“
No! Don’t touch me. I can’t control it.”
“Let me help him,” Lady Amber said quietly. Two hesitant steps brought her to where I lay on the floor.
I pulled my arms in tight, hiding my bare hand under my vest. “No. You of all people must not touch me!”
She had crouched gracefully beside me, but as he hunkered back in his heels, he was my Fool and not Amber at all. There was immense sorrow in his voice as he said, “Did you think I would take from you the healing that you did not wish to give me, Fitz?”
The room was spinning and I was too exhausted to hold anything back from him. “If you touch me, I fear the Skill will rip through me like a sword through flesh. If it can, it will give you back your sight. Regardless of the cost to me. And I believe the cost of restoring your sight will be that I lose mine.”
The change in his face was startling. Pale as he was, he went whiter until he might have been carved from ice. Emotion tautened the skin of his face, revealing the bones that frames his visage. Scars that had faded stood out like cracks in fine pottery. I tried to focus my gaze on him, but he seemed to move with the room. I felt so nauseous and so weak, and I hated the secret I had to share with him. But there was no hiding it any longer. “Fool, we are too close. For every hurt I removed from your flesh, my body assumed the wound. Not as virulently as the injuries you carried, but when I healed my knife-stabs in your belly I felt them in mine the next day. When I closed the sores in your back, they opened in mine.”
“I saw those wounds!” Perseverance gasped. “I thought you’d been attacked. Stabbed in the back.”
I did not pause for his words. “When I healed the bones around your eye sockets, mine swelled and blackened the next day. If you touch me Fool—”
“I won’t!” he exclaimed. He shot to his feet and staggered blindly away from me. “Get out of here. All three of you! Leave now. Fitz and I must speak privately. No, Spark, I will be fine. I can tend myself. Please go. Now.”
They retreated, but not swiftly. They went in a bunch, with many backward glances. Spark had taken Per’s hand, and when they looked back it was with the faces of woeful children. Lant went last, and his expression was set in a Farseer stare so like his father’s that no one could have mistaken his bloodlines. “My chamber,” he said to them as he shut the door behind them, and I knew he would try to keep them safe. I hoped there was no real danger. But I also feared that General Rapskal was not finished with us.
“Explain,” the Fool said flatly.
I gathered myself up from the floor. It was far harder than it should have been. I rolled to my belly, drew my knees up under me until I was on all fours, and then staggered upright. I caught myself on the table’s edge and moved around it until I could reach a chair. My inadvertent healing of first Lant and then Per had extracted the last of my strength. Seated, I dragged in a breath. It was so difficult to keep my head upright. “I can’t explain what I don’t understand. It’s never happened with any other Skill-healing I’ve witnessed. Only between you and me. Whatever injury I take from you appears on me.
”
”