Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy, #3)

by Robin Hobb

All too often, I find I have wandered far from a history of the duchies into a history of FitzChivalry. Those recollections leave me face-to-face with who I once was, and who I have become.

I have known beauties and joys that tried my heart’s strength as surely as the tragedies and uglinesses have. Yet I possess, perhaps, a greater share of dark memories than most men; few men have known death in a dungeon, or can recall the inside of a coffin buried beneath the snow.

Though I no longer possess the body of a healthy young man, many still live who once called me friend. Sometimes, still, I long to rest eyes on them, to touch hands, to lay to peace the loneliness of years. I cannot.

Patience came to lay claim to my body. My father’s wife, once so distressed to discover he had sired a bastard before they were wed, was the one who took me from that cell. Hers the hands that washed my body for burial, that straightened my limbs and wrapped me in a grave cloth. Awkward, eccentric Lady Patience, for whatever reason, cleansed my wounds and bound them as carefully as if I still lived.

When they would not let her go, she was too dutiful a child to disobey them. But she was also too ardent a woman to live without her true love. She lay down on her bed and died of sorrow.

But the waiting still had not stopped. One bite I was allowed to take. It must be chewed and swallowed before I took more, or he would cuff me. I could take only as much stew as would fit on the spoon. I picked up the cup and drank from it. He smiled at me. “Good, Fitz. Good boy.” I smiled back, but then I took too large a bite of the bread and he frowned at me. I tried to chew it slowly, but I was so hungry now, and the food was here, and I did not understand why he would not just let me eat it now. It took a long time to eat. He had made the stew too hot on purpose, so that I would burn my mouth if I took too big a bite. I thought about that for a bit. Then I said, “You made the food too hot on purpose. So I will be burned if I eat too fast.” His smile came more slowly. He nodded at me. I still finished eating before he did. I had to sit on the chair until he had finished eating, too.

The gray one just smiled. “I have my ways, Burrich,” he said. I smiled too, remembering that he had always been proud of his secrets.

And I will beat you to death.

I kept scratching at my face. At my beard. Finally, I went and stood in front of Burrich. I scratched at it in front of him. “I don’t like this,” I told him. He looked surprised. But he gave me very hot water and soap, and a very sharp knife. He gave me a round glass with a man in it. I looked at it for a long time. It made me shiver. His eyes were like Burrich’s, with white around them, but even darker. Not wolf eyes. His coat was dark like Burrich’s, but the hair on his jaws was uneven and rough. I touched my beard, and saw fingers on the man’s face. It was strange.

Burrich was right. All of it was there, like a song one has heard too often and cannot get out of one’s mind. It ran behind all my thoughts and colored all my dreams. It came pushing back at me and gave me no peace. Spring ventured into summer.

I shook my head, tried to rattle from it my terrifying memories of Will. He brought back the shadows of the dungeon, the things I still refused to recall. I wondered if I had killed him. I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I’d got enough poison into him. I looked up to find Burrich watching me intently.

“It was not the Fool who was our downfall. It was I.” And that, I think, was the moment when I came fully back to myself. I had said the most unsayable thing, faced my most unfaceable truth. I had betrayed them all. “The Fool warned me.

It was too thin a comfort. That night I went out and ran with the wolf, and Burrich made no rebuke to me. But we could not run far enough, nor fast enough, and the blood we shed that night was not the blood I wished to see run, nor could the hot fresh meat fill the void inside me.

So I remembered my life and who I had been.

“Hate you? No. They liked you well enough, those that knew you. But if you came back, a man who had died and been buried, again walking among them, they’d fear you. It’s not a thing you could explain away as a trick. The Wit is not a magic that is well thought of. When a man is accused of it and then dies and is buried, well, in order for them to remember you fondly, you’d have to stay dead. If they saw you walking about, they’d take it as proof that Regal was right; that you were practicing Beast magic, and used it to kill the King. They’d have to kill you again. More thoroughly the second time.” Burrich stood suddenly, and paced the room twice. “Damn me, but I could use a drink,” he said. “Me, too,” I said quietly.

Ten days later, Chade came up the path. The old assassin walked slowly, with a staff, and he carried his pack up high on his shoulders. The day was warm, and he had thrown back the hood of his cloak. His long gray hair blew in the wind and he had let his beard grow to cover more of his face. At first glance, he looked to be an itinerant tinker. A scarred old man, perhaps, but no longer the Pocked Man.

I was kind to the old man. I did not tell him that they had.

I sat thinking for a moment. The sword Verity had given me. The silver ring King Eyod had given me, that had been Rurisk’s. A pin from Lady Grace. Patience’s sea-pipes had been in my room—I hoped she had got them back. My paints and papers. A little box I had carved to hold my poisons. Between Molly and me there had never been any tokens. She would never allow me to give her any gifts, and I had never thought to steal a ribbon from her hair. If I had… “No. A clean break is best, perhaps. Though you’ve forgotten one item.” I turned the collar of my rough shirt to show him the tiny ruby nestled in silver. “The stickpin Shrewd gave me, to mark me as his. I still have that.” Patience had used it to secure the grave cloth that had wrapped me. I set aside that thought.

