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

by Robin Hobb

I hadn’t read a story; I’d shared a life.

Story has a current of its own. It can’t be defied forever.

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

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.

I have since come to know that many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves.

“Soldiers and sailors whore around. It’s a common way for common folk. But not for royalty. Or for anyone with a bit of pride. What would you have thought of me, when you were younger, if I’d gone out whoring at night, or brought women up to the room? How would you see women now? Or men? It’s fine to fall in love, Fitz, and no one begrudges a young woman or man a kiss or two. But I’ve seen what it’s like down to Bingtown. Traders bring pretty girls or well-made youths to the market like so many chickens or so many potatoes. And the children they end up bearing may have names, but they don’t have much else. And even when they marry, they don’t stop their…habits. If ever I find the right woman, I’ll want her to know I won’t be looking at another. And I’ll want to know all my children are mine.” Burrich was almost impassioned.

“There is this, boy. And you should remember it in every situation, not just this one. Learning is never wrong. Even learning how to kill isn’t wrong. Or right. It’s just a thing to learn, a thing I can teach you. That’s all. For now, do you think you could learn how to do it, and later decide if you want to do it?”

“Be your blood, boy, and ignore what anyone else thinks of you.” “Sometimes I get tired of doing the hard things.” “So do I.”

“Most prisons are of our own making. A man makes his own freedom, too.”

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

“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.”

It was an impressive display of good food abused in the name of fashionable cooking.

I have never known a soldier who didn’t know where the kitchens were.

The Lady Patience established her eccentricity at an early age. As a small child, her nursemaids found her stubbornly independent, and yet lacking the common sense to take care of herself. One remarked, “She would go all day with her laces undone because she could not tie them herself, yet would suffer no one to tie them for her.” Before the age of ten, she had decided to eschew the traditional trainings befitting a girl of her rank, and instead interested herself in handicrafts that were very unlikely to prove useful: pottery, tattooing, the making of perfumes, and the growing and propagation of plants, especially foreign ones. She did not scruple to absent herself for long hours from supervision. She preferred the woodlands and orchards to her mother’s courtyards and gardens. One would have thought this would produce a hardy and practical child. Nothing could be further from the truth. She seemed to be constantly afflicted with rashes, scrapes, and stings, was frequently lost, and never developed any sensible wariness toward man or beast. Her education came largely from herself. She mastered reading and ciphering at an early age, and from that time studied any scroll, book, or tablet that came her way with voracious and indiscriminate interest. Tutors were frustrated by her distractible ways and frequent absences that seemed to affect not at all her ability to learn almost anything swiftly and well. Yet the applying of such knowledge interested her not at all. Her head w...

“Sometimes, you are so like him that…” She choked. “You should have been mine! It isn’t fair, you should have been mine!” She cried out the words so fiercely that I thought she would strike me. Instead, she leaped at me and caught me in a flying hug, at the same time treading upon her dog and overturning a vase of greenery. The dog sprang up with a yelp, the vase shattered on the floor, sending water and shards in all directions, while my lady’s forehead caught me squarely under the chin, so that for a moment all I saw was sparks. Before I could react, she flung herself from me and fled into her bedchamber with a cry like a scalded cat. She slammed the door behind her. And all the while Lacey kept on with her tatting. “She gets like this, sometimes,” she observed benignly, and nodded me toward the door. “Come again tomorrow,” she reminded me, and added, “You know, Lady Patience has become quite fond of you.”

Once she had given up the notion of teaching me everything that a Farseer prince should know, she was able to teach me a great deal. Very little of it was what she initially intended to teach me.

For a very brief period I was happy, and, an even rarer gift, I knew I was happy.

I helped her with her cloak and we left, walking uphill and into the wind. And that suddenly seemed a metaphor for my whole life.

And prettiness is not all that important in a woman. I’ve watched Lacey’s hands making one of the keep children a fishnet from a bit of jute string. Quick and clever as any webman’s fingers down on the dock are her fingers; now that’s a pretty thing that has nothing to do with her face.

“But if noble ladies do all those things, they’ll ruin their hands with the work, and the wind will dry their hair and tan their faces. Surely Verity doesn’t deserve a woman who looks like a deckhand?” “Surely he does. Far more than he deserves a woman who looks like a fat red carp kept in a bowl.”

That was Burrich’s teaching; I fed myself as I would have an injured animal.

