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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robin Hobb
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October 27 - November 15, 2023
‘I assure you, I’m not a grand noble. I spent a fair amount of time pulling an oar on the Rurisk during the Red-Ship Wars. My gear was under my bench, and half the time, that was my bed as well.’ ‘Ah, you’ll do well then. I’d like to introduce Althea Vestrit. I’ve tried to make her a Trell, but she persists in being a Vestrit, stubbornness being the hallmark of her family’s women. But if you’ve met Malta, you’ll know that already.’
‘Well. It’s a strange pleasure to see the man who wears my ship’s face—though doubtless you think of it the other way. Please, come to our table, and have a cup of coffee and tell me how it felt to see the figurehead Amber carved to match the man who held her heart.’
From the Rain Wilds to Bingtown, women have stood on an equal footing with men for quite some time. Even if some forget it from time to time.’ She smiled at me. ‘When you were otherwise occupied, Spark had many questions for Bellin and me about Tarman. She learns quickly, and I assure you, there’s no harm in a girl knowing more than ribbons and sewing.’ I defended the Six Duchies. ‘I assure you, in the Six Duchies we do not confine our women at all. They are minstrels and guards, scribes and huntswomen, or whatever other occupation appeals to them.’ Spark found her tongue. ‘I wasn’t asking
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We were back to an awkward silence as I sought words. It was broken by a loud shout that vibrated the planks of the deck. ‘Ahl-theee-a!’ ‘Paragon,’ she explained unnecessarily. ‘I’d best see what he needs. Don’t wait for me, but help yourself to coffee and cakes. Brashen, would you show them where their cabins are?’
‘Did you grow up here?’ I asked Brashen. ‘Here? Oh, no. I’m Bingtown born and bred, from an illustrious Trader family. But I’m the black sheep and not the heir, so here I am, captaining a liveship instead of minding the family fortune.’ He was clearly well satisfied with his lot. ‘Not too different to my tale,’ I told him. ‘Amber may call me a prince, but my name tells the truth. “Fitz” means I was born on the wrong side of the blankets. So, I’m a Farseer, but a bastard one.’
‘Will he?’ Paragon demanded harshly. ‘He has been gone two years! Will he ever come back? Or will Vivacia claim him? He was born here, on my decks! He is mine! Or am I the only liveship without a family? The only liveship with no heir to my captaincy? For even as Althea’s brother demands my boy for his deck, he keeps from me what should be mine! Kennit’s son!’
aft. I began to follow but the ship suddenly spoke. ‘You, with my face. Don’t go.’ I halted. Brashen stopped and looked back at me, his eyes wide. A small shake of his head was full of warning. Lant’s gaze went from me to Amber. I tipped my head toward her, letting him know he should follow her and he quickly took Brashen’s place. The captain folded his arms and stood watching the figurehead. ‘Buckman. I want to talk to you. Come here.’
Are you listening, Buckman? For that is your role in this conversation. You listen.’ I wheezed a response. ‘I’m listening.’ ‘Excellent. Amber seems to be fond of you. Perhaps she has been fond of you for years.’ He paused. I nodded. ‘Friends since childhood.’ The pressure eased. ‘Friends?’ ‘Since we— since I was a boy.’ He made a deep sound that I felt all through my body. Then he said, ‘Understand this. We share a face, though mine is more youthful and handsomer. I asked her to carve me a face she could love. She gave me yours. But it was “could” love, not “did” love. Remember that. She loves
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He was captured by the notorious pirate Igrot and used as his personal vessel. And Kennit Ludluck, the son of his family, was tormented on board him. Tormented and twisted.’ She added in a whisper, ‘Cruelty begets cruelty.’ ‘Deliberate cruelty is never forgivable,’ Althea said brusquely. Amber nodded curtly. ‘I understand that now, perhaps better than I once did.’
