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The Fool smiled sweetly at me. “Don't look like that. You know I survived.”

“At what cost?” I asked, knowing there must be one.Advertisement

“Exhaustion. I emerged somewhere, I have no idea where. Nowhere I've ever been before. It was a city in ruins, and still as dead stone can be. There was a river near it. That is as much as I can tell you. I slept, I don't know how long. When I awoke, dawn was all around me. And the Skill-pillar towered over me. This one shone clean of lichen or moss, with each rune standing out as clear as if it had been chiseled yesterday. I studied them a long time, afraid and dreading, and yet knowing they offered me my only hope. I narrowed my choices down to two of them that might possibly be the one I wished. And then I entered the pillar again.”

“No.” I groaned.

“Exactly how I felt. I emerged feeling as if I had taken a bad beating. But I had come to the right place.”

He made me ask the question, enjoying it. “Where?”

“Do you remember the broken plaza, like an ancient market circle? The one where the forest was trying to encroach? I stood on top of a stone pillar there, and for a moment, in a dream, I wore the Rooster Crown. You saw me. You remember it.”

I nodded slowly. “It was on our road to the Stone Garden. Where the stone dragons slept, before we roused them and sent them to fight the Red Ships. Where they sleep again now, Verity-as-Dragon amongst them.”

“Exactly. Again, I went down that forest path, and I saw him there. But he was not the one I sought. I found Girl-on-a-Dragon there, sleeping, her arms clasping the neck of her dragon, just as you had told me. And I woke her and made her understand that I must come here, and once again I mounted behind her and she flew here with me. And left me. So, you see, old friend, I did not lie to you. I flew here.”

I sat bolt upright, suddenly wide awake. A hundred questions swelled in me but I asked the most important one. “How did you wake her? It takes the Wit, the Skill, and blood to wake a stone dragon. Well do I know that!”

“It did. And it does. The Skill I had on my fingertips, and blood was easy enough to come by.” He rubbed his wrist, possibly remembering an old cut. “I did not and do not have the Wit. But you may remember that, foolishly, I had already put some of myself into Girl-on-a-Dragon, when I was attempting to complete the carving of her and wake her.”

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“As did I,” I recalled guiltily.

“Yes. I know,” he said softly. “It is still in her. You put in the memories you could not stand to recall and the emotions you would not let yourself feel. You gave her your mother abandoning you, and never knowing your father. You gave her Regal's torment of you in his dungeons. You gave her, most of all, the pain of losing Molly and your child, to Burrich, of all people. You put into her your fury and your hurt and your sense of being betrayed.” He gave a little sigh. “It is all in her still. The things you could not allow yourself to feel.”

“I left all that behind me long ago,” I said slowly.

“You cut out a part of yourself and went on, less than you had been.”

“I do not see it that way.” My reply was stiff.

“You cannot see it that way,” he informed me calmly. “Because you cannot truly remember how awful any of it was. Because you put all of it into Girl-on-a-Dragon.”

“Can we leave this?” I asked, almost frightened, almost angry, but confused over what would scare or anger me.

“We must. Because you already left it, long years ago. And only I will ever know the full depth of what you felt about those things. Only I fully remember who and what you were before you did it. For we are bound together, not only by Skill and fate, but also because both of us live on, inside Girl-on-a-Dragon. Because I knew what went into her, I could reach her and rouse her. I could convey to her my desperate purpose. And so she brought me to Aslevjal.

“It was a strange journey, wild and wonderful. You know I have ridden with her before. I was with her when she and the other dragons attacked not just the Red Ships that assailed the Six Duchies, but the White Ships that were the cruel tools of the Pale Woman. It was strange for me to be caught up in true battle. I did not like it.”

“No one does,” I assured him. I put my brow back down on my knees and closed my eyes.

“I suppose not. But this time, flying with her, it was different. There was no killing to witness, no other dragons flying beside us. Instead, it was just she and I. I sat behind her and put my arms around her slender waist. She is a part of the dragon, you know, not a separate creature at all. Rather like a girl-shaped limb more than anything else. So she did not speak to me, yet, strangely enough, she did smile and from time to time, she would turn to look into my face or gesture to something on the world below us that she wished me to see. pqdm.com