Assassin’s Fate

‘And yet I am here, and alive, and our enemies are walled away from us by smouldering rubble. Perhaps I am still the Catalyst, and can change even her predictions of what must be. I am not dead yet and I don’t intend to die. I am taking Bee home, to Buckkeep. She will be raised as a princess, and you will be at her side to teach and advise her. Her sister will adore her and she will have a little niece to play with.’

Two of the freed Whites rose and went to the rack of torture tools. They made choices and then joined Lant, Spark and Per, chipping away at the mortar. The irony twisted my gut.

‘And we will live happily ever after?’ the Fool asked.

I watched the bits of mortar fall. ‘That is my intention.’

‘And mine. My hope. But a thin one.’

‘Don’t doubt us, or we are lost.’

‘Fitz, my love, that is the problem. I do not doubt Bee’s dreams at all.’

I opened my mouth and then found wisdom. I closed it. But as a dreadful thought came to me, I asked him, ‘The container of Silver you took from the stateroom. Did the Servants get it?’

‘I stole it to keep a promise,’ he admitted. ‘What did you think? That I’d taken it to use on myself?’

‘I feared that.’

‘No. I didn’t even bring it with me. I told Boy-O—’

Beside me, Bee stirred. She lifted her head and took her hand out of mine. The Skill-link held, stretched thin as a thread but still there. I wondered if she felt it. She drew in a deep breath and sighed it out. She looked from me to the Fool. He smiled at her as I’d never seen him smile at anyone. His scars stretched with it, but his half-blind eyes shone with tenderness. She stared back at him and leaned tighter into me. As she looked at him, she whispered, ‘I had a dream.’

He lifted a gloved hand and stroked her hair. ‘Would you like to tell it to me?’ he offered.

She looked at me. I nodded. ‘I sit near a fire beside Da and a wolf. He is very old. He tells me stories and I write them down. But I am very sad as I do this. Everyone is mourning.’ She finished with, ‘I believe this dream is very likely.’ She turned worried eyes to me.

I smiled at her. ‘That dream sounds lovely to me. I would change only your sadness.’

She frowned at how little I understood. ‘Da. I don’t make the dreams. I can’t change them. They just come to me.’

I laughed. ‘I know. The same thing happens to the Fool. Sometimes he is very sure a dream will come true.’ I shrugged one shoulder and grinned at her. ‘And then I make it not true.’

‘You can do that?’ She was astonished.

‘He is my Catalyst. He changes things. Sometimes in ways I never imagined,’ the Fool admitted ruefully. ‘And often enough I have been grateful for him to do that. Bee, there is so much I must teach you. About Catalysts and dreams and—’

‘Prilkop told me that Dwalia was my Catalyst. She came and made changes in my life. She changed me. Thus she enabled the changes I made. And I killed her. I killed my Catalyst.’ She looked up at me. Her eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots, her pale curls matted to her head. ‘Did you know that I killed people? And I burned all the dreams so the Servants cannot use them for evil any more. Papa, I am the Destroyer.’ Her words left me speechless. In a very small voice, she asked, ‘Can you change that for me?’

‘You are Bee and you are my little girl,’ I told her fiercely. ‘That doesn’t change. Not ever.’

Bee turned her head sharply to something and I followed her gaze. Another prisoner was making her slow way toward us, her pale face pinched with pain as she limped on a welted foot. ‘In my dream, I saw you, little girl,’ she said. She smiled at us with chapped lips. ‘You were made of flame. You danced in the flames and brought war to where war had never been. With a sword of flame, you sliced the past from the present, and the present from the future.’

Prilkop started toward us, his face full of worry.

The White shuffled closer. ‘I am Cora, a collator. I studied in the scroll-library. I had a lovely little cottage. But I spilled ink on an old text. I knew I must be punished. But I also knew that one day I would go back to my ink and pens and fine vellum. To evenings of rest and wine and songs by moonlight.

‘But you came. And you destroyed it all. ‘She shrieked the last words and flung herself at Bee. Bee screamed in fury and fear, and stood to meet her. My knife clashed against Bee’s as they drove into the woman’s body at the same moment. She went down under our combined weight as I fell onto her. The Fool gave an incoherent cry over Per’s roar of rage. The killing wrath that rose in me obscured all else. Bee was fast. She withdrew her knife and sank it again before I could finish the woman. Cora bubbled a whine that became silence. We sprawled on the filthy floor, my hands slick with blood and my leg searing with pain. Bee rolled off the woman and struggled to rise. The blood on her clothes terrified me. She was not hurt, our Skill-thread assured me. She retrieved her knife and wiped it on Cora’s dirty trousers.