and socks and shirt, and wrung as much water from everything as I could. I propped the garments on driftwood sticks to dry near the fire, and put my boots upside-down on two stakes to drain. I sat by the fire, hugging myself against the chill of the fading day. Expecting nothing, I still ventured to quest again. Nighteyes?
There was no response. It meant nothing, I told myself. If he and the Fool had managed to escape, then he would not reach out towards me for fear of being detected by the Piebalds. It might mean only that he was choosing to be silent. Or it might mean he was dead. I wrapped my own arms around myself and held tight. I must not think such thoughts or grief would tear me apart. The Fool had asked me to keep Prince Dutiful alive. I’d do that. And the Piebalds would not dare to kill my friends. They would want to know what had become of the Prince, how he could have vanished before their eyes.
What would they do to the Fool to wring answers from him? Don’t think such things.
Reluctantly, I rose to seek out the Prince.
The boy had not moved from where I had left him. I walked up behind him, and when he did not even turn towards me, I nudged him rudely with my foot. ‘I’ve a fire,’ I said gruffly.
He didn’t respond.
‘Prince Dutiful?’ I could not keep the sneer from my voice. He did not flinch.
I crouched down next to him and set a hand on his shoulder. ‘Dutiful.’ I leaned around him to look into his face.
He wasn’t there.
His expression was slack, his eyes dull. His mouth hung slightly ajar. I groped towards our tenuous Skill-bond. It was like tugging at a broken fishing line. There was no resistance, no sense that anyone had ever been at the other side of that bond.
A terrible echo of a long-ago lesson came to me. ‘If you give in to the Skill, if you do not hold firm against its attraction, then the Skill can tatter you away and you will become as a great drooling babe, seeing nothing, hearing nothing …’ The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I shook the Prince, but his head just lolled and nodded on his neck. ‘Damn me!’ I roared to the sky. I should have foreseen he would try to reach the cat, I should have known this could happen.
I tried to force calmness on myself. Stooping, I lifted his arm and set it across my shoulders. I set my arm around his waist and drew him to his feet. As I hauled him down the beach, his toes dragged in the sand. When I reached the fire, I put him down beside it. He sprawled over on his side.
I spent several minutes replenishing the blaze with nearby driftwood. I built it large and hot, not caring who or what it might draw. My hunger and my weariness were forgotten. I dragged the Prince’s boots from his feet, emptied them of water and set them upside-down to dry. My own shirt was steaming warm now. I peeled Dutiful’s wet shirt from his back and hung it out. I spoke to him the whole time, rebuking him and taunting him at first, but before long I was pleading with him. He made no response at all. His skin was chill. I wrestled his arms into the sleeves and dragged my warmed shirt onto him. I chafed his arms, but his stillness seemed to invite the cold to fill him. With every passing moment, his body seemed to have less life in it. It was not that his breathing laboured or that his heart beat more slowly, but more that my Wit-sense of his presence was fading, exactly as if he were travelling away from me.
Finally, I sat down behind him. I pulled him back against me, his back to my chest and put my arms around him in a vain effort to warm him. ‘Dutiful,’ I said by his ear. ‘Come back, boy. Come back. You’ve a throne to inherit, and a kingdom to rule. You can’t go like this. Come back, lad. It can’t all have been for nothing. Not the Fool and Nighteyes both spent for nothing. What will I say to Kettricken? What will Chade say to me? Gods, gods, what would Verity say to me now?’
It was not so much what Verity would have said to me as what Verity would have done for me. I held his son close to me, and then placed my face next to his beardless cheek. I took a deep breath and dropped all my walls. I closed my eyes, and slipped into the Skill in search of him.
I nearly lost myself.
There have been times when I could scarcely reach the flow of Skill, and in other times and places, I have experienced the Skill as a flowing river of power, incredibly swift and powerful. As a boy, I had nearly lost myself in that river, sustained and rescued only by Verity’s intervention. I had grown in strength and control since then. Or so I had thought. This sensation was like diving into a racing current of Skill. Never before had I felt it so strong and seductive. In my present frame of mind, it seemed to offer the complete and perfect answer to me. Just let go. Stop being this person Fitz trapped in a battle-scarred body. Stop bleeding sorrow for the death of my closest friends. Just let go. The Skill offered me existence without thought. It was not the suicide’s temptation to die and make the world stop for him. This was far more enticing. Change the shape of your being and leave all those considerations behind. Merge.
If I had had only myself to think of, I know I would have yielded to it. But the Fool had charged me with seeing that he did not die in vain, and my wolf had bid me live and tell Nettle of him. Kettricken had asked me to bring her son back to her. Chade was depending on me. And Hap. So I found myself in that seething current of streaming sensations, and I fought to remain who I was. I don’t know how long it took me to do that. Time has no meaning in that place. That alone is one of the Skill’s dangers. Some part of me knew I was burning my body’s strength, but when one is immersed in the Skill it is hard to care about physical things.
When I was sure of myself, I cautiously reached out in search of Dutiful.
I had thought it would be easy to find him. The night before, it had been effortless. I had but clasped his hand then, and found him within the Skill. Tonight, though I knew that somewhere I cradled his chilling body, I could not discover him. It is difficult to describe how I sought him. The Skill is not truly a place nor a time. Sometimes I think it can be described as being without the boundaries of self. At other times, that defining seems too narrow, for ‘self’ is not the only boundaries we set to how we experience being.
I opened myself to the Skill and let it stream through me like water through a sieve, and still I found no trace of the Prince. I stretched myself beneath the flow of the Skill like a hillside full of tiny grasses under sunlight and let it touch each blade of me, and still I could not sense him. I wove myself throughout the Skill, twining over it like ivy, and still I could not separate the lad from its flow.
He had left a sense of himself in the Skill, but like a bootmark in fine dust on a windy day that trace was crumbling to meaningless grains flowing with the Skill. I gathered what I could of him, but it was no more Prince Dutiful than the scent of a flower is the flower. Nevertheless, I took to myself the bits that I recognized and held them fiercely. It was becoming more difficult for me to recall what exactly was the essence of the Prince. I had never known him well, and the body that my body held was rapidly losing its connection to him.
In an effort to find the boy, I engaged completely with the Skill. I did not surrender myself, but I stepped free of all the safety holds that always before I had clung to. It was an eerie feeling. I was a kite cut free and flying, a tiny boat with no hand on the tiller. I had not lost my sense of self, but I had given up the absolute certainty that I could find my way back to my body. Yet it put me no closer to finding Dutiful. It only made me more aware of the vastness that surrounded me and the hopelessness of my task. It would have been easier to net the smoke from an extinguished fire than to gather the boy together again.
And all the while the Skill plucked at me, whispering promises. It was only cold and rushing so long as I resisted it. If I gave in, I knew it would become all warmth and comfort and belonging. If I surrendered to it, I would subside into
