Assassin’s Fate

‘Once begun, there is no stopping this task. I have already put a great deal of myself into the wolf, and as I add more, I will become vaguer — just as Verity did. This task will consume me, as it consumed him.’ I struggled to focus on their anxious faces. ‘Bee, know this now, while I can still marshal my thoughts. I will become distant to you. It almost broke Kettricken’s heart, how Verity ignored her. But he never stopped loving her. He had put his love for her into his dragon, for he never expected to see her again. It is still there, in the stone. To last forever. And so it will be with my love for you. And the wolf’s love for you.’ I looked at Lant, at Spark, at Per. ‘Everything I feel for each one of you will go into the stone.’ My gaze sought out the Fool’s, but he was looking past me, into the darkness.

Bee was sitting between Spark and Per. Her hair had grown but it was still short. Golden and curly. I had never seen such hair. My curls and my mother’s coloration. My mother. Would I put her into the wolf? Yes. For she had loved me in the time she had me.

‘Fitz?’

‘Yes?’

‘You keep drifting away.’ Kettricken looked at me with concern. Bee had wilted over and was asleep by the fire. Someone had put a blanket over her. ‘Are you hungry still? Do you want more food?’

I looked down at a bowl with a spoon in it. The taste of beef soup was in my mouth. ‘Yes. Yes, please.’

‘And then you should sleep. We should all sleep.’

‘I’ll keep the first watch,’ Lant offered.

‘I will keep you company,’ Spark added.

I finished the soup and someone took the bowl. Soon, I would sleep. But while the taste of the good food was fresh in my mind, I would put it into my wolf.

In the time before dawn, I felt a tug at my sleeve. I’d been putting the roughness on the bottoms of the pads of his feet. Strange to shape something I could neither see nor touch. I looked down at Bee sitting cross-legged beside me. She had an open book before her, and a pot of ink and a brush and a pen, all set out neatly. ‘Da, I dreamed of a time when I would sit beside you and you would tell me the tale of your days. I want that now, for I do not think we will have years for you to pass that on to me.’

‘I recall that you told me that dream.’ I looked around the quarry. ‘This is not how I imagined it. I thought I would be an old man, too feeble to write, and that we would sit by a hearth fire in a pleasant chamber, after a long and lovely life together. Is that the book I gave you to write in?’

‘No. That one went to the bottom of the bay at Clerres, when Paragon became dragons and we all fell in the water. This is a new one. The one you call Fool gave it to me, along with a book for writing down my dreams. He reads that one, and tries to help me understand them. But this one … He has explained how you must put all your memories into your wolf so that he can become a stone wolf, just as Verity is a stone dragon. But as you put them in, if you spoke them aloud, I could write them down. So I would have at least that much of you to keep.’

‘What would you have me tell you?’ It was hard to stay focused on her. My stone wolf waited for me.

‘Everything. Everything you might have told me as I was growing up. What is the first thing you remember?’

Everything I might have told her, had I longer to live. That was a fresh cut of pain. Was it a memory to consider the future we would never have? I considered her question. ‘The first thing I remember clearly? I know I have older memories, but I hid them from myself, long ago.’ I drew a deep breath. Hiding memories again. Setting the pains and the joys deep into stone. ‘The rain had soaked through me. The day was chill and cold. The hand that held mine was hard and callused. His grip was remorseless but not unkind. The cobblestones were icy, and that grip kept me from falling when I slipped. But it also would not let me turn around and run back to my mother.’

She dipped her pen and began to write rapidly. I could not tell if she took down my exact words, and as I began to pour those first memories into the wolf, what she wrote mattered less and less.

Dawn came. Lant and Per followed my directions to the stream and came back with fish. There was bread to go with it, and bacon to cook it in. I felt my strength returning to me as my body finally began to get the sustenance it needed to both rebuild what the parasites were destroying and power me through my carving. They were catching the fish and bringing the firewood. I no longer had to leave my carving at all. It was kind of them and I managed to tell them so, but the more I carved my wolf, the more focus it demanded and the less I cared for any of them.