Chade’s frustration grew with every shake of my head. “Damn it, Fitz, you must!” “I don’t want to!” I cried out suddenly. I was on my feet.

I hoped my face was not dirty.

“You didn’t,” I said quietly. “You but put your finger on the spot where I had been pressing myself the most. Sometimes a man doesn’t know how badly he’s hurt until someone else probes the wound.”

“Not I. That Fitz died,” I said bluntly. Burrich looked as if I had struck him. But Chade asked quietly, “Then why does he still wear King Shrewd’s pin?”

Chade nodded. Still I sat, holding the red-and-silver pin in my hand. I remembered my king’s hands as he’d pushed the pin through the folds of a boy’s shirt. “There,” he had said. “Now you are mine.” But he was dead now. Did that free me from my promise? And the last thing he had said to me? “What have I made of you?” I pushed that question aside once more. More important, what was I now? Was I now what Regal had made of me? Or could I escape that?

Where would I go, were I free? To Molly, cried my heart.

“You’d have me devote myself to my king and sacrifice all else to it, as you did. Give up the woman I love to follow a king like a dog at his heels, as you did. And when that king abandoned you? You swallowed it, you raised his bastard for him. Then they took it all away from you, stable, horses, dogs, men to command. They left you nothing, not even a roof over your head, those kings you were sworn to. So what did you do? With nothing else left to you, you hung on to me, dragged the bastard out of a coffin and forced him back to life. A life I hate, a life I don’t want!”

He stared at me, bereft of words. I wanted to stop, but something drove me on. The anger felt good, like a cleansing fire.

Can’t you see there’s more to being alive than giving it all up for someone else?”

“No,” I said dully after a breath. “You don’t see, you can’t know. You can’t even imagine what you’ve taken away from me. I should be dead, but you wouldn’t let me die. All with the best of intentions, always believing you were doing what was right, no matter how it hurt me. But who gave you that right over me? Who decreed you could do this to me?”

But you came back with an…anger. Like a challenge to the world at large, to kill you if it could. It wasn’t just that you threw yourself in Regal’s path: whatever was most dangerous to you, you plunged yourself into. Burrich wasn’t the only one to see it. Look back over the last year: every time I turned about, here was Fitz, railing at the world, in the middle of a fistfight, in the midst of a battle, wrapped up in bandaging, drunk as a fisherman, or limp as a string and mewling for elfbark. When were you calm and thoughtful, when were you merry with your friends, when were you ever simply at peace?

And it was back, the ember of my anger billowing into flame. “Perhaps because I’ve never been given the chance to make my own decisions. Perhaps because I’ve been everyone’s ‘boy’ too long. Burrich’s stableboy, your apprentice assassin, Verity’s pet, Patience’s page. When did I get to be mine, for me?” I asked the question fiercely. “When did you not?” Chade demanded just as heatedly. “That’s all you’ve done since you came back from the Mountains. You went to Verity to say you’d had enough of being an assassin just when quiet work was needed. Patience tried to warn you clear of Molly, but you had your way there as well. It made her a target. You pulled Patience into plots that exposed her to danger. You bonded to the wolf, despite all Burrich said to you. You questioned my every decision about King Shrewd’s health. And your next-to-last stupid act at Buckkeep was to volunteer to be part of an uprising against the crown. You brought us as close to a civil war as we’ve been in a hundred years.”

He stood up and somehow managed to tower over me as he had used to. “With all your years of training from me, all my schooling in quiet work, you went racing about in the keep with a drawn knife, cutting the throat of one, and stabbing the other to death in the Great Hall before all assembled nobles….My fine apprentice assassin! That was the only way you could think of to accomplish it?” “I was angry!” I roared at him. “Exactly!” he roared back. “You were angry. So you destroyed our power base at Buckkeep! You had the confidence of the Coastal Dukes, and you chose to show yourself to them as a madman! Shattered their last bit of faith in the Farseer line.”

“No. I rebuked you for putting yourself before them. You should never have let them offer you the rule of Buckkeep. Had you been doing your tasks properly, such a thought would never have occurred to them. Over and over and over again, you forget your place. You are not a prince, you are an assassin. You are not the player, you are the game-piece. And when you make your own moves, you set every other strategy awry and endanger every piece on the board!”

He shook his head slowly. “What has come most clear to me tonight is that I must not base anything on you. You’ll get no assignment from me, nor will you be privy to my plans any longer. Those days are over.” I could not grasp the finality in his voice. He turned aside from me, his eyes going afar. When he spoke again, it was not as my master, but as Chade. He looked at the wall as he spoke. “I love you, boy. I don’t withdraw that from you. But you’re dangerous. And what we must attempt is dangerous enough without you going berserk in the middle of it.”

