I bit a torn corner off my thumbnail. “I don't know what I think,” I admitted.
For a time we both pondered in silence and darkness. I drew a breath. “We must go after the Prince. Nothing must distract us from that. We should go back to where we left his trail yesterday and try to discover it again, if the rains have left anything for us to discover. That is the only path that we are absolutely certain will lead to Dutiful. If that fails us, then we will fall back on trying to follow Laurel and the Piebald and hope that that trail also leads to the Prince.”
“Agreed,” the Fool replied softly.
I felt oddly guilty because I felt relief. Not just that he had agreed with me, not just that the Piebald had been put out of my reach, but relief that with Laurel and the prisoner gone, we could drop pretenses and just be ourselves. “I've missed you,” I said quietly, knowing that he would know what I meant.
“So have I.” His voice came from a new direction. In the dark, he was up and moving silently and gracefully as a cat. That thought brought my dream back to me abruptly. I grasped at the tattered fragments of it. “I think the Prince might be in danger,” I admitted.
“You're only now concluding that?”
“A different type of danger from what I expected. I suspected the Witted ones of luring him away from Kettricken and the Court, of bribing him with a cat to be his Witpartner so that they could take him off and make him one of their own. But last night, I dreamed, and ... it was an evil dream, Fool. Of the Prince displaced from himself, of the cat exerting so much influence over their bonding that he could scarcely recall who or what he was.”
“That could happen?”
“I wish I knew for certain. The whole thing was so peculiar. It was his cat, and yet it was not. There was a woman, but I never saw her. When I was the Prince, I loved her. And the cat, I loved the cat, too. I think the cat loved me, but it was hard to tell. The woman was almost . . . between us,”
“When you were the Prince.” I could tell that he could not even decide how to phrase the question.
The mouth of the cave was a lighter bit of darkness now. The wolf slumbered on. I fumbled through an explanation. “Sometimes, at night . . . it's not exactly Skilling. Nor is it completely the Wit. I think that even in my magic, I am a bastard cross of two lines, Fool. Perhaps that is why Skilling sometimes hurts so much. Perhaps I never learned to do it properly at all. Maybe Galen was right about me, allthe time ”
“When you were the Prince,” he reminded me firmly.
“In the dreams, I become him. Sometimes I recall who I truly am. Sometimes I simply become him and know where he is and what he is doing. I share his thoughts, but he is not aware of me, nor can I speak to him. Or perhaps I can. I've never tried. In the dreams, it never occurs to me to try. I simply become him, and ride along.”
He made a small sound, like breathing out thoughtfully. Dawn came in the way it does at the change of the seasons, going from dark to pearly gray all in an instant. And in the moment, I smelled that summer was over, that the thunderstorm last night had drowned it and washed it away, and the days of autumn were undeniably upon us. There was a smell in the air of leaves soon to fall, and plants abandoning their greenery to sink back into their roots, and even of seeds on the wing seeking desperately for a place to settle and sink before the frosts of winter found them.
I turned away from the mouth of our cave and found the Fool, already dressed in clean clothes, putting the final touch on our packing. “There's just a bit of bread and an apple left,” he told me. “And I don't think Nighteyes would fancy the apple.”
He tossed me the bread for the wolf. As the light of day reached his face, Nighteyes stirred. He carefully thought nothing at all as he rose, cautiously stretched, and then went to lap water from the pool at the back of the cave. When he came back, he dropped down beside me and accepted the bread as I broke it into pieces.
So. How long have they been gone? I asked him.
You know I let them go . Why do you even ask me that?
I was silent for a time. had changed my mind. Couldn't you feel that? had decided wouldn't even hurt him, let alone kill him.
Changer. Last night you bore us both too close to a very dangerous place. Neither one of us truly knew what you would do. I chose to let them go rather than find out. Did choose wrong?
I didn't know. That was the frightening part, that I didn't know. I wouldn't ask him to help me track Laurel and the archer. Instead I asked, Think we can pick up the Prince's trail?
I promised you I would, didn't ? Let us simply do what we must do and then go home.
