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

by Robin Hobb

“Chivalry’s,” the old man said, and he was already turning his back on me, taking his measured steps down the graveled pathway. “Prince Chivalry,” he said, not turning back as he added the qualifier. “Him what’s King-in-Waiting. That’s who got him. So let him do for him, and be glad he managed to father one child, somewhere.”

Can’t have royal bastards cluttering up the countryside.”

“As like to Prince Chivalry as can be, as even his brother said but a while ago. Not the Crown Prince’s fault if his Lady Patience can’t carry his seed to term….”

I drifted into his mind and shared his dim dreams of an endless chase, pursuing a quarry I never saw, but whose hot scent dragged me onward through nettle, bramble, and scree. And with the hound’s dream, the precision of the memory wavers like the bright colors and sharp edges of a drug dream. Certainly the days that follow that first night have no such clarity in my mind.

“Now you’ve wakened him,” warned the one, and he was Prince Verity, the man from the warmly lit chamber of my first evening. “So? He’ll go back to sleep as soon as we leave. Damn him, he has his father’s eyes as well. I swear, I’d have known his blood no matter where I saw him. There’ll be no denying it to any that see him. But have neither you nor Burrich the sense of a flea? Bastard or not, you don’t stable a child among beasts.

“I meant no disrespect to the blood, sir,” Burrich said in honest confusion. “I am Chivalry’s man, and I saw to the boy as I thought best. I could make him up a pallet in the guardroom, but he seems small to be in the company of such men, with their comings and goings at all hours, their fights and drinking and noise.” The tone of his words made his own distaste for their company obvious. “Bedded here, he has quiet, and the pup has taken to him. And with my Vixen to watch over him at night, no one could do him harm without her teeth taking a toll. My lords, I know little of children myself, and it seemed to me—” “It’s fine, Burrich, it’s fine,” Verity said quietly, cutting him off. “If it had to be thought about, I should have done the thinking. I left it to you, and I don’t find fault with it. It’s better than a lot of children have in this village, Eda knows. For here, for now, it’s fine.”

“I see no confusion in it now, Regal.” Verity spoke evenly. “Chivalry, me, and then you. Then our cousin August. This bastard would be a far fifth.” “I am well aware that you precede me; you need not flaunt it at me at every opportunity,” Regal said coldly. He glared down at me. “I still think it would be better not to have

‘Regal,’ he said, in that way he has. “Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.’

Buckkeep the heart of the First Duchy, and eventually the capital of the kingdom of the Six Duchies.

There was a high night sky over Buckkeep, with stars shining bright and cold. The smell of the bay was stronger as if the day smells of men and horses and cooking were temporary things that had to surrender each night to the ocean’s power.

If the children I was with were more ragged and boisterous than those who passed at their chores, I did not notice. And had anyone told me I was passing the day with a pack of beggar brats denied entrance to the keep because of their light-fingered ways, I would have been shocked. At the time I knew only that it was suddenly a lively and pleasant day, full of places to go and things to do.

Molly Nosebleed was my most frequent companion. I seldom saw her father strike her after that day; for the most part he was too drunk to find her, or to make good on his threats when he did. To what I had done that day, I gave little thought, other than to be grateful that Molly had not realized I was responsible.

The storytellers told the classic tales, of voyages of discovery and crews who braved terrible storms and of foolish captains who took down their ships with all hands. I learned many of the traditional ones by heart, but the tales I loved best came not from the professional storytellers but from the sailors themselves. These were not the tales told at the hearths for all to hear, but the warnings and tidings passed from crew to crew

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.

Burrich regarded me gravely. “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.

“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.”

Will the scent of fresh blood touch off your temper, will the sight of prey shut down your thoughts?” His voice grew softer still, and I heard the sickness he felt as he asked me, “Will you wake fevered and asweat because somewhere a bitch is in season and your companion scents it? Will that be the knowledge you take to your lady’s bed?”

I repelled at him again. But this time my defense was met by a wall that hurled it back at me, so that I stumbled and sank down, almost fainting, my mind pressed down by blackness. Burrich stooped over me. “I warned you,” he said softly,

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.

But again, in looking back, I cannot imagine to whom he could have made complaint. Locked into loneliness were we two, and looking at one another every evening, we each saw the one we blamed for it.

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.”

Then the King stood. When he turned away from me, a chill went over me, as if I had suddenly shed a cloak. It was my first experience of the Skill at the hands of a master.

I stood and watched as the old King departed the hall. I felt an echoing loss. Strange man. Bastard though I was, he could have declared himself my grandfather, and had for the asking what he instead chose to buy.

There was something more than jealousy in his tone. I have since come to know that many men always see another’s good fortune as a slight to themselves.

Was a time when no woman of the keep walked quickly past him; to catch his eye was to make yourself the envy of nearly anyone old enough to wear skirts. And now? Old Burrich, they called him, and him still in his prime.

“A shame Galen refuses to teach you the Skill. But years ago it was restricted, for fear it would become too common a tool. I’ll wager if old Galen were to try to teach you, he’d find you apt.

“It’s murder, more or less. Killing people. The fine art of diplomatic assassination. Or blinding, or deafening. Or a weakening of the limbs, or a paralysis or a debilitating cough or impotency. Or early senility, or insanity or…but it doesn’t matter.