What I had been snarling for earlier now seemed like an abandonment. The fear surged up in me, undercutting my resolve. I sat up abruptly, panicky. I took a long shuddering breath. “Burrich. What I said to you earlier, I was angry, I was…” “Right on target.” The sound he made might have been a laugh, if not so freighted with bitterness. “Only in the way that people who know one another best know how to hurt one another best,” I pleaded.

“I was tired, and half drunk. But I wouldn’t quit. Finally, he got in a lucky one. Laid me out cold. “When I woke up, the dog had a master again. Of a different sort. I know you’ve heard people say Chivalry was cold and stiff and correct to a fault. He wasn’t. He was what he believed a man should be. More than that. It was what he believed a man should want to be. He took a thieving, unkempt scoundrel and…” He faltered, sighed suddenly. “He had me up before dawn the next day. Weapons practice till neither of us could stand.

“Chade says you have been my boy too long. Chade’s boy, Verity’s boy, even Patience’s boy. That we kept you a boy and looked after you too much. He believes that when a man’s decisions came to you, you made them as a boy. Impulsively. Intending to be right, intending to be good. But intentions are not good enough.”

“Did you listen to me at all? I killed people as a boy. It didn’t make me a man. Nor you.”

He met my gaze. There was too much understanding in his eyes. It frightened me to think that he might actually know what I was facing. I denied that possibility, pushed it aside entirely. I turned a shoulder to him, almost hoping my anger would come back. But Burrich sat silently.

“I will never regret loving her. Only that I could not make her my wife in all eyes as she was in my heart.”

I wanted to babble apologies, to beg him to reconsider, to do something, anything, to keep our friendship from ending this way. At the same time, I wished him gone, wished it over, wished it to be tomorrow, a new day dawning and I alone.

I had always been able to count on his strength, even when I didn’t want it. Now he was gone. Like Chade, like Molly, like Verity, like Patience.

And so he perceived my vendetta with Regal as equivalent to his weakness for porcupines. I found myself accepting my stated goals with less equanimity. Having stated them, I could not imagine turning aside for anything else.

For the first time that I could recall, I arose from sleep when I awoke naturally, and ate when I was hungry. I had no tasks save those I set myself. Surely it would not hurt if I took a bit of time to recover my physical health. Although the bruises of my dungeon time had long faded, and the only external signs of my injuries were scars, I still felt oddly stiff some mornings. Occasionally, my body would shock me with a twinge when I leaped after something, or turned my head too quickly. A particularly strenuous hunt would leave me trembling and dreading a seizure. It would be wiser, I decided, to be fully healed before I departed. So we lingered a time. The days were warm, the hunting was good. As the days slipped by, I made peace with my body. I was not the physically hardened warrior I had been the summer before, but I could keep pace with Nighteyes through a night’s hunting.

“As soon as Burrich left me here, alone, I reverted to something less than an animal. No time, no cleanliness, no goals, no awareness of anything save eating and sleeping. This was what he was trying to warn me about, all those years. I did just what he had always feared I would do.”

I was as alone, and as human, as I had been in months.

Time, no time, Nighteyes interrupted wearily. Time is a thing that men made up to bother themselves with. You think on it until I am dizzy.

I blinked my eyes and looked away from the flames. The fire had burned low. My life was like that now, all in ashes behind me. There was no way to reclaim the woman I had loved. Molly believed me dead now, and doubtless viewed my use of Wit magic with disgust. And anyway she left me days before the rest of my life had fallen apart. I had known her since we were children and had played together on the streets and docks of Buckkeep Town. She had called me Newboy, and assumed I was just one of the children from the keep, a stableboy or a scribe’s lad. She had fallen in love with me before she discovered that I was the Bastard, the illegitimate son that had forced Chivalry to abdicate the throne. When she found out, I very nearly lost her. But I had persuaded her to trust me, to believe in me, and for almost a year we had clung to one another, despite every obstacle. Time and again, I had been forced to put my duty to the King ahead of what we wished to do. The King had refused me permission to marry; she had accepted that. He had pledged me to another woman. Even that, she had tolerated. She had been threatened and mocked, as “the Bastard’s whore.” I had been unable to protect her. But she had been so steadfast through it all…until one day she simply told me there was someone else for her, someone she could love, and put above all else in her life, just as I did my king. And she had left me. I could not blame her. I could only miss her.

You sleep too soundly. Are you sick? No. Just stupid. I never before noticed that it made you sleep soundly.

Just a pin, and all I had left of my king and my grandfather.

It was just a thing from a yesterday? Nighteyes wondered hesitantly. A thing no longer here? It is not a thorn in your paw, or a pain in your belly? “Just a thing from yesterday,” I had to agree. A pin that had been given to a boy who no longer existed by a man who had died. Perhaps it was as well, I thought to myself. One less thing that might connect me to FitzChivalry the Witted.