Alone? You know there is no true ‘alone’ for either of us anymore.
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 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 bade 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 colors. Even in the muted light of the dying fire, the reds blazed and the yellows shimmered. With that length of textile, he could have purchased the favor 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 color. It was a simple thing of carved wood, skillfully wrought, 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 redo the colors. 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 coloring 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 fervor 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.”