Fool's Quest

“Yes,” I responded. I held my hands out to her and she set her fate in them. Two slender hands in my sword-callused ones. I felt her pain as she struggled to balance on her twisted feet. I sank down to sit on the floor and she folded gratefully. The Skill in me sent a tendril to touch her brow. This one, ah, this one was a puzzle. Here was her father and there her mother, and here the dragons that had touched her and quarreled over her like two children ripping at a single doll. There were so many possible ways. “What would you like?” I asked her, and her face lit. Her vision of herself surprised me. She did not mind her strong clawed feet, if only they would grow straight. She wished for a blue horse on one cheek, and for the darker green in her scaling to run up her back and down her arms like vines. She wanted black hair, thick and strong like her mother’s, and ears that she could move to catch sound. She showed me and with the Skill, I persuaded her body to follow her will. I heard as at a distance her parents speaking in worried tones, but it was not their choice to make but hers. And when at last she stepped back from me, walking on the front pads of her high arched feet, shaking back a glossy mane, she cried out to them, “See me! This is me!”

Another child they brought to me, born with nostrils so flat to his face that he could scarcely breathe. We found the nose he should have had, and lengthened his fingers and set his hips so that he might walk upright. This child moaned and I was sorry for how he ached with the turning of his bones, but, “It must be done!” the Skill and I whispered to him. He was thin when I gifted him back to his fathers, and panting with pain. One stared at me, teeth bared, and the other wept, but the boy breathed and the hands that he reached to them had thumbs he could move.

“Fitz. You are finished. Stop.” Amber’s voice trembled.

The Skill coursed through me and I recalled that this rush of pleasure was as dangerous as it was sweet. To some. To some it was dangerous. But I was learning, I’d learned so much this very day. I could control it in ways I’d never learned before, in ways I’d never thought were possible. To touch with a tendril, to read the makeup of a child, to allow someone to guide the Skill I wielded as if sharing a grip on a brush, all this I could do.

And I could cool the Skill, reduce it from a boil to a simmer. I could control it.

“Please!” a woman shouted suddenly. “Kind prince, if you would, cannot you open my womb! Let me conceive and bear a child! Please. I beg you, I beg you!”

She flung herself down at my feet and embraced my knees. Her head was bowed, her hair hanging past her heavily scaled face as she sobbed. She was no Elderling but one whose body had been distorted by contact with dragons. With every child I had touched, the influences of a dragon on a growing human body had become plainer to me. In some of the children, I had seen deliberation and even art in how dragons had marked them. But in this woman, the changes were as random as a tree planted in rocky soil and shaded by a boulder. As close as she was to me, I could not exclude her from my Skill, and as it closed around her I felt her innate ability in the magic. It was untrained and yet in that instant I shared how deep her longing for a child was, and how it distressed her to watch the slow years pass and her cradle remain empty.

Such a familiar pang. How could I refuse such a request when I knew so well what it was like to have it denied? Why had I never sought to use the Skill to find why Molly could not bear a child for us? Years wasted, never to be recovered. I set my hands to her shoulders to lift her to her feet and in doing so closed a circle. We were bound for that moment, the pain of loss tying us together, and what had been crooked in her the Skill straightened and what had been closed opened. She cried out suddenly and stepped back from me, her hands clasped over her belly. “I felt the change!” she cried out. “I felt it!”

“Enough!” Amber cried in a low voice. “This must be enough.”

But there was suddenly before me a man saying, “Please, please, the scales have grown down my brow and onto my eyelids. I can barely see. Push them back, I beg of you, prince from the Six Duchies.” He seized my hand and set it to his face. Did he have the Skill as the woman had, or was it that it was running so strongly in me that I could not deny it? I felt the scales retreat from his eyelids, from his brow-line, and he fell back from me laughing aloud.

Someone took my hand and held it tightly. I felt the fabric of a glove against my skin.

“King Reyn! Queen Malta, please, tell them they must step back! He heals them at great danger to himself. He must stop, he must take rest now. See how he shakes! Please, tell them they must not ask more of him.” I heard the words. They meant little to me.