of black stone broke that heaving green surface. There was not even a clue as to where it had spat us out offshore.
No way back.
I had left my friends to die. Regardless of what the Fool had said, I had resolved to return immediately via the pillar. Otherwise, I would not have gone. I would not have done it if I had thought I was not going back to them. Telling myself that did not make me feel a shard less cowardly.
Nighteyes! I quested desperately, flinging the call with all my strength.
No one answered.
‘Fool!’ The word ripped out of me, a futile scream of Wit and Skill and voice. Distant gulls seemed to echo it mockingly. My hope faded with their dwindling cries over the windswept sea.
Unmoving, I stared out over the water until an incoming wave lapped against my feet. The Prince had not moved, except to fall back onto his side on the wet sand. He lay, staring blankly and shivering. I slowly turned away from the surf and surveyed the land. Black cliffs rose up before us. The tide was coming in. My mind put the pieces together.
‘Get up. We have to move before the tide traps us.’
To the south, the rocky cliffs gave way to a half-moon of black sand. A grassy tableland backed it. I reached down and seized the Prince’s arm. ‘Up,’ I repeated. ‘Unless you want to drown here.’
The lad lurched to his feet without protest. We trudged down the shore as the waves reached ever higher towards us. Desolation was a cold weight inside me. I dared not look at what I had just done. It was too monstrous to consider. While I walked down this beach, did their blood flow down swords? I stopped my mind. As if I were setting walls against an intrusive mind, I blocked all feelings from myself. I stopped all thoughts and became a wolf, concerned only with the ‘now’.
‘What was that?’ Dutiful demanded suddenly. ‘That … feeling. That pulling …’ Words failed him. ‘Was that the Skill?’
‘Part of it,’ I answered brusquely. He seemed entirely too interested in what he had just experienced. Had it called to him that strongly? The Skill’s attraction was a terrible trap for the unwary.
‘I … he tried to teach me, but he couldn’t tell me what it felt like. I couldn’t tell if I was doing it or not, and neither could he. But that!’
He expected a response to his excitement. I gave him none. The Skill was the last thing I wanted to talk about just now. I didn’t want to speak at all. I did not want to break the numbness that wrapped me.
When we reached the black sand, I kept Prince Dutiful walking. His wet clothes flapped around his body, and he hugged himself against the chill. I listened to his shivering breaths. A greenish sheen on the sand proved to be a flow of fresh water over the beach to the sea. I walked him upstream, away from the sandy beach and into a field of coarse sedge grasses until I reached a place where the trickle was deep enough for me to cup handfuls of it. I washed out my mouth several times and then drank. I was splashing water on my face to get sand out of my eyes and ears when the Prince spoke again.
‘What about Lord Golden and the wolf? Where are they, what happened to them?’ He looked out over the water as if he expected to see them there.
‘They couldn’t come. By now, I imagine your friends have killed them.’
It amazed me that I could speak the words so flatly. No choking tears, no gasping breath. It was a thought too terrible to be real. I could not allow myself to consider it. Instead, I flung the words at him, hoping to see him flinch from them. Instead he just shook his head, as if my words made no sense, then asked numbly ‘Where are we?’
‘We are here,’ I replied, and laughed. I had never known that anger and despair could make a man laugh. It was not a pleasant sound, and the Prince cowered away from me for an instant. Then in the next, he stood up very straight and pointed an accusing finger at me. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, as if he had suddenly discovered the one mystery that underlay all his questions.
I looked up from where I still crouched by the water. I drank another handful before I answered. ‘Tom Badgerlock.’ I slicked my hair back with my wet hands. ‘For this. I was born with this white streak at my temple, and so my parents named me.’
‘Liar.’ He spoke the word with flat contempt. ‘You’re a Farseer. You may not have the looks of a Farseer, but you have the Skill of one. Who are you? A distant cousin? Someone’s by-blow?’
I’d been called a bastard many times in my life, but never by someone I might call a son. I looked up at Dutiful, Verity’s and Kettricken’s heir from the seed of my body. Well, if I’m a bastard, I wonder what that makes you? What I said instead was ‘Does it matter?’
While he was still struggling to find an answer to that, I scanned our surroundings. I was stuck here with him, at least until the tide went out. If I was fortunate, it would bare the pillar that brought us here, and I could use it to return. If I was unfortunate, the water wouldn’t retreat that far, and then I’d have to discover just where we truly were and how to get back to Buckkeep from here.
The Prince spoke angrily to mask his sudden uncertainty. ‘We can’t be that far. It only took us a moment to get here.’
‘Magic such as we used makes little of distance. We may not even be in the Six Duchies any more.’ I abruptly decided he needed to know no more than that. Whatever I told him, the woman would likely know as well. The less said, the better.
Slowly he sat down on the ground. ‘But –’ he said, and then fell silent. After a time, I sensed his Wit-keening. The look on his face was that of an apprehensive child reaching out desperately for something familiar. But my heart did not go out to him. Instead, I repressed an urge to give him a firm whack on the back of the head. For this whimpering self-obsessed juvenile, I’d traded the lives of my wolf and my friend. It seemed the poorest bargain I’d ever made. Nettle, I reminded myself. Keeping him alive might keep her safe. Farseer heir or not, it was the only value that I could see in him just then.
I am disappointed in my son.
I examined that, and reasserted to myself that Dutiful was not my son and since I had never accepted any responsibility for his rearing, I had no right to be either disappointed or pleased by him. I walked away from him. I let the wolf in me have ascendancy, and he spoke to me of the need for immediate creature comfort. The wind along the beach was constant and chill, slapping my wet garments against my body. Find wood, get a fire going if I could. Dry out. Look for food at the same time. There was no point to agonizing about what had become of Nighteyes and the Fool. The tide was still coming in. That meant that the next low tide would probably come in the dark of night. The following low tide would be sometime the next morning. I had to be resigned that my next opportunity to return to my friends was nearly a full day away. So, for now, gather strength and rest.
I looked across the grassy tableland at the forest that backed it. The trees here were the green of summer still, yet somehow it impressed me as an unfriendly and lifeless place. I decided that there was no point in hiking across the meadow and hunting under the trees. I had no heart for a chase and a kill. The small creatures of the beach would suffice.
It was a poor decision to make during an incoming tide. There was driftwood to gather for a fire, flung high by a previous storm tide, out of reach of today’s water. The blue mussels and other shellfish were already underwater, however. I chose a place where the cliffs subsided into the tableland, a spot somewhat sheltered from the wind,
