Page 22 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

I suppose I noticed my eyes were getting heavy, but I can’t say I thought much about it. Of course I was tired—it had been a rough haul, hadn’t it? And I wasn’t a lad anymore. I was already twenty and five, practically a dotard. So of course my head was nodding a bit.

As much as I meant to look past the illustrations, I came across one I hadn’t seen yet, and that’s another thing—this book had more pages in it than it should have. And fewer. What I mean is that some pages I’d seen before I couldn’t find again. And some I’d never seen showed up, though I’d have sworn I’d at least skimmed the whole thing. So here was this picture of a house on a cliff looking over a lake, or maybe a calm sea, at night. And the moon was up over the water, pretty as you like; and one window in the house was lit with candlelight, represented in gold leaf. And around the window a fluttering of beautiful moths. It was the prettiest picture of a house I could remember ever seeing. I fingered at the gold leaf, just gently, to feel it, not trying to do any damage. And so sleepy I was, I put my head on my arm and looked at the house and the window and the moon. When I stopped doing that and started dreaming proper I couldn’t tell you.

I was in that house, walking upstairs toward the room I’d seen in the window. The boards creaked under my feet, and night-birds cried outside. I heard a fiddle playing, slow and sweet, like I like it best. It was coming from that room. I walked closer to the door, gold light leaking under the crack, and saw a carpet under my feet now. A beautiful one, worth a fortune, from the Kesh empire before the Knock. Elephants walking upright on their treelike back legs in a flowered forest. An ancient carpet, but somehow new under my feet.

I opened the door now, and what should I see but a lovely woman on a bed? And around the bed lay piles of gold and silver coins, I could smell them. Honey mead from Brayce in bottles all around. Magic books on shelves of hoary oak. Out the window, that moon making ladders on the water of a calm sea. Maybe the Tattered Sea, for the air was cool and I could smell salt on it, and it seemed familiar as well. Like an old friend.

Of particular note was a candle, a large one made of beeswax, and giving off a warm, foresty smell that seemed to invoke not only memory but anticipation. Its flame was more gold than I remembered ever seeing flame before.

“Fothannon never wake me, for it’s paradise I’m in,” I said. I looked again at the woman on the bed, and at first, I thought she was nude, but then I realized that would seem strange and forced, so I glanced again and she was wearing a simple kirtle. I squinted at her face, knowing she would be beautiful, wondering exactly what kind of beauty I would see when my vision cleared. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were my honey-haired Norrigal?

“I love this dream!”

But no sooner had I thought that than it was Norrigal, and she smiled at me sweet as she had in the Baths in Edth. And I looked at her legs and I saw they were straight and beautiful, and that seemed wrong, so she covered her legs up with a reindeer pelt she suddenly had handy.

“The fuck is happening here?” I said, and my arm hurt. Not where the tattoo of the cat was but near it, where Deadlegs had bit me in the cave over a week ago. Now Norrigal’s face took on an agonized look and got puffy like she’d been stung with bees, and that made me think of the fuck-hair in the honeypot, and I twisted my own mouth up and said, “By the gods, can’t I even live in paradise a moment before everything goes to shyte?” Then Norrigal said, in a strangled voice, “Paradise is always a lie, sprumlet, and you shouldn’t need me to tell you.” Then she spoke again, and not to me. “Bitch, you’ll not be stealing my face for your lies.”

Next thing I knew, Norrigal’s face peeled off that body and formed a second body, which grew down to the floor from it. The first woman, in that moment, wasn’t near as pretty as my witchlet, nor was my witchlet quite so young as I recalled, what with just a touch of silver starting in the gilded chestnut of her hair.

“Get out of here,” the first woman said with a pronounced Gallardian accent, and started shoving Norrigal toward the window. And as Norrigal was on a skeleton’s legs as I now saw, she wasn’t much able to resist.

“I hate this dream!” I said.

“I’m going, you slag,” Norrigal told the first woman while they fought and pushed, and then she looked at me. “And you, hang on, I’ll get you out of this. And don’t trust a thing this hoor tells you; I don’t know what she is, but she’s the book’s creature, or it’s hers, and she’s made of lies.”

And with that, the first woman bundled Norrigal toward the window, grabbed her by her skeletal legs, and heaved. Out she went with an angry growl, and fell.

“No,” I yelled, and I heard a cry as a seagull flew up to the window, hovering there for a moment as they will on a breeze, looking hard at the first woman as if to tell her what a bitch she was. Then hard at me like I was an eejit. Then she flapped off into the night.

I looked now at the woman, who settled herself back on the bed, and whose face had grown beautiful again, if not familiar.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said, clearly a bit embarrassed, smoothing her hair and patting the bed next to her.

“I’m fine standing,” I said. But my eyes drifted toward a pile of money. Gallardian gold lions, as common in this room as copper shaves in a tavern. I picked one up, tasted it. Tasted real enough.

“So what do you want?”

“Mead?” she said.

“Well, have some,” I said, nodding toward a glass pitcher and two pretty glasses on a near table.

“No, I meant would you like mead?”

And at that, the pitcher floated up and started filling a glass.

But I didn’t really care for mead just then, cold as I was. And hungry, too.

“No thank you,” I said.

“Ah. Then you’ll be cold. And hungry.”

“How the fuck did you know?” I said, but I was glad when the fireplace sparked to life with a blazing fire, and when I looked over to my right and saw a platterful of hot roast beef and mashed turnips. Some kind of gravy in a silver tureen next to it.

“What’s…?”

“Fig gravy,” she said.

“I love figs.”