Royal Assassin (Farseer Trilogy, #2)

by Robin Hobb

‘It calls me,’ he admitted to me, calmly, simply, as if observing that he enjoyed plums. ‘It calls to me, at any moment when I am not busied. And so I must be busy, Fitz. And too busy.’

Verity spoke with great certainty. ‘It is like a great loneliness, boy. I can reach out and touch others. Some, quite easily. But no one ever reaches back. When Chivalry was alive … I still miss him, boy. Sometimes I am so lonely for him; it is like being the only one of something in the world. Like the very last wolf, hunting alone.’

‘My lord Verity has forgiven me. And this is his way of showing it. Oh, I shall make a garden for us to share. I shall never shame him again.’ As I stared at her rapt smile,

You saved my life, yesterday. You saved me from a death in a cage. I think that I had been alone so long, I had forgotten what it meant to have a friend. He stopped chewing his bone and looked up at me in mild amusement. A friend? Too small a word for it, brother. And in the wrong direction. So do not look at me like that. I will be to you what you are to me. Bond brother, and pack. But I am not all you will ever need.

I looked at Molly again and something inside me gave way. It took me four steps to cross the room to her. I knelt beside her chair and as she drew back from me, I seized her hand and carried it to my lips.

‘If you come in, I shall scream. The guards will come.’ ‘Then you’d best put on tea for them,’ I replied grimly and went back to wriggling at the lower catch.

I seated myself on the windowsill, one leg inside the room, the other dangling out of the window. Wind gusted past me, stirring her night robe and fanning the flames of the fire. I said nothing. After a moment, she began to shiver. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You. I wanted to tell you that tomorrow I am going to the King to ask permission to marry you.’

Molly stared a moment. Her voice was low as she said, ‘I do not wish to marry you.’ ‘I wasn’t going to tell him that part.’ I found myself grinning at her. ‘You are intolerable!’

Neither of us moved. But somehow, I stepped to another place, where I was achingly aware of every scent and touch of her. Her eyes and the herb scents of her skin and hair were one with the warmth and suppleness of her body under the soft woollen night robe. I experienced her as if she were a new hue suddenly revealed to my eyes. All concerns, even all thoughts, were suspended in that sudden awareness. I know I trembled, for she put her hands on my shoulders and clasped them, to steady me. Warmth flowed through me from her hands. I looked down into her eyes and wondered at what I saw there. She kissed me.

The memory of that night’s sweet awkwardness is the truest possession of my soul. My trembling fingers jumbled the ribbon at the neck closure of her nightgown into a hopeless knot. Molly seemed wise and sure as she touched me, only to betray her surprise with her sharply in-drawn breath when I responded. It did not matter. Our ignorance yielded to a knowing older than both of us. I strove to be both gentle and strong, but found myself amazed at her strength and gentleness.

For myself, I think some things are beyond words. The colour blue can only be experienced, as can the scent of jasmine or the sound of a flute. The curve of a warm, bared shoulder, the uniquely feminine softness of a breast, the startled sound one makes when all barriers suddenly yield, the perfume of her throat, the taste of her skin are all but parts, and sweet as they may be, they do not embody the whole. A thousand such details still would not illustrate it.

out. It seemed we were in a place we had entered as strangers, and discovered to be home.

Did I lie to myself, then? Don’t we all?

‘I have to leave you,’ I whispered as she stirred. ‘But I pray it will not be for long. Today I go to Shrewd, to ask permission to marry you.’ She stirred and opened her eyes. She watched in a sort of wonder as I went naked from her bed. I put more wood on the fire, then avoided her gaze as I gathered my scattered clothes and put them on. She was not so shy, for as I looked up from fastening my belt, I found her eyes upon me, smiling. I blushed. ‘I feel we are wed already,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot imagine how the speaking of any vows could make us more truly joined.’ ‘Nor I.’

I smiled down at her. ‘I know. There were more interesting things to pursue. No, my dear. But I promise you I shall take care of it this morning, in my room.’ To call her ‘my dear’ made me feel a man as no words ever had before. I kissed her, promising myself that I would go immediately afterwards, but found myself lingering to her touch on my neck. I sighed.

