Assassin's Fate (The Fitz and the Fool, #3)

by Robin Hobb

I longed to exchange a glance with Amber. Instead I patted her hand on my arm fondly and she immediately replied, “Together, if we may.”

Oh my oobies

“As for my getting in, that’s not a problem. If I show myself in a guise they recognize, they will be very anxious to take me back in and finish what they began.” He tried for laughter but abruptly fell silent. I wondered if he had frightened himself. I sought for a distraction. “You smell like her.” “What?” “You smell like Amber. It’s a bit unnerving.” “Like Amber?” He lifted his wrist to his nose and sniffed. “There’s barely a trace of attar of roses there. How can you smell that?” “I suppose there’s still a bit of the wolf in me. It’s noticeable because you usually have no scent of your own.

Raaahggh

I set my hand on his shoulder. He was shaking. I spoke quietly. “So they found me. And we will make them very sorry they did. Did not you tell me that you had dreamed me as Destroyer? That is my prediction: I will destroy the people who destroyed my child.” “Where is the bottle?” He sounded utterly discouraged, and I decided to take mercy on him. “We drank it. We’ve talked enough. Go to sleep.” “I cannot. I fear to dream.” I was drunk. The words tumbled from my mouth. “Then dream of me,

I did, I think, what anyone would have done for a friend, especially as drunk as we both were. I remembered Burrich, too, and how his strength had sheltered me when I was small. I put my arm around the Fool and pulled him close. For an instant I felt that unbearable connection. I lifted my hand away and shifted so that his face rested on my shirt.

Ooough

“I should.” I secured my walls against him. I wished I didn’t have to. “Go to sleep,” I told him. I made a promise I doubted I could keep. “I will protect you.”

He sniffed a final time, wiped his wrist across his eyes, and gave a deep sigh. He groped with his gloved hand and clasped my hand, wrist-to-wrist, the warriors’ greeting. After a time, I felt his body go slack against mine. His grip on my wrist loosened. I kept mine firm.

cudddddlin

His hands on my shoulders felt good but reminded me too sharply of Molly.

ok robin whatever robin

That’s my Alise. Always wanting to do things in the best possible way.”

I missed leftrinnnnn

gifts. A pragmatic man named Carson had brought us dried strips of meat in a leather pouch. “It will keep if you don’t let damp get to it.” I thanked him, and had that instant sense of connection that sometimes comes, a feeling of a deep friendship that could have been.

what do u mean fitz about the gay guy what do u mean

Amber and Spark both received earrings from a woman named Jerd. “There’s nothing magical about them, but they’re pretty, and in a hard time you could sell them.” She had given birth to a little girl I had healed, but oddly enough an Elderling named Sedric was raising the child with Carson. “I am fond of the girl, but was never meant to be a mother,” Jerd informed us cheerily.

Aawwwwwwwww surrogatemommmmmm

Please, come to our table, 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.”

uh oh

There was a hasty knock and an instant later Spark flung open the door. “Oh!” she exclaimed upon seeing our clasped hands. I released the Fool.

Ok romance trope

I pushed aside reluctance and tried to reconstruct that moment of contact we’d had. With Chade rushing down on us like a summer squall on a small boat, pushing and scattering and threatening. Fitz, my boy! An echo in the vast current of Skill. A brief recollection of Chade, like a perfume on a spring breeze. Dead. Gone. The flood of loss was too much. I tried again to reach for Bee but I was groping in dark water. My child was as gone as Chade was. I drew back from the Skill-current and opened my eyes to the darkness of the Fool’s chamber. He was sleeping deeply. There was no one else in the room. Sitting on the floor, I pulled my knees up tight to my chest and bowed my head over them. Chade’s boy wept.

ughhhh chadeeeeeee

Was his Fool, his Beloved, dead? Or were they together? Was that why he had pushed me away? To make room in his life for his old friend?

awww bbaby

“Dead. I am certain he is dead. Just as dead as you wished him to be. And he died the way I wished him to die, at his lover’s hands! Over and over FitzChivalry Farseer sank his knife into Beloved’s belly, for he did not even know him after all I had done to change him!

his LOVERRRRRRR ROBINNNNNN

Two of the freed Whites rose and went to the rack of torture tools. They made choices and then joined Lant, Spark, and Per, chipping away at the mortar. The irony twisted my gut. “And we will live happily ever after?” the Fool asked. I watched the bits of mortar fall. “That is my intention.” “And mine. My hope. But a thin one.” “Don’t doubt us, or we are lost.” “Fitz, my love, that is the problem. I do not doubt Bee’s dreams at all.”

sharts

“Prilkop told me that Dwalia was my Catalyst. She came and made changes in my life. She changed me. Thus she enabled the changes I made. And I killed her. I killed my Catalyst.” She looked up at me. Her eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots, her pale curls matted to her head. “Did you know that I killed people? And I burned all the dreams so the Servants cannot use them for evil anymore. Papa, I am the Destroyer.” Her words left me speechless. In a very small voice, she asked, “Can you change that for me?” “You are Bee and you are my little girl,” I told her fiercely. “That doesn’t change. Not ever.”

