Assassin's Quest

Chade gripped my wrists and pulled down firmly. My chest and cheek pressed against the hard wooden bench. The Fool straddled my legs and pinned my hips down with his leaning weight. Even Kettle had her hands on my bare shoulders, pressing me down on the unyielding bench. I felt like a hog trussed for slaughter. Starling stood by with lint bandaging and a basin of hot water. As Chade drew my hands down tight, I felt as if my whole body might split open at the rotten wound in my back. The healer squatted beside me. I caught a glimpse of the pincers she held. Black iron. Probably borrowed from the blacksmith's shed.

"Ready?" she asked.

"No," I grunted. They ignored me. It wasn't me she was talking to. All morning she had worked on me as if I were a broken toy, prodding and pressing the foul fluids of infection from my back while I squirmed and muttered curses. All had ignored my imprecations, save the Fool, who had offered improvements on them. He was very much himself again. He had persuaded Nighteyes to go outside. I could sense the wolf prowling about the door. I had tried to convey to him what was to be done. I'd pulled enough quills from him in our time together that he had some idea of necessary pain. He still shared my dread.

"Go ahead," Chade told the healer. His head was close to mine, his beard scratching my shaven cheek. "Steady my boy," he breathed into my ear. The cold jaws of the pincers pressed against my inflamed flesh.

"Don't pant. Hold still," the healer told me severely. I tried. It felt as if she were plunging them into my back seeking for a grip. After an eternity of probing, the healer said, "Hold him." I felt the jaws of the pincers clench. She pulled, ripping my spine up and out of my body.

Or so it felt. I recall that first grating of metal head against bone, and all my resolutions not to scream were forgotten. I roared out my pain and my consciousness together. I tumbled again into that vague place that neither sleep nor wakefulness could reach. My feverish days had made it entirely too familiar to me.

Skill river. I was in it and it was in me. Only a step away, it had always been only a step away. Surcease from pain and loneliness. Swift and sweet. I was tattering away in it, coming undone like a piece of knitting comes unraveled when the right thread is tugged. All my pain was coming undone as well. No. Verity forbade it firmly. Back you go, Fitz. As if he shooed a small child away from the fire. I went.

Like a diver surfacing, I came back to the hard bench and voices over me. The light seemed dim. Someone exclaimed about blood and called for a cloth full of snow. I felt it pressed to my back while a sopping red rag was tossed to the Fool's rug. The stain spread out on the wool and I flowed with it. I was floating and the room was full of black specks. The healer was busy by the fire. She drew another smith's tool from the flames. It glowed and she turned to look at me. "Wait!" I cried in horror and half reared up off the bench, only to have Chade catch me by the shoulders.

"It has to be done," he told me harshly and held me in a grip of iron as the healer came near. At first I felt only pressure as she held a hot brand to my back. I smelled the burning of my own flesh and thought I did not care, until a spasm of pain jerked me more sharply than a hangman's noose. The black rose up to drag me down. "Hung over water and burned!" I cried out in despair. A wolf whined.

Rising. Coming up, nearer and nearer the light. The dive had been deep, the waters warm and full of dreams. I tasted the edge of consciousness, took a breath of wakefulness.

Chade: “… but surely you could have told me, at least, that he was alive and had come to you. Eda and El in a knot, Fool, how often have I trusted you with my closest counsels?"

"Almost as often as you have not," the Fool replied tartly. "Fitz asked me to keep his presence here a secret. And it was, until that minstrel interfered. What would it have hurt if he had been left alone to rest completely before that arrow came out? You've listened to his ravings. Do they sound to you like a man at peace with himself?"

Chade sighed. "Still. You could have told me. You know what it would have meant to me, to know he was alive."

"You know what it would have meant to me, to know there was a Farseer heir," the Fool retorted.

"I told you as soon as I told the Queen!"

"Yes, but how long had you known she existed? Since you sent Burrich to keep watch over Molly? You knew Molly carried his child when last you came to visit, yet you said nothing."

Chade took a sharp breath, then cautioned. "Those are names I'd as soon you did not speak, not even here. Not even to the Queen have I given those names. You must understand, Fool. The more folk who know, the greater the risk to the child. I'd never have revealed her existence, save that the Queen's child died and we believed Verity dead."