And so Lord Golden was allowed to claim what was left of me. He sent two serving-men to fetch me home. Stinking and semi-conscious, I was loaded onto a litter for a cold and jolting trip up to Buckkeep Castle. I did not know the men who came to fetch me, and they cared little for me. I felt each step they took, and would have wept if I had had the strength. The pain was such that it kept jolting me back to wakefulness. The stoutly-muscled men who trudged up the hill commented that they were grateful for the cold, still air, for it made the smell of my pus-running wound less. They delivered me to Lord Golden’s door. He held a scented handkerchief over his mouth and nose as he commanded them to put me on my bed. Then he paid the men generously and thanked them for bringing me home to die. In the blackness of my closed room, I shut my eyes and tried to do just that.

Fragments of speech whirled like falling leaves in my memory. They flowed into my head and filled it up like other people’s furniture moved into a once-familiar room. I could not disengage from them. Something held me there as firmly as the hand that gripped mine.

‘… Can’t move him again, even if you could get a litter up those stairs. You’ll have to do it here.’

‘I don’t know how. I don’t know how. I don‘t know how!’ This from Dutiful. ‘Eda and El, Chade, I’m not being stubborn. Don’t you think I’d save him if I could? But I don’t know how; I’m not even sure what you’re asking me to do.’

Stinks worse than dogshit now. Thick was bored and wished he were anywhere else.

Chade, patiently explaining it yet again. 'It doesn't matter that you don't know how. He's going to die if we don't do anything. If you try and it kills him, well, at least it will be quicker than what he's enduring now. Now, I want you to look at these drawings carefully. They are my own work, from years ago. This shows you what those organs should look like, intact…

I fell away from them. Blessed blackness for a time. Just as I found the snow-rounded hills, they tugged me back. Their hands were on me. My clothing was cut away. Someone retched, and Chade, tight-breathed, told them to get out of the room until called for. Then, harsh rags, water both cold and hot on my wound and close at hand a woman said sadly, 'It's hopelessly foul. Can't we just let him go peacefully?

'No! I thought the voice was King Shrewd's. Then I knew it could not be. It must be Chade, sounding so like his brother. 'Get the Prince back in here. It's time.

Then I felt Dutiful's icy hands on my hot flesh, set to either side of the wound. 'Just Skill into his body, Chade told him. 'Skill into him, look at what is wrong, and fix it.

'I don't know how, Dutiful repeated, but I felt him try. His mind battered against mine like a moth against a lamp's chimney. He was trying to reach my thoughts, not my body. I pushed feebly at him. That was a mistake.

For a moment, our minds touched and linked. No. I told him. No. Leave me alone.

His hands went away. 'He doesn't want us to do this, Dutiful reported uncertainly.

‘I don’t care! Chade’s voice was furious. ‘He isn’t allowed to die. I won’t permit it.’ Suddenly, the words were louder, shouted right by my ear. ‘Fitz, do you hear me? Do you hear me, boy? I’m not going to let you die, so you might as well cooperate. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and fight to live.’

‘Fitz?’ There was wonder and horror in Dutiful’s voice.

A crack of silence opened. Then, harshly, Chade explained. ‘He was born a bastard, just as I was. It’s long been a joke between us, that the word only stings when it comes from someone who doesn’t wear it also.’

Feeble, Chade. Feeble, I wanted to tell him, and Dutiful knows you too well to be taken in by it.

Someone stroked the hair back from my brow and took my hand. I thought it was the Fool. I tried to tighten my hand on his slender one, to somehow let him know that I would beg his pardon if I could. I suddenly thought of all the persons that I hadn’t bid farewell. Hap. Kettricken. Burrich and Molly. I’d always meant to make everything right with everyone before I died. ‘Patience, mother, I said, but no one heard me. Perhaps I didn’t even speak the words aloud.

‘Show me the picture,’ Lord Golden said. He let go of my hand and I swung abruptly into the blackness. I fell until I died. From the pillowed brow of a snow hilly, I glimpsed the summerland. A flash of grey moved in the tall grasses. Nighteyes! I called to him. He turned and looked back at me. He showed his teeth in a snarl, warning me back. I tried to move forward but again I was drawn back up to the surface. I thrashed helplessly, a fish on a line, but my body moved not at all.

‘… done it before. At least, something like it. I was there when he used the Skill to heal his wolf. And years ago, I studied how a man’s body is put together. And I don’t have the Skill, myself, but I know Fi—Tom. If you can use the Skill through me, I’m willing to allow that.’ The Fool was insistent.

‘I have to use the privy.’

‘Go, then, Thick, but come right back. Understand me? Come right back here when you have.’ I can hear annoyance in Chade’s voice. And uncertainty. ‘Well, what can it hurt? Go ahead. Try.’

Then I felt the Fool’s touch on my back. If Dutiful’s hands had been cold to my fevered skin, then the Fool’s fingers were as icicles. Their jabbing ice probed me. All eternity paused in anticipation of that dreaded, desired touch.

Long ago, the Fool had accompanied me into the Mountains on the quest to find Verity. In helping me tend our exhausted king, he had carelessly let his fingers come into contact with Verity’s Skill-silvered hands. That physical manifestation of the Skill-magic had gleamed like quicksilver. The contact with the pure magic had jolted the Fool and forever marked him. The silvering magic had faded with time, yet enough of it remained on his fingertips that I had seen the Fool use it in his woodcarving. It allowed him to know, intimately, whatever those fingers touched, be it wood or plant or beast. Or me. Long ago, he had left his fingerprints on my wrist. Lord Golden’s gloves always kept his Skill-fingers covered, protected from casual contact. Yet now the hands that touched the skin of my back were bared.

I knew the instant that his Skill-coated fingers made contact with my skin. Like little cold knives his touch plunged into me, cutting more sharply than the sword which had stirred my guts. It was neither pain nor pleasure; it was connection, pure and simple, as if we shared a skin. I lay still under that scrutiny, lacking even the strength to tremble, as I prayed he would go no further. I need not have feared. I felt the Fool’s honor in that touch, an honor that was like armour between us. It was only my body he probed, not my heart or mind. I knew then with terrible guilt how my earlier accusations had wronged my friend. He would never seek anything from me that I did not first offer him. I heard him speak, and the words echoed through, me even as they washed against my ears.

‘I can see the damage, Chade. The muscles are like snapped cords that have pulled back on themselves. And where the blade cut him, there is rot and poison leaking from his own guts. His blood carries it through his body. It is not just this wound that is toxic. The wrongness gleams throughout his whole body, like dye spreading through water or decay that has reached up through a tree. It has overwhelmed him, Chade. The trouble is not just here, where the blade went in, but in other places where his own body tries to make it right and instead succumbs to the poison.’

‘Can you repair it? Can you heal his body?’ Chade’s voice seemed choked and weak, but it could have been because the Fool’s thoughts seemed so thunderously loud.

‘No. I can see what is wrong but perceiving damage does not mend it. He is not a chunk of wood, so I cannot simply carve the rot away from what is sound.’ The Fool fell silent, but I felt how he struggled within that silence. Then he spoke in a voice full of despair. ‘We have failed him. He’s dying.’