Even looking at his back, I knew that Chade pulled now at his chin considering. He glanced over at the Queen. Whatever he saw in her face made up his mind. ‘Lords and ladies, I suggest we end this audience for the time being. Let our fair and gracious queen discuss your offer with her nobles. Chambers have been prepared for you. Enjoy our hospitality.’ I could hear the faint smile that came into his voice as he added, ‘Any of the minstrels we have provided will be happy to enlighten you, in song or story, about the dragons of the Six Duchies. Perhaps when next we meet, all our tempers will be evened with song and rest.’
Dismissed so firmly, the Bingtown envoys could do little but withdraw. The Queen and Prince Dutiful departed next. Chade lingered amongst the nobles; he seemed to be arranging a time for all to sit down and discuss the Bingtown proposal. The Duke of Shoaks was striding about, visibly excited, while the Duchess of Beams stood, tall and silent, her arms crossed before her breast as if denying any interest at all. I leaned back from the peephole, letting the flap of leather fall. ‘Let us go,’ I whispered to the Fool, and he nodded in silent agreement.
I took up our candle again, and we negotiated the narrow warren of rat-runs that threaded Buckkeep’s walls. I did not take him directly back to my chamber, but instead stopped at Chade’s old tower room. Immediately inside the room, the Fool halted. He closed his eyes for a moment, and then took a deep breath. ‘It has not changed much since the last time I was here,’ he said in a choked voice.
I used my candle to kindle the waiting ones on the table. I added another piece of wood to the coals on the hearth. ‘I imagine Chade brought you here the night King Shrewd was murdered.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I had encountered Chade before, and conversed with him over the years. The first time I met him was shortly after I came to King Shrewd. Chade would come by night, to speak with the King. Sometimes they played dice together; did you know that? Mostly they sat by the fire and drank fine brandy and talked whatever danger was currently confronting the kingdom. That was how I first heard of your existence. In a fireside conversation between those two. My heart pounded until I thought I would faint as I understood what their words meant to me. They scarcely noticed me listening. They thought me but a child, perhaps lacking in true wit and I had taken care initially to appear to have little mastery of your language.’ He shook his head to himself. ‘Such a strange time in my life. So significant and portentous, and yet, sheltered by King Shrewd, it was the closest I ever came to having a true childhood.’
I found two cups and Chade’s current bottle of brandy. I set them out at the table and poured for us. The Fool lifted an eye to that. ‘This early in the day?’
I shrugged. ‘It seems later to me than it is, perhaps. My day started early. With Hap.’ I sat down heavily as that particular worry weighed my heart again. ‘Fool. Do you ever long to go back in your life and do something differently?’
He took his seat but did not touch the glass. ‘All men do. It’s a foolish game we play. What troubles you, Fitz?’
And I told him, pouring out my heart as if I were a child, giving him all my fears and disappointments to sort, as if somehow he could make sense of them for me. ‘I look back, Fool, and sometimes it seems that the times when I was most certain I was doing the right thing was when I made my gravest errors. Hunting down Justin and Serene and killing them before the assembled dukes after they had assassinated my king. Look what that did to us, the cascade of events that followed.’
He nodded to that. ‘And?’ he prompted me as I poured more brandy for myself.
I drank it off. ‘And bedding with Molly,’ I said. I sighed, but felt no easing. ‘It seemed so right. So sweet and true and precious. The only thing in my world that belonged completely to me. But if I had not…’
He waited for me.
‘If I had not, if I had not got her with child, she would not have left Buckkeep to hide her pregnancy. Even when I made my other stupid mistake, she would have been able to take care of herself. Burrich would not have felt that he had to go to her, to watch over her until her child was born. They would not have fallen in love; they would not have married. When… After the dragons, I could have come back to her. I could have something, now.’
I wasn’t weeping. This was pain past weeping. The only thing new about this was admitting it aloud, to myself. ‘I brought it all down on myself. It was all my own doing.’
He leaned across the table to set his long cool hand atop mine. ‘It’s a foolish game, Fitz,’ he said softly. ‘And you attribute too much power to yourself, and too little to the sweep of events. And to Molly. If you could go back and erase those decisions, who knows what others would take their places? Give it over, Fitz. Let it go. What Hap does now is not a punishment for what you did in the past. You didn’t cause him to make this choice. But that doesn’t free you from your duties as a father, to try to turn him aside from that path. Do you think because you made that same decision it disqualifies you from telling him it was a mistake?’ He took a breath, then asked, ‘Have you ever considered telling him about Molly and Nettle?’…
‘I… no. I can’t.’
‘Oh, Fitz. Secrets and things held back…’ His voice trailed away sorrowfully.
‘Such as Bingtown’s dragons,’ I said levelly.
He lifted his hand from mine. ‘What?’
‘We were drinking that night, and you told me a story. About serpents that went into butterfly cocoons and came out as dragons. But for some reason they came out small and sickly. You thought somehow it was your fault.’
He leaned back in his chair. He looked more sallow than golden. ‘We had been drinking. A lot.’
‘Yes. We had. You were drunk enough to talk. But I was still sober enough to listen.’ I waited, but he just sat quietly looking at me. ‘Well?’ I demanded at last.
‘What do you want to know?’ he asked in a low voice.
‘Tell me about Bingtown’s dragons. Are they real?’
I sat and watched him reach some decision. Then he sat up and poured more brandy for us both. He drank. ‘Yes. As real as the Six Duchies dragons were, but in a different way.’
‘How?’
He took a breath. ‘Long, long ago, we argued this. Remember? I said that at one time there had to have been dragons of flesh and bone, to inspire Skill-coteries to create dragons of stone and memory.’
‘That was years ago. I barely recall the conversation.’
‘You don’t need to. All you need to know is that I was right.’ A smile flickered across his face. ‘Once, Fitz, there were real dragons. The dragons that inspired the Elderlings.’
‘The dragons were the Elderlings,’ I contradicted him.
He smiled. ‘You are right, Fitz, but not in the way you think you mean those words. I think. It is a shattered mirror I am still reassembling. The dragons you and I awoke, the Six Duchies dragons… they were created things. Carved by coteries or Elderlings, the memory-stone took on the shapes they gave it, and came to life. As dragons. Or as winged boars. Or flying stags. Or as a Girl-On-A-Dragon.’
He was putting it together almost too swiftly for me to follow. I nodded nonetheless. ‘Go on.’
‘Why did Elderlings make those stone dragons and store their lives in them? Because they were inspired by real dragons. Dragons that, like butterflies, have two stages to their lives. They hatch from eggs into sea serpents. They roam the seas, growing to a vast size. And when the time is right, when enough years have passed that they have attained dragon size, they migrate back to the home of their ancestors. The adult dragons would welcome them and escort them up the rivers. There, they spin their cocoons of sand — sand that is ground memory-stone — and their own saliva. In times past, adult dragons helped them spin those cases. And with the saliva of the adult dragons went their memories, to aid in the formation of the young dragons. For a full winter, they slumbered and changed, as the grown dragons watched over them to protect them from predators. In the hot sunlight of summer, they hatched, absorbing much of their cocoon casing as they did so. Absorbing, too, the memories stored in it. Young dragons emerged, full-formed and strong, ready to fend for themselves, to eat and hunt and fight for mates. And eventually lay eggs on a distant island, The island of the Others. Eggs that would hatch into serpents.’