I looked idly around myself. I nearly recognized the shape of the land. It was spring and close by apple trees were in bloom. I could hear bees busy amongst the blossoms. There was soft green grass under my bare feet and a gentle air moved through my hair.
I’ve come so often to your dreams, and watched what you did. I thought I would invite you to one of mine. Do you like it?
There was a woman beside me. No, a girl. Someone. It was hard to tell. I could see her dress and her little leather shoes, and her weather-browned hands but the rest of her was fogged. I could not resolve her features. As for myself … it was strange. I could behold myself, as if I stood outside myself, and yet it was not the me that I saw when I looked in a mirror. I was a shaggy-haired man, much taller than I truly am, and far more strong. My rough grey hair spilled down my back and hung over my brow. The nails of my hands were black, and my teeth were pointed in my mouth. Uneasiness nibbled at me. Danger here, but not to me. Why couldn’t I remember what the danger was?
This isn’t me. This isn’t right.
She laughed fondly. Well, if you won’t let me see you as you are, then you’ll just have to be how I’ve always imagined you. Shadow Wolf, why have you stayed away? I’ve missed you. And I’ve feared for you. I felt your great pain, but I do not know what it was. Are you hurt? There seems less of you than there was. And you seem tired and older. I’ve missed you and your dreams. I was so scared you were dead, and then you didn’t come any more. It’s taken me forever to discover that I could reach out to you instead of waiting for you to come to me.
She chattered like a child. A very real and wakeful dismay crept through me. It was like a cold mist in my heart, and then I saw it, a mist rising around me in the dream. Somehow, without knowing how, I had summoned it. I willed it thicker and stronger around me. I tried to warn her. This isn’t right. Or good. Stay back, stay away from me.
That isn’t fair! She wailed as the mist became a wall between us. Her thoughts reached me more faintly. Look what you’ve done to my dream. It was so hard to make and now you’ve spoiled it. Where are you going? You are so rude!
I twitched free of her failing grip on me, and found I could wake up. In fact, I was already awake, and an instant later I was sitting on the edge of my cot. My combing fingers stood up what was left of my hair. I was almost ready for the Skill-pain when it lurched through my belly and slammed against the cap of my skull. I took deep, steadying breaths, resolved not to vomit. When some little time had passed, a minute or half a year, I could scarcely tell which, I painstakingly began to reinforce my Skill-walls. Had I been careless? Had weariness or my exposure to Smoke dropped them?
Or was my daughter simply strong enough to break through them?
A storm of gems they were.
Scaled wings jewel-like glittered.
Eyes flaming, wings fanning
The dragons came.
Too flashing bright for memory to hold.
The promise of a thousand songs fulfilled.
Claws shredding, jaws devouring
The King returned.
Verity’s Reckoning – Starling Birdsong
Air stirred against my cheek. I opened my eyes wearily. I had dozed off, despite the open window and chill morning. Before and below me stretched a vista of water. Waves tipped with white wrinkled under a grey sky. I got up from Verity’s chair with a groan; two steps carried me to the tower window. From here, the view was wider, showing me the steep cliffs and the clinging forest below this aspect of Buckkeep castle. There was the taste of a storm in the air, and the wind was cutting its winter teeth. The sun was a hand’s-breadth above the far horizon, dawn long fled. The Prince had not come.
I was not surprised. Dutiful was probably still deeply asleep after last night’s festivities. No, it was no surprise that he should forget our meeting, or perhaps rouse just enough to decide it wasn’t that important and roll back into sleep. Yet I felt some disappointment, and it was not just that my prince had found sleep more important than meeting me. He had said he would meet me here, and then hadn’t. And had not even sent word to cancel the meeting and save me the time and trouble of being here. It was a trifling thing in a boy of his years, a bit of thoughtlessness. Yet what was minor in a boy was not so in a prince. I wanted to rebuke him for it, as Chade would have chastened me. Or Burrich. I grinned ruefully. In fairness, had I been any different at Dutiful’s age? Burrich had never trusted me to keep dawn appointments. I could well recall how he would thunder at my door to be sure I did not miss a lesson with the axe. Well, perhaps if our roles had been different, I would have gone and pounded on the Prince’s chamber door.
As it was, I contented myself with a message, drawn in the dust on the top of a small table beside the chair. ‘I was here; you were not.’ Brief and succinct, a rebuke if he chose to take it that way. And anonymous. It could just as easily have been a sulky page’s note to a tardy chambermaid.
I closed the window shutters and let myself out by the way I had come, through a side panel in the decorative mantel around the hearth. It was a narrow squeeze and it was tricky to properly seal it closed behind me. My candle had gone out. I descended a long and gloomy stair, sparsely lit by tiny chinks in the outer wall that let in thin fingers of light and wind. There was a level section that I negotiated through pitch dark; it seemed far longer than I recalled, and I was glad when my groping foot found the next stair. I made a wrong turn at the bottom of it. The third time I walked into a faceful of cobwebs, I knew I was lost. I turned around and groped my way back. When, some time later, I emerged into Chade’s chamber from behind the wine rack, I was dusty and irritable and sweaty. I was ill prepared for what met me there.
Chade started up from his seat before the hearth, setting down a teacup as he did so. ‘There you are, FitzChivalry,’ he exclaimed, even as a wave of Skill slammed into me.
Don’t see me, stink dog man.
I staggered and then caught at the table to remain standing. I ignored Chade, who was scowling at me, to focus on Thick. The idiot serving-man, his face smudged with soot, stood by the work-hearth. His figure wavered before my eyes and I felt giddy. If I had not reset my walls the night before to guard against Nettle’s Skill tinkering, I think he would have been able to wipe all image of himself from my mind. As it was, I spoke through gritted teeth.
‘I do see you. I will always see you. But that does not mean I will hurt you. Unless you try to hurt me. Or unless you are rude to me again.’ I was sorely tempted to try the Wit on him, to repel at him with a burst of sheer animal energy, but I did not. I would not use the Skill. I would have had to open my walls to do so, and it would have revealed to him what my strength was. I was not yet ready for that. Remain calm, I told myself. You have to master yourself before you can master him.
‘No, no, Thick! Stop that. He’s good. He can be here. I say so.’
Chade spoke to him as if he were three years old. And while I recognized that the small eyes in the round face that glowered at me were not the eyes of a man my intellectual equal, I also saw a flash of resentment there at being thus addressed. I seized on it, keeping my gaze on Thick’s face but speaking to Chade.
‘You don’t need to talk to him like that. He isn’t stupid. He’s …’ I groped for a word to express what I suddenly was certain of. Thick’s intelligence might be limited in some ways, but it was there. ‘… different,’ I ended lamely. Different,