Royal Assassin (Farseer Trilogy, #2)

by Robin Hobb

If any other man says to you, “I know just how you feel,” you may regard it as a politeness. But from me accept it as truth.

‘Would that you had mastered the Skill. I could offer you strength, just as I have too often taken it from you.’ ‘I could not,’ I muttered,

My father’s wife, once horrified to discover that he had sired a bastard before they were wed, had gone from abhorring me to aggressively bettering me. Sometimes that was more difficult to deal with than if she had ostracized me.

‘Are you all right, sir?’ someone asked uncertainly. ‘A bit too much to drink,’ I lied. Certainly the wine I had dumped over myself made me smell like a drunk. ‘I’ll be fine in a moment.’ ‘Let me help you up the stairs. A stumble here might be dangerous.’ There was starched disapproval in the voice now. I opened my eyes and peered through my fingers. Blue skirts. Of the sensible fabric that all the servants wore. No doubt she’d had to deal with drunks before.

‘Newboy!’ she hissed in fury. ‘I should drop you right here.’ I jerked my head up. I could not make my eyes focus on her eyes, but all the same, I knew her, knew the shape of her face and how her hair fell forward on her shoulders, and her scent, like a summer afternoon. Relief crashed over me like a wave. It was Molly, my Molly the candle-maker. ‘You’re alive!’ I cried out. My heart leaped in me like a hooked fish. I took her in my arms and kissed her.

I was amazed at how strong women were when they were angry.

I knew her eyes were blazing, her cheeks flushed. ‘I thought you did want to marry me, that you did want a future with me. I wanted to bring something to it, not come to you penniless and prospectless.

And I swallowed my pride and came up here that day, and found out how stupid I was, how you’d pretended and lied to me. You are a bastard, Newboy. You are.’

He asked me if I didn’t want to know my fortune. And I started crying, because I did, but I didn’t have a penny. Then Brinna the fish-wife laughed, and said there was no need for me to pay to know it. Everyone knew my future already. I was the daughter of a drunk, I’d be the wife of a drunk, and the mother of drunks.’ She whispered, ‘Everyone started laughing. Even the old man.’

Instead, I lay there and thought what a stupid boy I had been last summer. I had courted a woman, thinking that I was walking out with a girl. Those three years difference in age had mattered so much to me, but in all the wrong ways. I had thought she had seen me as a boy, and despaired of winning her. So I had acted like a boy, instead of trying to make her see me as a man. And the boy had hurt her, and yes, deceived her, and in all likelihood, lost her forever. The dark closed down, blackness everywhere but for one whirling spark. She had loved the boy, and foreseen a life together for us. I clung to the spark and sank into sleep.

The two sons of Queen Constance and King Shrewd were Chivalry and Verity.

Prince Regal, youngest of Shrewd’s sons and his only child with Queen Desire,

No. Quietly, Fitz. Quietly.’ ‘Just look into it quietly.’ I did not voice it as a question. Verity gave his broad shoulders a small shrug. But it was more like a man shifting a burden than dislodging a load. ‘Put a stop to it where you can.’ His voice was small and he looked into the fire. ‘Quietly, Fitz. Very quietly.’

There is no peace in her for me, Fitz. Either she wants to be romped like a child, or she is quizzing me on the very details of some crisis I am trying to set aside for a few moments.’

So the King’s health was now talk for the keep. That was not good.

‘Ah, but you and I, we must remember whatever he forgets, Fitz, and keep it safe for him. It costs him much to show as strong as he did tonight. Do not be deceived about that. What he said to you, twice, you must cherish and obey, for it means he held it twice as hard in his mind to be sure he would say it to you.’

Assassin. That was the word for what I was. I had no honour to preserve, I realized. ‘Not true, Fitz.’ He answered my thought. ‘You preserve my honour. And I honour you for that, for doing what must be done.

He gave an inadvertent chuckle. ‘And hope your Lady Red Skirts has no Skill in her blood, for if she does at all, she must have heard you all these many nights.’ And having put that unsettling thought into my head, he dismissed me back to my chambers and bed. I did not sleep again that night.

