Assassin's Quest (Farseer Trilogy, #3)

by Robin Hobb

The earring had probably been Burrich’s grandmother’s. He had mentioned she had been a slave but had won free of that life. I wondered what the earring had come to mean to him, that he had given it to my father, and what it had meant to my father that he had kept it. Had Patience known any of this when she had passed it on to me?

I stood leaning on the fence, watching the animals, wondering how it would be if this were all there was to my life. It made me realize that it would not have been bad, not if there’d been a woman like Molly waiting for me to come home at night.

The only dream I had after that was of a lone wolf, running, endlessly running. He was as alone as I was.

They seemed unable to answer her questions about Verity and what had become of him coherently. They could not even recall when they had parted company with him or under what circumstances. Without exception, they seemed almost obsessed with returning to Buckkeep.

She turned her head and leaned down to see my face. Blue eyes. Too close to my own.

‘Fool?’ My voice came out as a croak this time. His eyes came instantly to mine and he dropped to his knees beside me. His breath came and went raggedly in his throat. He snatched up the cup of water and held it to my mouth while I drank. Then he set it aside, to take up my dangling hand and clasp it gently. He spoke softly as he did this, more to himself than to me. ‘What have they done to me, Fitz? Gods, what have they done to you, to mark you so? What has become of me, that I did not

He leaned down suddenly to rest his brow against mine. ‘When I recall how beautiful you were,’ he whispered brokenly, and then fell silent.

‘I should have listened to my dreams. Over and over, I dreamed you were coming. It was all you ever said, in the dream. I am coming. Instead I believed so firmly that I had failed somehow, that the Catalyst was dead. I could not even see who you were when I picked you up from the ground.’

‘I was not much more than a child when I set out. Alone, I made my way to Buckkeep, to seek the Catalyst that only I would recognize. And I found you, and I knew you, though you did not know yourself.

And when Kettricken’s child, my last hope, came into the world still and blue, what could it be but my doing somehow?’ ‘No!’ The word burst from me with a strength I had not known I had. The Fool flinched as if I had struck him. Then, ‘Yes,’ he said simply, carefully taking my hand again. ‘I am sorry. I should have known you did not know. The Queen was devastated at the loss. And I. The Farseer heir. My last hope crumbled away.

‘Now I find you truly alive. So I live. And again, suddenly, I believe. Once more I know who I am. And who my Catalyst is.’ He laughed aloud, never dreaming how his words chilled my blood. ‘I had no faith. I, the White Prophet, did not believe my own foreseeing! Yet here we are, Fitz, and all will still come to pass as it was ever meant to do.’

King Eyod’s wrath, slow to stir, was now at white heat. Although the Mountain folk had no standing army as such, there was not one inhabitant who would not take up arms at the word of their Sacrifice. War was imminent.

‘There must be an heir to the Farseer throne,’ he insisted. ‘Verity must get one. Otherwise …’ He made a helpless gesture. ‘Why not Regal? Would not a child from his loins suffice?’ ‘No.’ His eyes went afar. ‘No. I can tell you that quite clearly, yet I cannot tell you why. Only that in all futures I have seen, he makes no child. Not even a bastard. In all times, he reigns as the last Farseer, and ushers in the dark.’

‘Let FitzChivalry remain dead. Mostly, it is better so.’ ‘Surely you will at least see Chade?’ He was incredulous. ‘Not even Chade should know I live.’

‘You were never really good at it, you know. There was a naiveté to you that none of the ugliness could stain, as if you never truly believed in evil. It was what I liked best about you.’ The Fool swayed slightly where he sat, but righted himself. ‘It was what I missed most, when you were dead.’ I smiled foolishly. ‘A while back, I thought it was my great beauty.’ For a time the Fool just looked at me. Then he glanced aside and spoke quietly. ‘Unfair. Were I myself, I would never have spoken such words aloud. Still. Ah, Fitz.’ He looked at me and shook his head fondly. He spoke without mockery, making almost a stranger of himself. ‘Perhaps half of it was that you were so unaware of it. Not like Regal. Now there’s a pretty man, but he knows it too well.

He laid one long cool hand along my cheek and then gentled the hair back from my eyes. ‘Tomorrow,’ he told me gravely. ‘We shall be ourselves again. The Fool and the Bastard. Or the White Prophet and the Catalyst, if you will.

