Fool’s Assassin

My knife led the way as I advanced. With my free hand I kindled a fresh candle and then poked up the fire. Then I stood still, looking around my room. They had been here. They had come here, to my den, someone’s blood still wet on them.

If Chade had not trained me through a thousand exercises to recall a room exactly as I had left it, their passage might have been unnoticeable. I smelled a brush of blood on the corner of my desk, and there was a small smear of browning red where my papers had been shifted. But even without the scent of blood and its tiny traces, they had been here, touching my papers, moving the scroll I’d been translating. They’d tried to open the drawer of my desk, but had not found the hidden catch. Someone had picked up the memory-stone carving the Fool had made for me decades before and put it back on the mantel with the facet that showed my face looking out into the room. When I picked it up to correct it, my lip lifted in a snarl. On the Fool’s image, a clumsy thumb had left blood smeared down his cheek. The surge of fury I felt was not rational.

When I lifted it, I felt the tide of the memories stored in it. The Fool’s last words to me, stored in the stone, tugged at my recollection. “I have never been wise,” he had said. A reminder of the recklessness of our youths, or a promise that someday he would ignore caution and return? I closed my mind against that message. Not now.

And foolishly, I tried to swipe the blood from his face with my thumb.

Memory stone is peculiar stuff. Of old, Skill-coteries had traveled to a distant quarry in the Mountain Kingdom where they carved dragons from it, imbuing the stone with their memories before being absorbed into their creations to give them a semblance of life. I’d seen it happen, once. Verity, my King, had given himself to a stone dragon, and then risen in that guise to bring terror and war to the enemies of the Six Duchies. On Aslevjal Island I’d discovered that small cubes of the gleaming black stuff had been used by the Elderlings to store songs and poetry.

I myself had wakened the slumbering dragons of previous generations with an offering of blood and a call to arms that was both Wit- and Skill-wrapped into one magic.

Blood on memory stone, and my touch. The Skill and the Wit both boiling inside me. The smear of blood sank into the stone.

The Fool opened wide his mouth and screamed. I saw his lips stretch, his bared teeth and stiffened tongue. It was a screech of unremitting agony.

No sound reached my ears. It was more intimate than that. Sourceless and enduring, the endless, hopeless, merciless agony of systematic torture engulfed me. It filled my entire body and burned my skin as if I were a glass brimming with black despair. It was too familiar, for it was not the keen pain of any one physical torment but the overwhelming drowning of the mind and soul in the knowledge that nothing could prevent this torment. My own memories rose up in a shrieking chorus. Once more I sprawled on the cold stone floor of Prince Regal’s dungeons, my battered body suffocating my tormented mind. I tore my awareness free of that memory, denying that bond. The Fool’s carved eyes stared at me blindly. For a moment our gazes met, and then all went dark and my eyes burned. My enervated hands fumbled the carving, nearly dropping it but instead hugging it to me as I collapsed to my knees. I held it to my chest, feeling a far-distant wolf lift his muzzle and snarl in fury. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I babbled blindly, as if it were the Fool himself I had injured. Sweat burst from every pore on my body, drenching me. Still clutching the carving to me, I sank onto my side. Slowly, vision came back to my open, tearing eyes. I stared into the dying fire, haunted by images of dull-red instruments soaking in the flames, smelling blood both old and new mixed with the acrid stench of terror. I remembered how to close my eyes. I felt the wolf come to stand over me, threatening to rend any who came near. Slowly, the echoes of the pain passed. I drew breath.

Blood had the power to waken memory stone, whether it was an Elderling-carved dragon or the bust the Fool had shaped. And in that brief linking, I knew that the girl was dead. I’d felt her terror at being hunted and cornered, her memory of past torments, and the agony of her death. By that, I knew her for Revel’s girlish messenger rather than the soldier-schooled woman I’d seen with the two men. They’d followed her, they’d hunted her through my home, and they’d killed her. I did not know why or what message they had foiled, but I would find them and I would find out.