My prince was human, I suddenly perceived. It was not reassuring.

He turned to face me, eyes blazing, and found out that he must look up, ever so slightly, to glare at me eye to eye. I had grown and put on weight. I had known that, but had never considered this delightful side-effect. I stopped the grin before it reached my mouth, but it must have showed in my eyes.

In the Lesser Hall, she paused, then removed her gaily knit cap and her jacket, to reveal underneath a simple soft shirt of purple linen. The cap and jacket she gave over to a page, who looked stunned by the honour. She stepped to the head of one of the tables, and began to fold her sleeves back. All movement in the hall ceased as heads turned to watch her. She looked up to our amazed regard. ‘Bring in our dead,’ she said simply. The pitiful bodies were carried in, a heart-breaking stream of them. I did not count how many. More than I had expected, more than Verity’s reports had led us to believe. I followed behind Kettricken, and carried the basin of warm, scented water as she moved from body to body, and gently bathed each ravaged face and closed tormented eyes forever.

I stood stupid in the circle of her arms. I looked down at her. Yes, I realized dully, I had grown that much taller than she. ‘Well?’ she prompted, and for a moment I was puzzled. ‘I love you, Molly.’ So easy to say, after all. And such a relief. Slowly, cautiously, I put my arms around her. She smiled up at me. ‘And I love you.’

So, finally, I kissed her. In the moment of that kiss, somewhere near Buckkeep a wolf lifted up his voice in a joyous ululation that set every hound to baying and every dog to barking in a chorus that rang against the brittle night sky.

I fancied that if I sat very still, I could still feel the warmth of Molly’s arms around me. I knew precisely where her cheek had touched mine. A very faint scent of her clung to my shirt from our brief embrace, and I agonized over whether to wear the shirt that day, to carry that scent with me, or to set it aside carefully in my clothing chest, to preserve it. I did not think it a foolish thing at all to care so much about that. Looking back, I smile, but it is at my wisdom, not my folly.

‘Go to bed,’ she chided me. Blushing, she added, ‘And dream of me. I hope I have plagued your dreams lately as much as you have mine.’ Those words sent me fleeing down to my room, and every time I thought of it, I blushed again.

I had always been mystified as to why Patience had come back to Buckkeep, to live a hermit’s life in the midst of a society she obviously did not care for. Now I knew. She had come for me, for my sake. To protect me.

Only this woman, who by all rights should have abhorred me, had come to shelter me for my sake alone. She was so often foolish and meddlesome and sometimes most annoying. But as our eyes met, I knew she had breached the final wall I had kept between us.

She had given up her quiet life, her orchards and gardens and woods, to come here, to a damp castle of stone on the sea-cliffs, to a court full of folk she cared nothing about, to watch over her husband’s bastard. ‘Thank you,’ I said quietly. And meant it with all my heart. ‘Well,’ she turned aside from my look quickly. ‘Well. You are welcome, you know.’

Lacey glared at me as if affronted by my smile. Before I could even unfold from the hearth, she sprang up from her rocking chair. A long needle, stripped of its eternal yarn, prodded my jugular vein, while the other probed a certain space between my ribs. I very nearly wet myself. I looked up at a woman I suddenly knew not at all, and dared not make a word. ‘Stop teasing the child,’ Patience rebuked her gently. ‘Yes, Fitz, Lacey. The most apt pupil that Hod ever had, even if she did come to Hod as a grown woman.’ As Patience spoke, Lacey took her weapons away from my body. She reseated herself, and deftly re-threaded her needles into her work. I swear she didn’t even drop a stitch. When she was finished, she looked up at me. She winked. And went back to her knitting.

To confront finally the worst there is, to look it squarely in the face and say, ‘I know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still, I live. And I will go on living.’

‘Have you never wished to pass your time in someone’s presence, Fitz, whether they welcomed you or not? Cannot you understand my loneliness …’

To bond to any animal was to promise oneself that future pain.

