Fool’s Assassin

A child is bitten by a rat. The parent rushes to comfort him. But the bite on the hand becomes septic and the child’s hand must be taken to preserve his life. That day, the child’s life changes forever.

Or a child is bitten by a rat. The parent rushes to comfort him. The wound heals well without a scar and all is well.

But it isn’t. The memory of the bite and the rat will be carried by the child for the rest of his life. Even as a grown man, the sound of scuttling in the night will make him waken bathed in sweat. He cannot work in barns or around granaries. When his dog brings him a dead rat, he starts back in terror.

Such is the power of memory. It is fully as strong as the most feverish infection, and it lingers not just for a period of sickness but for all the days of a man’s life. As dye soaks fibers, drawn into them to change their color forever, so does a memory, stinging or sweet, change the fiber of a man’s character.

Years before I knew that a man’s memories could be pressed into stone and waken as a dragon, I still trembled before their power, and hid from them. Oh, the memories I denied and concealed from myself, for they were too fraught with pain for me to consider, as a child or as a man. And the memories I bled away from myself into a dragon, thinking that I freed myself of a poison that would weaken me. For years I walked, dulled to my life, unaware of what I had stripped away from myself. The day the Fool restored those memories to me it was like blood pulsing through a numbed limb, wakening it, yes, but bringing with it tingling pain and debilitating cramps.