"How is it done?"

The Fool shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think Verity himself knows. He blunders toward it, blind and groping. He shapes the stone, and gives it his memories. And when it is finished, it will come to life. I suppose."

"Do you hear what you are saying?" I asked him. "Stone is going to rise, and defend the Six Duchies from the Red-Ships. And what of Regal's troops and the border skirmishes with the Mountain Kingdom? Will this 'dragon' drive them off as well?" Slow anger was building in me. "This is what we have come all this way for? For a tale I would not expect a child to believe?"

The Fool looked mildly affronted. "Believe it or not as you choose. I but know that Verity believes it. Unless I am much mistaken, Kettle believes it as well. Why else would she insist we must stay here, and help Verity complete the dragon?"

For a time, I pondered this. Then I asked him, "Your dream about Realder's dragon. What do you recall of it?"

He gave a helpless shrug. "The feelings of it, mostly. I was exuberant and joyful, for not only was I announcing Realder's dragon, but he was going to fly me on it. I felt I was a bit in love with him, you know. That sort of lift to the heart. But…" He faltered. "I cannot recall if I loved Realder or his dragon. In my dream, they are mingled… I think. Recalling dreams is so hard. One must seize them as soon as one awakes, and quickly repeat them to oneself, to harden the details. Otherwise they fade so quickly."

"But in your dream, did a stone dragon fly?"

"I was announcing the dragon in my dream, and knew I was to fly upon it. I had not yet seen it, in my dream."

"Then maybe it has nothing to do at all with what Verity does. Perhaps, in the time from which your dream came, there were real dragons, of flesh and blood."

He looked at me curiously. "You do not believe there are real dragons, today?"

"I have never seen one."

"In the city," he pointed out quietly.

"That was a vision of a different time, You said today."

He held one of his own pale hands up to the firelight. "I think they are like my kind. Rare, but not mythical. Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?"

I shook my head wearily. "This conversation goes in circles. I am tired of riddles and guesses and beliefs. I want to know what is real. I want to know why we came all this way, and what it is we must do."

But the Fool had no answers to that. When Kettle and Starling got back with the wood, he helped me layer the fire and arrange the meat where the heat would drive the fat from it. What meat we could not set to cook, we bundled aside in the pigskin. There was a sizable pile of bones and scraps. Despite how he had gorged earlier, Nighteyes settled down with a leg bone to gnaw. I surmised he had regurgitated part of his bellyful somewhere.

There is no such thing as having too much meat in reserve, he told me contentedly.

I made a few attempts to needle Kettle into talking to me, but somehow it evolved into a lecture on how much more aware of the Fool I must be now. He must be protected, not only from Regal's coterie, but from the Skill-pull of objects that might take his mind wandering. For that reason, she wished us to stand our watches together. She insisted the Fool must sleep on his back, his bared fingers upturned so they touched nothing. As the Fool usually slept huddled in a ball, he was not overly pleased. But at last we settled for the night.

I was not due to take my watch until the hours before dawn. But it was short of that when the wolf came to push his nose under my cheek and jog my head until I opened my eyes.

"What?" I demanded tiredly.

Kettricken walks alone, weeping.

I doubted she would want my company. I also doubted that she should be alone. I rose noiselessly and followed the wolf out of the tent. Outside, Kettle sat by the fire, poking disconsolately at the meat. I knew she must have seen the Queen leave, so I did not dissemble.

"I'm going to go find Kettricken."

"Probably a good idea," she said quietly. "She told me she was going to look at his dragon, but she has been gone longer than that."

We needed to say no more about it. I followed Nighteyes as he trotted purposefully away from the fire. But he led me, not toward Verity's dragon, but back through the quarry. There was little moonlight, and what there was the looming black blocks of stone seemed to drink away. Shadows seemed to fall in all different directions, altering perspective. The need for caution made the quarry vast as I picked my way along in the wolf's wake.

My skin prickled as I realized we were going in the direction of the pillar. But we found her before we reached there. She was standing, motionless as the stone itself, by the girl on the dragon. She had clambered up onto the block of stone that mired the dragon, and reached up to lay a hand on the girl's leg. A trick of the moonlight made it look as if the girl's stone eyes looked down at her. Light sparkled silver on a stone tear, and glistened on the tears on Kettricken's face. Nighteyes padded lightly up, leaped weightlessly upon the dais, and leaned his head against Kettricken's leg with a tiny whine.

"Hush," she told him softly. "Listen. Can you hear her weeping? I can."

I did not doubt it, for I could feel her questing out with the Wit, more strongly than I had ever sensed it from her before.

"My lady," I said quietly.

She startled, her hand flying to her mouth as she turned to me.

"I beg your pardon. I did not mean to frighten you. But you should not be out here alone. Kettle fears there may still be danger from the coterie, and we are not so far from the pillar."

She smiled bitterly. "Wherever I am, I am alone. Nor can I think of anything they could do to me worse than what I have done to myself."

"That is only because you do not know them as well as I do. Please, my queen, come back to the camp with me."

She moved and I thought she would step down to me. Instead she sat down and leaned back against the dragon. My Wit-sense of the dragon-girl's misery was echoed by Kettricken's. "I just wanted to lie beside him," she said quietly. "To hold him. And to be held. To be held, Fitz. To feel… not safe. I know none of us are safe. But to feel valued. Loved. I did not expect more than that. But he would not. He said he could not touch me. That he dared not touch anything live save his dragon." She turned her head aside. "Even with his hands and arms gloved, he would not touch me."

I found myself clambering up the dais. I took her by the shoulders and drew her to her feet. "He would if he could," I told her. "This I know. He would if he could."

She lifted her hands to cover her face, and her silent sliding tears suddenly became sobs. She spoke through them. "You… and your Skill. And him. You speak so easily of knowing what he feels. Of love. But I… I don't have that. I am only… I need to feel it, Fitz. I need to feel his arms about me, to be close to him. To believe he loves me. As I love him. After I have failed him in so many ways. How can I believe… when he refuses to even…" I put my arms about her and drew her head down on my shoulder, while Nighteyes leaned up against both of us and keened softly.

"He loves you," I told her. "He does. But fate has laid this burden upon both of you. It must be borne."

"Sacrifice," she breathed, and I did not know if she named her child or defined her life. She continued to weep, and I held her, soothing her hair and telling her it would get better, it had to be better someday, there would be a life for them when all this was over, and children, children growing up safe from Red-Ships or Regal's evil ambitions. In time I felt her quiet, and realized it was Wit as much as words I had been giving her. The feeling I had for her had mingled with the wolf's and joined us. Gentler than a Skill-bond, more warm and natural, I held her in my heart as much as in my arms. Nighteyes pressed up against her, telling her he would guard her, that his meat would ever be her meat, that she need fear nothing that had teeth, for we were pack, and always would be.