The Tawny Man Trilogy

‘I found peace,’ I told him. ‘A bit at a time, but it came to me. There was a morning when Nighteyes and I were returning from a dawn hunt. We’d had a good hunt, and taken a mountain goat that the heavy snows of winter had pushed down from the heights. The hill was steep as we worked our way down, the gutted carcass was heavy, and the skin of my face was stiff as a mask from the cold burning down from the clear blue sky. I could see a thin tendril of smoke rising from my chimney, and just beyond my hut, the foggy steam rose off the nearby hot springs. At the top of the last hill, I paused to catch my breath and stretch my back.’

It all came back so clearly to me. Nighteyes had halted beside me, panting clouds. I’d swathed my lower face in the edge of my cloak; now it was half-frozen to my beard. I looked down, and knew that we had meat for days, our small cabin was tight against winter’s cold clench, and we were nearly home. Cold and weary as I was, satisfaction was still uppermost in my mind. I hefted my kill to my shoulders. Almost home, I told Nighteyes.

Almost home, he had echoed. And in the sharing of that thought, I sensed a meaning that no man’s voice could have put into it. Home. A finality. A place to belong. The humble cottage was home now, a comforting destination where I expected to find all I needed. As I stood staring down at it, I felt a twinge of conscience as for some forgotten obligation. It took me a moment to grasp what was missing. The whole of a night had passed and I had not once thought of Molly. Where had my yearning and sense of loss gone? What sort of shallow fellow was I, to let go of that mourning and think only of the dawn’s hunting? Deliberately I turned my thoughts to the place and the people who were once encompassed in the word home.

When I wallow in something dead to reawaken the savour of it, you rebuke me.

I turned to look at Nighteyes but he refused the eye contact. He sat in the snow, ears pricked forwards towards our hut. The unpleasant little winter wind stirred his thick ruff, but could not penetrate to his skin.

Meaning? I pressed him, though his meaning was perfectly clear.

You should leave off sniffing the carcass of your old life, my brother. You may enjoy unending pain. I do not. There is no shame in walking away from bones, Changer. He finally swivelled his head to stare at me from his deep-set eyes. Nor is there any special wisdom in injuring oneself over and over. What is your loyalty to that pain? To abandon it will not lessen you.

Then he had stood, shaken his coat free of snow, and trotted resolutely down the snowy hillside. I had followed him more slowly.

Finally I glanced over at the Fool. He looked at me but his eyes were unreadable in the darkness. ‘I think that was the first bit of peace I found. Not that I take any credit for discovering it. Nighteyes had to point it out to me. Perhaps to another man it would have been obvious. Leave old pains alone. When they cease coming to call, do not invite them back.’

His voice was very soft in the dim room. ‘There is nothing dishonourable about abandoning pain. Sometimes peace is most quickly found when a man simply stops avoiding it.’ He shifted slightly in the dark. ‘And you never again lay awake all night, staring at darkness and thinking of them.’

I snorted softly. ‘I wish. But the most I can say is that I stopped deliberately provoking that melancholy. When summer finally came and we moved on, it was like leaving a cast-off skin.’ I let a silence follow my words.

‘So you left the Mountains and came back to Buck.’

He knew I had not; it was just his little prod to get me talking again.

‘Not right away. Nighteyes didn’t approve, but I felt I could not leave the Mountains until I had retraced some of our journey there. I went back to the quarry, back to where Verity had carved his dragon. I stood on the spot. It was just a flat, bare place hemmed by the towering quarry walls under a slate-grey sky. There was no sign of all that had happened there, just the piles of chips and a few worn tools. I walked through our campsite. I knew the flattened tents and the possessions scattered about had once been ours, but most of them had lost their significance. They were greying rags, sodden and slumped. I found a few things I took with me … the pieces for Kettle’s stone game, I took those.’ I took a breath. ‘And I walked down to where Carrod had died. His body was as we had left it, gone to bones and bits of mouldering cloth. No animals had disturbed it. They don’t like the Skill-road, you know.’

‘I know,’ he admitted quietly. I felt he had walked with me through that abandoned quarry.

