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

by Robin Hobb

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...