We did not work well together. I think by nature we were both Solos, and yet we would have to learn to function together as part of Dutiful’s Coterie. And so we made a number of false starts, and irritably blamed Galen’s fogging of me and my use of elfbark and those shortsighted folk who had not trained Chade when he was a boy. But at length, the Skill flowed hesitantly between us, and as I so often had before, I trusted myself to his long-fingered hands. I fed him strength and the Skill itself, for his ability was as yet only a sporadic trickling of the magic. Chade’s knowledge of how a man’s body was put together combined with my own body’s awareness of itself to guide what we did. In some ways it was a more difficult task than my healing had been, for each piece had to be done separately, and in defiance of what my body felt was correct. But we prevailed.
And when we were finished, I took up the mirror again. My new scar was less noticeable than the old one, and my nose not quite as crooked. But it would suffice. The marks were there. As were the old bite scar on my neck, the star from the arrowhead near my spine, and a new web of scarring where the sword wound should have been. These new scars were easier to tolerate than the old ones, for we involved only the skin and did not anchor them to the muscles underneath. Still, they pulled irritatingly. I knew I’d eventually get used to them. It was Chade who noticed that my “badgerlock” was now growing in dark at the roots. He shook his head over that. “I’ve no idea how to change that. Nothing in the scrolls mentions a change in the color of hair. Dye the whole shock of white hair black is my advice. Let that change be obvious. Folk will think you’ve become vain. Vanity is easy to explain.”
I nodded and set the mirror down. “But later. Not now. Right now, I’m exhausted,” I said, and spoke the simple truth.
He looked at me oddly. “And your headache?”
I frowned and lifted a hand to my brow. “Is no worse than an ordinary headache, despite all the Skilling we’ve done tonight. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps it only took getting used to.”
He shook his head slowly and came around the table to set his hands to my skull. “Here,” he said, tracing the now nonexistent scar that had birthed my badgerlock of white hair. “And here.” He prodded an area near my eye socket.
I winced from habit, then sat still. “It doesn’t hurt. My head always hurt, when I combed my hair, and my face always ached if I was long in the cold. I never thought about it before.”
“I’d date the injury by your eye to when Galen tried to kill you on the tower top. In the Queen’s garden, when you were his student. Burrich said you nearly lost the vision in that eye. Have you forgotten the beating he gave you?”
I shook my head silently.
“Neither had your body. I’ve seen you from the inside out, Fitz. Seen the damage done to your skull in Regal’s dungeons, and other long-healed fractures in your face and spine. The Skill healing seems to have put right a lot of old damage. It interests me that you do not have a headache after Skilling. It will interest me even more if you cease having to fear seizures.”
He left my side and went to his scroll rack. He returned with a copy of that most horrific of books, Man’s Flesh by Verdad the Flayer. It was a beautifully made thing, layers of paper bound between carved covers of hinkwood, and still smelled of its inks. Obviously this copy had been recently created. That corrupt and ruthless Jamaillian priest had flayed and dismembered bodies for years in a monastery in that distant land, but when his depravity was discovered, his notoriety spread even as far as the Six Duchies. I had heard of this treatise, but never before seen a copy.
“Where did this come from?” I asked in surprise.
“Some years ago, I sent for it. It took me two years to find one. And the text is obviously corrupted. Verdad never referred to himself as ‘the flayer’ as this manuscript does. And I doubt that he rejoiced in the smell of rotting flesh, as this claims he did. No, I sought it out for the copies of his illustrations, not the words others have added.”
Chade opened it reverently and set it before me. As he had bid me, I ignored the ornate Jamaillian lettering and focused instead on the detailed depictions of the interiors of bodies. As a boy, I had seen the sketches that Chade had made, and those he had from his master before him, but they had been crude things compared to these. Charts that show the most swiftly lethal places to thrust a dagger are not to be compared with a map of a man’s exposed vitals. The colors were very true. It was strange to look at them and find myself reminded of the steaming entrails of a gutted deer. How can I explain how vulnerable I suddenly felt? All these soft structures, deep red and glistening gray, gleaming liver and intricately coiled intestines, fit so precisely inside my body. Then Laudwine had thrust a sword blade through my back and into them. Without thinking, I set a hand to the false sword scar on my lower back. No ribs had shielded me there, only overlapping strands of muscle. Chade saw the gesture. “Now you see why I feared so for you. From the start, I suspected that only the Skill could restore you to health.”
