Fool's Assassin (The Fitz and the Fool, #1)

by Robin Hobb

A secret is only yours so long as you don’t share it. Tell it to one person, and it’s a secret no more.

He would never know what I knew, that to have one woman a thousand times, and each time find in her a different delight, is far better.

And like a child, I’d been testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me.

When one has been disappointed for so long, hope becomes the enemy. One cannot be dashed to the earth unless one is lifted first, and I learned to avoid hope.

I could not remember when I had dreamed it, and then it seemed that perhaps it was a dream I was going to have. Or a dream of…something. A dream of a crossroads, a place not of two roads intersecting but of thousands.

He gave a small sigh. Elbow on knee, he cupped his jaw in his hand. “I don’t know any real games. I didn’t have much chance to play with other children.” He looked at me and lifted a helpless hand. “I just wanted to…” He sighed away the rest of his words.

“When the bee to the earth does fall, the butterfly comes back to change all.”

But sometimes there is simply a long space after an ending, a time when it seems everything has ended and nothing else can ever begin.

Empty. No Molly, no Burrich, no Verity, no Shrewd. No Nighteyes. The yawning cavern of emptiness gaped wider as each remembered death slashed at me. No Fool.

Even after we are grown, in moments of fear or sorrow, we still turn instinctively to the older generation, hoping to finally learn some great hidden lesson about death and pain. Only to learn instead that the only lesson is that life goes on.

There is a wolf as big as a horse. He is black and stands still as stone and stares. My father is as gray as dust, and old, so old. “I’m just so tired,”

You are finding your courage. Now find your wits. Sniff your way home, cub.

Not allowed to make me think I’ve lost you.”

I decided that night that the discomfort of being close to him was preferable to standing away from the only person in the world who I knew loved me.

Sometimes I thought that the dreams went back beyond my existence, that they were the fragments of someone else’s life, but were somehow bound to me.

“Oh. The cloak. It was the cloak. I was cold and pulled the cloak over me. It vanished me.”

He believes there could be another one.

He does not know where, or when, or who mothered him. But he hopes you can find him. Before the hunters do.”

Wait for the one who sent me. He will come for him, if he can.

He escaped but they will hunt him. When he is able to, he will come.

That, I think, is the shock of any relationship ending. It is realizing that what is still an ongoing relationship to someone is, for the other person, something finished and done with.

“No matter what name they call us by, you will always be mine. And I am yours, Bee. And I will always do everything in my power to protect you. Do you understand that?” I nodded my head against him. “I will always need you. I will always want you to be part of my life. Do you understand that?”

“I will always take your part, Bee. Right or wrong. That is why you must always take care to be right, lest you make your father a fool.”

the Fool in my arms.

“For him, other people can be moved.” She rested a gentle hand on his shoulder. “He got me to the Mountains. Alive. I will never forget that.”

“People love you far more than you deserve, Tom Badgerlock. But you don’t even believe that they love you at all.” I was still pondering that when she added, “And I am one of those people.”