“Wortletree.” The name rang oddly familiar in my mind. I’d heard it or read it somewhere. It was a place we could find. A destination. “And from there?”

“To Clerres. And then to the White Island. Where the school is also called Clerres.”

“The White Island.” More ports to rattle my sailor friends’ brains. More clues to give Kettricken and Elliania. I wanted to rush out of the room with my new information, but I looked at my friend and knew that I could not leave him so abruptly. “Fool. What can I do to make you feel better?”

He turned his face toward me. His golden eyes, so unnerving and so unseeing, seemed to bore into me. “Go with me to Clerres. And kill all of them.”

“I shall. But we need to plan now. How many people do you expect me to kill, and how shall we accomplish it? Poison? Knives? Explosives?”

My question trigged a terrible joy in his sightless gaze. “As to how, I leave that to the expert. You. How many? Forty, perhaps. Certainly no more than fifty.”

“Fifty … Fool, that’s a staggering number.” I had imagined six or even a dozen.

“I know. But they must be stopped. They must!”

“Who were the ones sent for the Unexpected Son? Who would have sent them?”

I could hear his breathing. I poured a bit more brandy into his teacup and he took a healthy swallow of it. “Dwalia was sent, but she would have been eager to go. She is not of the top echelon of Servants but, oh, how she longs to be! She is a Lingstra, rather like an emissary. They are sent on errands, to gather information or to tip events in the direction the Servants think they should go.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Lingstras behave as Catalysts for the Servants. Instead of supporting a true White Prophet and allowing him to find his Catalyst and change the world as his vision bids, they study all the prophecies and employ the Lingstras to set the world in a path that will best benefit them. An example. Say there is a prediction that a disease that kills sheep will sweep through an area where all depend on sheep for a livelihood. The sheep will die and the livelihood of all will be destroyed. What might one do?”

“One might study to see what cures there are for a sheep plague? Or warn the shepherds to keep their flocks from mingling.”

“Or one might seek to gain from it, by buying up wool and good-quality breeding stock, so that when disease makes wool scarce and sheep hard to find, one can sell them at a great profit.”

I was silent, shocked a bit.

“Fitz, do you remember the first time I came to you and asked you to do something?”

“Fat suffices,” I said quietly.

“A silly poem from a dream I had when I was barely seven. A dream that made you keep a lonely young woman’s lapdog alive, and give her advice to make her step up into her role as a duchess. A little tipping point. But what if someone went there and deliberately poisoned her dog, to set her at odds with her husband. What then?”

“The Six Duchies might have fallen to the Red Ships.”

“And the dragons might have been extinct forever.”

A sudden question stung me. “Why are the dragons so important? Why were the Servants so opposed to the dragons being revived?”

“I don’t have the answers to those questions, Fitz. The Servants are a secretive folk. Dragons being absent benefited them somehow. On that, I would wager my life. Yet over and over, my dreams came to me and told me that dragons must be returned to the world, dragons full of beauty and power and might. I did not even know what sort of dragons. Stone dragons? Real dragons? But together we brought them back. And, oh, how the Servants hate us for it.”

“Is that why they took my child?”

I was surprised when he reached across and put his hand on my forearm. “Fitz. It was an intersection of fates and futures, a very powerful one. If they could discover how much they have injured both of us, they would rejoice. They have struck us down, haven’t they? Dwalia came looking for the Unexpected Son. She was so certain I knew where he could be found. I didn’t, but she was willing to destroy me to find out what I did not know. And she has destroyed both of us, by taking and then losing our child. They have destroyed the hope of this world, the one that could guide us on a better course. We cannot restore that. But if we cannot give the world hope, we can remove some of its despair by killing those who serve only their own greed.”

“Tell me more about them.”

“They are tremendously wealthy. They have been corrupt for generations, and they use the prophecies to make themselves ever wealthier. They know what to buy to sell later at a much higher price. They manipulate the future, not to make the world a better place but only to add to their wealth. The White Island is their castle, their palace, and their citadel. At low tide, there is a causeway. When the tide comes in, it becomes a sea-swamp. It is called the White Island not for the White Prophets who once were sheltered and taught there, but for the fortified city, all made of bones.”