I found the place where my experience matched Icefyre's. I found the cold and the dark and the despair, I found the longing for a death that I could not reach on my own. I returned my soul to Regal's dungeon of beatings and isolation.
It was one thing to know I had been in a place like that. It was another to reach for it, to taste again old blood around my loosened teeth, to smell the stink of my own festering wounds, and feel the numbing cold of the stone walls that was still not enough to dull the aching of my battered flesh. I put my soul back into that trapped body and knew again the despair of reaching for a death that would not come to me. I pushed the life from my body and held it at bay, only to have it flow relentlessly back into my flesh the moment I relaxed my guard against it.
Sweet Eda, was that really you, trapped like that? I thought it but one of your nightmares!
Nettle's horror nearly ripped me from my despair, but in that moment, I felt the dragon once more surge back to the edge of life's shores. In that instant, we touched and duplicated one another. My nightmare and his were the same, and I felt Nettle's awareness flow from my nightmare into the dragon's dark dream.
An instant later, I grasped the fullness of my error. His dream closed around her and took her down as he submerged his life again. I heard Nettle's fading wail at the complete foreignness of the consciousness that now enmeshed her.
I had time only to gasp. Then she was gone, fallen into a tarry darkness that engulfed her.
I Skilled uselessly after her. It was like groping in cold black water. And then even my awareness of the dragon was snatched from me, and my daughter was carried down with him, into the death he so avidly sought.
Once, I had seen a motley-fish leap from the water and seize a seabird in its jaws and bear it down. So had it been. One moment Nettle had been with me, poised at my request to plunge in where I bade her go. And she had and now she was gone, carried down to a place I could not even imagine. I had risked her, weaponless, untrained in the Skill. She had gone at my request. The magnitude of my stupidity gutted me. I could neither blink nor breathe.
I had fed my daughter to a dragon.
I tried to unbelieve that it had happened, to force time back by sheer effort of will. It was impossible that such a terrible thing could have happened so instantaneously, impossible that so dreadful an error could be irreversible. The injustice of it alone would have seemed to make it impossible. She had done nothing to deserve such an end. It was my fault; it should have fallen upon me. Horror hollowed me as I scratched my claws against iron-hard reality. I could not unmake that moment of foolishness. What had possessed me, why hadn't I paused to think before I flung her into the dragon's dream?
Dimly, I was aware of the others.
Where did she go? What happened? This from Dutiful.
She went in the dragon. I been there. The music is big, but he doesn't let you go. He doesn't find you and he doesn't care. You have to be his music, down there. No room for your own music. Thick's Skilling was full of awe and fear.
But worst was Chade's woeful Oh, Fitz, what have you done? What have you done?
I wanted to die, if dying could undo my shame and remorse. I needed to die, because I could not live through feeling those things.
And in that horrid place, I again touched the dragon. Touched him, and knew that he had taken my message from Nettle. Taken it and demanded more of her, to know more of things that she did not know. He had torn her wide and emptied her out, a useless juvenile human female, full of their trivial fancies. And so he had discarded her, coughed her out into the Skill, a useless indigestible bit of waste. Like a thoughtless child would wipe the scales of a dead butterfly's wings from his grubby hands, he disposed of her. Unprepared, she dispersed, a drop of pale ink in a rush of water.
And now the dragon found me, wordlessly, roaring into my being, tearing me open to the Skill as if he ripped the scar from an old wound. It was not the Skill that linked our minds, but it was kin to it in some strange way. And in that instant, it was all out of my hands. For I had the knowledge that he wanted, and he took it. He tore my mind open like an old purse, upended my memory as if it were a crock of oddments, and sorted my life impatiently for whatever he wished to know. And even before he was finished, our fate, the fate of all humans, was sealed. For Tintaglia, roaring like a storm wind, suddenly rushed through me, using her awareness of me to find Icefyre. It was as if they converged inside my body; I was the conduit for them, briefly, until they recognized one another. After that, they locked their minds together and cast me aside, unneeded, unnoticed, and unimportant. But their use of me had torn me wide and turned me inside out, emptied me into the wild currents of the Skill. I could no longer find myself, and did not much care to try.
