Assassin's Apprentice (The Farseer Trilogy, #1)

by Robin Hobb

think myself cured of all spite, but when I touch pen to paper, the hurt of a boy bleeds out with the sea-spawned ink, until I suspect each carefully formed black letter scabs over some ancient scarlet wound.

I grew up fatherless and motherless in a court where all recognized me as a catalyst. And a catalyst I became.

“NO!” I shouted, and repelled at him, while crabbing sideways along the wall. I saw him stagger a step backward, losing his grip on his cask, so that it fell to the cobbled path and cracked open. No one in the crowd could have understood what had happened. I certainly didn’t.

Nosy took me to what he obviously regarded as the safest place in the world.

Here Nosy had been whelped, in total defiance of Burrich, and here she had managed to keep her pups hidden for almost three days. Burrich himself had found her there. His smell was the first human smell Nosy could recall.

It brought us a whiff of him. Sweat and beer, Nosy informed me sagely.

My heart leaped sideways in my chest and I pushed at the man, the force jerking out oddly from my belly.

this man fell clutching at his chest, his driftwood weapon spinning harmlessly away. He dropped to the sand, gave a twitch that spasmed his whole body, and then was still.

And through it all, Nosy was at my side, so bonded to me now that I seldom separated my mind completely from his. I used his nose, his eyes, and his jaws as freely as my own, and never thought it the least bit strange.

I didn’t want to be right. I’ve never hit a pup with that damn thing in my life. Nosy had no reason to fear it. Not unless you’d been sharing minds with him.”

“You don’t speak like a child,” he observed suddenly. “But I’ve heard that was the way of it, with those who had the old Wit.

“It’s the power of the beast blood, just as the Skill comes from the line of kings. It starts out like a blessing, giving you the tongues of the animals. But then it seizes you and draws you down, makes you a beast like the rest of them. Until finally there’s not a shred of humanity in you, and you run and give tongue and taste blood, as if the pack were all you had ever known. Until no man could look on you and think you had ever been a man.”

There was a sudden flash of red pain, and Nosy was gone.

I know he meant well. But I did not feel protected by him, but confined. He was the warden that ensured my isolation with fanatical fervor. Utter loneliness was planted in me then, and sent its deep roots down into me.

“When the sea blood flows with the blood of the plains, the Skill will blossom.”

All events, no matter how earthshaking or bizarre, are diluted within moments of their occurrence by the continuance of the necessary routines of day-to-day living.

missed Nosy with a keenness as great as if Burrich had severed a limb from my body. But neither of us ever spoke of that.

Locked into loneliness were we two, and looking at one another every evening, we each saw the one we blamed for it.

So I was and was not a member of the keep community. I avoided some and I observed some and I obeyed some. But with none did I feel a bond.

Imagine the uses for one who is and yet is not of the royal bloodline. Hostage exchanges. Marital alliances. Quiet work. The diplomacy of the knife.”

I realized that some people, like some animals, were totally unaware of my reaching out toward them. I might have quested farther into her mind, except that I was so relieved at not finding any hostility that I feared to stir any.

I could make out a gleaming and winged creature of some sort, and a kingly personage in supplication before it. I was later informed it was King Wisdom being befriended by the Elderling.

“A ruler must be of all his people, for one can only rule what one knows.”

Just know, from the beginning, that I’m going to be teaching you how to kill people. For your king. Not in the showy way Hod is teaching you, not on the battlefield where others see and cheer you on. No. I’ll be teaching you the nasty, furtive, polite ways to kill people.

“There is this, boy. And you should remember it in every situation, not just this one. Learning is never wrong.

I meant only as a general rule, that sleeping the morning away ill befits a man, and even less so a boy.” “And never a prince.”

Men like that in a leader, that he demands of himself the same thing he expects of them.

The welfare of the people belongs to the people, and they have the right to object if their duke stewards it poorly.

I closed my eyes, but even my dreams were bright and annoying. Arguing voices, as loud as if they were in the bed with me, and all the more frustrating because it sounded like one man arguing with himself and taking both sides.

suddenly there were arms around me, holding me tight. Chade held me and rocked me as if I were a much younger child.

“Don’t mind him, boy. You gave us both a bit of a turn. A river ship just came into town, flying the pennant for a special message. And when Regal and I rode down to get it, lo and behold, it’s from Patience, to tell us Chivalry’s dead. Then, as we come up the road, what do we see but the very image of him as a boy, standing silent before us, and of course we were in that frame of mind and—”

“The hand that moves unseen, cloaked by the velvet glove of diplomacy.”

The hand doesn’t always deal death, my boy. Not always.” “Often enough.” “I never lied to you about that.”

“I don’t know. But like Burrich, I do not believe he fell from a horse.”

“Are they going to kill me, too?”

don’t know. Not if I can help it. I think they must first convince King Shrewd it is necessary. And if they do that, I shall know of it.” “Then you think it comes from within the keep.” “I do.”

We’re always a risk and a vulnerability. We’re always expendable. Except when we are an absolute necessity to their own security.

We??

“When you spring to an idea, and decide it is truth, without evidence, you blind yourself to other possibilities.

“Fitz fixes fyce fits. Fat suffices.”

“Fitz fixes feists fits. Fat suffices. It’s a message, I believe. A calling for a significant act. As you are the only one I know who endures being called Fitz, I believe it’s for you. As for what it means, how should I know? I’m a fool, not an interpreter of dreams. Good day.”

That is the trick of good government. To make folk desire to live in such a way that there is no need for its intervention.”

“There is a duke whose mind is not upon the governing of his Duchy.” I suspected Lady Grace was wearing the required road repairs and the wages of those soldiers who would have kept his trade routes policed against brigands. Perhaps the jewels that dangled from her ears should have gone to pay to man Watch Island’s towers.

The Fool was almost certainly born of the human race, though not entirely of human parentage.

The gender of the Fool has been disputed.

the Fool replied that it was no one’s business but his own.

in many well-witnessed cases, he has predicted, however obscurely, events that later came to pass.

They say that in the old days, when more men trained in the Skill, a man could tell what his leader was thinking about just by being silent and listening for a while. But that may be no more than a legend. Not many are taught the Skill, anymore.

“Burrich says that once you’ve given it to an animal, it’s never the same. It does things to horses. He says you can use it to win one race, or run down one stag, but after that, the beast will never be what it was. He says dishonest horse traders use it to make an animal show well at a sale; it gives them spirit and brightens their eyes, but that soon passes. Burrich says that it takes away all their sense of when they’re tired, so they go on, past the time when they should have dropped from exhaustion. Burrich told me that sometimes when the carris oil wears out, the horse just drops in its tracks.”

there is something in a boy that takes the mundanely difficult and unpleasant and turns it into a personal challenge and an adventure.

Hard times are here, boy. And I wonder if they will ever pass.” In the years to come, I was to wonder that often.