Let me see if I can guess yours, I offered playfully. It pleased me unreasonably to think of my daughter in love and treasuring that first secret realization. I hoped the young man was worthy of her.
She looked alarmed. No. Stay away from it. It isn’t even mine. It was only entrusted to me.
Has a young man, perhaps, spoken his heart to you? I hazarded merrily.
Her eyes widened in dismay. Go away! Don’t guess. A wind stirred the tree branches above her head. We both looked up just as the blue bird changed into a bright blue lizard. Its silver eyes sparkled and whirled as it scuttled closer, coming down the trunk almost to her hair. ‘Tell me,’ it chirruped. ‘I love secrets!’
She looked at me disdainfully. Your ruse does not deceive me. She flapped a hand at the lizard. Go away, pest.
Instead the creature leapt into her hair. It dug its claws in, tangling itself in her tresses. It grew suddenly larger, the size of a cat, and wings sprouted from its shoulders. Nettle shrieked and swatted at it, but it clung there. It lifted its head, suddenly at the end of a long neck and regarded me with spinning sliver eyes. Small but perfect, a blue dragon sneered at me. Its voice changed terribly. Alien and freezing, it rasped against my soul. ‘Tell me your secret, Dream Wolf!’ it demanded. Tell me of a black dragon and an island! Tell me now or I tear her head from her shoulders.’
The voice tried to set hooks in me. It endeavored to seize me and know me exactly as I was. I sprang to my feet and shook myself. I willed the wolf to fly free of me so that I could escape the dream, but it held me. I felt the creature’s regard, the prying of another mind at mine, as it demanded silently that I give up my true name.
Suddenly, Nettle stood up. Reaching out, she seized the hissing creatures in both hands and glared at me. It’s only a dream. This is only a dream. You will not trick any secrets from me this way. This is only a dream and I break it and I awake. NOW!
I do not know what she did. It was not so much that she shifted her shape out of the dream as that she trapped the dragon. It became blue glass in her hands, and then she flung it from her. It struck the soil at my feet and exploded in a storm of sharp fragments. The pain of the cuts it dealt me jabbed me back into wakefulness. I sat up with a gasp, throttling Chade’s old blanket between my hands, then sprang from the bed and brushed my hands down my chest, expecting to sweep away shards of glass and feel the sting of bloody cuts. But there was only sweat. I shivered suddenly, and then shook as with an ague and spent the rest of the night sitting up before the fire wrapped in a blanket and staring into the flames. Try as I might, I could make no sense of what I had experienced. What parts were a dream, what parts a Skill-sharing with Nettle? I could not draw any lines, and I feared. I feared not only that something from the Skill-current had found us both, but also I feared the Skill-talent I had sensed in Nettle as she had saved us both from its deadly regard.
I told no one of that dream. I knew what Chade’s answer would be to my concerns. ‘Bring the girl to Buckkeep where we can protect her. Teach her to Skill.’ I would not. It had just been the bizarre ending to a dream in which my worst fears mingled. With all the strength I possessed, I believed that, as if my belief could make it the truth.
By daylight, it was easier to shelve those fears. I had many other concerns to occupy me, and much to arrange before my departure. I went down to Gindast and paid far ahead on Hap’s education. My lad seemed to be prospering at his apprenticeship. Gindast himself told me that the boy surprised him almost daily. ‘Now that he has put his mind to his learning,’ he added heavily, and I heard there the master’s rebuke of my slovenly parenting. But it was Hap who had applied the discipline to himself, and I gave him full credit for it. Every third or fourth day, I would make time in my schedule to visit him at least briefly. We did not speak of Svanja, only of how his work progressed and the approaching Springfest and the like. I had not yet told him that I would be leaving Buckkeep with the Prince. If I had, I was sure he would tell the other apprentices and perhaps pass it on to Jinna as well, for he was still occasionally a guest in her home. Habit made me wish to keep my travelling plans quiet until close to my departure date. Just as well not to connect me with the Prince, I told myself. I did not want to admit that part of that was my own dread at being parted from my foster son for that long, especially as I expected to be going into danger.
I had taken the Fool’s warning to heart. In addition to raiding Chade’s armoury for an impressive array of small and deadly items, I had undertaken modifying my clothing to accommodate them. It was a lengthy and frustrating process and I often missed the Fool’s deft suggestions and defter hands. I saw little of him in those days. I might glimpse Lord Golden about the halls and courtyards of the keep, but other young and dashing nobles of the court always accompanied him. The halls of Buckkeep seemed to be swarming with such youngsters. The Prince’s quest seemed to have a fascination for a certain type of young man, one eager both to prove himself and to spend his ancestral fortune on amusing himself at the same time. They were attracted to Lord Golden as moths are to a lamp. Then I heard a rumour that Lord Golden was completely enraged that Chalcedean vessels were disrupting trade and delaying the arrival of the Jamaillian cloaks that he had specially commissioned for the Outislander expedition wardrobe. They were, according to gossip, to have been patterned with dragons in black, blue and silver thread.
I asked Chade about it. He had come up to the tower that evening to help me work on speaking basic Outislander. The language shared many words with the common tongue of the Six Duchies, but the Outislanders twisted them and spoke gutturally. My throat was sore from my attempts. ‘Did you know that Lord Golden still plans to accompany us?’ I asked him.
‘Well, I’ve given him no reason to think otherwise. Use your head, Fitz. He’s a very resourceful man. As long as he thinks he will simply take ship with the Prince, he will make no alternate arrangements. And the less time we give that one to think of alternate arrangements, the less chance that he can circumvent our will.’
‘I thought you said you could prevent him from taking ship from Buckkeep.’
‘I did. I can. But he seems to have a goodly supply of coin at his command, Fitz, and that can make many things possible. Why give him any extra time to plan?’ He glanced away from me. ‘When the time comes to board, he will simply be told that there has been a miscalculation. There is no room for him. Perhaps he can follow on a later vessel. But I will be sure that there are no such vessels with available space.’
I was silent for a time. I tried to imagine that scene, and winced. Then I said softly, ‘It seems a hard way to treat a friend.’
‘We treat him thus precisely because he is your friend. You were the one who wished him stopped. He told you he had foreseen his death on Aslevjal, and that you must somehow prevent the Prince from slaying the black dragon. As I told you then, I put little weight on either event happening. If Lord Golden does not accompany us, he cannot die there. Nor can he provoke you into interfering with Dutiful’s mission. I doubt it will be much of an adventure, anyway. He will have missed only some cold and difficult work. I think that the Prince’s “slaying” may be no more than chopping free the head of something that was buried in the ice ages ago. How are you two getting along lately?’
He added the final question so adroitly that I answered it without thinking. ‘Not well and not poorly. Mostly I don’t see much of him.’ I looked down at my fingers and scraped at a hanging nail. ‘It’s as if he has become someone else, someone I don’t know very well. And would have no reason to know, in this life we live now.’