I stopped.

I halted my hands, and it felt as if by doing so, I stood alone against fate and defied the flow of all time. I knew what I was meant to do. I should crown my Fool and then drench the pyre with the remaining oil. A spark, at most two, would be enough for the summer-dry tinder. He would burn away to nothing, his smoke rising on the summer wind of the land beyond the Mountain Kingdom. I would go back, through the pillar, to Aslevjal. I would collect Thick and go back to the little bay and wait for a ship to come and fetch us. It was right, it was inevitable, it was the channel in which the entire world wished to flow. Life would go on without the Fool, because he had died. I could see it all so clearly, as if I had always known it would come to this.

He was dead. Nothing could change that.

But I was the Changer.

I stood suddenly. I lifted the humming crown high overhead in my hands and shook it at the sky. “NO!” I roared. I still do not know to whom I spoke. “No! Let it be different! Not this way! Whatever you want from me, take it! But don't let it all end like this! Let him take my life and give me his death. Let him be me and I be him. I take his death! Do you hear me? I take his death for my own!”

I lifted the crown to the sun. Through my flowing tears, it shone iridescent, and the feathers seemed to waver gently in the summer breeze. Then, with an almost physical wrench, I tore it out of time's destined path. I clapped it firmly upon my own brow. As the world spun around me, I lay my body down on my funeral pyre, wrapped my arms around my friend, and gave myself over to whatever awaited me beyond it.

Chapter 29

FEATHERS IN A FOOL'S CAP

She was the richest girl in the world, for not only had she a noble father, and many silk gowns and so many necklaces and rings that not even a dozen little girls could have worn them all at once, but she had also a little gray box, carved from a dragon's womb. And inside it, ground to fine powder, were all the happy memories of the wisest princesses who had ever lived. So, whenever she got the least bit sad, all she had to do was open her little box and take a tiny bit of the memory snuff, and, kerchoo! She was as happy as a girl could be again.

— OLD JAMAILLIAN TALE

I missed a step in the dark. It was like that, that unexpected lurch.

“Blood is memory.” I swear someone whispered that by my ear.

“Blood is who we are,” a young woman agreed with him. “Blood recalls who we were. Blood is how we will be remembered. Work it well into the womb wood.”

Someone laughed, an old woman with few teeth. “Say that six times swiftly!” she cackled. And she did. “Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood. Work it well into the womb wood.”

The others laughed, amused at her tripping tongue. “Well, you try it!” she challenged us.

“Work it well into the womb wood,” I said obediently.

But it wasn't me.

There were five other people there inside me, looking out of my eyes, running my tongue over my teeth, scratching at my beard with my unkempt nails. Breathing my breath, and rejoicing in the taste of the forest on the night air. Shaking out my hair, alive again.

Five poets, five jesters. Five tellers of tales. Five jumbling, tumbling minstrels, leaping and whirling in gratitude for their release, shaking out my fingers, limbering my voice, and already squabbling and vying for my attention.

“What is your need? A birthday anthem? I've a host of them at my beck and call, and it's no trouble, no trouble at all, to adapt one to your recipient's name!”

“Hackery! Shameless hackery, this chopping and splicing of old relics, this dressing of bones anew! Let me have your voice and I'll sing you a song to rouse your warriors and make your maidens tremble with newborn lust!” This was a man, and he filled my lungs to bursting to roar out his words. Each set of words, each voice came from my own throat. I was a puppet for them, a pipe to be played.

“Lust is but a wet moment, a surge and a splat!” she said disdainfully. She was a young woman, and she remembered freckles across the bridge of her nose. Strange to hear her words pipe from my throat. “You want a love song, don't you? Something timeless, something older than the fallen mountains, and newer than a seed unfurling in rich soil. Such is love.”

“Good luck!” someone exclaimed in dismay. He tinged his words with a fop's disdain. “Listen. Fa, la, la, la, la, la—oh, hopeless! This one has the pipes of a sailor, and a body of wood. The finest song ever sung will be a crow's croaking when it comes from this throat, and I'll wager he never turned a handspring in his life. Who is this, and how came he by our treasure?”