‘Promise me! Otherwise, I shall not survive this day. Promise me you will return to me. For no matter what the King may say, know this. I am your wife now. And always will be. Always.’

Galen reportedly congratulated himself at taking students of little talent, and teaching them to Skill reliably. This may be the case. Or perhaps he took students with great potential, and ground them down to adequate tools.

Our bond is a secret. I must keep it so. Today, men, I must hunt alone. Do you understand? No. It is stupid and dangerous. I shall be there, but you may trust me to be unseen and unknowable.

I longed to unburden myself, to have one person in the world who knew all about me, everything that I was. You already do, Nighteyes objected.

‘You must trust me, also,’ I found myself saying to my King-in-Waiting. And when he remained looking up at me consideringly, I asked, ‘My prince. Do you?’ ‘Yes.’ With one word, he gave me his trust, and with it his confidence that whatever I had been doing would not bring him harm. It sounds a simple thing, but for a King-in-Waiting to permit his own assassin to keep secrets from him was a staggering act.

I sat in the snow with the dead child on my lap. So this was how a child felt in one’s arms. So small, and once so warm. So still. I bowed my head over her smooth hair and wept.

A secret for a secret.’ I had not forgotten. But I was not sure, suddenly, that I wanted to know. ‘Whence comes the Fool, and why?’ I asked softly. ‘Ah.’ He stood a moment, then asked gravely, ‘You are certain you wish the answers to these questions?’ ‘Whence comes the Fool, and why?’ I repeated slowly.

Like a liturgy, I repeated the question. ‘Whence comes the Fool and why?’

‘Go south, Fitz. To lands past the edges of every map that Verity has ever seen. And past the edges of the maps made in those countries as well. Go south, and then east across a sea you have no name for. Eventually, you would come to a long peninsula, and on its snaking tip you would find the village where a Fool was born.

‘When I was … old enough, I bade them all farewell. I set off to find my place in history, and choose where I would thwart it. This was the place I selected; the time had been destined by the hour of my birth. I came here, and became Shrewd’s. I gathered up whatever threads the fates put into my hands, and I began to twist them and colour them as I could, in the hopes of affecting what was woven after me.’

‘History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.’ He smiled enigmatically. ‘The future is another kind of history.’

‘Perhaps, Fitz, somewhere, there is written down all that is the future. Not written down by one person, know, but if the hints and visions and premonitions and foreseeings of an entire race were written down, and cross-referenced and related to one another, might not such a people create a loom to hold the weaving of the future?’

Bear in mind that those who keep these records are another race, an exceedingly long-lived one. A pale, lovely race, that occasionally mingled its blood-lines with that of men.

‘And then, when certain ones were born, ones marked so clearly that history must recall them, they are called to step forward, to find their places in that future history. And they might further be exhorted to examine that place, that juncture of a hundred threads, and say, these threads, here, these are the ones I shall tweak, and in the tweaking, I shall change the tapestry, I shall warp the weft, alter the colour of what is to come. I shall change the destiny of the world.’

What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? A sadder thing I cannot imagine. Why should not a mother say to herself, if I raise this child aright, if I love and care for her, she shall live a life that brings joy to those about her, and thus I have changed the world? Why should not the farmer that plants a seed say to his neighbour, this seed I plant today will feed someone, and that is how I change the world today?’

‘No, Fitz. I have come to believe it is through you.’ He reached out and tapped me lightly with Ratsy. ‘Keystone. Gate. Crossroads. Catalyst. All these you have been, and continue to be.

I came here for you, Fitz. You are the thread I tweak. One of them, anyway.’

The very name of your house is the future reaching back in time to you, and naming you by the name that someday your house will deserve. The Farseers. That was the clue I took to my heart. That the future reached back to you, to your house, to where your blood-lines intersected with my lifetime, and named you so. I came here, and what did I discover? One Farseer, with no name at all. Unnamed in any history, past or future. But I have seen you take a name, FitzChivalry Farseer. And I shall see that you deserve it.’

‘No.’ A terrible cold was welling up inside me. I shook with it. My teeth began to chatter, and the bright motes of light to sparkle at the edges of my vision. A fit. I was going to have another fit. Right here, in front of the Fool. ‘Leave!’ I cried out, unable to abide the thought. ‘Go away. Now! Quickly. Quickly!’ I had never seen the Fool astonished before. His jaw actually dropped open, revealing his tiny white teeth and pale tongue.