I rose from their midst feeling ashamed of how I had dismissed them; in so short a time Galen had brought me to think of them as ignorant sword wielders, men of brawn with no brain at all. I had lived among them all my life. I should have known better. No, I had known better. But my hunger to set myself higher, to prove beyond doubt my right to that royal magic had made me willing to accept any nonsense he might choose to present me. Something clicked within me, as if the key piece to a wood puzzle had suddenly slid into place. I had been bribed with the offer of knowledge as another man might have been bribed with coins.

I envied him the ability to whine so well. My own seemed to go unheard.

Nothing takes the heart out of a man more than the expectation of failure.

I don’t think there is anything more cruelly tedious than unremitting nervousness.

For a time I tried to bolster myself with anger, but my despair was too clammy and dark a thing for anger’s flames to overcome.

I could

I thought to myself. Hollow. And weary.

I held on to Smithy in my mind the way a child grips a beloved toy as protection against nightmares. I had to get home to him, therefore I must not be discovered. The knowledge that I must do the first somehow made the second seem more possible.

The Wit was not dominion over beasts, but only a glimpse into their lives.

“Do you think this is a bad…task? Wrong?” I took a breath. “From what I’ve been told, he has not that much longer to live anyway. It might almost be a mercy, if death were to come quietly in the night, instead of—” “Boy,” Chade remarked quietly. “Never pretend we are anything but what we are. Assassins. Not merciful agents of a wise king. Political assassins dealing death for the furtherance of our monarchy. That is what we are.”

Maybe, now that I know you, I wish I had never set out to make you what…”

“I have been waiting for you to come to apologize to me,” Patience observed. I immediately opened my mouth to do so, but she irritably waved me to silence. “But, in discussing it with Lacey tonight, I found I had already forgiven you. Boys, I decided, simply have a given amount of rudeness they must express. I decided you meant nothing by it, hence you do not need to apologize.” “But I am sorry,” I protested. “I just couldn’t decide how to say—” “It’s too late to apologize now, I’ve forgiven you,”

When considering a man’s motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.”

It would not do for the royal entourage to be late for the wedding; it was bad enough that the groom was not attending.

I flung my strength to Verity, reserves I had not suspected in myself. I opened up and let go of them, just as Verity did when he Skilled. I had not known I had so much to give. “Take it all. I would die anyway. And you were always good to me when I was young.” I heard the words as clearly as if I had spoken them, and felt the breaking of a mortal bond as strength flowed into Verity through me. He waxed suddenly strong, beast strong, and angry.

In the great Library at Jhaampe there is a tapestry that is rumored to contain a map through the mountains to the Rain Wilds. Like many Jhaampe maps and books, the information contained was considered so valuable that it was encoded in the forms of riddles and visual puzzles. Figured on the tapestry, among many images, are the forms of a dark-haired, dark man, stout and muscular and bearing a red shield, and in the opposite corner, a golden-skinned being. The golden-skinned creature has been the victim of moths and fraying, but it is still possible to see that in the scale of the tapestry, it is much larger than a human, and possibly winged. Buckkeep legend has it that King Wisdom sought and found the Elderlings’ homeland by a secret path through the Mountain Kingdom. Could these figures represent an Elderling and King Wisdom? Does this tapestry record the path through the Mountain Kingdom to the Elderlings’ homeland in the Rain Wilds?

Of one other I must speak, one dragged into that conflict and intrigue only by his loyalty to me. To the end of my days, I will bear the scars he gave me. His worn teeth sank deeply into my hand several times before he managed to drag me from that pool. How he did it, I will never know. But his head still rested on my chest when they found us; his mortal bonds to this world had broken. Nosy was dead. I believe he gave his life freely, recalling that we had been good to one another when we were puppies. Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But we grieve for many years.

“You are wearied,” my boy says. He is standing at my elbow and I do not know how long he has been there. He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering trail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red-Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red-Ship raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman’s hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail a man’s heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smoldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother’s cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red-Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy. “You should rest,” the boy says again, and I realize I am sitting, staring at a line of ink on a page. It makes no sense. Here is another sheet spoiled, another effort to set aside. “Put them away,” I tell him, and do not object as he gathers all the sheets and stacks them haphazardly together. Herbary and history, maps and musings, all a hodgepodge in his hands as they are in my mind. I can no longer recall what it was I set out to do. The pain is back, and it would be so easy to quiet it. But that way lies madn...