The Farseer Trilogy (The Farseer Trilogy, #1-3)

by Robin Hobb

I cried so hard I felt I couldn’t breathe. I think I cried every tear I had never shed since the day my grandfather forced my mother to abandon me.

How can I say I love you so much that I wish I did not love you, or at least could refrain from showing that I loved you, because my love puts you in such danger, and have those words be true?”

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 know you. You have hurt me, almost to death, but still I live. And I will go on living.”

Now there was a sense that we might begin to heal, and to fight back.

To bond to any animal was to

promise oneself that future pain. My heart had been broken sufficient times already.

“I feel we are wed already,” she whispered. “I cannot imagine how the speaking of any vows could make us more truly joined.”

I reached out and drew her to me, marveling. Yesterday, I had been a man seldom touched: the clap of a friend on my shoulder, or the casual jostling of a crowd, or too often lately, hands seeking to throttle me. That had been the extent of my personal contact. Then, last night, and now this. She finished the kiss and then lay beside me, gently arranging herself against me. I took a deep breath of her scent and kept still, savoring the places where her body touched mine and made warmth. The sensation was like a soap bubble floating on the wind; I feared even to breathe lest it vanish. Nice, agreed Nighteyes. Not so much aloneness here. More like pack.

“You’re not dead, son. You’re not dead.”

At last I went to meet him, feeling strangely shy and embarrassed. When he looked up and saw me, he halted and stood in the trail. I continued toward him. “Boy?” he asked cautiously when I was near. I managed a nod and a smile. The answering smile that broke forth on his face humbled me. He dropped his staff to hug me, and then pressed his cheek to mine as if I were a child. “Oh, Fitz, Fitz, my boy,” he said in a voice full of relief. “I thought we had lost you. I thought we’d done something worse than let you die.” His old arms were tight and strong about me. I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him that they had.

Out in the night, a single wolf lifted his nose and howled suddenly up to the sky, piercing the night with his loneliness and despair.

“Did you doubt it before?” “The Witted part … yes. I thought it an evil lie they had told about you. That the son of a prince could be Witted … You did not seem a man who would share his life with an animal.” The tone of her voice left me no doubt as to how she regarded such a habit. “Well. I do.” A tiny spark of anger made me forthright. “He’s everything to me. Everything. I have never had a truer friend, willing without question to lay his life down for mine. And more than his life. It is one thing to be willing to die for another. It is another to sacrifice the living of one’s life for another. That is what he gives me. The same sort of loyalty I give to my king.”

The Fool surprised me by putting an arm around me. I moved closer to him gratefully, sharing warmth. The sympathy of my wolf wrapped me. I waited for the Fool to say something comforting. He was too wise to try. I fell asleep longing for words that did not exist.

There is no more slippery task than to refrain from thinking of something.