“Because they have a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand predictions that if I succeeded as a White Prophet, then such an heir would follow me. Someone who would wreak even greater changes in this world.”
I spoke carefully. I didn’t want to upset him. “But there were thousands of prophecies that said you would die. And you did not. So can we be sure these foretellings of a son are real?”
He sat quietly for at time. “I cannot allow myself to doubt them. If my heir exists, we must find him and protect him. If I dismiss the possibility of his existence, and he does exist and they find him, then his life will be a misery and his death will be a tragedy for the world. So I must believe in him, even if I cannot tell clearly how such a child came to be.” He stared into darkness. “Fitz. There in the market. I seem to recall he was there. That I touched him and in that moment, I knew him. My son.” He drew a ragged breath and spoke in a shaky voice. “All was light and clarity around us. I could not only see, I could see all the possibilities threading away from that moment. All that we might change together.” His voice grew weaker.
“There was no light. The winter day was edging toward evening, and the only person near you was . . . Fool. What’s wrong?”
He had swayed in his chair and then caught his face in his hands. Then he said in a woeful voice. “I don’t feel well. And . . . my back feels wet.”
My heart sank. I moved to stand behind him. “Lean forward,” I suggested quietly. For a wonder, he obeyed me. The back of his nightshirt was wet with something that was not blood. “Lift up your shirt,” I bade him, and he tried. With my help, we bared his back, and again he did not protest. I lifted a candle high. “Oh, Fool,” I said before I could think to control my voice. A large and angry swelling next to his spine had split open and was leaking a thin, foul fluid down his scarred and bony back. “Sit still,” I told him and stepped away to the water warming by the fire. I soaked my napkin in it, wrung it out, and then warned him, “Brace yourself,” before applying it to the sore. He hissed loudly, and then lowered his forehead onto his crossed arms on the table.
“It’s like a boil. It’s opened and draining now. I think that might be good.”
He gave a small shudder but said nothing. It took me a moment to realize he was unconscious. “Fool?” I said, and touched his shoulder. No response. I reached out with the Skill and found Chade. It’s the Fool. He’s taken a turn for the worse. Is there a healer you can send up to your old rooms?
None that would know the way, even if any were awake at this hour. Shall I come?
No. I’ll tend to him.
Are you certain?
I’m sure.
Probably better not to involve anyone else. Probably better it was only him and me, as it had been so often before now. While he was unaware of pain, I lit more candles to give me light, and brought a basin. I cleansed the wound as well as I could. He was limp and still as I trickled water onto it and sponged away the liquid that flowed out. It did not bleed. “No different from a horse,” I heard myself say once through my gritted teeth. Cleaned, the split boil gaped on his back as if some vile mouth had opened in his skin. It went deep. I forced myself to look at his abused body. There were other suppurations. They bulged, some shiny and almost white, others red and angry and surrounded by a network of dark streaks.
I was looking at a dying man. There was too much wrong with him. To think that somehow food and rest could bring him closer to healing was folly. It would prolong his dying. The infections that were destroying him were too widespread and too advanced. He might even now be dead.
I set my hand to the side of his neck, placing two of my fingers on the pulse point there. His heart was still beating: I felt it there in the feeble leaping of his blood. I closed my eyes and held my fingers there, taking a peculiar comfort in that reassuring beat. A wave of dizziness passed through me. I had been awake too long, and drunk too much at the feast long before I’d added brandy with the Fool to the mix. I was suddenly old, and tired beyond telling. My body ached with the years I’d heaped on it and the tasks I’d demanded of it. The ancient, familiar pain of the arrow scar in my back, so close to my spine, twitched to wakefulness and grew to an unavoidable deep throb, as if someone’s finger were insistently prodding the old injury.
Except that I no longer had that scar. Or the pain from it. That realization whispered into my awareness, light as the first clinging snowflakes on a window. I did not look at it, but accepted what was happening. I let my breathing slow and remained very still inside my own skin. Inside our skin.
I slipped my awareness from my own body into the Fool’s and heard him make a soft sound, a wounded man disturbed in deepest sleep. Do not worry. I am not after your secrets.
But even the mention of secrets roused him. He struggled a little, but I remained still and I do not think he could find me. When he subsided, I let my awareness tendril throughout his body. Gently. Go softly, I told myself. I let myself feel the pain of his back injury. The boil that had drained was not as dangerous as the ones that had not. It had emptied itself but the poisons from some of the others were working deeper into his body and he had no strength to fight them.
I turned them back. I pushed them out.
It did not take that much effort. I worked carefully, asking as little of his flesh as I could. In some other place, I set my fingers to the sores and called up the poison. Hot skin strained to the breaking point opened under my touch, and the poisons trickled out. I used my Skill-strength in a way that I had not known it could be used, yet it seemed so obvious to me there and in that moment. Of course it worked this way. Of course it could do this.
“Fitz.”
“Fitz!”
“FITZ!”
Someone seized me and jerked me back. I lost my balance and fell. Someone tried to catch me, failed, and I struck the floor hard. It knocked the wind out of me. I gasped and wheezed and then opened my eyes. It took a moment for me to make sense of what I saw. The dying firelight illuminated Chade standing over me. His face was seized with horror as he stared down at me. I struggled to speak and could not. I was so weary, so very tired. Sweat was drying on my body, and my clothing clung to me where it was soaked. I lifted my head and became aware that the Fool was slumped forward on the table. The red light of the fire showed pus oozing from a dozen injuries on his back. I rolled my head and my gaze met Chade’s horrified stare.
“Fitz, what were you doing?” he demanded, as if he had caught me in some foul and disgusting act.
I tried to draw breath to respond. He looked away from me and I became aware that someone else had entered the room. Nettle. I knew her as she brushed against my Skill-sense. “What happened here?” she demanded, and then as she stepped close enough to see the Fool’s bared back, she gasped in dismay. “Did Fitz do this?” she demanded of Chade.
“I don’t know. Build up the fire and bring more candles!” he ordered in a trembling voice as he sank into the chair I had left empty. He set his shaking hands on his knees and leaned down toward me. “Boy! What were you doing?”
I’d remembered how to pull air into my lungs. “Trying to stop . . .” I pulled in another breath. “. . . the poisons.” It was so hard to roll over. I ached in every fiber of my body. When I set my hands to the floor to try to lever myself up, they were wet. Slippery. I lifted them and brought them up to my eyes. They were dripping with watery blood and fluid. Chade shoved a table napkin into my hands.