‘Fitz. How old are you?’ ‘Exactly? I’m not sure. You know that.’ ‘Take a guess,’ he chided me. I blew out my distaste for the subject. ‘Sixty-two, perhaps sixty-three. Sixty-four, maybe. But I don’t look it and most days I don’t feel it.’ ‘But you are it. It’s going to take its toll. You had a good life, for a time. An easy life. With Molly. Calm and prosperity dull a man’s edge just as endless battle and hardship dulls the gentler parts of the soul.’ ‘It was good, Fool. I wanted it to be forever. I wanted to grow old and to die with her sitting by my bed.’ ‘But you didn’t get that.’ ‘No. I
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So many mistakes, Fool. How roughly I “healed” those children.’ I looked at his empty eyes. ‘And just now, with Paragon … Stupid, stupid, stupid.’ I reached to seize his gloved hand. ‘Fool. I’m not competent to do what you want done. I’m going to fail you, drag you down into torture and death with me. Will Lant and Per and Spark fall with us? Will we listen to Per scream? Watch Spark abused and torn? I can’t stand it. I can’t stand to think of it. Do you wonder that I want to send them home, that I am terrified of bringing anyone with me into this? I fear failing all of you as I have feared
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‘He’s gone,’ I said dully. ‘If I still had him, I wouldn’t feel so diminished. His senses were so sharp and he shared all with me. But he’s gone completely now. I used to feel him inside me, sometimes. I could almost hear him, usually mocking me. But I don’t even have that any more. He’s just gone.’ ‘That’s not what I meant, though I’m sad to hear it.
I was recalling Nighteyes at the end of his life. You wanted to heal him and he refused. How you tried to leave him safe while we went after the Piebalds and he came after you.’ I smiled, remembering my wolf’s determination to live until he died. ‘What are you saying?’ He spoke solemnly. ‘This is our last hunt, old wolf. And as we have always done, we go to it together.’
A flaming man offers a drink to my father. He drinks it. He shakes himself like a wet dog, and pieces of wood fly in all directions. He turns into two dragons that fly away. I am almost certain that this dream will come to pass. A dream that makes no sense!
‘But no good, either. I must do only what keeps the world to the Path. Harm can come of simple things. The cake I eat, another person lacks. Like tiny pebbles that shift till the hillside gives way, carrying a road into oblivion.’
‘She will kill me if she finds I’ve answered your questions.’ He gave me a sideways glance. ‘If I don’t answer, you will push me past what I can do. It is harder and harder to hide you. I hid a troop of men from an entire town. Why are you so hard to hide?’ I didn’t know and didn’t care. ‘Why me?’ I demanded of him. ‘Why did you destroy my home and ruin my life?’ He shook his head slowly, deeply hurt at my failure to understand. ‘Not to ruin your life,’ he objected. ‘To set you on the true Path. To control you lest you create a false way and carry us all to a terrible future.’
‘You are doing it, aren’t you? Right now. You are making me tell you things, and then you will know and you will change things. Because you are him. You fight me when I try to hide you. You make Dwalia angry with me. You ran away, and so many died. And we caught you again, but Reppin died and Alaria was sold. Now there’s just Dwalia and me, and this Kerf. All those others … you changed all their lives into deaths! That is what the Unexpected Son would do!’ He looked furious.
‘Why did you steal me? What are you going to do with me?’ I spoke the words loud and clear into the dark. I heard Dwalia shift in the bunk as the ship lurched in another direction. ‘Make her be quiet!’ she ordered Vindeliar. ‘Make her fall asleep.’ ‘He can’t! I can block him out of my mind. He can’t control me.’
‘You thought I was the Unexpected Son. Then you thought I wasn’t! Well, I think I am! And I am changing the world, right now. You will never know how I will change it, for I think you will die before we reach port. You have certainly lost flesh and strength. And if you die, and Vindeliar is left alone with us? Well, I doubt I shall go to Clerres.’ I laughed again.
He was Nettle’s father, too, and he was my mother’s husband all those years. Of course he was my father.
‘Fool! Step away from him!’ I cried, and Paragon lifted his eyes to lock his gaze on me. ‘Don’t ever call her a fool!’ he snarled at me, past sharp teeth. ‘She is wiser than all of you!’ ‘Amber, what have you done?’ Althea cried in a low, broken voice. Brashen was silent, staring in stark horror at the transformed figurehead. ‘She has given me back my true nature, at least in part!’