I can’t do this. I can’t be like this, with you. This is wrong. Puzzlement. Wrong? If you can do it, how can it be wrong? I am a man, not a wolf. Sometimes, he agreed. But you don’t have to be all the time. Yes, I must. I don’t want to be bonded with you like this. We cannot have this closeness. I have to set you free, to live the life you were meant to live. I must live the life I was meant for.

He offered me a moonlit world of blacks and whites, of food and rest, so simple, so complete. Our eyes were locked, and his were lambent green and beckoning to me.

‘We are what we are, brother. Eat well,’

The key members in these coteries were often referred to as a King’s or Queen’s Man or Woman.

The Fool, of course. At my elbow, companionably pacing alongside me, his rat sceptre jouncing lightly on his shoulder. I did not startle physically, but he knew that, once more, he had taken me by surprise. His amusement shone in his eyes.

Answer me this one, if you can. How does one call a thing when one does not know how to call it?’ ‘I have never been any good at this game, Fool.’ ‘Nor any other of your blood-line, from what I have heard. So answer this. What has wings in Shrewd’s scroll, a tongue of flame in Verity’s book, silver eyes in the Relltown Vellums, and gold-scaled skin in your room?’ ‘That’s a riddle?’ He looked at me pityingly. ‘No. A riddle is what I just asked you. That’s an Elderling. And the first riddle was, how do you summon one?’

‘You see, Ratsy, he knows no more than his uncle or his grandfather. None of them knows how to summon an Elderling.’ ‘By the Skill,’ I said impetuously. The Fool looked at me strangely. ‘You know this?’ ‘I suspect it is so.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know. Now that I consider it, I do not think it likely. King Wisdom made a long journey to find the Elderlings. If he could simply have Skilled to them, why didn’t he?’ ‘Indeed. But sometimes there is truth in impetuosity.

Bastard princeling, Fitz my sweet,

He sang quite lustily, and even well. The tune belonged to a popular love ballad. He looked at me, sighed theatrically, wet his lips and continued mournfully,

A slow flush began to heat my cheeks, for the Fool’s expression was both tender and ardent as he looked up at me.

He suddenly released my cuff, to tumble away from me in a somersault that somehow reached a finish with his presentation of his bare buttocks to me. They were shockingly pale, and I could conceal neither my amazement nor affront.

Brother! He came, slashing teeth and weight hitting our tangled struggle like a battering ram.

Cold nose against my cheek. I opened my eyes. He sat beside me, regarding me. Cub. Nighteyes, he corrected me. My mother named me Nighteyes. I was the last of my litter to get my eyes open.

Why? The question hung between us in the cold air. Night was about to find us. Overhead the tree branches had gone black against the evening sky. I did not need the light to see him. I did not even need to see him. Do you need to see your ear to know it is part of you? As useless to deny that part of my flesh was mine as to deny Nighteyes. We are brothers. We are pack, I conceded. Are we?

Trust is not trust until it is complete. So close were we, I do not know which of us offered this thought.

Nighteye’s perceptions overlay my own, his scenting of the bodies, his hearing telling me of scavenger foxes already creeping closer, his eyes making no difficulty of the fading light. Then the duality was gone, and his senses were mine, and mine his. We were bonded.

You were wrong, he observed. Neither of us hunts very well alone. Sly amusement. Unless you thought you were doing well before I came along? ‘A wolf is not meant to hunt alone,’ I told him. I tried for dignity. He lolled his tongue at me. Don’t fear, little brother. I’ll be here. We continued walking through the crisp white snow and the stark black trees. Not much farther to home, he comforted me. I felt his strength mingling with mine as we limped on.

Yet when I had encountered the Skill joy, I had not found it the tawdry pleasure Galen had implied. Rather, it had been the same rush of blood and thunder of heart that sometimes music brought to me, or a sudden flight of bright pheasant in an autumn wood, or even the pleasure of taking a horse perfectly over a difficult jump, that instant when all things come into balance, and for a moment turn together as perfectly as birds wheeling in flight. The Skill gave that to one, but not for just a moment. Rather it lasted for as long as a man could sustain it, and became stronger and purer as one’s ability with the Skill refined; or so I believed.