‘I stood a long time looking at those bones. I tried to remember Carrod as he had been when I first met him, but I couldn’t. But looking at his bones was like a confirmation. It all had truly happened, and it all was truly finished. The events and the place, I could walk away from. I could leave it behind now and it could not get up and follow me.’

Nighteyes groaned in his sleep. I set a hand on his side, glad to feel him so near in both touch and mind. He had not approved of me visiting the quarry. He had disliked journeying along the Skill-road, even though my ability to retain my sense of self against its siren call had increased. He was even more disgruntled when I insisted I must return to the Stone Gardens as well.

There was a small sound, the chink of the bottle against the cup’s lip as the Fool replenished our brandy. His silence was an invitation for me to speak on.

‘The dragons had gone back to where we first found them. I visited them there. The forest was gradually taking them back again, grass sprouting tall around them and vines creeping over them. They were just as beautiful and just as haunting as when we first discovered them there. And just as still.’

They had broken holes in the forest canopy when they had left their slumbers and arisen to fight for Buck. Their return had been no gentler, and thus sunlight fell in shafts, penetrating the lush growth to gild each gleaming dragon. I walked amongst them, and as before, I felt the ghostly stir of Wit-life within the deeply slumbering statues. I found King Wisdom’s antlered dragon; I dared to set my bare hand to his shoulder. I felt only the finely-carved scales, cold and hard as the stone they had been carved from. They were all there: the boar dragon, the winged cat, all the widely divergent forms carved by both Elderlings and Skill coteries.

‘I saw Girl on a Dragon there.’ I smiled at the flames. ‘She sleeps well. The human figure is sprawled forwards now, her arms twined lovingly around the neck of the dragon she bestrides still.’ Her I had feared to touch; I recalled too clearly her hunger for memories, and how I had fed her with mine. Perhaps I feared as much to regain what I once had willingly given her. I slipped past her silently, but Nighteyes stalked past her, hackles abristle, showing every white tooth he possessed in a snarl. The wolf had known what I truly sought.

‘Verity,’ the Fool said softly, as if confirming my unspoken thought.

‘Verity,’ I agreed. ‘My king.’ I sighed and took up my tale.

I had found him there. When I saw Verity’s turquoise hide gleaming in the dappling summer shade, Nighteyes sat down and curled his tail tidily around his forefeet. He would come no closer. I felt the silence of his thoughts as he carefully granted me the privacy of my mind. I approached Verity-as-Dragon slowly, my heart thundering in my throat. There, in a body carved of Skill and stone, slept the man who had been my king. For his sake, I had taken hurts so grievous that both my mind and my body would bear the scars until the day I died. Yet as I drew near to the still form, I felt tears prick my eyes, and knew only longing for his familiar voice.

‘Verity?’ I asked hoarsely. My soul strained towards him, word, Wit and Skill seeking for my king. I did not find him. I set my hands flat to his cold shoulder, pressed my brow against that hard form, and reached again, recklessly. I sensed him then, but it was a far and thin glimpse of what he had been. As well to say one touches the sun when one cups a dapple of forest light in the palm of a hand. ‘Verity, please,’ I begged him, and reached yet again with every drop of the Skill that was in me.

When I came to myself, I was crumpled beside his dragon. Nighteyes had not moved from where he kept his vigil. ‘He’s gone,’ I told him, uselessly, needlessly. ‘Verity’s gone.’

I bowed my head to my knees and I wept then, mourning my king as I never had the day his human body had vanished into his dragon form.

I paused in my telling to clear my throat. I drank a bit of the Fool’s brandy. I set down my cup and found the Fool looking at me. He had moved closer to hear my hoarse words, and the firelight gilded his skin, but could not reveal what was behind his eyes.

‘I think that was when I fully acknowledged that my old life was completely reduced to ashes. If Verity had remained in some form I could reach, if he had still existed to partner me in the Skill, then I think some part of me would have wanted to remain FitzChivalry Farseer. But he did not. The end of my king was also the end of me. When I rose and walked away from the Stone Garden, I knew I truly had what I had longed for all those years: the chance to determine for myself who I was, and a time in which to live my own life as I chose. From now on, I alone would make my decisions.’

Almost. The wolf derided me. I ignored him to speak to the Fool. ‘I stopped at one more place before we left the Mountains. I think you will recall it. The pillar where I saw you change.’

