Assassin's Quest (Farseer Trilogy, #3)

by Robin Hobb

‘I may not even be truly ill. I have been going through some changes in the past year. As you have noticed.’ He added the last in a whisper. ‘You have grown, and gathered colour,’ I agreed softly. ‘That is a part of it.’ A smile twitched over his face, then faded. ‘I think I am almost an adult now.’

‘Starling!’ I called to her softly. She looked up. Her eyes were huge. ‘It all started to move around us. Little rocks and then bigger ones. So I stopped still to let it settle. Now I can’t get the Fool up and I can’t carry her.’ She fought the panic in her voice.

‘They don’t need to physically follow us here to attack us. So why have they come all this way?’

But I Skill-duelled a member of my own coterie, and killed her. And that was unforgivable.’

It happens. It is not good, but it happens. Tell her that. Not just now.

‘He drank some soup. I think he’ll be all right, Fitz. He was sick once before, for a day or so in Blue Lake. It was the same, fever and weakness. He said then that it might not be a sickness, but only a change his kind go through.’

‘All I can give you is the game. Trust it. It’s been used by generations of Skill-users to keep such dangers at bay.’

Instead, in horrific detail, I beheld a great eye, as if the closing of my own eyes had opened this one.

The eye watched me. One single immense dark eye. Not Will’s. Regal’s. He stared at me, and I knew he took delight in my struggles. It seemed effortless for him to hold me there, like a fly under a glass bowl. Yet even in my panic, I knew that if he could have done more than hold me, he would. He had got past my walls, but had not the power to do more than threaten me. That was still enough to make my heart pound with terror. ‘Bastard,’ he said fondly. The word broke over my mind like a cold ocean wave. I was drenched in its threat. ‘Bastard, I know about the child. And your woman. Molly. Tit for tat, Bastard.’ He paused and his amusement grew as my terror swelled. ‘Now there’s a thought. Has she pretty tits, Bastard? Would I find her amusing?’

‘The game? Regal knows about Molly and Nettle. He threatens them. And I am powerless! Helpless.’

Had it been Regal’s whole countenance or both his eyes it would not perhaps have seemed so awful. But the disembodied eye seemed all-seeing and constant, inescapable.

Nighteyes and I had gone back to a sort of wordless bond. He understood that I did not wish to think at all, and did his best not to distract me. It was still unnerving to sense him trying to use the Wit to communicate with Kettricken. No sign of anyone behind us, he would tell her as he trotted past on one of his endless trips.

I tried to tell myself that she merely had faith that Nighteyes would let me know if he found anything amiss on his scouting trips. But I suspected she was becoming more and more attuned to him.

you think that might have caused it?’ ‘Caused what?’ ‘Her child to be stillborn …’ His voice dwindled off. I tried to think of words. ‘I don’t think it was any one thing, Fool. She simply suffered too many misfortunes while she was carrying the babe.’

‘Kettricken said that you might not truly be ill. That it might be … peculiar to your kind.’ I was uncomfortable coming even that close to a question regarding this. ‘It could be. I suppose. Look.’ He drew off his mitten, then reached up and dragged his nails down his cheek. Dry white trails followed them. He rubbed at it and the skin powdered away beneath his hands. On the back of his hand, the skin was peeling as if it had been blistered. ‘It’s like a sunburn peeling away. Do you think it’s the weather you’ve been in?’ ‘That, too, is possible. Save that if it is like last time, I shall itch and peel over every bit of my body. And gain a bit more colour in the process. Are my eyes changing?’ I obliged him by meeting his gaze. Familiar as I was with him, it was still not an easy task. Had those colourless orbs darkened a trifle more? ‘Perhaps they are a bit darker. No more than ale held up to the light. What will happen to you? Will you continue to have fevers and gain colour?’ ‘Perhaps. I don’t know,’ he admitted after a few moments had passed.

Somewhere back in my bloodline, there was a White. In me, as rarely happens, that ancient blood is given form again. But I am no more White than I am human.

I am an anomaly, even among those who share my mixed lineage. Did you think White Prophets were born every generation? We would not be taken so seriously if we were. No. Within my lifetime, I am the only White Prophet.’

There have been other White Prophets, you see. But when I tried to make them see that I was the White Prophet, they could not accept it.

