabbed Kettle’s hand. “KESTREL!” I cried aloud. I felt the stir of her, and I pulled her into us.
I was the Fool and the Fool was me. He was the Catalyst and so was I. We were two halves of a whole, sundered and come together again. For an instant I knew him in his entirety, complete and magical, and then he was pulling apart from me laughing, a bubble inside me, separate and unknowable, yet joined to me. You do love me! I was incredulous. He had never truly believed it before. Before, it was words. I always feared it was born of pity. But you are truly my friend. This is knowing. This is feeling what you feel for me. So this is the Skill. For a moment he reveled in simple recognition.
Abruptly, another joined us. Ah, little brother, you find your ears at last! My kill is ever your kill, and we shall be pack forever!
The Fool recoiled at the wolf’s friendly onslaught. I thought he would break the circle. Then suddenly he leaned into it. This? This is Nighteyes? This mighty warrior, this great heart?
How to describe that moment? I had known Nighteyes so completely for so long, it shocked me to see how little the Fool had known of him.
Hairy? That was how you saw me? Hairy and drooling?
Your pardon. This from the Fool, quite sincerely. I am honored to know you as you are. I had never suspected such nobility within you. Their mutual approval was almost overwhelming.
Then the world settled around us. We have a task, I reminded them. The Fool lifted his touch from my wrist, leaving behind three silver prints on my skin. Even the air pressed too heavily against that mark. For a time, I had been somewhere else. Now I was once more within my own body. It all had taken but moments.
I turned back to Kettle. It was an effort to look only through my eyes. I still gripped her hand. “Kestrel?” I said quietly. She lifted her gaze to mine. I looked at her and tried to see her as she had once been. I do not think she even knew then of that tiny hair of Skill between us. In the moment of her shock at the Fool touching me, I had pressed past her guard. It was too fine a line to be called a thread. But I now knew what choked it. “All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don’t you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out.”
I caught at the Fool’s wrist and held him beside me. Somewhere I felt Nighteyes as well. They were back within their own minds, but I could reach them easily. I drew strength from them, carefully, slowly. I drew their strength and love and turned it against Kettle, trying to force it into her through that tiny chink in her armor.
Tears began to trickle down her seamed cheeks. “I can’t. That is the hardest part. I can’t. They burned me to punish me. But it was not enough. It would never be enough. I can never forgive myself.”
Skill was starting to seep from her as she reached to me, trying to make me understand. She reached, to clasp my hand between both of hers. Her pain flowed through that clasp to me. “Who could forgive you then?” I found myself asking.
“Gull. My sister Gull!” The name was torn from her, and I sensed she had refused to think of it, let alone utter it, for years. Her sister, not just her coterie-mate, but her sister. And she had killed her in a fury when she had found her with Stanchion. The leader of the coterie?
“Yes,” she whispered, though no words were needed between us now. I was past the burn wall. Strong, handsome Stanchion. Making love to him, body and Skill, an experience of oneness like no other. But then she had come upon them, him and Gull, together, and she had . . .”
“He should have known better,” I cried out indignantly. “You were sisters and members of his own coterie. How could he have done that to you? How could he?”
“Gull!” she cried out loud, and for an instant I saw her. She was behind a second wall. Both of them were. Kestrel and Gull. Two little girls, running barefoot down a sandy shore, just out of reach of the icy waves licking up the sand. Two little girls, as like as apple pips, their father’s joy, twins, racing to meet the little boat coming in to shore, hurrying to see what Papa had caught in his nets today. I smelled the salt wind, the iodine of the tangled, squidgy kelp as they dashed through it squealing. Two little girls, Gull and Kestrel, locked and hidden behind a wall inside her. But I could see them even if she could not.
I see her, I know her. And she knew you, through and through. Lightning and thunder, your mother called you, for while your temper flashed and was gone, Gull could carry a grudge for weeks. But not against you, Kestrel. Never against you, and not for years. She loved you, more than either of you loved Stanchion. As you loved her. And she would have forgiven you. She would never have wished this on you.
I . . . don’t know.
Yes, you do. Look at her. Look at you. Forgive yourself. And let the part of her within you live again. Let yourself live again.
She is within me?
Most certainly. I see her, I feel her. It must be so.
What do you feel? Cautiously.
Only love. See for yourself. I took her deep inside her mind, to the places and memories she had denied to herself. It was not the burn walls her coterie had imposed on her that had hurt her most. It was the ones she had put up between herself and the memory of what she had lost in a moment of fury. Two girls, older now, wading out to seize the line their father threw to them, and helping to pull his laden boat up onto the beach. Two Buck girls, still as alike as apple pips, wanting to be the first ones to tell their Papa they had been chosen for Skilltraining.
Papa said we were one soul in two bodies.
Open, then, and let her out. Let both of you out to live.
I fell silent, waiting. Kestrel was in a part of her memories she had denied for longer than other folk lived. A place of fresh wind and girlish laughter, and a sister so like yourself you scarcely needed to speak to one another. The Skill had been between them from the moment they were born.
I see what I must do now. I felt her overwhelming surge of joy and determination. I must let her out, I must put her into the dragon. She will live forever in the dragon, just as we planned it. The two of us, together again.
Kettle stood up, letting go of my hands so suddenly that I cried out at the shock. I found myself back in my body. I felt I had fallen there from a very great distance. The Fool and Nighteyes were still near me, but no longer a part of a circle. I could scarcely feel them for all else I felt. Skill. Racing through me like a riptide. Skill. Emanating from Kettle like heat from a smith’s furnace. She glowed with it. She wrung her hands, smiled at the straightened fingers.
“You should go and rest now, Fitz,” she told me gently. “Go on. Go to sleep.”
A gentle suggestion. She did not know her own Skillstrength. I lay back and knew no more.