She wore a wreath of holly upon the tumble of her hair. That was all. And she stood against the door, wanting me to look at her. How can I explain the line that had been crossed? Before, we had ventured into this together, exploring and inquisitive. But this was different. This was a woman’s frank invitation.

The axe is his weapon.’ Verity nodded slowly. ‘And he is mine.’

‘Of stone were their bones made, of the sparkling veined stone of the mountains. Their flesh was made of the shining salts of the earth. But their hearts were made of the hearts of wise men. ‘They came from afar, those men, a long and trying way. They did not hesitate to lay down the lives that had become a weariness to them. They ended their days and began eternities, they put aside flesh and donned stone, they let fall their weapons and rose on new wings. Elderlings.’

‘You are not dismissed. Had I dismissed you, it would have been years ago. I would have let you grow up in some backwater village. Or seen that you did not grow up at all. No, FitzChivalry, I have not dismissed you.’

And still I stood before him and gazed at him. My king. When finally I dropped my eyes from him, I saw the only thing that could have wrenched me into greater turmoil. The Fool huddled disconsolately at Shrewd’s feet, his knees drawn up to his chest. He stared at me furiously, his mouth a flat line. Clear tears brimmed in his colourless eyes.

It was so good to sit with her and look at her out under the open sky, with the bright sun bringing out glints in her hair and the wind rosying her cheeks. It was so good to laugh aloud, to mingle our voices with the cries of the gulls without fear of awakening anyone. We drank the wine from the bottle, and ate with our fingers, and then walked down to the waves’ edge to wash the stickiness from our hands.

Taking things off suddenly seemed a very good idea. Molly was not as sure of that as I. ‘There’s fully as much stone as sand under this blanket. I’ve no wish to go back with bruises up my back!’ I leaned over her to kiss her. ‘Am not I worth it?’ I asked persuasively. ‘You? Of course not!’ She gave me a sudden push that sent me sprawling on my back. Then she flung herself boldly upon me. ‘But I am.’ The wild sparkle in her eyes as she looked down on me took my breath away. After she had claimed me ruthlessly, I discovered she had been right, both about the rocks, and her being well worth the bruises. I had never seen anything so spectacular as the blue sky glimpsed through the cascade of her hair over my face.

‘She said,’ Molly went on teasingly, ‘“he has used his time well amongst the stallions to learn their ways. I carried the mark of his teeth on my shoulders for a week.”’ ‘That cannot be,’ I declared. My ears burned for Burrich’s sake.

‘Mostly. As I have heard it, the legends called them not a folk, but near-gods.

information than that the Elderlings resided in the Rain Wilds beyond the tallest mountains of the Mountain Kingdom.

She smiled at me cautiously as I looked at her. ‘My lady queen, I am dazzled,’ I ventured. ‘You flatter me as wildly as Regal does,’ she proclaimed, and hastened away down the hall, but a blush warmed her cheeks. She dresses so just to come to speak to me? She dresses so to … attract you. How could a man so astute at reading men be so ignorant of women?

Verity was wearing a soft shirt of pale-blue linen, and the mingled scents of lavender and cedar were lively in the air. It reminded me of a clothes chest. His hair and beard were freshly smoothed;

She looked aside. ‘I would rather go with you,’ she said fiercely. I averted my eyes as he reached and took her chin in his fingers and lifted her face so he might see her eyes. ‘I know,’ he said evenly. ‘That is the sacrifice I must ask you to make. To stay here, when you would rather go. To be alone, yet again. For the sake of the Six Duchies.’ Something went out of her. Her shoulders sagged as she bowed her head to his will.

What I sensed from her was not despair, but containment: a fierce resolve that we would not lose what we had now to what we could not have tomorrow. I did not deserve the devotion of such a faithful heart.

I had once told Verity I could not draw off another man’s strength to feed my own, that I would not. Yet every day, that was what I did to Molly.

Rosemary, freshly-washed and clothed in Kettricken’s colours, reminded me of a scrubbed purple and white turnip. I smiled at the chubby child, but she returned my look gravely.