“Ah, boredom. Fitz, you have no idea how sweet boredom can be. When I think of endless days spent wondering when next they would return to take me, and what new torment they might devise, and if they might see fit to give me food or water before or afterward . . . well, boredom becomes more desirable than the most extravagant festival. And on my journey here, oh, how I longed for my days to be predictable. To know if the person who spoke to me was truly kind or cruel, to know if there might be food that day, or if I would find a dry place to sleep. Ah.” He had almost reached me. He halted where he was, and the emotions that passed over his face tore me. Memories he would not share with me.
“The bedstead is right there, to your left. There. Your hand is on it.”
He nodded to me, and patted and felt his way back to the side of the bed. I had opened the blankets to the linens for him. He turned and sat down on the bed. A smile crossed his face. “So soft. You’ve no idea, Fitz, how much this pleases me.”
He moved his body so carefully. It reminded me of Patience toward the end of her years. It took him time to maneuver so that he could lift his legs up onto the bed. The loose trousers bared his meager calves and the distorted knobs of his ankles. I winced as I looked at his left foot. To call it a foot was a charity. How he had walked on that I did not know.
“I had a stick to help me.”
“I didn’t speak that aloud!”
“I heard that little sound you made. You make it when you see anything hurt. Nosy with a scratch on his face. Or the time I had a sack put over my head and took a beating.” He lay on his side and his hand scrabbled at the bedcovers. I pulled them up over him with no comment. He was silent for a minute and then said, “My back hurts less. Did you do something?”
“I cleaned out the injuries and put dressings on them.”
“And?”
And why should I lie? “When I touched you to clean the first boil that had broken, I . . . went into you. And encouraged your body to heal itself.”
“That’s . . .” He groped for a word. “. . . interesting.”
I had expected outrage. Not his hesitant fascination. I spoke honestly. “It’s a bit frightening, too. Fool, in my previous experiences with Skill-healings, it took a real effort, often the effort of an entire coterie, to find a way into a man’s body and provoke it to work harder at healing itself. So to slip into awareness of your body so easily is unsettling. Something is strange there. Strange in the same way that it was too easy to bring you through the Skill-pillars. You took back our Skill-bond, many years ago.” It was a struggle to keep rebuke from my voice. “I look back on the night when we came here and I marvel at my foolhardiness in making the attempt.”
“Foolhardiness,” he said softly, and laughed low. He coughed then and added, “I believe my life was in the balance that night.”
“It was. I thought I had burned Riddle’s strength to bring you through. But the degree of healing you already showed when we arrived here makes me wonder if it wasn’t something else.”
“It was something else,” he said decisively. “I can’t claim to know this and yet I feel certain I am right. Fitz, all those years ago when you brought me back from the dead, you found me and put me into your own flesh while you entered my dead body and forced it back into life, as if you were lashing a team to pull a wagon from a swamp. You were ruthless in what you did. Much as you were when you risked all, not just you and me, but Riddle, to bring me here.”
I lowered my head. It was not praise.
“We passed each other as we each resumed life in our own bodies. Do you remember that?”
“Somewhat,” I hedged.
“Somewhat? As we passed, we merged and blended.”
“No.” Now he was the one who was lying. It was time to speak the truth. “That is not what I recall. It was not a temporary merging. What I recall is that we were one. We were not wholes blending as we passed. We were parts, finally forming a whole. You and me and Nighteyes. One being.”
He could not see me and yet he still averted his face, as if I had said a thing too intimate for us to witness. He bowed his head, a small affirmation. “It happens,” he said softly. “A mingling of beings. You’ve seen the results, though you may not have recognized it. I certainly didn’t. That tapestry of the Elderlings that once hung in your room.”
I shook my head. I’d been a child the first time I’d seen it. It was enough to give anyone nightmares. There was King Wisdom of the Six Duchies, treating with the Elderlings, who were tall, thin beings with unnaturally colored skin, hair, and eyes. “I don’t think that has anything to do with what I’m talking about now.”
“Oh, it does. Elderlings are what humans may become through a long association with dragons. Or more commonly, what their surviving offspring may become.”
I saw no connection. “I do recall, long ago, when you tried to convince me that I was part dragon.”
A smile twisted his weary mouth. “Your words. Not mine. But not so far from what I was theorizing, even if you’ve phrased it very poorly. Many aspects of the Skill put me in mind of what dragons can do. And if some distant ancestor of yours was dragon-touched, so to speak, could it be why that particular magic manifests in you?”
I sighed and surrendered. “I’ve no idea. I don’t even know quite what you mean by ‘dragon-touched.’ So, perhaps. But I don’t see what that has to do with you and me.”
He shifted in the bed. “How can I be so tired, and not one bit sleepy?”
“How can you start so many conversations and then refuse to finish any of them?”
He went off into a coughing fit. I tried to tell myself he was feigning it but went to fetch him water anyway. I helped him sit up and waited while he drank. When he lay back down, I took the cup and waited. I said nothing, simply stood by the bed with the cup. After a time I sighed.
“What?” he demanded.
“Do you know things you aren’t telling me?”
“Absolutely. And that will always be true.”
He sounded so much like his old self and took such obvious pleasure in the words that I felt almost no annoyance. Almost.
“I mean about this. About what bonds us in such a way that I can take you with me through a Skill-pillar, and almost without effort enter your body to heal it?”
“Almost?”
“I was exhausted afterward, but that was from the healing, I think. Not from the joining.” I would say nothing of what it had done to my back.
I thought he would detect I was holding something back. Instead he spoke slowly. “Because perhaps the joining already exists and always does.”
“Our Skill-bond?”
“No. You haven’t been listening.” He sighed. “Think again about the Elderlings. A human lives long in the company of dragons, and eventually he begins to take on some of the traits of the dragon. You and I, Fitz, lived in close company for years. And in the healing that was actually a snatching back from death, we shared. We mingled. And perhaps we became, as you claim, one being. And perhaps we did not completely sort ourselves back into our own separate selves as thoroughly as you think. Perhaps there was an exchange of our very substances.”
I thought about this carefully. “Substances. Such as flesh? Blood?”
“I don’t know! Perhaps. Perhaps something more essential even than blood.”
I paused to sort the sense from his words. “Can you tell me why it happened? Is it dangerous to us? Something we must try to undo? Fool, I need to know.”
He turned his face toward me, took a breath as if he was going to speak, then paused and let it out. I saw him thinking. Then he spoke simply, as if I were a child. “The human that lives too long near the dragon takes on aspects of the dragon. The white rose that is planted for years beside the red rose begins to have white blossoms threaded with red. And perhaps the human Catalyst who is companion to a White Prophet takes on some of his traits. Perhaps, as you threatened, your traits as a Catalyst have infected me as well.”