‘How much do you truly know of what is to come?’ He took a deep breath, then sighed it out. ‘Only that we do it together, Fitzy-fitz. Only that we do it together.’

I left the road to sit beside him, and was instantly aware of a difference. As subtle as bees’ humming was the working of the road, but when it suddenly ceased, I felt it. I yawned to pop my ears, and suddenly felt more clear-headed.

‘I saw a black buck rising from a bed of shining black stone. When first I saw the black walls of Buckkeep rising over the waters, I said to myself, “Ah, that is what that meant!” Now I see a young bastard whose sigil is a buck walking on a road wrought from black stone. Maybe that is what the dream signified. I don’t know. But my dream was duly recorded, and someday, in years to come, wise men will agree as to what it signified. Probably after both you and I are long dead.’

‘So you came, all that way, so that the Six Duchies would not fall to the Red Ships.’ He gave me an odd look, then grinned as if astonished. ‘Is that how you see it? That we do all this to save your Six Duchies?’ When I nodded, he shook his head. ‘Fitz, Fitz. I came to save the world. The Six Duchies falling to the Red Ships is but the first pebble in the avalanche.’

They are the first stain of poison spreading in a stream. Fitz, do I dare tell you this? If we fail, the spread is fast. Forging takes root as a custom, nay, as an amusement for the high ones.

‘I declare, talking to you is more wearying than hiking. Take me at my word, Fitz. As bad as the Red Ships are, they are amateurs and experimenters. I have seen visions of what the world becomes in the cycle when they prosper. I vow it shall not be this cycle.’

Starling observed sleepily, ‘We walked from winter to spring yesterday.’

Nighteyes thrust his head into the tent, a bloody rabbit dangling in his jaws. The hunting is better, too. The Fool sat up in his blankets. ‘Is he offering to share that?’ My kill is your kill, little brother.

I understand. It is no longer just we two. Now we are pack. You are right, I told him humbly. But this evening, I intend to hunt with you. The Scentless One may come too, if he wishes. He could be a good hunter, did he try, for his scent could never give him away. ‘He not only offers to share meat, he invites you to hunt with us this evening.’ I had expected the Fool to decline. Even at Buck he had never shown any inclination toward hunting. Instead he inclined his head gravely toward Nighteyes and told him, ‘I would be honoured.’

Upon a dais stood a figure dressed in a flowing garment that shimmered with the glint of gold thread. She wore a gilded wooden crown decorated with cunningly carved and painted rooster heads and tail feathers. Her sceptre was no more than a feather duster but she gestured with it royally as she issued some decree.

I could only stare at her ice-white skin and colourless eyes.

Then he gasped, snorted out water and sat up abruptly. His eyes were blank. Then his gaze met mine and he grinned wildly. ‘Such a folk and such a day! It was the announcing of Realder’s dragon, and he had promised he would fly me …’ He frowned suddenly and looked about in confusion. ‘It fades, like a dream it fades, leaving less than its shadow behind …’

‘The White Prophet and the Catalyst!’ she cried in disgust. ‘Rather name them as they are, the Fool and the Idiot. Of all the careless, foolish things to do!

‘You are alive again,’ I said wonderingly. I had not seen such light in his eyes since the days when he had made King Shrewd bellow with laughter. ‘Yes,’ he said gently. ‘And when we have finished, I promise that you will be, also.’

As we left the fireside, Kettricken said quietly, ‘Watch over them, wolf,’ and Nighteyes replied with a wave of his tail.

Her back was turned so I changed hastily. We had grown accustomed to granting one another the privacy of ignoring such things.

My heart is given already. It is no more right to say that I disdain Starling than it is to say that you disdain me because your heart is filled with my Lord Verity.’ Kettricken shot me an oddly startled look. For a moment she seemed flustered.

‘Fitz,’ Kettricken said quietly. Her voice was suddenly that of a friend, not the Queen. ‘I speak to you as a woman, to tell you that although you bear scars, you are far from the grotesque you seem to believe yourself. You are, still, a comely youth, in ways that have nothing to do with your face. And were my heart not full with my Lord Verity, I would not disdain you.’ She reached out a hand and ran cool fingers down the old split down my cheek, as if her touch could erase it. My heart turned over in me, an echo of Verity’s embedded passion for her amplified by my gratitude that she would say such a thing to me. ‘You well deserve my lord’s love,’ I told her artlessly from a full heart. ‘Oh, do not look at me with his eyes,’ she said dolefully. She rose suddenly, clasping the map to her breast like a shield, and left the tent.