‘You will become dragons? You will cease to be Paragon? How?’ Then, even more incredulously, ‘You will leave us?’ He ignored the hurt in her voice, choosing instead to take offence at a meaning her words had not held. ‘What would you have me do? How could you want me to stay like this? Always at the whim of others? Going only where you take me, carrying burdens back and forth between human ports? Sexless? Trapped in a form not my own?’ From almost begging, his voice edged into fury. I expected his arrowed words to wound her, but she seemed immune to them.
‘You love him. You’ve loved him for years, since the time he was a derelict hulk dragged up on the beach. Althea, you played inside him as a girl. Brashen, you took shelter inside him when no one else would offer you a roof. You know him, you know how mistreated he has been. What he said was true. You can’t possibly wish for him to remain as he is.’
Then, like a drenching wave that cannot be outrun, hope crashed over me. It seized me and dragged me over barnacles into its depths. I forgot all other events of the day as I demanded, ‘Bee, alive? How? Why do you believe such a thing?’
If your daughter is alive you will rescue her, and even if she is not you will destroy that nest of ugliness. Then we will come back here and sail up the river, and Amber will get Silver for me. Enough Silver for me to become the dragons I was meant to be.’
I wanted to ask him what he would do if we died trying. I was sure he’d still go back to Kelsingra and demand Silver. So why didn’t he do that right now? Because your vengeance is dragon-vengeance as well. He paused. I waited, but he gave me no more than that. As dragons, I cannot bear you there. Only as a ship can I transport you that far. So we all go, together, to take the vengeance that is owed to us. And then we will be free, to become what we were always meant to be.
I sat very still. It was too ridiculous to believe. A surge of something—not hope, not belief, but something I’d no name for—rushed through me. I felt as if my heart had begun to beat again, as if air filled my lungs after a long denial. I wanted so desperately to believe Bee might still be alive. Belief burst through any wall of rationality or caution I possessed. ‘Three candles,’ I said weakly. I wanted to weep and to laugh and shout. Three candles meant that my daughter still lived.
I was too well-born for that sort of work. Wasn’t I? Did I want to live and escape Dwalia? I did. I thought of my father. But for fate, he’d have been heir to the Six Duchies throne.
When the Stolen Child lands, the child has become a scaled monster with glittering eyes and a heart full of hatred. ‘I am come to destroy the future.’
He kissed her again. Then, with a discipline I envied, he took her by the shoulders and pushed her gently away from him. He spoke hoarsely. ‘There are enough bastards in my lineage, Spark. I won’t make another one. Nor will I break faith with my father. I promised him, and I fear those words will be the last ones he heard from me. I must see this through to the end. And I will not chance leaving a fatherless child behind.’
You told me what Amber said to you, that in all likelihood, she and Fitz will both die. And as I am sent to protect him, that means I will die before he does. It will shame me enough to leave you without a protector, though I hope that Per will stand by you. But I’ll not chance leaving you with child.’
I moved softly away from them, scarcely able to breathe for the tears. I hadn’t realized I’d begun to cry until I’d choked on them. So many lives contorted because my father had given in to lust. Or love? If Chade had not been born, if I had not been born, would other players have stepped up into our roles?
How often had the Fool told me that life was an immense wheel, turning in a set track and that his task was to bump the wheel out of that track and set it on a better one? Was that what I’d witnessed tonight? Lant refusing to continue the Farseer tradition of hapless bastards?
They knew me as Amber, so Amber I must remain.’ ‘I don’t like her,’ I said abruptly. He gave a caw of laughter. ‘Really?’ I spoke honestly. ‘Really. I don’t like who you are when you are Amber. She’s, she’s not a person I would choose as a friend. She’s … conniving. Tricky.’ A half-smile curved his mouth. ‘And as the Fool, I was never tricky?’
Amber spoke my question aloud. ‘So. You have forgiven me?’ Althea gave her head a short shake. ‘Not any more than I’ve forgiven Kennit for raping me. Or Kyle for taking Vivacia from my care. For some things, there is no forgiving or unforgiving. They are simply a crossroads, and a direction taken, whether I would or no.
‘That’s exactly how Prince FitzChivalry looks when he’s puzzled,’ Per observed, answering a question I hadn’t even formed in my mind. Slowly, Paragon turned away from us. He lifted his arm, offering the back of his wrist to the sky. Motley swooped in to land there, completing my utter confusion.
