Assassin's Quest

The Fool shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think Verity himself knows. He blunders toward it, blind and groping. He shapes the stone, and gives it his memories. And when it is finished, it will come to life. I suppose."

"Do you hear what you are saying?" I asked him. "Stone is going to rise, and defend the Six Duchies from the Red-Ships. And what of Regal's troops and the border skirmishes with the Mountain Kingdom? Will this `dragon' drive them off as well?" Slow anger was building in me. "This is what we have come all this way for? For a tale I would not expect a child to believe?"

The Fool looked mildly affronted. "Believe it or not as you choose. I but know that Verity believes it. Unless I am much mistaken, Kettle believes it as well. Why else would she insist we must stay here, and help Verity complete the dragon?"

For a time, I pondered this. Then I asked him, "Your dream about Realder's dragon. What do you recall of it?"

He gave a helpless shrug. "The feelings of it, mostly. I was exuberant and joyful, for not only was I announcing Realder's dragon, but he was going to fly me on it. I felt I was a bit in love with him, you know. That sort of lift to the heart. But …" He faltered. "I cannot recall if I loved Realder or his dragon. In my dream, they are mingled … I think. Recalling dreams is so hard. One must seize them as soon as one awakes, and quickly repeat them to oneself, to harden the details. Otherwise they fade so quickly."

"But in your dream, did a stone dragon fly?"

"I was announcing the dragon in my dream, and knew I was to fly upon it. I had not yet seen it, in my dream."

"Then maybe it has nothing to do at all with what Verity does. Perhaps, in the time from which your dream came, there were real dragons, of flesh and blood."

He looked at me curiously. "You do not believe there are real dragons, today?"

"I have never seen one."

"In the city," he pointed out quietly.

"That was a vision of a different time, You said today."

He held one of his own pale hands up to the firelight. "I think they are like my kind. Rare, but not mythical. Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?"

I shook my head wearily. "This conversation goes in circles. I am tired of riddles and guesses and beliefs. I want to know what is real. I want to know why we came all this way, and what it is we must do."

But the Fool had no answers to that. When Kettle and Starling got back with the wood, he helped me layer the fire and arrange the meat where the heat would drive the fat from it. What meat we could not set to cook, we bundled aside in the pigskin. There was a sizable pile of bones and scraps. Despite how he had gorged earlier, Nighteyes settled down with a leg bone to gnaw. I surmised he had regurgitated part of his bellyful somewhere.

There is no such thing as having too much meat in reserve, he told me contentedly.

I made a few attempts to needle Kettle into talking to me, but somehow it evolved into a lecture on how much more aware of the Fool I must be now. He must be protected, not only from Regal's coterie, but from the Skill-pull of objects that might take his mind wandering. For that reason, she wished us to stand our watches together. She insisted the Fool must sleep on his back, his bared fingers upturned so they touched nothing. As the Fool usually slept huddled in a ball, he was not overly pleased. But at last we settled for the night.

I was not due to take my watch until the hours before dawn. But it was short of that when the wolf came to push his nose under my cheek and jog my head until I opened my eyes.

"What?" I demanded tiredly.

Kettricken walks alone, weeping.

I doubted she would want my company. I also doubted that she should be alone. I rose noiselessly and followed the wolf out of the tent. Outside, Kettle sat by the fire, poking disconsolately at the meat. I knew she must have seen the Queen leave, so I did not dissemble.

"I'm going to go find Kettricken."

"Probably a good idea," she said quietly. "She told me she was going to look at his dragon, but she has been gone longer than that."

We needed to say no more about it. I followed Nighteyes as he trotted purposefully away from the fire. But he led me, not toward Verity's dragon, but back through the quarry. There was little moonlight, and what there was the looming black blocks of stone seemed to drink away. Shadows seemed to fall in all different directions, altering perspective. The need for caution made the quarry vast as I picked my way along in the wolf's wake.