I think he tried to be gentle. Nonetheless, it was more like a serpent's strike than a tender kiss as his mouth fastened to mine and the venom of pain flowed. I think that if there had not been his love mixed with the anguish he gave back to me, I would have died of it, human or not. It was a searing, scalding kiss, a flow of memories, and once they began, I could not deny them. No man, in the fullness of his years, should have to experience afresh all the passion that a youngster is capable of embracing. Our hearts grow brittle as we age. Mine near shattered in that onslaught.

It was a storm of emotion. I had not forgotten my mother. Never forgotten, I had banished her to a part of my heart and refused to open the door to it, but she was there, her long gold hair smelling of marigolds. And I remembered my grandmother, also of Mountain stock, but my grandfather had been no more than a common guardsman, posted too long at Moonseye and taking on the Mountain ways. All that I knew in a flash, and recalled how my mother had summoned me in from the pastures where, even at five, I had a share of the shepherding. 'Keppet, Keppet!' her clear voice would ring out, and I would run to her, barefoot over wet grass.

And Molly . . . how had I ever banished the smell and taste of her, honey and herbs, and the way her laugh rang like chimes when I had chased down the beach after her, her red skirts whipping wildly around her bare calves as she ran, or the feel of her hair in my hands, the heavy strands of it tangling and snagging on the rough skin of my palms? Her eyes were dark, but they'd held the light of the candles when I'd looked down on them below me as I made love to her in her servant's room in the upper reaches of Buckkeep Castle. I had thought that light seen there would always belong only to me.

And Burrich. He'd been father to me in every way he could, and friend to me when I'd been tail enough to stand at his side. A part of me understood how he had fallen in love with Molly when he'd thought I was dead, but a part of me was outraged and hurt beyond common sense or rationality that he could have taken to wife the mother of my daughter. In ignorance and passion, he had stolen from me both woman and child.

Blow after blow rained on me. I was pounded iron on an anvil of memory. I languished again in Regal's dungeons. I smelted the rotting straw on the floor and felt the cold of the stone against my smashed mouth and pulped cheek as I lay there, trying to die so he could not hurt me any more. It was a sharp echo of the beating Galen had given me years before, on the stone tower top we had called the Queen's Garden. He had assaulted me physically and with the Skill, and to finish the task, he had crippled my magic, putting it firmly in my mind that I had no ability and would do better to kill myself than live on in shame to my family. He had given me, forever, the memory of teetering on the brink of taking my own life.

It was new, it all happened to me afresh, flaying my soul and leaving me bared to a salty wind.

I came back to summer and the sun's slackening strength. The shadows were darker under the trees. I sprawled on the forest humus, my face hidden in my hands, beyond tears. The Fool sat next to me in the leaves and grass, patting my back as if I were an infant and singing some gentle, silly song in his old tongue. Slowly it caught my attention and my shuddering breaths calmed. When at last I was still, he spoke to me quietly. 'It's all right now, Fitz. You're whole again. This time, when we go back, you'll go all the way back to your old life. All of it.'

After a time, I found I could breathe deeply again. Gradually I got to my feet. I moved so cautiously that the Fool came to take my arm. But it was not weakness, but wonder that slowed my steps. I was like a man given back his sight. The edges of every leaf stood out when I glanced at it, and there, the veins, and a lacy heart where insects had fed. Birds called overhead and answered, and my Wit of them was so keen that I could not focus on the soft questions the Fool kept asking me. Light broke in streams through the canopy of leaves overhead, sending shafts of gold arrowing through the forest. Floating pollen sparked briefly in those beams. We came to the stream and I knelt to drink its cold, sweet water. But as I bent over it, the rippling of the water over the stones suddenly captured me and drew me into the clear, darkling world beneath the moving water. Silt was layered in patterns over the smoothed pebbles and water plants moved gently in the current. A silver fingerling angled through the plants to disappear beneath a trapped brown leaf. I poked at it with a finger and had to laugh aloud at how he darted away from me. I looked up at the Fool, to see if he had also seen it, and found him looking down on me fondly but solemnly. He set his hand to my head as if he were a father blessing a child and said, 'If I think of all that befell me as a linked chain that brings me finally to this place, with you kneeling by the water, alive and whole, then . . . then the price was not too high. To see you whole again heals me.'

He was right. I was whole again.

We did not leave the forest plaza that evening. Instead, I built a new fire, and stared into it for most of the night. As if I were sorting scrolls or storing herbs for Chade, I went through all the years since I had given half my life away, and reordered my experience of them. Half-passions. Relationships in which I had invested nothing and received it in return. Retreats and evasions. Withdrawal. The Fool lay between the fire and me, pretending to sleep. I knew he kept vigil with me. Towards dawn, he asked me, 'Did I do you a wrong?'

'No,' I said quietly. 'I did myself a wrong, long ago. You've put me on the path to righting it.' I did not know how I would do it, but I knew I would.

In the morning, I scattered the ashes of our fire on the plaza. We left the Elderling tent billowing in the wind and fled a promised summer squall. We shared out my winter clothing between us, and then, his fingers pressed to my wrist and, Skill-linked, we entered the pillar.

We stepped out into the pillar room of the Pale Woman's ice castle. The Fool gasped and went to his knees after two staggering steps into the room. The trip through the pillar did not affect me as badly, though I knew a moment's vertigo. Almost immediately, the chill of the place seized me. I helped the Fool to his feet. He stared around himself in wonder, hugging himself against the cold. I gave him some time to recover, and time to explore the frost-rimed windowpanes, the snowy view and the Skill-pillar that dominated the room and then told him quietly, 'Come on.'

We went down the stairs, and halted again in the map room. He looked down at the world portrayed there. His long fingers wandered over the rippling sea and then returned, to hover over Buck. Without touching them, he indicated the four jewels set near Buckkeep. 'These gems . . . they indicate Skill-pillars?'

'I think so,' I replied. 'And those would be the Witness Stones.'

He touched, a wistful caress, the coast of a land far to the south and east of Buckkeep. No gem winked there. He shook his head. 'No one who knew me lives there any more. Silly even to think of it.'

'It's never silly to think of going home,' I assured him. 'If I asked Kettricken, she -'

'No, no, no,' he said quietly. 'It was but a passing fancy, Fitz. I cannot go back there.'

When he had finished gazing at the map, we went down the stairs, deeper into the pale blue light of the labyrinth. I felt as if we descended back into old nightmare. As we went, I saw his trepidation grow. He grew paler, not just from the cold. The half-healed bruises on his face stood out like shadows of the Pale Woman's power over us. I tried to stay to the stone passages and find some egress from there, without success. As we wandered from room to room, the beauty of the place touched me even as I worried about the Fool's growing silence and weariness. Perhaps we had misjudged, and he was not yet ready to confront the place where he had been so tormented.