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

by Robin Hobb

I have spoken to other writers about this phenomenon. When it finds you (whatever we call “it”—the Muse, inspiration, Story), writing moves past the careful construction of a plot line and the adding-in of needed characters. Story overflows outline and cuts its own passage through the valley of fiction. For the writer, it’s an immersion. I don’t remember writing scenes and chapters; I recall a conversation on a snowy tower top with Fitz, or the warmth and sounds of a stable lit by lantern light. I’ve smelled the fragrances of the Women’s Garden, and heard the mocking lilt of the Fool’s laughter.

Sometimes, that same immersion engulfs the reader. When I converse with those readers, we don’t discuss words on a page. We reminisce about people we know, and the adventures we shared with them. The characters (not just Fitz and the Fool, but all of them, Chade and Burrich and Molly and Regal) became real. We’ve seen their faces and heard their distinct voices. Readers have hiked the windy cliffs near Buckkeep, shivered in the perpetual chill of Shrewd’s great hall, and dodged cobwebs in the labyrinth of spy passages in those stone walls.

I sent them because I wanted that writer to know that I’d met their characters. Their characters had become my friends. I hadn’t read a story; I’d shared a life.

Fritz Leiber.

He explained to me that characters had to be challenged. They had to grow and change. He told me that if the happy ending of the tale was just a return to how things had been at the beginning, well, what was the point of writing that story at all?

Harpy’s Flight by Megan Lindholm.

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

Magali Villeneuve agreed to do the illustrations for this book.

A Journey Through Illustrations, published in 2015.

Folk beliefs claim that such names were sealed to the newborn babes by magic, and that these royal offspring were incapable of betraying the virtues whose names they bore. Passed through fire and plunged through salt water and offered to the winds of the air; thus were names sealed to these chosen children.

I 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.

Before that, there is nothing, only a blank gulf no exercise of my mind has ever been able to pierce.

to snow again, a lacy veil that clung to eyelashes and coat sleeves.

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

Some of what I was feeling passed to Nosy, who dropped over onto his side and showed his belly in supplication while thumping his tail in that ancient canine signal that always means, “I’m only a puppy. I cannot defend myself. Have mercy.” Had they been dogs, they would have sniffed me over and then drawn back. But humans have no such inbred courtesies.

Ships must dock and unload as the rising and falling of the tides allow, and those who fish for a living must follow the schedules of the finned creatures, not those of men.

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. Men walking a battlefield to search for wounded among the dead will still stop to cough, to blow their noses, still lift their eyes to watch a V of geese in flight. I have seen farmers continue their plowing and planting, heedless of armies clashing but a few miles away.

When I had slept above the stables in Burrich’s rooms, my nights had been muzzy, my dreams heathery with the warm and weary contentment of the well-used animals that slept and shifted and thudded in the night below me. Horses and dogs dream, as anyone who has ever watched a hound yipping and twitching in dream pursuit well knows. Their dreams had been like the sweet rising waft from a baking of good bread. But now, isolated in a room walled with stone, I finally had time for all those devouring, aching dreams that are the portion of humans.

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

“I don’t suppose it’s any man’s fault that he’s born….”

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

And a moment later he was telling me how one could sicken a man just by feeding him rhubarb and spinach at the same sitting, sicken him even to death if the portions were sufficient, and never set a bit of poison on the table at all. I asked him how to keep others at the same table from also being sickened, and our discussion wandered from there.

This was crushsweet, and this beebalm. This was thresher’s root, not her favorite, no, but some said it made a good candle to cure headaches and winter glooms. Mavis Threadsnip had told her that Molly’s mother had mixed it with other herbs and made a wonderful candle, one that would calm even a colicky baby.

know the thresher’s root,” I told her. “Some use it to make an ointment for sore shoulders and backs. That’s where the name comes from. But if you distill a tincture from it and mix it well in wine, it’s never tasted, and it will make a grown man sleep a day and a night and a day again, or make a child die in his sleep.”

I burned two tapers of bayberry and two cup candles scented with two handfuls of the small violets that grow near Dowell’s Mill and one handful of redroot, chopped very fine. May she do likewise when her time comes to bear a child, and her labor will be as easy as mine, and the fruit of it as perfect.

sweetberry-blossom ones will give you calm dreams.

“Nosegay.

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

“Royalty,” Chade had warned me, “never travels light. Verity goes on this journey with the weight of the King’s sword behind him. All folk who see him pass know that without being told. The news must run ahead to Kelvar, and to Shemshy. The imperial hand is about to reconcile their differences. They must both be left wishing they had never had any differences at all. 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.