‘Why do you allow Starling to believe you are a woman?’ He turned to me, waggled his eyebrows and blew me a kiss. ‘And am I not, fair princeling?’ ‘I’m serious,’ I rebuked him. ‘She thinks you are a woman and in love with me. She thought that we had a tryst last night.’ ‘And did we not, my shy one?’ He leered at me outrageously.

‘That is one thing that in all my years among your folk I have never become accustomed to. The great importance that you attach to what gender one is.’

‘Oh, when the Fool pisses Pray tell, what’s the angle? Did we take down his pants Would he dimple or dangle?’

‘There, now you have said it,’ the Fool replied as if I had proven his point for him. ‘And I love you, and all that is a part of you.’ He cocked his head and the next words held a challenge. ‘And do you not return that to me?’

‘You know I love you,’ I said at last, grudgingly. ‘After all that has been between us, how can you even ask? But I love you as a man loves another man …’

‘What you know, I can know.’ ‘What did you say?’ I asked the Fool uneasily. His words had replied so exactly to my thoughts that it sent a chill up my spine. ‘I said, what you know, I can know,’ he repeated absently. ‘Why?’ ‘Exactly my thought. Why would I wish to know what you know?’ ‘No. I mean, why did you say that?’ ‘In truth, Fitz, I’ve no idea. The words popped into my head and I said them. I often say things I have not well considered.’ The last he said almost as an apology.

Then I saw the dragon. I halted in my tracks and lifted my arms out in a sudden gesture for both stillness and silence that all seemed to recognize. All of my companions’ gazes followed mine. Starling gasped and the hackles on the wolf stood up. We stared at it, as unmoving as it was. Golden and green, he sprawled under the trees in their dappled shade. He was far enough off the trail that I could only see patches of him through the trees, but those were impressive enough. His immense head, as long as a horse’s body, rested deep in the moss. His single eye that I could see was closed. A great crest of feather-scales, rainbow-hued, lay lax about his throat. Similar tufts above each eye looked almost comical, save that there could be nothing comical about a creature so immense and so strange. I saw a scaled shoulder, and winding between two trees, a length of tail. Old leaves were heaped about it like a sort of nest.

Yet again we halted, silently transfixed, to stare at a sleeping dragon. This one sprawled in the deep shade of evergreen trees. Like the first, she nestled deep in moss and forest debris. But there the resemblance ended. Her long sinuous tail was coiled and wrapped around her like a garland, and her smoothly scaled hide shone a rich, coppery brown. I could see wings folded tight to her narrow body. Her long neck was craned over her back like a sleeping goose’s and the shape of her head was bird-like also, even to a hawk-like beak. From the creature’s brow spiralled up a shining horn, wickedly sharp at the tip. The four limbs folded beneath her put me more in mind of a hind than a lizard. To call both these creatures dragons seemed a contradiction, yet I had no other word for beings such as these.

Abruptly Kettricken spoke. ‘I do not think they are living beings. I think they are clever carvings of stone.’ My Wit-sense told me otherwise. ‘They are alive!’ I cautioned her in a whisper. I started to quest toward one, but Nighteyes near panicked. I drew my mind-touch back. ‘They sleep very deeply, as if still hibernating from the cold weather. But I know they are alive.’

Kettle place her withered hand on the creature’s still brow. Her hand seemed to tremble as she touched it, but then she smiled, almost sadly, and stroked her hand up the spiralling horn. ‘So beautiful,’ she mused. ‘So cunningly wrought.’

There is another, with the antlers of a stag and the face of a man!’ Kettricken lifted a hand to point and I glimpsed yet another figure sprawled sleeping on the forest floor.

I finally forced myself to set a hand to the cold, carved stone. ‘It’s a statue,’ I said aloud, as if to force myself to believe what my Wit-sense denied.

And yet, why? What was important about these statues? The significance of the city I had seen at once; it might have been the original habitation of the Elderlings. But this?

Are all the statues of sleeping creatures?’ She frowned to herself for a moment. ‘I believe so. And I think that all are winged.’