What’s this? Fitz? Then I was whirled away, carried into the heart of King Shrewd’s pain. Skilled deep inside him, beyond where the herbs and smoke deadened him, I was scorched with the agony. It was a slow growing pain, along his spine and in his skull, a pushing crowding thing that would not be ignored. His choices were to be consumed by the agony that would not let him think, or to deaden his body and mind with herbs and Smokes to hide from it. But deep inside his fogged mind, a King still lived and raged at his confinement. The spirit was still there, battling the body that no longer obeyed him and the pain that devoured the last years of his life. I swear I saw him, a young man, perhaps a year or so older than myself. His hair had been as bushy and unruly as Verity’s, his eyes were wide and lively, and once his face’s only lines had been from a wide grin. This was who he still was, in his soul, this young man, trapped and desperate. He seized on me, asking wildly, “Is there a way out?” I felt myself sinking with his grip.
Then, like two rivers merging, another force crashed against me, sent me spinning with its current. Boy! Contain yourself. It was as if strong hands steadied me and established me as a separate strand in the twisting rope we were forming. Father. I am here. Are you in need?
No. No. All is as it has been for some time. But Verity …
Yes. I am here.
Bearns is no longer true to us. Brawndy harbors Red-Ships there, in exchange for protection for his own villages. He has turned on us. When you come home, you must …