Assassin’s Fate

I know you do. They are eating you faster than your body can heal itself.

I thought deeply as I left the stream and made my way back to the quarry. My fire had burned low. I raked coals out and rebuilt the rest of it. I baked two of the fish on the coals and ate them. I looked at the other two. I was still so hungry. I could catch more tomorrow for my journey. I raked out more coals and set the fish on them.

When will you decide?

Soon.

I almost heard his sigh, the same sigh he would give when he wished to go hunting at night and I would stay in, morosely writing on paper that I would burn before morning. I poked at the fish. Almost done. Eating raw fish could give me worms. I smiled bitterly. Would those worms eat the parasites that the wolf insisted I already had? With two sticks, I turned the fish over on the coal bed. Be patient.

It began to rain. I felt two warm drops fall onto my wrist. No. Blood. My nose was bleeding. I reached up and pinched it shut.

What if it doesn’t stop?

It always stops.

And your body always heals itself.

After a time, I let go of my nose. No more blood. See?

No response.

‘Wolf. Are you still with me?’

A sulky acknowledgement.

A thought came to me. ‘If you had to. If something happened to me, could you go to Bee? And be with her the rest of her life?’

I would be the shadow of a shadow.

‘Could you do it?’

Perhaps. If her walls were down and everything was right. But I would not.

‘Why not?’

Fitz. I am not a thing you can give away. We are interwoven.

I poked the fish out of the fire. With a twig, I dusted off the ash. In a less hungry time, I would have peeled back the skin to reveal the flesh and then discarded the skin. Now I scarcely waited for it to cool before I was juggling steaming chunks of fish to cool them before pushing them into my mouth. After the fish was gone, I went back to the water and drank. I felt better.

I looked up at a clear blue sky. Even in summer, nights in the Mountains were chill. I decided I should get firewood. My path out of the quarry took us past abandoned blocks of cut stone. As I headed toward the forest, Nighteyes spoke. I like that piece.

It’s not very big.

There are only two of us.

To placate him, I walked over to the chunk of rock. I saw why it had been discarded. It had been part of a larger piece that had broken along a thick silver vein. It was gleaming black and richly streaked with threads of Silver. Not near as large as what Verity had used. This stone was about the side of a pony cart. I set my hand on top of it. It was a very strange sensation. Raw Skill-stone was empty, I discovered. Empty and waiting to be filled. It had an indefinable tactile sensation. I wanted to touch it. The sun had warmed it pleasantly. If I’d been a cat, I would have curled up on top of it.

You are so stubborn.

And you are not?

I was as a cub. I wanted to hate you. Do you remember how savage I was when you first saw me in the cage? Even as you were carrying me off, I was trying to bite you through the bars.

You were not much more than a cub. And you’d been treated badly. You had no reason to trust me or listen to what I told you.

True.

He’d been dirty and smelly and bone-thin. Riddled with parasites and full of anger. But that anger was what had drawn us together. Our parallel fury at the paths we were trapped on had linked our minds and for those first few moments, I had not realized our minds were joined. That we had the beginning of a deep Wit-bond, whether we wanted it or not.

‘Oh, cub,’ I said out loud.

So you called me then.

I realized what we had done. The fused memory had poured from us into the stone. I could feel it under my hand and I knew exactly what I would find when I moved my hand. There was a patch of fur on the back of Nighteyes’ neck, where the black guard hairs had a sort of gentle swirl on top of his thick grey-and-black fur. I had a sensory memory of how it had felt to put my hand on him there. Often, I’d put my hand on his back, as we walked side by side, or as we sat on the cliff’s edge looking out over the sea. It had been the natural place for my hand to fall. The touch that had renewed our bond like a repeated vow.

It felt good to feel that again.