LITMIR.BIZ

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did not watch as Amber discarded her skirts and wiped paint from her face. When I felt someone sit down on the edge of the bed, it was the Fool in plain leggings and a simple shirt. He had brought a teacup from the table. ‘And you still dare not venture to help any of the dragon-touched folk? Not even with the smallest complaint? Scales growing down over the eyes, for example?’

      I sighed. I tapped the neck of the bottle light on the edge of his teacup to warn him, and then filled it well. ‘I know the man you speak of. He has come twice to talk to me, once to beg, once with coin. Fool, I dare not. I am besieged by the Skill. If I open my gates to it, I will fall.’ I moved over on the bed. He took two generous sips from his cup to lower the level of the brandy before taking a place beside me. I set the bottle on the bed between us.

      ‘And you cannot reach out to Nettle or Dutiful at all?’ He leaned back on the pillows beside me and held the teacup in both hands on his chest.

      ‘I dare not,’ I repeated. ‘Think of it this way. If there is water sloshing in my boat, I don’t drill a hole in the bottom to let it out. For then the ocean would surge in.’ He did not reply. I shifted in the bed and added, ‘I wish you could see how beautiful this chamber is. It is night in here, with the stars illuminated on the ceiling, and the walls have become a shadowed forest.’ I hesitated, needing to ease into the topic. Do it. ‘It makes me grieve for Aslevjal. The Pale Woman’s soldiers destroyed so much beauty there. I wish I could have seen it as it was.’

      The Fool held a long silence. Then he said, ‘Prilkop often spoke of the beauty that was lost when she invaded Aslevjal and made it hers.’

      ‘Then he was there before she was?’

      ‘Oh, long before. He’s very old. Was very old.’ His voice went dark with dread.

      ‘How old?’

      He made a small, amused noise. ‘Ancient, Fitz. He was there before IceFyre buried himself. It shocked him that the dragon would do so, but he dared not oppose him. IceFyre was seized by the idea that he must burrow into the ice and die there. The glacier had claimed most of Aslevjal when Prilkop first arrived there. Some few Elderlings still came and went, but not for long.’

      ‘How could anyone live that long?’ I demanded.

      ‘He was a true White, Fitz. Of a much older and purer bloodline than existed when I was born. Whites are long-lived and terribly hard to kill. You have to work at it to kill a White or permanently disable one. As the Pale Woman did with me.’ He sipped noisily from his teacup, and then tipped it to take a healthy drink from it. ‘What they did to me in Clerres … it would have killed you, Fitz. Or any other human. But they knew that, and were always careful not to go too far. No matter how much I hoped they would.’ He drank again.

      I’d come to the topic I wanted to explore but not by the path I’d hoped. I could already feel the tension in him. I looked around and asked, ‘Where is that bottle?’

      ‘It’s here.’ He groped beside him on the bed then passed it to me, and I tipped a bit into my glass. He held out his cup and I sloppily refilled it.

      He scowled as he shook brandy from his fingertips, and then sipped it down to where it would not spill. For a time, neither of us spoke. I counted his breaths, and heard them slow and become deeper.

      Beside me in the darkness, he lifted his gloved hand. He let the teacup balance on his chest by itself. Gingerly he pulled at the fingertips of the glove with his other hand, until his silvered hand was bared. He held it up and turned it first one way and then the other. ‘Can you see it?’ I asked him curiously.

      ‘Not as you do. But I can perceive it.’

      ‘Does it hurt? Thymara said it would kill you, and Spark told me that Thymara is one of the few Elderlings allowed to work with Silver and knows more of it than anyone. Not that she has mastered the artful way of the old Elderlings.’

      ‘Really? I had not heard that.’

      ‘She attempts to learn from the memories stored in the city. But it is dangerous to listen too closely to them. Lant hears the city whisper. Spark hears it singing. I’ve warned them to avoid deliberate contact with places where memories are stored.’ I sighed. ‘But I am certain they have at least sampled some of what is there.’

      ‘Oh, yes. Spark told me that some of the serving girls do nothing in their free time except seek out the erotic remembrances that a certain Elderling left stored in a statue of herself. Malta and Reyn disapprove, and with reason. Years ago, I heard a rumour about the Khuprus family, that Reyn’s father spent too much time in a buried Elderling city among such stones. He died of it. Or rather, he became immersed in it and then his body died from lack of care. They call it drowning in memories.’ He sipped from his cup.

      ‘And we call it drowning in the Skill. August Farseer.’ I spoke aloud the name of a cousin long lost.

      ‘And Verity, in a much more dramatic way. He did not drown in someone else’s memories but submerged himself in a dragon, taking all his memories with him.’

      I was quiet for a time, thinking about his words. I lifted my glass to my lips and then paused to say, ‘A hedge-witch once told me that all magic is related—like a circle—and people may have this arc of it, or that. No one gets it all. I’ve got the Skill and the Wit, but I can’t scry. Chade can, or could. I think. He never fully admitted it to me. Jinna could make charms for people, but despised my Wit as a dirty magic …’ I watched his silvered hand turning. ‘Fool. Why did you silver your hand? And why did you ask for more Silver?’

      He sighed. His free hand shook out his glove and held it open as his silvered hand crept into it. He took up his cup in both hands. ‘To have the magic, Fitz. To be able to use the pillars more easily. To be able to shape wood again, as I once did. To touch someone or something and know it, from the bones out, as I once could.’ He drew in a deep breath and sighed it out. ‘When they tormented me … When they skinned my hand …’ He faltered. He took a slow sip of his brandy and said in a careless voice, ‘When I had no Skill on my fingers, I missed it. I wanted it back.’

      ‘Thymara said it would kill you.’

      ‘It was slow death for Verity and Kettle. They knew it. They raced to create the dragon and enter it before the Silver could kill them.’

      ‘But you lived for years with Silver on your fingertips.’

      ‘And you bore the marks of my fingers on your wrist for years. You didn’t die of it. Nor has Malta from my touch on her neck.’

      ‘Why not?’

      He scowled at his teacup and drank to lower the level of brandy in it before he shifted onto his side to face me. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps because I am not fully human. Perhaps because of the White heritage. Perhaps because you were trained to master the Skill. Perhaps because for you, like Malta, it was the barest brush of Silver on your skin. Or, for her, perhaps Tintaglia’s dragon-changes made her immune.’ He smiled. ‘So perhaps because there is something of a dragon in you. Elderling blood, from long ago. I suspect it entered the bloodlines of the Farseers when the first Holder came to the shores of what would be Buck. Perhaps the walls of Buckkeep are not as heavily infused with Skill as the walls of Kelsingra, but we both know there is some of it, in the Skill-pillars and in the oldest stones of the castle. Perhaps you are immune to it because you grew up with it, or perhaps you were born that way.’ He shook his head against the bed that had relaxed to cushion him. ‘We don’t know. But I think this,’ he held his gloved hand aloft and rubbed his fingertips together, ‘will be very useful to me when we reach Clerres.’

      ‘And the vials of Silver you asked for?’

      ‘Truthfully, I wished them for a friend. To improve his lot in life. And perhaps to win a favour of him.’

      I trickled some brandy into my glass and refilled his teacup. We both drank. ‘Do I know this friend?’

      He laughed aloud. It was a sound that had become so rare that I smiled to hear it, even when I did not know the reason.

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