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

by Robin Hobb

“Chivalry, me, and then you. Then our cousin August. This bastard would be a far fifth.”

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

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.

Nosy was with us, as always. The other children had come to accept him as a part of me. I don’t think it ever occurred to them to wonder at our singleness of mind. Newboy and Nosy we were, and they probably thought it but a clever trick that Nosy would know before I threw where to be to catch our shared bounty.

“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. That from the beginning, they were never truly children. They always knew too much, and as they got older they knew even more. That was why it was never accounted a crime, in the old days, to hunt them down and burn them. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Fitz?”

“The old Wit,” he began slowly. His face darkened, and he looked down at his hands as if remembering an old sin. “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.” His voice had gotten lower and lower as he spoke, and he had not looked at me, but had turned to the fire and stared into the failing flames there. “There’s some as say a man takes on the shape of a beast then, but he kills with a man’s passion rather than a beast’s simple hunger. Kills for the killing… “Is that what you want, Fitz? To take the blood of kings that’s in you, and drown it in the blood of the wild hunt?

I whimpered, then howled, clawing at the door and seeking after my contact with him. There was a sudden flash of red pain, and Nosy was gone. As his canine senses deserted me completely I screamed

DID HE JUST OLD YELLER NOSY

“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.

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

“The bastard? He’s only a child.” The old King sighed. “Today. This morning and now he is a child. When next you turn around he will be a youth, or worse, a man, and then it will be too late for you to make anything of him. But take him now, Regal, and shape him, and a decade hence you will command his loyalty. Instead of a discontented bastard who may be persuaded to become a pretender to the throne, he will be a henchman, united to the family by spirit as well as blood. A bastard, Regal, is a unique thing. Put a signet ring on his hand and send him forth, and you have created a diplomat no foreign ruler will dare to turn away. He may safely be sent where a prince of the blood may not be risked. 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.”

Okay so, fuck this guy’s grandpa lmfaooo

Her ambitions have always exceeded her abilities.” He paused, and looked directly at Regal. “In royalty, that is a most lamentable failing.”

one needn’t love in order to depend.

many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves.

no wise man tells all he knows. And that he who carries tales has little else in his head.

“Fitz is what Burrich calls me.” She flinched slightly. “He would. Calls a bitch a bitch, and a bastard a bastard, does Burrich. Well…I suppose I see his reasons. Fitz you are, and Fitz you’ll be

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

You’re not especially strong, or fast, or bright. Don’t think you are. But you’ll have the stubbornness to wear down anyone stronger, or faster, or brighter than yourself. And that’s more of a danger to you than to anyone else.

example. It didn’t always make him popular, but his soldiers respected him. Men like that in a leader, that he demands of himself the same thing he expects of them.

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

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

One can only be a true steward of one holding.

for the purposes of royalty, it is better to have the common folk believe that a boy given a noble name must grow to have a noble nature.

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

For a moment I thought of setting my basket down and running away, running off into the darkness and never coming back. Would anyone ever come looking for me? I wondered.

“If you had known he’d cared, so would others. When you are a man, maybe you’ll understand just how much that cost him. To not know you in order to keep you safe. To make his enemies ignore you.”

Oof

I’ve taught you quite a bit, these last few years. But hold this lesson closest and keep it always before you. If ever you make it so they don’t need you, they will kill you.”

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

He held it out to me, and I took death upon my open palm.

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.”

advice for a young man dealing with elderly women: be attentive and polite, cheerful and pleasant of mien. Old women were easily won over by a personable young man.

Time and tide wait for no man. There’s an ageless adage.

For there is a very strange peace in giving over your judgment to someone else, to saying to them, “You lead and I will follow, and I will trust entirely that you will not lead me to death or harm.”

sometimes there are no choices but poor ones.

The councils met, to decide what they would do if Forged. And some decided one way, and some the other. “But in every case,” Chade told me wearily, “it matters not what they decide; it weakens their loyalty to the kingdom. Whether they pay the tribute or not, the Raiders may laugh over their blood ale at us. For in deciding, our villagers are saying in their minds, not ‘if we are Forged’ but ‘when we are Forged.’ And thus they have already been raped in spirit, if not in flesh. They look at their kin, mother at child, man at parents, and already they have given them up to death or Forging. And the kingdom fails, for as each town must decide alone, so it is separated from the whole. We will shatter into a thousand little townships, each worrying only about what it will do for itself if it is raided.

Intrigued by the political strategy of this

“Sometimes,” grumbled Chade, “it is better to be defiantly wrong than silent.

“When you cut pieces out of the truth to avoid looking like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron instead.

The dogs don’t like him,

Red flag

Her head was full of fancies and imaginings, she substituted poetry and music for logic and manners both, she expressed no interest at all in social introductions and coquettish skills.

If you can read, you can learn anything. If you’ve a will to.

Now, I’ve had boys of my own, and I know boys aren’t that way. They don’t learn, or grow, or have manners when you’re looking at them. But turn away, and turn back, and there they are, smarter, taller, and charming everyone but their own mothers.”

if incredibly gifted with the Skill, a man can aspire to speak directly to the Elderlings, those who are below only the gods themselves. Few have ever dared to do so, and of those who did, even fewer attained what they asked. For it is said, one may ask of the Elderlings, but what they answer may not be the question you ask, but the one you should have asked. And the answer to that question may be one a man cannot hear and live.

For in using the Skill, the user feels a keenness of life, an uplifting of being, that can distract a man from taking his next breath.

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear,”

And when he was done, the stablemaster bent and whispered something to the Skillmaster, before he and all others turned and left the man lying there, with the Stones witness to his whimpering

I can’t wait to find out what he whispered after beating that man’s ass 👏👏👏

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

“FitzChivalry Farseer.” I halted, frozen by the words. I turned slowly. “It’s your name, boy. I wrote it myself,

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.”