He took one solemnly and bit into it. “They’re sweet,” he said, as if it surprised him. With an old man’s caution, he lowered himself to the ground. I saw him run his tongue around the inside of his mouth and winced with him when he found the gap of missing teeth on one side. “Tell me what happened,” he requested quietly. So I did. I began with her guards throwing me out into the snow, and reported in as much detail as if it were Chade sitting there, nodding to my words. His face changed slowly as I began to speak about the dragons. Slowly he sat up straighter. I felt the Skill-link between us intensify as he reached for my heart to confirm what he was hearing, as if mere words could not be enough to convey it to him. Willingly, I opened myself to him and let him share my experience of that day. When I told him that Icefyre and Tintaglia had mated in flight and then disappeared, a sob shook him. But he was tearless as he asked me incredulously, “Then… we triumphed. She failed. There will be dragons in the skies of this world again.”
“Of course,” I said, and only then realized that he could not have known that. “We walk in your future now. On the path you set for us.”
He choked again, audibly. He rose stiffly and paced a turn or two. He turned back to me, his heart in his eyes. “But… I am blind here. I never foresaw any of this. Always, in every vision, if there was triumph, I bought it with my death. I always died.”
He cocked his head slowly and asked me, as if for confirmation, “I did die?”
“You did,” I admitted slowly. But I could not help the grin that crept over my face. “But, as I told you in Buckkeep, I am the Catalyst. I am the Changer.”
He stood still as stone, and when comprehension seeped into him, it was like watching a stone dragon come to wakefulness. Life infused him. He began to tremble, and this time I did not fear to take his arm and help him sit down. “The rest,” he demanded shakily. “Tell me the rest.”
And so I told him, the rest of that day, as we ate plums and drank his tea and then finished the rabbit broth from the night before. I told him what I knew of the Black Man, and his eyes grew wide. I spoke of searching for his body, and reluctantly told how I had found him. He looked aside from me as I spoke and I felt our Skill-link fade as if he would vanish from my sight if he could. Nonetheless, I told him, and told him too of my encounter with the Pale Woman. He sat rubbing his arms while I spoke of her, and when he asked, “Then, she lives still? She did not die?” his voice shook. “I did not kill her,” I admitted.
And, “Why?” he demanded shrilly, incredulously. “But why didn’t you kill her, Fitz? Why?” That outburst shocked me and I felt stupid and defensive as I said, “I don’t know. Perhaps because I thought she wanted me to.” The words seemed foolish to me, but I said them anyway. “First the Black Man and then the Pale Woman said I was the Catalyst for this time. The Changer. I did not want to cause any change to what you had done.”
For a time, silence held between us. He rocked back and forth, very slightly, breathing through his mouth. After a time, he seemed to calm, or perhaps he only deadened. Then with an effort he tried to conceal, he said, “I’m sure you did what was best, Fitz. I don’t hold it against you.”
Perhaps he meant those words, but I think it was hard for either of us to believe them just then. It dimmed the glow of his triumph and made a small shadowy wall between us. Nevertheless, I continued my account, and when I spoke of how we had come here through a Skill-pillar I’d found in the ice palace, he grew very still. “I never saw that,” he admitted with a shade of wonder. “Never even guessed it.”
The rest was quickly told. When I came to the Rooster Crown and my shock that it was not some powerful magical talisman, but only five poets frozen in time, he lifted one shoulder as if to excuse his desiring such a frivolous item. “It wasn’t for me that I wanted it,” he said quietly.
I sat silent for a moment, waiting for him to enlarge on that. When he did not, I let it go. Even when my tale was done and he realized how completely he had won, he seemed oddly muted. His triumph might have been years ago instead of mere days. The way he accepted it made it seem inevitable instead of a battle hard-won. Evening had crept up on us. My tale was done, but he made no effort to tell me of what had befallen him. I did not expect him to. Yet the quiet that followed and fell between us was like a telling. It spoke of humiliation, and the bafflement that something done to him could make him feel shamed. I understood it too well. I understood too that if I had tried to tell him that, I would have sounded condescending. Our silences lasted too long. The small sentences, my telling him that I would fetch more firewood, or his observation that the chirring of the insects was actually pleasant after our silent nights on the glacier, seemed to float like isolated bubbles on the quiet that separated us.
At last he said that he was going to bed. He entered the tent and I did the small tasks one does around a camp at night. I banked the fire so the coals would survive until the morning and tidied away our clutter. It was only when I approached the tent that I found my cloak outside it, neatly folded on the ground. I took it and made my own bed near the fire. I understood that he still struggled, and that he wished to be alone. Yet, still, it stung, mostly because I wanted him to be more healed than he was.
Night was deep and I was sleeping soundly when the first shriek burst from the tent. I sat up, my heart pounding and my hand going immediately to the sword on the ground beside me. Before I could draw it from the sheath, the Fool burst from the tent, eyes wide and hair wild. The panic of his breathing shook his entire body and his mouth hung wide in his effort to gulp down air.
“What is it?” I demanded, and he started again, flinching back from me. Then he appeared to come to himself and to recognize my shadow by the banked fire.
“It’s nothing. It was a bad dream.” And then he clutched his elbows and bent over his crossed arms, rocking slightly as if some terrible pain gnawed at his vitals. After a moment, he admitted, “I dreamed she came through the pillar. I woke up and thought I saw her standing over me in the tent.”
“I don’t think she knows what a Skill-pillar is, or how it works,” I offered him. Then I heard how uncertain a reassurance that was, and wished I had said nothing.
He did not reply. Instead he came shivering through the mild night to stand close to the fire. Without asking him, I leaned over and put more wood on it. He stood, hugging himself and watching as the flames woke and took hold of the fuel. Then he said apologetically, “I can’t go back in there tonight. I can’t.” I didn’t say anything, but spread my cloak wider on the ground. Cautious as a cat, he approached it. He did not speak as he lowered himself awkwardly to the ground and stretched out between me and the fire. I lay still, waiting for him to relax. The fire mumbled to itself, and despite myself, my eyes grew heavy again. I was just starting the slide toward sleep when he spoke quietly.
“Do you ever get over it? Did you ever get past it?” He asked me so earnestly for there to be a tomorrow that did not possess that shadow.
I told the hardest truth I had ever had to utter. “No. You don’t. I didn’t. You won’t. But you do go on. It becomes a part of you, like any scar. You will go on.”
That night, as we slept back to back beneath the stars on my old cloak, I felt him shudder, and then twitch and fight in his sleep. I rolled to face him. Tears slid gleaming down his cheeks and he struggled wildly, promising the night, “Please, stop. Stop! Anything, anything. Only please, please stop!”
I touched him and he gave a wild shriek and fought me savagely for an instant. Then he came awake, gasping. I released him and he immediately rolled free of me. On hands and knees, he scuttled away from me, over the stone of the plaza to the forest edge, where he hung his head like a sick dog and retched, over and over, trying to choke up the cowardly words he had said. I did not go to him. Not then.