After some silence had passed, I told him, “Beloved, you need to eat. And drink. I've brought fresh water.”
I waited. “I could make tea for you if you'd like.”
Eventually, I fetched a mug and poured the cooling broth into it. “Just drink this, and I'll stop bothering you. But only if you drink this.”
Crickets were chirping in the dusk. “Beloved, I mean it. I won't leave you in peace until you at least drink this.”
He spoke. His voice was flat and he did not look at me. “Could you not call me that?”
“Beloved?” I asked, confused.
He winced to the word. “Yes. That.”
I sat holding the mug of cold broth in both hands. After a time I said, stiffly, “If that is what you wish, Fool. But I'm still not leaving until you drink this.”
He moved in the dimness of the tent, turning his head toward me and then reaching a hand for the mug. “She mocked me with that name,” he said quietly.
“Oh.”
He took the mug awkwardly from me, protecting his torn fingertips from contact. He levered himself up on an elbow, quivering with pain and effort. I wanted to help him. I knew better than to offer. He drank the broth in two long draughts, and then held the mug out to me shakily. I took it and he sank down on his belly again. When I continued to sit there, he pointed out wearily, “I drank it.”
I took the kettle and the mug out into the night with me. I added more water to the kettle of soup and set it near the fire. Let it simmer until morning. I sat staring into the fire, recalling things I didn't want to think about and chewing on my thumbnail until I bit it too close to the quick and tore it. I grimaced, and then, staring out into the night, shook my head. I had been able to retreat into being a wolf. As a wolf, I had not been humiliated and degraded. As a wolf, I'd kept my dignity and power over my life. The Fool had nowhere to go.
I'd had Burrich, and his calm, familiar ways. I'd had isolation and peace and the wolf. I thought of Nighteyes, and rose, and went to the hunt.
My first night's luck did not hold. I came back to the camp after sunrise, with no meat, but a shirt full of ripe plums. The Fool was gone. A kettle of tea had been left to stay warm by the fire. I resisted the urge to call out his name and waited, almost patiently, by the fire until I saw him coming up the path from the stream. He wore the Elderling robe and his hair was slicked flat to his skull with water. He walked without grace in a lurching limp and his shoulders were bowed. With difficulty, I restrained myself from going to him. He reached the fire at last and, “I found plums,” I told him.
He took one solemnly and bit into it. “They're sweet,” he said, as if it surprised him. With an old man's caution, he lowered himself to the ground. I saw him run his tongue around the inside of his mouth and winced with him when he found the gap of missing teeth on one side. “Tell me what happened,” he requested quietly.
So I did. I began with her guards throwing me out into the snow, and reported in as much detail as if it were Chade sitting there, nodding to my words. His face changed slowly as I began to speak about the dragons. Slowly he sat up straighter. I felt the Skill-link between us intensify as he reached for my heart to confirm what he was hearing, as if mere words could not be enough to convey it to him. Willingly, I opened myself to him and let him share my experience of that day. When I told him that Icefyre and Tintaglia had mated in flight and then disappeared, a sob shook him. But he was tearless as he asked me incredulously, “Then . . . we triumphed. She failed. There will be dragons in the skies of this world again.”
“Of course,” I said, and only then realized that he could not have known that. “We walk in your future now. On the path you set for us.”
He choked again, audibly. He rose stiffly and paced a turn or two. He turned back to me, his heart in his eyes. “But . . . I am blind here. I never foresaw any of this. Always, in every vision, if there was triumph, I bought it with my death. I always died.”
He cocked his head slowly and asked me, as if for confirmation, “I did die?”
“You did,” I admitted slowly. But I could not help the grin that crept over my face. “But, as I told you in Buckkeep, I am the Catalyst. I am the Changer.”
He stood still as stone, and when comprehension seeped into him, it was like watching a stone dragon come to wakefulness. Life infused him. He began to tremble, and this time I did not fear to take his arm and help him sit down. “The rest,” he demanded shakily. “Tell me the rest.”
And so I told him, the rest of that day, as we ate plums and drank his tea and then finished the rabbit broth from the night before. I told him what I knew of the Black Man, and his eyes grew wide. I spoke of searching for his body, and reluctantly told how I had found him. He looked aside from me as I spoke and I felt our Skill-link fade as if he would vanish from my sight if he could. Nonetheless, I told him, and told him too of my encounter with the Pale Woman. He sat rubbing his arms while I spoke of her, and when he asked, “Then, she lives still? She did not die?” his voice shook.