‘Yet you changed your face,’ Amber continued, ‘so that Boy-O would see you in your familiar guise and not be alarmed.’ I wondered if she were guessing or if she knew. ‘I changed my face because it suited me to do so.’ Paragon spoke the words defiantly. Amber’s response was mild. ‘And it suited you to do so because you care for Boy-O. Paragon, there is no shame in being who and what you are. In partaking of two worlds instead of one.’
‘I do,’ Per said quietly. ‘Sometimes. I miss being so sure of what my life would be. I was going to grow taller than my father and be Tallestman, and step up to his job in the stables when he got old.’ ‘That might still be,’ I said, but he shook his head. For a time, he was quiet. Then he told me a long, wandering tale about the first time he’d had to groom a horse much taller than he could reach.
He caught and lofted the young man as I had once lifted Dutiful’s small sons; and, as I had then, feigned tossing him into the air before catching him securely once more. Agile as a tumbler, the man accepted this treatment and laughed aloud at being caught. Freeing himself of the ship’s grip, he climbed onto Paragon’s hands and then launched himself backwards,
As Paragon twisted to put him on the deck, I heard Boy-O say to the ship, ‘I have missed you so! Vivacia is a very fine ship, but she is always serious. And Cousin Wintrow is an excellent captain, but he sets a very simple table. Mother! Papa! There you are! What brings you to Divvytown without a bird to warn us of your coming? I was at the sailmaker’s when they came running to fetch me! If we’d known to expect you, you would have had a much better welcome!’
When I was sure the others slept, I allowed myself to weep.
And so my dream of the slow team of oxen that trampled a child into a muddy street, my dream of a wise queen who planted silver and reaped golden wheat, my dream of a man who rode a huge red horse across ice to a new land, all those I choked back and swallowed.
‘You do not need! You want. And I know what you want. Do you think I don’t know how much pleasure you take from it? I’ve seen your eyes roll back with it and how you drool. No. There is only one left and we must save it against most dire need. Then there will be no more for you, Vindeliar. No more ever, for it has become scarce since the nine-fingered slaveboy set the serpent free!’
A nine-fingered slaveboy. I could almost see him, dark-haired and slight, strong only in his will. His will to do what was right. ‘The serpent was in a stone pool.’ I breathed the words to myself. It had not been a dream of a snake in a bowl, no.
The man was too strong of self to be captured by such feeble threads. I could sense the shape the fortune-merchant made in the world and to my surprise I could feel that he had a sort of magic shimmer to him. He did not reach out with his magic as Vindeliar did. Instead, his magic coated him just as his bright colours did, and like his colours, it invited folk to study him and draw near. I reached toward his magic and pushed on it gently. For a moment, he looked puzzled. I moved away. All he could do was draw people in; he probably didn’t even know he was using it.
I felt him gather his magic, and suddenly I knew that no matter what Dwalia might believe, this was Farseer magic. I knew a moment of outrage that somehow he had stolen such an ability. Then I felt him bubbling it toward the merchant.
But I’m to be wed tomorrow, and the old saying tells us to pay a debt you don’t owe before your wedding day, and you’ll never have a debt you can’t pay. So, here’s a silver for you, a debt I don’t owe.’
I would die at her hands, and with me would die the future that should have been. I was the future they sought to destroy by capturing and holding the Unexpected Son. I felt half-stunned by the knowledge. Had it been in my mind all that time, finally to be shaken free by Dwalia’s abuse of me? I felt sick with the insight. It was no dream that flashed before my eyes as if I had stared at the sun. It was a future. I had to find the path to that future. I would find it, or I would die trying.
Physically, I came to my feet, but that was not how I faced him. How to describe it? He had ventured too close to me. He had pushed in and now suddenly, I enveloped him. I did not know what I did or how I did it. Did I remember doing this once? Did I remember my father doing it, my sister? I wrapped my awareness around him and trapped him. He was too surprised to struggle.
Then I acted, using the hereditary magic of the Farseers almost by instinct. ‘You cannot master me,’ I told him, pushing the thought at him with every ounce of strength I had. ‘You cannot break my walls.’ And then, I slammed shut the gates to myself.