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. You’ll either develop a taste for it, or not. That isn’t something I’m in charge of. But I’ll make sure you know how.

the people of the Duchy could rise up and come to ask the King’s justice. It has happened, and every noble is aware it can happen. The welfare of the people belongs to the people, and they have the right to object if their duke stewards it poorly.

She married Shrewd knowing well she was his second queen, and that the first had already borne him two heirs. She never concealed her disdain for the two older Princes and often pointed out that as she was much higher born than King Shrewd’s first queen, she considered her son, Regal, to be more royal than his two half brothers. She attempted to instill this idea in others by her choice of name for her son. Unfortunately for her plans, most saw this ploy as poor taste. Some even mockingly referred to her as the Inland Queen,

It is true, however, that before she finally succumbed to her addictions, she was responsible for nurturing the rift between the Inland and Coastal Duchies.

There were games we played, too. For instance, he would tell me that I must go on the morrow to Sara the cook and ask her if this year’s bacon was leaner than last year’s. And then I must that evening report the entire conversation back to Chade, as close to word perfect as I could, and answer a dozen questions for him about how she stood, and was she left-handed and did she seem hard of hearing and what she was cooking at the time.

Without intending it, I began to garner a reputation as a “sharp youngster” and a “good lad.” Years later I realized that the lesson was not just a memory exercise but also instruction in how to befriend the commoner folk, and to learn their minds. Many’s the time since then that a smile, a compliment on how well my horse had been cared for, and a quick question put to a stable boy brought me information that all the coin in the kingdom couldn’t have bribed out of him.

Such exercises initially appealed to a boy’s natural love of mischief, and I seldom failed at them. When I did, the consequences were my own lookout. Chade had warned me that he would not shield me from anybody’s wrath and suggested that I have a worthy tale ready to explain away being where I should not be or possessing that which I had no business possessing. I learned to lie very well. I do not think it was taught me accidentally. These were the lessons in my assassin’s primer. And more. Sleight of hand and the art of moving stealthily.

I concealed one puppet from a visiting puppeteer’s troupe so that he had to present the Incidence of the Matching Cups, a lighthearted little folktale, instead of the lengthy historical drama he had planned for the evening.

In fall I tied a thread around the fetlock of a visiting noble’s horse, to give the animal a temporary limp that convinced the noble to remain at Buckkeep two days longer than he had planned.

He had been lavishly praising my latest escapade, one that required me turning inside out every shirt hung to dry on the laundry courtyard’s drying lines without getting caught. It had been a difficult task, the hardest part of which had been to refrain from laughing aloud and betraying my hiding place within a dyeing vat when two of the younger laundry lads had declared my prank the work of water sprites and refused to do any more washing that day.

There are two traditions about the custom of giving royal offspring names suggestive of virtues or abilities. The one that is most commonly held is that somehow these names are binding; that when such a name is attached to a child who will be trained in the Skill, somehow the Skill melds the name to the child, and the child cannot help but grow up to practice the virtue ascribed to him or her by name.

A more ancient tradition attributes such names to accident, at least initially.

King Shrewd’s bounty, learning your lessons, under his eye, you are not a threat to him. Certainly, you are under Chivalry’s shadow here. Certainly, it does protect you. But were you away from here, far from being unneedful of such protection, you would become a danger to King Shrewd, and a greater danger to his heirs after him. You would have no simple life of freedom as a wandering scribe. Rather you would be found in your inn bed with your throat cut some morning, or with an arrow through you on the high road.”

Sooner or later, if things do not improve, people will look about and say, ‘Well, a bastard’s not so large a thing to make a fuss over. Chivalry should have come to power; he’d soon put a stop to all this. He might have been a bit stiff about protocol, but at least he got things done, and didn’t let foreigners trample all over us.’ ”

But it would cause mumblings and grumblings, and those could lead to riots and skirmishes, oh, and a generally bad climate for a bastard to be running around free in. You’d have to be settled one way or another. Either as a corpse, or as the King’s tool.”

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

“How do you know such things?” she demanded breathlessly. “I…I heard an old traveling midwife talking to our midwife up to the keep,” I improvised. “It was…a sad story she told, of an injured man given some to help him rest, but his baby got into it as well. A very, very sad story.” Her face was softening and I felt her warming toward me again. “I only tell it to be sure you are careful of the root. Don’t leave it about where any child can get at it.”

“He never did anything to make me think he cared about me.” Chade turned to look at me and his eyes were older, sunken and red. “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.”

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

I am sure that Chade had deliberately led me to consider who might have acted against my father, to instill in me a greater wariness of the Queen.

All this I knew better from tavern gossip and Chade’s political lectures than Burrich could imagine. But I bit my tongue and sat through his detailed and strained explanation. Not for the first time I realized he considered me slightly slow. My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.

Does Kelvar confer with the enemy to his profit? We want you to sniff about and see what you can discover. If all you find is innocence, or if you have but strong suspicions, bring news back to us. But if you discover treachery, and you are certain of it, then we cannot be rid of him too soon.” “And the means?” I was not sure that was my voice. It was so casual, so contained.