He nodded silently and I spoke on.

When we came to the place where a tall Skill-stone stood at a crossroads, I halted, beset by temptation. Memories washed over me. The first time I had come here, it had been with Starling and Kettle, with the Fool and Queen Kettricken, searching for King Verity. Here we had paused, and in a flash of waking-dream, I had seen the verdant forest replaced with a teeming market-place. Where the Fool had perched upon a stone pillar, a woman stood, like him in white skin and near-colourless eyes. In that other place and time, she had been crowned with a wooden circlet carved with rooster heads and decorated with tail feathers. Like the Fool, her antics had held the crowd’s attention. All that I had glimpsed in a moment, like a brief glance through some otherworldly window. Then, in the blinking of an eye, it had all changed back, and I had seen the stunned Fool topple from his precarious perch. Yet he seemed to have shared that brief vision of another time and folk.

The mystery of that moment was what drew me back to the place. The black monolith that presided over that circle of stones stood impervious to moss or lichen, the glyphs carved in its faces beckoning me to destinations unknown. I knew it now for what it was, as I had not when I had first encountered one of the Skill-gates. I circled it slowly. I recognized the symbol that would take me back to the stone quarry. Another, I was almost sure, would bear me back to the deserted Elderling city. Without thinking, I lifted a finger to trace the rune.

Despite his size, Nighteyes can move swiftly and near silently. He seized my wrist in his jaw as he sprang between me and the obelisk. I fell with him to keep his teeth from tearing my flesh. We finished with me on my back on the ground. He stood beside but not quite over me, still gripping my wrist in his jaws. You will not do that.

‘I didn’t intend to use the stone. Only to touch it.’

It is not a thing to trust. I have been inside the blackness within the stone. If I must follow you there again, for the sake of your life, then you know I would. But do not ask me to follow you there for puppy curiosity.

Would you mind if I went to the city for a short time, alone?

Alone? You know there is no true ‘alone’ for either of us any more.

I let you go alone to try a time with the wolf pack.

It is not at all the same, and you know it.

I did. He released my wrist and I stood and brushed myself off. We spoke no more about it. That is one of the best things about the Wit. There is absolutely no need for long and painfully-detailed discussions to be sure of understanding one another. Once, years ago, he had left me to run with his own kind. When he had returned, it was his unspoken assertion that he belonged more with me than he did with them. In the years since, we had grown ever closer. As he had once pointed out to me, I was no longer completely a man, nor was he completely a wolf. Nor were we truly separate entities. This was not a case of him overriding my decision. It was more like debating with myself as to the wisdom of an action. Yet in that brief confrontation, we both faced what we had avoided considering. ‘Our bond was becoming deeper and more complicated. Neither of us was certain of how to deal with it.’

The wolf lifted his head. His deep eyes stared into mine. We shared the misgiving, but he left the decision to me.

Should I tell the Fool where we had gone next and all we had learned? Was my experience among the Old Blood folk completely mine to share? The secrets I held protected many lives. For myself, I was willing to put my entire existence trustingly in the Fool’s hands. But did I have the right to share secrets that were not exclusively mine?

I don’t know how the Fool interpreted my hesitation. I suspect he took it for something other than my own uncertainty.

‘You are right,’ he declared abruptly. He lifted his cup and drained off the last of his brandy. He set the cup firmly on the floor, then rotated one graceful hand, to halt it with one slender forefinger held aloft in a gesture long familiar to me. Wait, it bid me.

As if drawn by a puppeteer’s strings, he flowed fluidly to his feet. The room was in darkness, yet he crossed it unerringly to his pack. I heard him rustling through it. A short time later, he returned to the fireside with a canvas sack. He sat down close beside me, as if he were about to reveal secrets too intimate even for darkness to share. The sack in his lap was worn and stained. He tugged open the draw-stringed mouth of it, and pulled out something wrapped in beautiful cloth. I gasped as he undid the folds of it. Never had I seen so liquid a fabric, nor so intricate a design worked in such brilliant colours. Even in the muted light of the dying fire, the reds blazed and the yellows simmered. With that length of textile, he could have purchased the favour of any lord.

