I do not have a memory of that frozen graveyard that is my own. I have a sort of dream. I was wretchedly cold, stiff, and the raw taste of brandy burned, not just in my mouth, but all through me. Burrich and Chade would not leave me alone. They didn’t care how much they were hurting me, they just kept on rubbing my hands and feet, careless of the old bruises, the scabs on my arms. And every time I closed my eyes, Burrich would seize me and shake me like a rag. “Stay with me, Fitz,” he kept saying. “Stay with me, stay with me. Come on, boy. You’re not dead. You’re not dead.” Then suddenly he hugged me to him, his bearded face bristling against mine and his hot tears falling on my face. He rocked me back and forth, sitting in the snow at the edge of my grave. “You’re not dead, son. You’re not dead.”
EPILOGUE
IT WAS A thing Burrich had heard of, in a tale told by his grandmother. A tale of a Witted one who could leave her body, for a day or so, and then come back to it. And Burrich had told it to Chade, and Chade had mixed the poisons that would take me to the brink of death. They told me I had not died, that my body had but slowed to an appearance of death.
I do not believe that.
And so I lived once more in man’s body. Though it took me some days and time to remember that I had been a man. And sometimes, still, I doubt it.
I did not resume my life. My life as FitzChivalry lay in smoking ruins behind me. In all the world, only Burrich and Chade knew I had not died. Of those who had known me, few remembered me with smiles. Regal had killed me, in every way that mattered to me as a man. To present myself to any of those who had loved me, to stand before them in my human flesh would have only been to give them proof of the magic I had tainted myself with.