'I'll see that Kettricken knows of it,' I promised him without telling him how I'd attempt to do that.

'But if we have set one puzzle to rest tonight,  we've only

encountered a greater one. Who is he, what is he?' The Fool's voice was musing.

'The Black Man?'

'Of course.'

I shrugged. 'Some recluse living on the island, accepting tribute from superstitious folk and ambushing those who don't leave him gifts. That's the simplest explanation.' Chade's teaching was that the simplest explanation was often likely to be the right one.

The Fool shook his head slowly. The look he gave me was incredulous. 'No. Surely you cannot believe that. Never have I felt a man so hung about with portents . . . not since I first encountered you have I felt such a tingle of ... of significance. He is important, Fitz, vastly important. Perhaps the most important person we have ever met. Didn't you feel his consequence, hanging like mist in the air?' He held the snow away from his face and leaned forward eagerly. A single scarlet final drop hung from the tip of his nose. I gestured at it and he wiped it carelessly on his blood-stained sleeve.

'No. I felt nothing like that. In fact ... oh, Eda and El! Why does it come to me only now? I could not see him when the sentry shouted, and when he was pointed out to me, I thought I saw but his shadow. Because I didn't sense him with my Wit. Not at all. He was as blank as a Forged one . . . He's Forged, Fool. And that means there is no predicting what he might do.'

A chill went over me despite the cosiness of the tent. It had been many years since I'd had to deal with Forged ones, but the unmerciful memories had not faded. One of my tasks as Chade's apprentice assassin had been to kill as many of them as I could, by whatever means was most expeditious. The deaths 1 had dealt to Six Duchies folk haunted me still, even though I knew there had been no alternative. Forging stole all humanity from its victims and was irreversible.

'Forged? Oh, surely not!' The Fool's astounded reaction broke my moment of introspection. He shook his head. 'No, Fitz. Not Forged. Almost the opposite, if such a thing is possible. I felt in him the weight of a hundred lifetimes, the significance of a dozen heroes. He . . . displaces fate. Much as you do.'

'I don't understand,' I said uneasily. I hated it when the Fool spoke like this. He loved it.

He leaned forward, eyes gleaming with enthusiasm. As he spoke, he lifted the kettle from the oil flame and poured steaming water into the cup and a bowl. Ginger and cinnamon wafted toward me. 'All of time, every sliced instant of it, is rich with vertices of choices. One becomes accustomed to that, to the point at which sometimes even I have to stop and remind myself that I am making choices, even when 1 do not seem to be. Every indrawn breath is a choice. But sometimes one is reminded of that forcibly, sometimes I meet a person so laden with possibilities and potential that the mere existence of such a being is a jolt to reality. You are like that, still, to me. The sheer improbability of your existence took my breath away. I have discovered relatively few possible futures in which you exist at all. In most of them, you died as a child. In others . . . well, I do not think I need to tell you all the ways in which you have died in other times. How many times have you been snatched from the jaws of death, in the most unlikely ways? I promise you, Fitz, in other times that parallel ours, you have met your deaths at those moments. Yet here you are, with me still, defying the odds by existing. And by your existence, with every breath you take, you change all time. You are like a wedge driven into dry wood. With every beat of your heart, you are pounded deeper into "what might be" and as you advance, you crack the future open, and expose a hundred, a thousand new possibilities, each branching into another hundred, another thousand.' He paused for breath. Noting my disgruntled expression, he laughed aloud. 'Well. Like it or not, you do, my Catalyst. And so also did he feel to me tonight, the Black Man! So many possibilities shimmered around him that I could scarcely see him. He is even more unlikely than you are!' He drew a black kerchief out of his sleeve and wiped all traces of blood from his face, and then his hands. Carefully enfolding the bloody side, he tucked it into his sleeve again. Then he leaned back on his cushions, his eyes staring into the dim shadows at the peak of his tent. 'And I have not a clue of who or what he is. I've never glimpsed him before. What does that mean? Was it only with our coming here that his influence on the future became possible?'

He picked up the steaming bowl and offered it to me, excusing it with, 'I only brought one cup. Travelling light, you know.' I took it from him, welcoming the warmth against my hands. With an odd jolt, 1 reminded myself that in the Six Duchies it was summer. Summer seemed an impotent thing here in the Out Islands, camped on a glacier- He picked up the cup and looking around, frowned slightly. 'You took my honey, didn't you? You don't happen to have it with you, do you? It brings out the flavour of the ginger and makes the tea more warming.'

'Sorry. I left it in my tent . . . no, that's not quite true. I left it outside by the fire last night, and this morning it was gone.' I halted, feeling as if I'd just heard a key turn in a lock. 'Or taken,' I amended. 'Fool, the Outislanders left gifts for the Black Man. He didn't take any of them, but honey was one of the things offered. And yours was missing that morning.'

'You think he took mine? You think that he supposed it an offering left by you?'

The excitement he manifested was out of proportion, I thought, to my speculation. I took a sip of the tea he had made. The ginger was heat. I felt it spread comfortingly through my belly even as his words unnerved me. 'More likely someone in our own camp took it. How could he creep amongst our very tents, unseen?'

'Unseen and unfclt,' he corrected me. 'You said he is invisible to your Wit. Likely the same is true for the other Witted ones. So. I think he took the honey. And with it, bound his fate to ours. It connects us, you see, Fitz.' He drank from his cup, his eyes near closing in enjoyment of the warm liquid as he did so. When he set the cup down, he had nearly drained it. He reached for a bright yellow coverlet which looked as insubstantial as the stuff of his tent walls, and draped it around his shoulders, then kicked off his loose boots and pulled his narrow feet up under him. 'It connects him to both of us. I think it might be highly significant. Do you see that it could change the outcome of our mission here? Especially if I let it be known that the Black Man had accepted our offering.'

My mind raced through the possibilities. Would such an announcement win the Outislanders to his side? Turn the Narcheska and Peottre against him? Where did it leave me, not only in relation

to them but in terms of how Chade saw me? The answers were not comforting. 'It could create a greater division in our party than there is now.'

He lifted his cup and drank the rest of the tea before answering. 'No. It would only expose the division that already exists.' He looked at me and his expression was almost pitying. This is the culmination of my life's work, Fitz. You cannot expect me to refuse any weapon, any advantage that fate gives me. If I must die on this cold and forsaken island, at least let me die knowing I've achieved my aim.'

I drank off the tea in the bowl and set it down beside his cup. I spoke firmly. 'I'm not going to stay here and listen to this . . . nonsense. I don't believe any of it.'

But I did. And it tightened my guts more than any cold or danger I'd ever faced.

'And you think that if you refuse to believe it, it can't come to pass? That is nonsense, Fitz. Accept it, and let's make the best of what time we have left.' There was such terrible calm in his voice that I suddenly wanted to strike him. If death was truly lurking in wait for him, he should not be so placid and accepting of it. He should fight it, he should be made to fight it.