me, the silent breathing of an assassin on the verge of a kill. I quenched my emotions. The violation I felt was too immense.
The Fool spoke softly. ‘I think she kept a dream journal. If she is mine, if she carries the blood of a White, then she will dream. The drive to share those dreams, to speak or write them, would be overpowering. She will have done it. Fitz, you are angry. I can feel it like storm waves lashing my shores. But I must know what she wrote. You have to read these books to me. From start to finish.’
‘No.’ One word. For one word, I could keep my voice level and calm.
His shoulders rose and fell with the strength of the breath he took. Did he struggle for control as I did? His voice was taut as a hangman’s rope. ‘I could have hidden this from you. I could have had Spark steal the books and read them to me here in stealth. I didn’t.’
I unclenched my fists and my throat. ‘That you didn’t wrong me in that way makes this no less of an affront.’
He took his gloved hand from the bag. He put both his hands, palms up, on his knees. I had to lean closer to hear his whisper. ‘If you think these the random writings of a small child, your anger is justified. But you cannot believe that. These are the writings of a White Prophet.’ He dropped his voice even lower. ‘These are the writings of your daughter, Fitz, your little Bee. And mine.’
If he had struck me in the belly with a stave’s end, the impact could not have been worse. ‘Bee was my little girl.’ It came out a wolf’s growl. ‘I don’t want to share her!’ Honesty can be like a boil that bursts at the most unfortunate time. Had I known the source of my anger before I spoke it aloud?
‘I know you don’t. But you must.’ He set his hand lightly on the pack. ‘This is all that she could leave for us. Other than one glorious instant of holding her and watching her promise explode all around me like a geyser of light into a dark night, it is all of her that I will ever know. Please, Fitz. Please. Give me that much of her.’
I was silent. I could not. There was too much in those books. In her journal, there was too little mention of me from the days when she had held herself apart from me. Too much of a small girl fighting alone the ugly, childish battles with the other Withywoods children. Too many entries that made me feel cowardly and ashamed of what a blind father I had been. Her account of her clash with Lant and how I had promised her afterward that I would always take her part showed how I had failed in that regard. How could I read those pages aloud to the Fool? How could I bare my shame?
He knew I could not share those writings, even before he had asked me. He knew me that well; he knew that there were some things I could not yield. Why did he even dare to ask? With both hands he lifted the pack to cradle it to his breast. The tears started in his golden eyes and traced the scars on his face as they ran down his cheeks. He held out the pack, surrendering to me. I felt like a thwarted child whose parent gives in to his tantrum. I took the pack and immediately opened it. There was little in it save the books and Molly’s candles. I had stowed most of my clothing, the Elderling firebrick and other possessions in the tidy cabin cupboards. In the bottom, one of my shirts wrapped the tubes of dragon-Silver. I had judged my pack to be the most private place to keep such things. They were wrapped as I had left them. He had spoken true; he hadn’t rummaged. A waft of fragrance rose to me. I breathed in Molly’s perfumes from the candles. With them came calm. Clarity. I lifted the books out to shift the candles to a safer position.
His words were hesitant. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you. Please, don’t blame Spark. Or Perseverance. It was a chance remark on his part, and the girl acted under duress.’
Molly’s calmness. Molly’s stubborn sense of fairness. Why was it so hard? Was there anything in those books that he did not already know about me? What could I lose? Was not all lost to me already?
Did he not share that loss?
Snow had dampened one corner of Bee’s dream journal. It had dried, but the leather cover had puckered slightly, rippling the embossing. I tried to smooth it with my thumb. It resisted. I opened it slowly. I cleared my throat. ‘On the first page,’ I said, and my voice squeaked tight. The Fool looked blindly toward me, tears streaming down his cheeks. I cleared my throat again. ‘On the first page there is a drawing of a bee. It is exactly the size of a bee and exactly the colours of a bee. Above the bee, written very carefully in a sort of arc, are the words “This is my dream journal, of my important dreams.’’’
His breath caught in his throat. He sat very still. I stood up. Crossing that tiny room took less than three steps. Something—not pride, not selfishness, something I had no name for—made those three steps the steepest climb I’d ever attempted. I sat down beside him with the book open on my lap. He was not breathing. I reached across and lifted his bare hand by its woollen sleeve. I brought it over to the page and lightly skimmed the arch of letters with his drooping fingers. ‘Those are the words.’ I lifted again and manoeuvred his forefinger onto the bee. ‘And here is the bee she painted.’
He smiled. He lifted his wrist to dash the tears from his face. ‘I can feel the ink she put on the page.’
Together we read our daughter’s book. It was still a barbed thought for me to name her so, but I forced myself to it. We did not read it swiftly. That was his decision, not mine. And to my surprise, he did not ask that I read her journal. It was her dreams he wanted to hear. It became our ritual as we parted each evening. A few dreams from her book, read aloud. I read no more than three or four of her dreams every night. Often I read each one over as many as a dozen times. I watched his lips move silently as he committed them to memory. He smiled when I read a favourite dream, of wolves running. A dream of candles made him abruptly sit up straight, and then fall into a long and pensive silence. Her dream of being a nut puzzled him as much as it did me. He wept the evening I read her dream of the Butterfly Man. ‘Oh, Fitz, she had it. She had the gift. And they destroyed it.’
‘As we shall destroy them,’ I promised him.
‘Fitz.’ His voice halted me at the door. ‘Are we sure she is destroyed? You were delayed in the Skill-pillars when you travelled from Aslevjal, but eventually you emerged at Buckkeep.’
‘Give up that hope. I was a trained Skill-user. I emerged. Bee went in untrained, with no experienced guide, part of a chain of untrained folk. So we know from Shun. There was no sign of them when Nettle’s coterie went after her. No trace of them when we followed that same route, months later. She is gone, Fool. Tattered away to nothing.’ I wished he had not made me speak the words aloud. ‘All that is left for us is vengeance.’
I did not sleep well on Tarman. It was, in some ways, like sleeping on the back of an immense animal and always being aware of him with my Wit-sense. Often I had slept with the wolf’s back against my belly, but Nighteyes had been a comfort, for he shared his wild awareness of our surroundings with my duller human senses. I had always slept better when he was near me. Not so with Tarman. He was a creature apart from me. It was like trying to sleep with someone staring at me. I sensed no malevolence, but the constant awareness made me jittery.
So it was that I was sometimes awake and restless in the middle of the night, or in the dark-grey time that comes before dawn. Dawn was a strange thing on the Rain Wild River. During the day, we travelled down a stripe of daylight in the centre of the river while the looming trees to either side blocked both sunrise and sunset. But my body knew when it was dawn, and often I would awake in the pre-dawn and go out onto the still, damp deck to stand in the un-silence of the slowly-waking forest that surrounded us. I found a small measure of peace in those hours when I was as close to alone as one can be on a ship. There was always a hand on anchor watch, but for the most part they respected my stillness.
One