Yet this wondrous cloth was not what he wished to show me. He unwound it from what it protected, heedless of how the glorious stuff pooled to the rough floor beside him. I leaned closer, holding my breath, to see what greater wonder it might reveal. The last supple length of it slithered away. I leaned closer, puzzled, to be sure of what I was seeing.

‘I thought I had dreamed that,’ I said at last.

‘You did. We did.’

The wooden crown in his hands showed the wear of years. Gone were the bright feathers and paint that had once lent it colour. It was a simple thing of wood, skilfully carved, but austere in its beauty.

‘You had it made?’ I guessed.

‘I found it,’ he returned. He took a breath, then said shakily, ‘Or perhaps it found me.’

I waited for him to say more but he did not. I put out a hand to touch it, and he made a tiny motion as if to keep it to himself. An instant later, he relented. He held it out to me. As I took it into my hands, I realized that in sharing this he offered me far more of himself, even more than the sharing of his horse. I turned the ancient thing in my hands, discovering traces of bright paint still trapped in the graven lines of the rooster heads. Two of the heads still possessed winking gem eyes. Holes in the brim of the crown showed where each tail feather would have been set. I did not know the wood it was carved from. Light but strong, it seemed to whisper against my fingers, hissing secrets in a tongue I did not know.

I proffered it back to him. ‘Put it on,’ I said quietly.

He took the crown. I saw him swallow. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked me quietly. ‘I have tried it upon my head, I will admit. Nothing happened. But with us both here, the White Prophet and his Catalyst … Fitz, it may be that we tempt a magic neither one of us understands. Time and again, I have searched my memory, but in no prophecy I was ever taught did I find mention of this crown. I have no idea what it signifies, or if it signifies anything at all. You recall your vision of me; I have only the haziest of memories of it, like a butterfly of a dream, too fragile to recapture yet wondrous in its flight.’

I said nothing. His hands, as golden as they had once been white, held the crown before him. In silence, we dared ourselves, curiosity warring with caution. In the end, given who we were, there could only be one outcome. A slow, reckless grin spread over his face. Thus, I recalled, had he smiled the night he set his Skilled fingers to the carven flesh of Girl on a Dragon. Recalling the agony we had inadvertently caused, I knew a sudden moment of apprehension. But before I could speak, he lifted the crown aloft and set it upon his head. I caught my breath.

Nothing happened.

I stared at him, torn between relief and disappointment. For an instant, silence held between us. Then he began to snicker. In an instant, laughter burst from both of us. The tension broken, we both laughed until the tears streamed down our cheeks. When our mirth subsided, I looked at the Fool, still crowned with wood, still my friend as he had always been. He wiped tears from his eyes.

‘You know, last month my rooster lost most of his tail to a scuffle with a weasel. Hap picked up the feathers. Shall we try them in the crown?’

He lifted it from his head and regarded it with mock regret. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps. And perhaps I shall steal some of your inks as well, and re-do the colours. Do you recall them at all?’

I shrugged. ‘I’d trust your own eye for that, Fool. You always had a gift for such things.’

He bowed his head with grave exaggeration to my compliment. He twitched the fabric from the floor and began to rewrap the crown. The fire was little more than embers now, casting a ruddy glow over both of us. I looked at him for a long moment. In this light, I could pretend his colouring had not changed, that he was the white-skinned jester of my boyhood, and hence, that I was still as young as he was. He glanced over at me, caught my eyes on him, and stared back at me, a strange avidity in his face. His look was so intense I glanced aside from it. A moment later, he spoke.

‘So. After the Mountains, you went …?’

I picked up my brandy cup. It was empty. I wondered how much I had drunk, and suddenly knew it was more than enough for one evening. ‘Tomorrow, Fool. Tomorrow. Give me a night to sleep on it, and ponder how best to tell it.’

One long-fingered hand closed suddenly about my wrist. As always, his flesh was cool against mine. ‘Ponder, Fitz. But as you do so, do not forget …’ Words seemed suddenly to fail him. His eyes gazed once more into mine. His tone changed to a quiet plea. ‘Tell me all you can, in good conscience. For I never know what it is I need to hear until I have heard it.’