I tell you this. I am glad, glad that you are alive. To see you take breath puts the breath back in my lungs. If there must be another my fate is twined around, I am glad it is you.’ He leaned forward then and for an instant pressed his brow to mine. Then he breathed a heavy sigh and drew back from me. ‘Go to sleep, boy,’ he said in a fair imitation of Chade’s voice. ‘Tomorrow comes early. And we’ve work to do.’ He laughed unevenly. ‘We’ve the world to save, you and I.’

Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold?

King Shrewd was fond of saying that there was no greater advantage than to know your enemy’s secret when he believed you ignorant of it. Perhaps that is the most powerful secret of all to possess.

I could not move. I could not breathe. My daughter, I knew. Kept safe and hidden, guarded by Burrich. To be sacrificed to the throne. Taken from Molly, and given to the Queen. My little girl, whose name I didn’t even know. Taken to be a princess and in time a queen. Put beyond my reach forever.

I dreamed a dream at once vivid and stultifying. I chipped black stone. That was the entire dream, but it was endless in its monotony. I was using my dagger as a chisel and a rock as a hammer. My fingers were scabbed and swollen from the many times my grip had slipped and I’d struck them instead of the dagger hilt. But it didn’t stop me. I chipped black stone. And waited for someone to come and help me.

‘I had to lie, to keep her mine! The child is mine, not a Farseer heir!’ I cried out desperately. ‘Mine and Molly’s. A child to grow and love, not a tool for a kingmaker. And Molly must not hear I am alive from any save me! Starling, how could you have done this to me? Why was I such an idiot, why did I talk of such things at all to anyone?’

No one smiled. No welcome, no joy. Only the savage emotions that I had wakened with all the changes I had wrought. Thus was the Catalyst greeted. No one wore any expression I’d hoped to see. None save Chade.

I looked up in his eyes and saw welcome and joy. Tears clouded my own as I had to demand, ‘Would you truly take my daughter for the throne? Another bastard for the Farseer line … Would you have let her be used as we have been used?’ Something grew still in his face. The set of his mouth hardened into resolve. ‘I will do whatever I have to do to see a true-hearted Farseer on the Six Duchies throne again. As I am sworn to do. As you are sworn also.’ His eyes met mine.

The Scentless One comes, stepping lightly, warily. He stretches his body past me, to put a pale paw on the door and open it for me. I slip out, back into a cool night world.

‘But I am. I should have trusted you and told you about my daughter.’ Nothing, not a fever, not an arrow in my back would keep me from smiling when I said that phrase. My daughter.

She isn’t truly a royal heir. Only a bastard’s bastard.’ I said those harsh words with difficulty, and vowed never to let anyone say them to her face.

‘I’d give anything to be able to go back in time and tell her that our child would be the most important thing in the world for me. More important than king or country.’

And,’ he said more softly, ‘no child can avoid the future that fate decrees. Not a fool, not a bastard. Not a bastard’s daughter.’ A shiver walked up my spine. Despite all my disbelief, I feared. ‘Are you saying that you know something of her future?’

‘That is how it is, for me. I know something of a Farseer’s heir. If that heir is she, then doubtless, years from now, I shall read some ancient prophecy and say, ah, yes, there it is, it was foretold how it would come to be.

sand. I moved through this ghost of a city, bodiless and seeking, unable to decipher why I was there or what was drawing me. It was neither light nor dark there, neither summer nor winter. I am outside time, I thought to myself, and wondered if this was the ultimate hell of the Fool’s philosophy or the final freedom.

I knew in that instant of sighting him that this was Verity. I knew by the jerk of life I felt in my chest, and knew then that what had pulled me here was the tiny pebble of Verity’s Skill that hid still within my own consciousness. I sensed also that the danger to him was extreme. Yet I saw nothing to threaten him.

A river flowed ahead. It was not water. It was not glistening stone. It partook of both those things, but was neither. It sliced through the city like a gleaming blade, sliding out of the riven mountain behind us and continuing until it disappeared into a more ancient river of water. Like a seam of coal bared by a cutting tide, or gold veining quartz, it lay exposed on the earth’s body. It was magic. Purest ancient magic, inexorable and heedless of men, flowed there. The river of Skill I had so tediously learned to navigate was to this magic as the bouquet of wine is to wine. That which I glimpsed with Verity’s eyes had a physical existence as concrete as my own. I was immediately drawn to it as a moth is drawn to a candle flame.