STOPPP

“You must. There’s no time to argue. I’ll say it for you. You don’t want to leave me here to die. I don’t want you to leave me here to die. But you must and you will. I’m done for. Save my child. Save our child.”

OUR CHILDDD

Spark stared blankly at me. “Amber is the Fool. But only your father called him that. Or Beloved.” “Beloved,” I said quietly. I added, “I have not seen him since we jumped from the ship.”

robin stop

So the plan is to lie here until we die? It’s not a plan, Nighteyes. It’s inevitable. I thought you were more of a wolf than that. That stung. I scowled and spoke aloud into the darkness. “Give me a better plan, then.” Make up your mind. Is Death a friend? Then go joyfully to hunt with it, as I did. If it’s an enemy, then fight it. But don’t sag here like a wounded cow waiting for predators to finish it off. You are not prey, nor I! If we must die, let us die as wolves! What would you have me do? Chew off my legs? A brief silence. Then, Could you do that?

nighteyes i missed u bro

“For my Beloved and for my Bee,

HELL YEAH

“I’m going to sleep now,” I told him. I closed my eyes and ignored him. He did not move. It was very annoying. I’d hoped he would leave. I waited a long time and then looked through my lashes. I was going to tell him to go away. Instead I asked, “Did you love my father?” He went as still as a cat. When he spoke it was with reservation. “I had a deep bond with your father. A connection I had with no one else.” “Why won’t you say you loved him?” I opened my eyes to see his face. My father had given him all his strength, and this man would not even say he had loved him? His smile was too tight, as if he was forcing a different expression to be a smile. “It always made him uncomfortable if I used that word.”

UGHHHH

“He did not use that word very much. His love was things he did.” “He never counted up the things he did for me, but he always remembered the things I did for him.” “So he loved you. Loved you so much he left me to take you to Buckkeep.” All expression fell away from his face. His peculiar eyes were empty. “He wrote long letters to you, but he had nowhere to send them. He missed you desperately. He loved my mother, but he always had to be strong for her. He had Riddle, too, and my brother Hap. But the things he wrote about in those letters were things he could not say to my mother, nor Riddle nor Hap. You left him, and all he could do was write them down.”

OUGH

“Kettricken. I did not see you there.” “You never did,” she said and smiled sadly.

STOPPPP

“Everything I feel for each one of you will go into the stone.” My gaze sought out the Fool’s, but he was looking past me, into the darkness.

oh my fucin ggod

Everything I might have told her, had I longer to live. That was a fresh cut of pain. Was it a memory to consider the future we would never have? I considered her question. “The first thing I remember clearly? I know I have older memories, but I hid them from myself, long ago.” I drew a deep breath. Hiding memories again. Setting the pains and the joys deep into stone. “The rain had soaked through me. The day was chill and cold. The hand that held mine was hard and callused. His grip was remorseless but not unkind. The cobblestones were icy, and that grip kept me from falling when I slipped. But it also would not let me turn around and run back to my mother.”

STOP SHES WRITING THE FFIRST BOOK

all the stories of how my life had intersected and twined with his. So much of his life was mine and so much of mine was his.

UGH

“Fool. What were we?” It wasn’t an idle question. I needed to know it. I needed to finally understand it to put it in the wolf. “I don’t know.” His reply was guarded. “Friends. But also Prophet and Catalyst. And in that relationship, I did use you, Fitz. You know it and I know it. I’ve told you how sorry I was to do it. I hope you believe that. And that you can forgive me.” His words were so intense, but that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I waved them away. “Yes, yes. But there was something else there. Always. You were dead, and I called you back. For that moment, when we returned to our proper bodies, as we passed each other, we…” We were one thing. Whole.

no ay he asked what are we omfgggughhh

‘Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.’

Could I still undo what I had done? So that he could do what he should? “I lied!” I spat my whisper at him. “I knew you read my journal. I knew you read my dreams. I wrote there what I thought would hurt you most! I lied to hurt you. For letting him be dead while you lived. For being loved by him more than he loved me!” I took a breath. “He loved you more than he ever loved any of the rest of us!”

And my father lifted a hand. His face was so ravaged, it was like looking at death itself. Except for the smooth, silvered part of it. By creeping degrees, his human hand lifted. He turned it over, showing a bloody palm. His cracked lips moved. Beloved. He could not say the word, but I knew it. So did his Fool. He rose, the blanket that had draped his shoulders falling to the earth. He pulled the glove from his hand and let it fall. He walked uncertainly, like a puppet with his strings pulled by an apprentice puppeteer. He reached my father. So tenderly, he set his hand into my father’s. Then he leaned down until he lay upon the wolf, his face turned to my father’s face. He put his arm across my father’s bony back. He drew him close and then set his silver fingers to the wolf.

OHHH MY BOYS