Again, the fervour of his stare unnerved me. ‘Riddles,’ I scoffed, trying to speak lightly. Instead, the word seemed to come out as a confirmation of his own.

‘Riddles,’ he agreed. ‘Riddles to which we are the answers, if only we can discover the questions.’ He looked down at his grip on my wrist, and released me. He rose suddenly, graceful as a cat. He stretched, a sinuous writhing that looked as if he unfastened his bones from his joints and then put himself together again. He looked down on me fondly. ‘Go to bed, Fitz,’ he told me as if I were a child. ‘Rest while you can. I need to stay up a bit longer and think. If I can. The brandy has quite gone to my head.’

‘Mine as well,’ I agreed. He offered a hand and I took it. He drew me easily to my feet, his strength, as always, surprising in one so slightly built. I staggered a step sideways and he moved with me, then caught my elbow, righting me. ‘Care to dance?’ I jested feebly as he steadied me.

‘We already do,’ he responded, almost seriously. As if he bid farewell to a dance partner, he pantomimed a courtly bow over my hand as I drew my fingers from his grip. ‘Dream of me,’ he added melodramatically.

‘Good night,’ I replied, stoically refusing to be baited. As I headed towards my bed, the wolf rose with a groan and followed me. He seldom slept more than an arm’s reach from my side. In my room, I let my clothes drop where they would before pulling on a nightshirt and falling into bed. The wolf had already found his place on the cool floor beside it. I closed my eyes and let my arm fall so that my fingers just brushed his ruff.

‘Sleep well, Fitz,’ the Fool offered. I opened my eyes a crack. He had resumed his chair before the dying fire and smiled at me through the open door of my room. ‘I’ll keep watch,’ he offered dramatically. I shook my head at his nonsense and flapped a hand in his direction. Sleep swallowed me.

SEVEN

Heart of a Wolf

One of the most basic misunderstandings of the Wit is that it is a power given to a human that can be imposed on a beast. In almost all the cautionary tales one hears about the Wit, the story involves an evil person who uses his power over animals or birds to harm his human neighbours. In many of these stories, the just fate of the evil magicker is that his beast servants rise up against him to bring him down to their level, thus revealing him to those he has maligned.

The reality is that Wit-magic is as much a province of animals as of humans. Not all humans evince the ability to form the special bond with an animal that is at the heart of the Wit. Nor does every animal have the full capacity for that bond. Of those creatures that possess the capacity, an even smaller number desire such a bond with a human. For the bond to form, it must be mutual and equal between the partners. Among Witted families, when the youngster comes of age, he is sent forth on a sort of quest to seek an animal companion. He does not go out, select a capable beast and then bend him to his will. Rather the hope is that the human will encounter a like-minded creature, either wild or domestic, that is interested in establishing a Wit-bond. Simply put, for a Wit-bond to be established, the animal must be as gifted as the human. Although a Witted human can achieve some level of communication with almost any animal, no bond will be formed unless the animal shares a like talent and inclination.

Yet in any relationship there is always the capacity for abuse. Just as a husband may beat his wife, or a wife pare her husband’s soul with belittlement, so may a human dominate his Wit partner. Perhaps the most common form of this is when a Witted human selects a beast partner when the creature is far too young to realize the magnitude of that life decision. Rarer are the cases in which animals debase or dictate to their bond fellow, but they are not unknown. Among the Old Blood, the common ballad of Roving Greyson is said to be derived from a tale of a man so foolish as to bond with a wild gander, and ever after spent his life in following the seasons as his bird did.

Badgerlock’s Old Blood Tales

Morning came, too bright and too early, on the third day of the Fool’s visit. He was awake before me, and if the brandy or the late night held any consequences for him, he did not betray them. The day already promised to be hot, so he had kept the cook fire small, just enough to boil a kettle for porridge. Outside, I turned the chickens out for the day, and took the pony and the Fool’s horse out to an open hillside facing the sea. I turned the pony loose but picketed Malta. She gave me a reproachful look at that, but went to grazing as if the tufty grass were exactly what she desired. I stood for a time, overlooking the calm sea. Under the bright morning sun, it looked like hammered blue metal. A very light breeze came off it and stirred my hair. I felt as if someone had spoken words aloud to me and I echoed them. ‘Time for a change.’