The wind carried its scent, elusive and changeable, one moment the edge of lemon blossoms and the next a smoky coiling of spices. I tasted it on every breath, and longed to plunge myself into it. I was suddenly sure that it could quench every appetite I had ever suffered, not just those of my body but the vague yearnings of my soul as well. I longed for my body to be here as well, that I might experience it as completely as Verity did.

When he got to it, he would throw himself on his knees and drink his fill. He would be filled with all the consciousness of the world, he would partake of the whole and become the whole. At last he would know completion. But Verity himself would cease to exist.

I don’t think there is anything more frightening than to encounter the true will for self-destruction.

I do not know where I found my own will to resist it. Possibly it was because I had paused and focused myself on Verity for an instant, and seen all that the world would lose if he ceased to exist as himself. Whatever the source of my strength, I pitted it against his. I threw myself into his path but he walked through me. There was nothing to me, here. ‘Verity, please, stop, wait!’ I cried and flung myself at him, a furious feather on the wind. I had no effect on him. He didn’t even pause. ‘Someone has to do it,’ he said quietly. Three steps later he added, ‘For a time, I hoped it would not be me. But over and over, I have asked myself, “Who else, then?”’

There came a moment when we stood on the brink of that iridescent flow of power. I stared down at it with his eyes. There was no gradual shore. Instead there was a knife’s edge brink where solid earth gave way to a streaming otherness. I stared at it, seeing it as a foreign thing in our world, a warping of our very world’s nature. Ponderously Verity lowered himself to one knee. He stared into that black luminescence. I did not know if he hesitated to say farewell to our world, or if he paused to gather his will to destroy himself. My will to resist was suspended. This was a door to an otherness I could not even imagine. Hunger and curiosity drew us closer to the brink.

There was the oneness of the world flowing there, like a single sweet note drawn out purely forever. It was not the song of humanity but an older, greater song of vast balances and pure being. Had Verity surrendered to it, it would have ended all his torments.

But now arms and fingers gleamed silver with the power that had penetrated and fused with his flesh. As he began to walk away from the stream with the same studied purposefulness with which he had approached it, I felt how his arms and hands burned as if with frostbite. ‘I don’t understand,’ I said to him. ‘I don’t want you to. Not yet.’ I felt a duality in him.

You and I are all that stand between them and their triumph. You and I. The Farseers.’

The jolt was as powerful as if a warrior had slammed his shield into my face. But not pain. Awareness. Like sunlight bursting through clouds to illuminate a clearing in the forest. Everything suddenly stood out clearly, and I saw all the hidden reasons and purposes for what we did, and I understood with a painful purity of enlightenment why it was necessary I follow the path before me.

I would not have been surprised to see Verity’s handprint on my face, or to find my scar eradicated and my nose straightened, such had been the power of that touch.

Again and again, my mind circled back to that moment, to that touch of purest power. I fumbled to recall it and almost could. But the absolute experience of it, like pain or pleasure, could not be recalled in full, but only in pale memory.

The Fool circled the quilt, complimented Jofron on her stitchery, and when she invited him, he took a place beside her. He took up a needle and floss, threaded it and began adding butterflies of his own invention to one corner of the quilt while he and Jofron talked softly of gardens they had known. He seemed very at ease.

‘We shall have to say that we said my child was stillborn to make Regal believe there was no heir to threaten. My poor little son. His people will never even know he was born. And that, I suppose, is how he is Sacrifice for them.’

‘I have made up the declaration and given a copy to Chade, with another to be kept safely here. Your child is heir to the throne, FitzChivalry.’

I wanted to come to a small cot as the light faded, to sit in a chair by a fire, my back aching from work, my hands rough with toil, and hold a little girl in my lap while a woman who loved me told me of her day.

FitzChivalry,’ she went on and her voice was almost kind, though my ears rang to hear her words and I near reeled where I stood, ‘no one can escape fate. Not you, nor your daughter. Step back and see this is why she came to be. When all circumstances conspired to deny the Farseer line an heir, somehow one was yet made. By you. Accept, and endure.’

Kettricken turned aside, blinking at tears. I think she may have felt slightly ashamed. To the Fool, I was once more his Catalyst. In Starling there bloomed the hope that I might still be worthy of a legend.