The fool came to Buckkeep in the seventeenth year of King Shrewd’s reign. This is one of the few facts that are known about the Fool. Said to be a gift from the Bingtown traders, the origin of the Fool can only be surmised. Various stories have arisen. One is that the Fool was a captive of the Red-Ship Raiders, and that the Bingtown traders seized the Fool from them. Another is that the Fool was found as a babe, adrift in a small boat, shielded from the sun by a parasol of sharkskin and cushioned from the thwarts by a bed of heather and lavender. This can be dismissed as a creation of fancy. We have no real knowledge of the Fool’s life before his arrival at King Shrewd’s court. The Fool was almost certainly born of the human race, though not entirely of human parentage. Stories that he was born of the Other Folk are almost certainly false, for his fingers and toes are completely free of webbing and he has never shown the slightest fear of cats. The unusual physical characteristics of the Fool (lack of coloring, for instance) seem to be traits of his other parentage, rather than an individual aberration, though in this I well may be mistaken. In the matter of the Fool, that which we do not know is almost more significant than that which we do. The age of the Fool at the time of his arrival at Buckkeep has been a matter for conjecture. From personal experience, I can vouch that the Fool appeared much younger, and in all ways more juvenile than at present. But as the Fool sho...

Time and tide wait for no man. There’s an ageless adage. Sailors and fishermen mean it simply to say that a boat’s schedule is determined by the ocean, not man’s convenience. But sometimes I lie here, after the tea has calmed the worst of the pain, and wonder about it. Tides wait for no man, and that I know is true. But time? Did the times I was born into await my birth to be? Did the events rumble into place like the great wooden gears of the clock of Sayntanns, meshing with my conception and pushing my life along? I make no claim to greatness. And yet, had I not been born, had not my parents fallen before a surge of lust, so much would be different. So much. Better? I think not. And then I blink and try to focus my eyes, and wonder if these thoughts come from me or from the drug in my blood. It would be nice to hold counsel with Chade, one last time.

carris-seed oil

All the threads that run back and forth between folk, that twine from mother to child, from man to woman, all the kinships they extend to family and neighbor, to pets and stock, even to the fish of the sea and bird of the sky—all, all were gone.

To me, it was as if I watched stones rise up from the earth and quarrel and mutter at one another.

The morning breeze swirled his dark cloak around him, in a way so ordinary that I felt my heart would break. How could there be folk like those in that village, and a simple morning breeze in the same world?

And this was fitting, for all know that the poxes come up from bad dust and are spread by the turning of the soil.

By the time the Red-Ship Raiders began to seriously harry our shores, they had subdued most opposition in the Out Islands. Those who openly opposed them died or fled. Others grudgingly paid tribute and clenched their teeth against the outrages of those who controlled the cult. But many gladly joined the ranks, and painted the hulls of their raiding vessels red and never questioned the rightness of what they did. It seems likely that these converts were formed mostly from the lesser houses, who had never before been offered the opportunity to rise in influence. But he who controlled the Red-Ship Raiders cared nothing for who a man’s forebears had been, so long as he had the man’s unswerving loyalty.

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

And there was no more substance to her than to cobwebs and sea foam. Thoughts and tongue always flying from this to that, nitterdy-natterdy, with never a pause or connection I could see. It used to exhaust me just to listen to her. But Chivalry would smile, and marvel.

It was worse than Chade’s. I would have thought it the clutter of years if I had not known that she had only recently arrived. Even a complete inventory of the room could not have described it, for it was the juxtaposition of objects that made it remarkable. A feather fan, a fencing glove, and a bundle of cattails were all vased in a well-worn boot.

But the dominant elements were the plants. There were fat puffs of greenery overflowing clay pots, teacups and goblets and buckets of cuttings and cut flowers and greenery, vines spilling out of handleless mugs and cracked cups. Failures were evident in bare sticks poking up out of pots of earth. The plants perched and huddled together in every location that would catch morning or afternoon sun from the windows. The effect was like a garden spilling in the windows and growing up around the clutter in the room.

This little fellow had a solidly established identity within himself, and a deep interest in all that was going on around him.

He thought I smelled very exciting, and the scents of horses and birds and other dogs were like colors in his mind, images of things that as yet had no shape or reality for him, but that he nonetheless found fascinating. I imaged the scents for him and he climbed my chest, wriggling, sniffing and licking me in his excitement. Take me, show me, take me.

It is a heady thing to be suddenly proclaimed the center of someone’s world, even if that someone is an eight-week-old puppy. It made me realize how profoundly alone I had felt, and for how long.

catmint is not for poultices

her buds from the lady’s-hand bush for her headache,

strewing herbs

“Paper reeds?”

But from what he was told, it was made of pounded reeds.